scholarly journals Relief in Ignorance, Shattered Subjectivity: A Lacanian Reading of Subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet”

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Alierza Kargar ◽  
Mahnoosh Vahdati ◽  
Hassan Abootalebi
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Normal Person ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
The Subject

This paper provides a psychoanalytical account of subjectivity. It engages in a Lacanian reading of subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889), whose protagonist, the lawyer, illustrates Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjectivity and the subject. In the story, the lawyer develops a fragmented sense of subjectivity and experiences alienation from the society and all its allegedly logical and supposedly eternal norms, as well as loss and lack in his very being. The story reveals that subjectivity is unstable and constructed within and through language and that remaining a normal person, from the society’s perspective, requires not pondering over and beyond the language, but remaining stuck in it and never suspecting its authenticity and reliability. By contemplating whether the society’s ideologies are everlasting and what are or might be over them, the lawyer expects the society’s ideologies to bring bliss to human and thereby he develops hatred and despise towards them all. The ideas of Jacques Lacan about the development of subjectivity in the course of the mirror stage and the oedipal crisis are drawn upon.

scholarly journals From de Clérambault's Theory of Mental Automatism to Lacan's Theory of the Psychotic Structure

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stijn Vanheule
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Clinical Issues ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Lacanian Theory ◽  
Structural Perspective

In 1966, in a paper on those who have influenced his work, Jacques Lacan suggested that his concept of ‘paranoid knowledge’ and his structural approach to psychoanalysis were closely linked to the work of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault. This article examines both of these points. Starting with an introduction to de Clérambault, focusing on his concept ‘mental automatism,’ the link between ‘mental automatism’ and ‘paranoid knowledge’ is discussed. Loyalty to Henri Claude and conflicts around theoretical and clinical issues seem to lie at the basis of Lacan's initial neglect of his conceptual indebtedness to de Clérambault. Second, the author discusses the presumed connection between mental automatism and Lacan's structural psychoanalytic theory, which Lacan did not elaborate. It is argued that from a structural perspective, mental automatism comes down to a rupture in the continuity of the signifying chain, which provokes the disappearance of the subject. Furthermore, Lacan's theory implies the hypothesis that manifestations of mental automatism are determined by a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, where questions related to existence cannot be addressed in a stable way. Lacanian theory thus retained de Clérambault's notion of a rupture in mental life that lies at the basis of psychosis, but replaced his biological framework with the dimension of the subject as produced through speech.

scholarly journals Breaking the Mirror: Alain Badiou’s Reading of Jacques Lacan

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Ndiaye Berankova
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Logical Impossibility

In this article, I focus on Alain Badiou’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Jacques Lacan and highlight his conceptual points of divergence with the psychoanalyst. I elaborate on Badiou’s distinction between philosophy, antiphilosophy, and sophistry as well as the notions of sense, ab-sense, and non-sense that he proposed in the book There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan as well as in his seminar on Lacan. Unlike Lacan, who affirmed that philosophy is subject to the fantasy of the One, Badiou claimed that the One exists merely as a result of an operation of counting. In this manner, he contested Lacan’s conviction that philosophy forecloses the real. I argue that Badiou’s main point of divergence with Lacan is centred on the notion of the subject and on the localization of the void in relation to the subject. I also touch upon philosophy’s relation to the symbolic, namely its ability to raise powerlessness to logical impossibility.

scholarly journals Mystical experience in the men of the cave: a Lacanian reading of al-Kahf

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 456-462
Author(s):  
Tayebeh Barati ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Real ◽  
Holy Quran ◽  
The Holy Quran ◽  
The Subject

In his contribution to psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan introduces three orders according to which every psychoanalytic phenomenon can be described. These three orders are the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The imaginary is the order in which the subject thinks of everything as his/her own. For the subject there is no distinction between the other and the subject itself. In the symbolic order the subject comes to realise that there is a gap between him/her and the other. S/he, then, starts to feel a lack which for the rest of his/her life the subject tries to fill in. The real is considered as the most important order in which the subject tears away from the symbolic and tries to experience, once again, the unity it had in the imaginary order. It is in this phase that the subject experiences what is known as jouissance or the 'pleasure in pain'. The present study tries to look at the eighteenth chapter of the Holy Quran, al-Kahf (The Cave), in the light of psychoanalysis studies and Lacan's theories in order to analyse the mystical experience that the Men of the Cave go through to reach their final jouissance. 

