Will Greenshields | Zhejiang University (original) (raw)

Papers by Will Greenshields

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2024

In the last five years the bodybuilding industry has been shaken by a significant number of high-... more In the last five years the bodybuilding industry has been shaken by a significant number of high-profile deaths caused by a combination of the cocktail of drugs (anabolic-androgenic steroids, growth hormone, insulin and diuretics) and the heavy bodyweights required to place well in competitions that are not drug tested. This article uses Lacan’s redevelopment of the Freudian concept of the death drive to study the sport’s discursive output—its forums, adverts and interviews—to understand the attachment of bodybuilders and bodybuilding fans to an activity that bewilders non-participants, has little financial reward and obvious negative health ramifications.

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies , 2024

Beginning with Lacan’s infamous provocation in Seminar XVIII—“peut-être, je ne suis lacanien que ... more Beginning with Lacan’s infamous provocation in Seminar XVIII—“peut-être, je ne suis lacanien que parce que j’ai fait du chinois autrefois”—this paper examines the stakes of his long but fragmented engagement with Chinese writing, specifying his concerns by distinguishing them from the political dreams of his contemporaries. How does this engagement differ from the comparison or application of knowledge?

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2023

The ontological incompleteness revealed by quantum physics and the ontological stability imposed ... more The ontological incompleteness revealed by quantum physics and the ontological stability imposed by the “augmented reality” of games such as Pokémon Go have become increasingly important references in Žižek’s materialist assessment of the contemporary Other. This paper analyzes a current online phenomenon, known as “the Backrooms,” that converges with these recent concerns in ways that are perhaps more interesting and provocative than films such as The Matrix and The Truman Show that, Žižek contends, lead one to a conceptual dead-end. That is, we might conclude that there is an authentic reality beyond the simulation or that there is no ‘real’ reality, just a variety of semblances – either way, we foreclose the real that, according to Žižek, inheres as incompleteness and inconsistency. “The Backrooms,” which began life as a cryptic and disquieting post on the forum 4chan before inspiring subreddits, video games and YouTube videos – content that is predominantly created and shared by the ‘gen x’ demographic – ex-sists in a reality that is unstable and, so goes its lore, can be accessed through glitches and ‘quantum tunnelling.’ With this one example, we shall see how culture is responding to the same political and scientific developments that Žižek’s materialism is also working through.

Biography, 2022

This essay examines Jacques-Alain Miller's avoidance and refashioning of various conventions of b... more This essay examines Jacques-Alain Miller's avoidance and refashioning of various conventions of biography in Life of Lacan in his attempt to adequately represent not a "Great Man" but a "man of desire"—the embodiment of a psychoanalytic ethics of desire. In doing so, comparisons are made to other biographies and memoirs such as Élisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan, Catherine Millot's Life with Lacan, and Sibylle Lacan's A Father: Puzzle. A discussion of Lacan's own resistance to biography and the mixed regard in which he held the biographies he read is followed by an explanation of the anti-biographical imperative established by Lacan and adopted by Miller as an unrealizable ideal of the psychoanalytic doctrine's transmission without reference to the person of Lacan. The third section is a reading of Miller's experiment in psychoanalytic life writing as an effort to represent, without resolving, the enigma of desire that Lacan is said to exemplify.

Angelaki, 2021

Evocatively referred to by Alain Badiou as a “final unravelling” and an “insoluble enigma” that “... more Evocatively referred to by Alain Badiou as a “final unravelling” and an “insoluble enigma” that “form[s] an integral part of his enigmatic legacy,” Lacan’s dissolution has long been regarded as a quixotic act at odds with reason and common sense. The purpose of this paper, through a close reading of the documents, seminars and epistles regarding dissolution, is to explain the reasons for this action and dispel some of the obscurity surrounding it. I will also attempt to reintegrate the act into Lacan’s intellectual trajectory through an identification of connections between the final and earlier formulations. The question as to how and why Lacan dissolved his school will be approached through the isolation and assessment of three substantive processes: the “research” preceding dissolution, the “work” of dissolution and the “saying” qua act that triggered dissolution.

Neohelicon, 2021

Throughout literary history the event of a plague has been an interpretation event typically spli... more Throughout literary history the event of a plague has been an interpretation event typically split into two mutually exclusive stances. On one side, the plague is interpreted as the manifestation of divine punishment (for example, Homer’s Iliad) or, more ambiguously, as a test of faith. On the other side, it is understood in terms of its material causes in the absence of God (for example, Lucretius’ De rerum natura). However, there is an important liminal space in which the plague is understood neither as evidence of divine presence nor as evidence of divine absence but as a sign of discord between the human and the divine and discord in the divine. In this space, both humanity and God are infected by a finitude and contingency that the plague, perhaps more than any other phenomenon, renders palpable and unavoidable. It is in and of this temporal space that Friedrich Hölderlin wrote. This article begins with an explication of Jacques Lacan and Jean-Claude Milner’s understanding of the plague as an affront to the belief in the existence of an exception to finitude and contingency (the immortal Absolute in the form of God or the soul) and then combines this with David Farrell Krell’s elucidation of the effect on German idealism’s poets and philosophers of an awareness of this ailing or “tragic Absolute..” It then turns to Hölderlin’s translation of Oedipus Rex and later poems and fragments where the plague is obliquely referenced in order to show how what Wilhelm Scherer diagnosed as Hölderlin’s “spiritual epidemic”—his struggle, to the point of madness, with a universe in which the divine exception is a presentified absence—is the result of a recognition that, in Lacan’s provocative terms, “Christianity is an epidemic.”

