with Lacan

 This is a paper I presented at the Summer University at Performance Arts Forum in St Erme, France, in late August of 2024, presenting alongside a small group of colleagues for a mixed audience, working towards the theme "Why Psychanalysis?" Is Psychoanalysis Weird? American party politics has recently put the signifier ‘weird’ front and centre in a way which is no doubt resonant, and is seemingly effective. It’s used there as a way of designating the strangeness of an out-group, and one can be reminded of Lacan’s idea of group identification [from his text on Logical Time, but this version from Éric Laurent's Racism 2.0 ]:   A man knows what is not a man;   Men recognise themselves among themselves;   I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.   That is to say, we don’t know so well what ‘we’ are as a group except by relation to what we take to be improper to our group, to what is alien, or foreign to it. We claim to be...

This is a short text intended as part of an introduction for a small publication project which it was not possible to undertake. Nonetheless I think the text stands without that context, and so here it is.  Out-of-Series / Hors-série What is this? This Out-of-Series, this Hors-série? On first parse it’s a place for writing towards the work of the School that fall out of the themes and formats that make a common flow of the School. Why that? The hors of hors-série is a word that comes up occasionally with Jacques Lacan, and Jacques-Alain Miller. For example there’s the hors-sen s, the out-of-meaning or out-of-sense. It’s a terms which I can find only once with Lacan in fact, in the Compte rendu du séminaire of …ou pire , in Autres êcrits (p547). Lacan talks of the hors-sens , the out-of-meaning, which is what interested him in the transmission of mathematical knowledge, and which he sought to bring to the transmission of psychoanalysis. Lacan referred there to hors-sens not with...

The following is a presentation made somewhat after my work in translating Jacques-Alain Miller's L'os d'un cure / Analysis Laid Bare for the work of the School, and perhaps I would have wished that this book had been produced in the manner described below, whilst it had been supported by the work of a team of others which was much appreciated. The presentation was made at a Cartel Study Day of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, a Cartel being a central organ of transmission in the School, a gathering around an agreed subject of study for no more than two years of between three and five participants, four being a fair number, plus one as an extimate to the group, decompleting the group effect that a cartel can produce. ___ The cartel was put to work initially by Lacan as an organ of the then new School, to work on themes imminent to its formation. We might tend to think cartels as devices principally for each to study for themselves, but it is also a device fo...

Someone I work with recently told me what he’d learned about ancient Greek culture, and in particular the word ‘barbarian’. He told me that the modern sense of barbarians as those who are uncivilised was not particularly shared by the Greeks in their use of the word. He had read that for the Greeks, barbarians were simply those who were not Greeks, who spoke foreign languages, whose speech was not decipherable, sounding like bar-bar – bar-bar- ians. He told me that for him, being autistic is a bit like that. He lives among people whose speech he feels he does not decipher well, does not understand their mores, and is not understood in return. I looked up the etymology of this word, barbarian , and found indeed that the modern word dates to the mid C14th, as “foreign, of another nation or culture”, and from the 1590s, “of or pertaining to savages, rude, uncivilised”. This has a relation via Latin to the Greek barbaros “foreign, strange; ignorant”, or barbaroi – “all that are not Gree...

This is a lightly edited version of a paper I presented at the London Society of the New Lacanian School in 2019 at an event studying Jacques-Alain Miller's The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School. The Turin Theory of the School of the People of the Secret. I’ve been asked to talk about a presentation that Jacques-Alain Miller made in 2000, at a conference which was part of the foundation of the School in Italy. The text of this presentation is known as The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School . It would be great to do a close reading of this text, and I’m not going to do that here, but I recommend you to read it, or to read it again. It’s certainly been precious to me to be able to re-read it and prepare this presentation. Miller often presents in a clear, logical style, albeit usually quite wittily. And we can have the impression reading Miller that we understand enough with one reading. It could be easy to miss the emphasis w...

During the time of Covid I wrote two short texts for the Lacanian Review Online, one admitedly more serious than the other, and which is also presented in the book Letters in Quarantine  .  Here are those two texts: Miasmas We don’t so often speak of miasmas now, but they once explained all kinds of illnesses the causes of which were not quite clear. Miasmas were invisible vaporous emanations, or “bad air” from decaying organic matter on those foreign parts of moorlands or urban areas. A miasma has never been detected. Whilst miasmic explanations of disease held sway for centuries, we have other theories about the spread of disease now, and so we don’t take miasmas to be a material reality. None the less, the expression remains. Lacan mentions miasmas in the second chapter of Seminar XI in talking about causes ,  and which Jacques-Alain Miller takes up in his 1988 seminar  Cause et consentement ,  with the emphasis of a separation of cause and effect, with a cut...