with Lacan

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...

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...