with Lacan

This paper features in The Lacanian Review 11: The Art of Singularities. If you like my contribution here you may find The Lacanian Review well worth buying. There is a familiarity about the term style in our literature and in our discussions. It’s a signifier which is very widely used in a seemingly everyday way by Lacan and by Jacques-Alain Miller, and we talk about one another’s style as an analyst, often regarding a way of working with one’s symptom, sinthome, or a style of jouissance.   The question of style as a distinct psychoanalytical concept, less obvious than its everyday sense, was highlighted to me through a paragraph of Jacques-Alain Miller’s course L e banquet des analystes  (teaching in the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8, lesson of 24/1/1990): “So transference of work means that it is not enough to simply transfer the results. It's even why Lacan could say that what he could transmit above all was a style. We mustn't explain this in terms of how he ...

I wrote this some weeks ago shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth, and with questions about the idea of civilisation, not least in extracting something of a change in civilisation which I think is not felt equally in all places, and as it relates to the theme of the upcoming New Lacanian School Congress (its argument by Daniel Roy in PDF is here) . The death of Queen Elizabeth II comes with an idea that she had, for the more than 70 years of her reign, represented a reference of fixed stability for her Kingdom and Commonwealth. Although it is known that she was occasionally involved in political decisions, and that her authority had been the guarantee of all sorts of partisan political activity, there is an idea that the Queen held the centre of power as an empty place. We don’t know much about her political views, only that from this empty centre she hoped to hold together what may be considered to be a people, indeed a diversity of peoples. I am reminded a little of the passages...