Anamorphosis and Subjectivity in the Space of Reasons

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Dominik Finkelde ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
True Belief ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Space Of Reasons ◽  
The Mind

Jacques Lacan comments repeatedly on anamorphic art as it exemplifies for him how the mind from a certain angle perceives through law-like patterns the world that would otherwise be nothing but a chaos of arbitrary multiplicities. The angle, though, has a certain effect on what is perceived; an effect that, as such, cannot be perceived within the realm of experience. The article tries to make the link between diffraction laws of perception more explicit in the subject-object dichotomy and refers for that purpose to the work of both Hegel and Lacan. A reference to Hegel is necessary, as Hegel was not only one of Lacan’s own most important sources of insights, but the author who first focused on justified true belief through a theory of a missed encounter between truth and knowledge.

scholarly journals From the Imaginary to Theory of the Gaze in Lacan

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmelo Licitra Rosa ◽  
Carla Antonucci ◽  
Alberto Siracusano ◽  
Diego Centonze
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Psychoanalytic Treatment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality (as imaginary), and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality (as object gaze). This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself.

scholarly journals The Black Heroine in the Mirror: crossing the threshold of the specular image, the esoteric journey and the encounter with the annihilating I in Jordan Peele’s Us

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gitanjali Kapila
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Hero's Journey ◽  
The Self ◽  
Joseph Campbell ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Specular Image ◽  
The One ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Ideal

Using the conceptual framework of the mirror-stage established by Lacan to describe the initial anchoring of the subject, this paper seeks to interrogate the mirror as the locus of a secondary elaboration of the hero’s journey which follows its traditional articulation adumbrated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If the goal of the classic hero as Campbell suggests is to exit the nursery which represents the subject’s entrapment in Oedipal triangulation, this study posits that the successful selfrelease of the hero from the nursery simply sees him entering another nursery where the hero’s world is conceived of as a series of infinitely nested nurseries without exit. The mirror and its binding capture become the exemplary point of departure for the secondary elaboration of the journey for which, it turns out, the black heroine is the ideal adventurer. It is no wonder then that Jordan Peele’s Us is replete with mirrors functioning as cinematic signifiers for the portals effecting the subject’s displacement not towards an outer world of aggressive fathers and unobtainable ideal mothers; but, rather into a proximate encounter with the self, one precipitated by the mirror where the goal of the journey –the one that can only be revealed by the black heroine– is the apprehension of the “cipher of [her] moral destiny” and the unfathomable cartography of her true exit.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Gareth Williams
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Subject

Building on the thought of Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, and Alberto Moreiras, the Introduction proposes globalization as the disastrous passing of a historical limit. Faith in the relations between the modern production of wealth in the form of commodity fetishism, capitalist development, human progress, the freedom of the subject, and the philosophy of history that has anchored all of them since the Enlightenment is succumbing before a generalized sense of expiration and of growing stupefaction. The Introduction presents recent debates on the notion of infrapolitics as a thinking dedicated to the question of clearing a way through the problem of globalization, in the name of existence. The Introduction explains the question of the historical limit, the terms of the debate on infrapolitics, the structure of the ensuing Passages, and the raison d’etre of the entire book.

Between Part and Whole: Benjamin and the Single Trait

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Weber
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference

This text, which is part of a project, ‘Toward a Politics and Poetics of Singularity’, explores the implications of a phrase used more or less simultaneously, although independently, by Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, ‘the single trait’ (der einzige Zug). In his 1962 lectures on the problem of identification, Jacques Lacan focused on this phrase in Freud in order to exemplify the difference between the subject and the signifier. The use of the phrase by Benjamin in his essay on ‘Destiny and Character’ inflects the discussion toward questions of ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, and thereby links the singularity of the signifying process to literary and theatrical forms.

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