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2021

This paper introduces the distinctiveness of Slavoj Žižek's reading of literature by examining th... more This paper introduces the distinctiveness of Slavoj Žižek's reading of literature by examining the import of his praise (proffered in the recently published Sex and the Failed Absolute) for Samuel Beckett as "the great writer of abstraction" and deployment of Friedrich Hölderlin as a counterexample. It begins by distinguishing what Žižek refers to as "idealism pushed to its limits"-that is, his retention of the idealist subject within a materialist project-from other contemporary idealisms and materialisms before turning to the question of how it informs his understanding of literature and other modes of literary criticism such as new historicism. Specific attention is paid to the apparently antimaterialist importance granted to the negative power of abstraction as opposed to a materialist analysis of the concrete and particular. To further elucidate the stakes of Žižek's project, a comparison is drawn between Kant's transcendental "I" and the "transcendental poetry" or "literary absolute" of the German Romantics on one hand and Žižek's "failed Absolute" and what he has baptized "poetry (of anxiety)" on the other.

Nottingham French Studies, 2019

Evidence of the Surrealists' influence on the work of Jacques Lacan is not in short supply. His E... more Evidence of the Surrealists' influence on the work of Jacques Lacan is not in short supply. His Ecrits and seminars of the 1940s to mid-1960s teem with direct and indirect references to the Surrealists and the case for recognising the latter's influence has been persuasively made by a number of critics. It is not our aim to again review or ague against this link. We shall instead examine several hitherto overlooked statements made by Lacan in 1970s on the subject of Surrealism in which he emphatically disavowed the existence of intellectual sympathies. Why was the Lacan of the 1970s so wary of the conjunction between psychoanalysis and Surrealism? In answering this question we shall concentrate on Lacan's objections to the principles behind two of the Surrealists' most important literary concepts: automatic writing and amour fou.

Canadian Review of American Studies, 2020

In answer to the question “What do Americans want?” Jacques-Alain Miller—Lacan’s son-in-law, edit... more In answer to the question “What do Americans want?” Jacques-Alain Miller—Lacan’s son-in-law, editor of his seminars, and the pre-eminent figure in the contemporary Lacanian institution—has stated “Žižek,” while also pessimistically musing that if Lacanian psychoanalysis were to triumph in America, it would be “an Americanized Lacan, pre-packaged for supermarkets.” This article introduces and examines Miller’s intellectual attitude toward America by first summarizing the primary arguments he advanced in his earliest addresses to American and anglophone audiences before turning to his more recent consideration of America as the exemplary “hypermodern civilization” and his development of the post-Lacanian clinical category of “ordinary psychosis” in response to both this hypermodernity and the establishment of a clinic of borderline personality disorders by the American analytic establishment.

Whilst the preponderance of references made in Frankenstein to the instruments and organs of the ... more Whilst the preponderance of references made in Frankenstein to the instruments and organs of the visual field has been repeatedly acknowledged by the text's readers, little sustained attention has been paid to the field that these instruments and organs both construct and occupy. In this paper we will examine the particularity of this field, outlining its structure (the vanishing points and framing), content (its peculiarities and obscurities) and subjects (their modes of witnessing and blindness). Opening with an analysis of Walton's visual field qua desirous fantasy in light of his reference to "keeping", we closely study the visual fields constructed by the artistic, scientific and profane eyes of Shelley, Frankenstein, Clerval and the monster.

The subject of this paper is the interdependence between three works: Clarice Lispector's Água Vi... more The subject of this paper is the interdependence between three works: Clarice Lispector's Água Viva, Hélène Cixous's ‘See the Neverbeforeseen’ and Roni Horn's Rings of Lispector (Água Viva). It begins by exploring by what means, according to Cixous's reading, Lispector subverts the order of language and narrative, the logic of representation and the concept of ‘The Author’ in Água Viva. We then look at how Horn's ‘plastic-surgical interpretation’ of Lispector's text further dislocates this order and how it permits us to experience the becoming unreadable of the readable and the becoming readable of the unreadable. The second half examines the analogical use made of the Borromean rings by Cixous in presenting the topological relation between herself, Lispector and Horn and its ‘capture [of] the secret of the intangibility of the intangible’.

We are used to hearing Žižek respond to a proposed choice between two options with the replies " ... more We are used to hearing Žižek respond to a proposed choice between two options with the replies " yes please! " or " no thanks! " – this answer amounting to a refusal of choice that maintains the productive antagonism between the presented options or a refutation that one offers a better solution than the other (" both are worse! "). However, when it comes to the question " Joyce or Beckett? " Žižek unequivocally responds " Beckett, please! " Through a close reading of Žižek's scattered references to and reflections on both writers, this paper sets out the theoretical stakes of such a response whilst also addressing other matters such as Žižek's remarks on the " Joycean " Lacan.

This essay challenges a certain trend in the Anglo-American reception of Lacan – namely, the tend... more 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.

This paper outlines an approach to Lacan’s XXVIth seminar Topology and Time. It begins with an ex... more This paper outlines an approach to Lacan’s XXVIth seminar Topology and Time. It begins with an examination of Lacan’s substitution of the philosopher’s being and time for the psychoanalyst’s topology and time by looking at Lacan’s deployment of the Moebius strip in clarifying the paradoxical temporality of the subject and the signifier. It then introduces the Borromean knot as a writing of the Real and attempts to explain the distinction Lacan makes between three different accesses to the Real: modelling, demonstration and monstration. Following a delineation of the place of the symptom and the unconscious in a nodal topology, this paper concludes by raising some questions about the temporality of the Borromean knot and outlining two of the concepts that Lacan introduced in Topology and Time – namely, ‘the generalised Borromean’ and ‘homotopic inversion’.

Books by Will Greenshields

Contents: Chapter 1: Dissolution and Déblayage 1.1. Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas 1.2. T... more 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

Book Reviews by Will Greenshields

Drafts by Will Greenshields