Lectures on Lacan Podcast

Our final episode on this often overlooked essay in Écrits begins by returning to the topic of speech. Because speech is always addressed, its meaning is always intersubjective — in keeping with the etymology of “communication,” which has nothing to do with unity but, instead, traces its origin to the Latin word for sharing. Classic 1950s Lacan.Which brings us back to another classic theme: truth vs. knowledge. This time, however, the operative word is ignorance. According to Lacan, ignorance is not the negation of knowledge but, instead, its most elaborate form. And psychoanalysis follows suit: It’s along the pathway of learned ignorance that the analyst helps the analysand discover the outer limit of knowledge: death. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

“Variations on the Standard Treatment” is about life and death — but not as we usually conceive of these basic human experiences. Between early lives tinged with death and encounters to come with this absolute master, there are egos fixated on images of life and, thank goodness, analysts who know the benefits of playing dead (and, wherever possible, dumb as well). What egos guard against, analysts help them confront, suggesting that psychoanalysis is not just about learning how to die, but also, more fundamentally, about learning how to live as though dead. From Zeno to Foucault, with important stops at Heidegger and Lacan, the lesson is the same: Only by subjectifying death do we finally learn how to live.And to think: “Variations on the Standard Treatment” is an often overlooked essay in Écrits!Stay tuned for our part three of this podcast early next week — and soon thereafter our second get together on THE DRIVE! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

“Variations on the Standard Treatment” in 10 moves — that’s our wager in this week’s installment of Often Overlooked Essays in Écrits. I’m not sure how I arrived at this number, or whether these mini-lectures even attempt to adhere to it, but there are definitely four clear themes in this episode:* The psychoanalytic semantics initially discovered by Freud, in which free associations are never exactly “free” because parapraxes aren’t just symptoms of underlying clinical structures but also signifiers in a sociolinguistic order known as the symbolic. * The theory and technique of psychoanalytic anemnesis enabled by Freud’s momentous discovery, in which secret affinities between present speech and past experience allow the latter to be recovered, reclaimed, and, above all, resubjectivized as one’s history — and with no small amount of self-compassion along the way.* The reciprocal misrecognition of ego and unconscious alike that many of Freud’s inheritors, especially in the tradition of ego psychology, have allowed to flourish by confusing the cause and effect resistance in analytic experience. * The fragmented bodies, specular images, mashed-up egos, and others big and small that populate child development — because apparently there’s still a lot of confusion about the mirror stage, too?! Be on the lookout for episode two later this week — and see you on Wednesday for our opening session on THE DRIVE! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

The keyword in the title of this often overlooked essay in Écrits is “subject.” No surprise there! But notice how Lacan presents the subject at essay’s end:Why and how the subject functions “a joint” — and not just any joint, but a joint between “the consequences of language and the desire for knowledge” — are the primary questions in part two of our podcast "On the Subject Who is Finally in Question."Along the way, we define subjects as symptoms as signifiers apart from signs and representational logics, with identity formations in the digital age as touchstones throughout. Lo! the networked self of late-modernity! Which is not the same, of course, as somebody sitting on a toilet. More like a dictionary shot through with desire. Or so this episode suggests. You’ll also hear one-line definitions of objet a, castration, holding environments, and the sinthome, along with shoutouts to Heidegger and Norbert Elias, a two-minute crash course on consumer logics of desire, another round of truths detoured in knowledge, and a final word on those bloody velvet shirts stuck to our skin.Stay tuned for two more episodes next week. “Variations on the Standard Treatment,” here we come!And I look forward to seeing y’all live and in-person (at least via Zoom) on Wednesday, the 28th, for our opening session on THE DRIVE! Link below for all the key details. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

For years, my go-to essay in Écrits was “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” I studied it, taught it, and even structured part of The Chattering Mind atop it. And don’t get me wrong: I still think this essay is fire. If ever there was a manifesto of Lacan’s return to Freud, “The Function and the Field” is it. But whenever I’ve flipped to this iconic essay in Écrits, I’ve often flitted past another fiery piece in the collection: “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question.” So this week, it’s all about latter! The first few minutes of this episode focus on mirages of completeness in common assumptions about pre-Oedipal life and clinical confusions about the end of analysis, suggesting that both fantasies of completeness are just that — fantasies. Then comes a classic but often misconstrued theme in Lacanian thought: the unconscious truth that psychoanalysis finds vs. the representational knowledge that philosophy seeks. Key phrase here: philosophy as truth’s detour into knowledge. Which brings this episode to another important theme: signs with referents vs. signifiers with . . . other signifiers. At stake in this versus is a properly Lacanian approach to language — not as a correspondent network of signs but, instead, as a differential system of signifiers. To illustrate this, we end in a series of velvet shirts — some soaked in blood, others ready for purchase, and all significantly repulsive.Stay tuned for more “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question” later this week! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

Here’s the thing about often overlooked essays in Écrits — or, at least, here’s what I learned last fall, while recording these mini-lectures: Even Lacan’s less iconic essays are studded with arresting insights, and many of these insights, when examined closely, shed fresh light on key features of psychoanalytic theory and technique. “Beyond the ‘Reality Principle’” is no exception. So much so, that I wound up recording three mini-lectures on this essay, all of which are presented in this podcast episode. The first is titled “Free Association,” the second “Addressivity as Relationality,” and the third, for reasons I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I still do, “Apology Screamed.”Hence, the Lacanian riddle (of sorts) at the end of this episode: What is expressed but not understood, conceptualized but denied, and unconscious insofar as it’s expressed but conscious insofar as it’s repressed? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

Our recent podcast on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialect of Desire” began with a question: If you could recommend only one essay in Écrits, which would it be? Today, I’d like to ask a different question — and, with it, to take our podcast in a new direction: Which of Lacan’s essays have you often skipped over, in order to focus on more iconic pieces in Écrits? First on my list has always been “On My Antecedents.” Until last fall, that is, when I decided to record a semester’s worth of mini-lectures on often overlooked essays in Écrits! Here’s the first recording in the series — on Lacan’s antecedents, of course! Stay tuned for more recordings on more essays in the coming weeks! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

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.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

If you’ve ever wondered how egos, superegos, ideal egos, and ego ideals hang together, and how others big and small are involved, Part 6 of this lecture series on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” is the one for you. What begins in the lower-half of the graph of desire quickly heads elsewhere, however, extending from sadism and the law, to pronouns vs. proper names, to Lacanian theories of love, to the discourse and desire of the analyst, to one of the reasons why there’s no Other of the Other, to our bone-deep longing — yours and mine alike — for non-maladaptive experiences of jouissance. If you’re also into cops, pencils, tattoos, plastic bags, bodies without organs, uteromorphic creation myths, Badiou’s math, and late-capitalist pursuits of pleasure . . . well . . . here you go. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com

The original audience for these lectures on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” was a group of 70+ doctoral students in clinical psychology. Some had studied Lacan with me before, others were completely new to his work, and a few were predictably resistant at every step of the way. All of which made the conceptual centerpiece of Part 5 — prohibition, the law, and the paternal function — especially fun to discuss. The clinical structure of perversion figures largely here, with sadism and masochism taking center stage. Followed by logics the American Western, the allure of overeating / workout cycles, and a hint at why the best father is a dead one. Then along comes phallic jouissance and, with it, a wide-ranging critique of “sexual enjoyment at the level of the swimsuit zone,” with help from subaltern theory, animal philosophy, Fanon’s case studies, even Freud himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lecturesonlacan.substack.com