with Lacan

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...

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...

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...