with Lacan

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...

I wrote this paper some time before the recent crisis of the pass in the ECF discussed here , and the College of the Pass which followed, and before the publication of the collection of Jacques-Alain Miller's book of presentations on the Pass  which contains a presentation made a little after his course of Le Banquet des Analystes , which discusses that Lacan had proposed a pass of entry to the School - that is to say that in addition to the entrant of the School being a decided worker, they may enter in accordance with their place, their work, in analysis. It is understood that this proposal was discussed but not agreed upon during the College of the Pass. In any case, whilst the following paper does not mention the underdeveloped theme of the logic of the School with regard to entry to the School, nonetheless, entry has been predicated, in keeping with Lacan's proposal, on the applicant being promised as a decided worker. As such you may well understand that this text address...