What Kind of Life Is Worth Living?

What was there before the Symbolic? Certainly not the Real. And what was life like before castration? Certainly not jouissance. So begins Part 7 in this series on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” From here, it’s up, up, up the graph of desire in search of drive satisfaction and, thanks to some intrepid clinicians in the group, the possibility of yet another rung in the graph’s ladder, where the matheme of the drive might give way to that of love. Part 7 also includes a crash course on psychosis, derived in part from the 31-part series on Seminar III available on our Substack, but with an added emphasis on the clinical and conceptual bookend to Lacan’s early work on the topic: The Sinthome (Seminar XXIII). Be on the lookout for auto-cannibalism, linguistic determinism, the etymological unconscious, why Jesus was a masochist, and — by far my favorite moment in this recording — an exasperated student blurting out, apparently believing their mic was turned off, “he doesn’t take any breaks!” To which your trusty sadist replies, “there will be no breaks.”

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