Sexuated Topology and the Suspension of Meaning: A Non-Hermeneutical Phenomenological Approach to Textual Analysis (original) (raw)
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Lacanian Literary Criticism and the Topological Unconscious (Textual Practice)
This essay challenges a certain trend in the Anglo-American reception of Lacan – namely, the tendency to either explicitly or implicitly section off his work on the literary from his attempts to present, in a non-metaphorical fashion, the mathematised structure of the psychoanalytic subject. It is, I argue, only when proper account is taken of Lacan’s topologisation of the unconscious that the precise nature of Lacan’s reading methodology – offered as an alternative to ‘applied psychoanalysis’ – becomes clear. The essay begins by noting the choice Lacan made in the 1970s to align the unconscious not with the symbolic (language and law) but with the real and outlines why the latter concept is best presented as a topological ex-sistence. Following an examination of the two topological qualities that define the psychoanalytic subject (the unlocalisable twist and the irreducible hole), the essay concludes with an explanation of the dense arguments proffered in two little read écrits on the subject of psychoanalytic literary criticism (‘Lituraterre’ and ‘Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin’) and articulates why the relation between the unconscious and literature is not akin to that between cause and effect but instead concerns a shared structural real.
Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and Topology (Introduction)
Contents: Chapter 1: Dissolution and Déblayage 1.1. Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas 1.2. Theory and the Real 1.3. Consistence and Ex-sistence Chapter 2: The Topology of the Psychoanalytic Subject 2.1. The Sphere 2.2. The Interior Eight 2.3. The Möbius Strip 2.4. The Torus 2.5. The Cross-cap Chapter 3: Topology and the Re-turn to Freud 3.1. Encore 3.2. A Möbian Method 3.3. The Lacanian Invention and the Millerian Reinvention 3.4. The Topology of Revolutions and Systems 3.5. From Myth to Structure 3.6. The Logic of Sexuation 3.7. The Topology of Interpretation Chapter 4: The Borromean Knot 4.1. From Topography to Knots 4.2. Writing the Real 4.3. La matière as l'âme à tiers 4.4 The Knot’s Iconoclasm 4.5. Deconstruction and the Knot 4.6. Metaphor and the Knot 4.7. From “thinking-the-Borromean-knot” to “monstrating the cord”: Writing the Lacanian (Dis)solution Chapter 5: Conclusion: A New Imaginary
Sense and Insensibility: Cross-currents in Lacan and Frege on the Problematics of Meaning
Parrhesia, 2017
Engaging with numerous philosophers of divergent persuasions throughout his lifetime, Jacques Lacan may be said to have been principally interested in the possibilities of the extension of certain philosophical concepts and ideas as such, and less so in their thinkers' total systems or theoretical positionings. Emblematic of this, a consistent preoccupation with the precursor/influence (founder?) of the analytic philosophical tradition, Gottlob Frege, throughout his series of Paris seminars over a number of years attests to the fact that Lacan held in esteemed regard the mathematician's insights into language as well as the (convoluted) place of subjectivity in the performance of logical analyses. Along with his psychoanalytic students who were involved with the publication Cahiers pour l'Analyse in the mid-60s, Lacan approached Frege in regard to three main issues represented by three key texts: conceptual variations and forms of inscription in his early Begriffsschrift (1879); the function of number outlined in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884); and the nature of naming in his 1892 paper 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung' wherein factors such as the subjective and objective representation of objects and their denomination were supremely relevant during this 'high structuralist' period. With his own forays into formalization and logic, Lacan was fascinated by the difficulties in ascribing any simple role to the function of thought, similar to the stumbling blocks enumerated by Frege in attempting to determine a logical structure of/through language. In the following discussion, we will return to the latter of Frege's original German texts to examine some of these complications in detail while scanning the Lacanian seminars to tease out his dealings with Frege (a thematic underdeveloped to date in scholarship). Ultimately we hope to determine whether Lacan's additions, particularly on the role of the unconscious, make impossible the attempt to conceive of a 'pure' logic of thought. Based on the illuminations Lacan and his entourage discovered in Frege's work, we will also indicate the future avenues wherein these cross-currents may be further elaborated and synthesized.
This paper proposes some phenomenological considerations on the relations between "subject," "language" and "World" in the perspective of the overcoming of the traditional opposition between "inner" and "outer." This work deals preliminarily with the renewed topicality of the problem of psychologism in the light of the neurosciences, touching on the theme of Heideggerian Being-in-the-world. After that, the paper directs attention to some topological properties of the Möbius strip and of the psychoanalytic investigation of language to illustrate the structure of subjectivity proposed by Jacques Lacan.
Living with Textual Surplus: Jacques Lacan’s Method/ Stuti Khare
One problem that the interpreters of texts have always faced is the problem of surplus signification that the texts generate. Since the beginning of hermeneutical practices, various thinkers have suggested a range of methods to resolve this complex issue. In this paper, I attempt to bring out the conceptual frameworks that Jacues Lacan has created to deal with the issue of surplus signification. I discuss the concepts of language, signifier, lalangue, epos, jouissance, sinthome, and lamella in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explicate the nature of the text, its constitutive elements, and its relationship with the author and the reader. By implication, the nature of signification is subjected to exhaustive scrutiny in order to arrive at an understanding of the complex issues of language and text.
Seaweed, the symptom, becomes caught and swept into the hard bone of symbolic, inside a matrix of rock lace, and wears it into another pattern within, within the coral, another shaping, another shifting. Jouissance is underwater, jouissance is captive, but spills over through openings into a labyrinth of white and pink cartlige breathing under water. It rips open the symptom against the coral-the symbolic. There is a dark blue moving into turquoise or perhaps a sea green that plays with a magenta light refracting off the sheen of reef …blasting colors onto the shifts and waves of an origin. The sea from which we evolved. Outside of language before…the origin of the universe whose coordinates can be located in numbers and geometry…we agree on this. We cannot locate the other side of our beginning, yet it is with us…this trace…of the universe of which we are matter…to which we belong which can also be located in numbers and geometry. We agree on this.
2017
In this work I compare select aspects of two philosophical systems of thinking in an effort to disclose unexpected and theoretically fruitful connections, resemblances and ideas. The systems in question belong to the authors Robert Brandom and Jacques Lacan. The tradition I believe them to share could be called semantic structuralism. Roughly speaking this could be defined as the idea that in order to explain the phenomenon of linguistic meaning, our main recourse should be to the structures inherent in language, and not only or in the first place to relations transcending language. The task ahead is built on the three substantial middle chapters. Chapter 1 begins by providing initial motivation for the work's major aims, as well as specifying those aims. In Chapter 2 I lay the groundwork for the comparison between Brandom and Lacan, which involves explicating two fundamental approaches possible for semantic theory. In Chapter 3 I expound on Brandom's side of the matter, especially on his inferentialist theory of meaning, which could be rightly called structuralist in orientation. In Chapter 4 I switch over to Lacan, arguing first how his general views on language share decisive similarities with Brandom's, second what those similarities in closer inspection consists of. Lastly, Chapter 5 offers conclusions and possible routes for further study on the subject.