Larval Subjects .

I previous posts I have expressed a sort of philosophical schizophrenia or malaise with regard to the question of where to begin in philosophy that perpetually has me batting about like a fly in a bottle. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that, “[w]here to begin in philosophy has always– rightly –been regarded as a very delicate problem, for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions” (DR, 129). In advancing this assertion, Deleuze ties himself to a long philosophical tradition stretching all the way back to Plato. As Plato writes in Book VI of The Republic:

Understand then, said I, that by the other section of the intelligible I mean that which the reason itself lays hold of by the power of dialectic, treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the starting point of all, and after attaining to that again taking hold of the first dependencies from it, so to proceed downward to the conclusion, making no use whatever of any object of sense but only of pure ideas [forms] moving on through ideas [forms] to ideas [forms] and ending with ideas [forms]. (511 b2-c1)

For Plato, philosophical discourse must break with all custom, authority, and mythological narratives to arrive at the assumptionless and demonstrable. An excellent example of this can be found in the early dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates is surprised to encounter Euthyphro at the Hall of Kings where legal matters are addressed. After a brief conversation, Euthyphro informs Socrates that he is there to prosecute his father for murder. Apparently one of his father’s servants had gotten drunk and murdered another servant. His father had bound the servant and thrown him in a ditch while dispatching another servant to determine what legal actions should be taken. While waiting for the authorities to arrive, the servant died from either the bonds or exposure to the elements.

Surprised that Euthyphro would prosecute his own father– here an anthropological knowledge of kinship relations would be important to the analysis of the dialogue –Socrates asks why Euthyphro would do such a thing. Euthyphro quickly responds that it is his pious or religious duty to do so. Socrates points out that only a man of very great wisdom (knowledge) would so confidently proceed in such a course of action and asks Euthyphro to explain piety to him so that he might better defend himself against the charges of impiety levelled against him by Meletus in his own court case. If Euthyphro can teach him the meaning of piety, then Socrates will be able to defend himself against Meletus’ charges as he will be able to show that he does, indeed, know what piety is (the presupposition here– common in the Ancient world –is that we only do wrong on the basis of ignorance, confusing what is good with its simulacrum). If, on the other hand, Euthyphro is mistaken, Socrates will be innocent as his soul will have been corrupted by a bad teacher.

The manner in which Euthyphro defends his first attempt at a definition of piety is of special interest with regard to the question of breaking with presuppositions. Having agreed to take Socrates as his pupil, Euthyphro remarks that,

…I say that the pious is what I am now doing, prosecuting the wrongdoer who commits a murder or a sacrilegious roberry, or sins in any point like that, whether it be your father, or your mother, or whoever it may be. And not to prosecute would be impious. And, Socrates, observe what a decisive proof I will give you that such is the law. It is one I have already given others; I tell them that the right procedure must be not to tolerate the impious man, no matter who. Does not mankind believe that Zeus is the most excellent and just among the gods? And these same men admit that Zeus shackled his own father [Cronus] for swallowing his [other] sons unjustly, and that Cronus in turn had gelded [castrated] his father [Uranus] for like reasons. But now they are enraged at me when I proceed against my father for wrongdoing, and so they contradict themselves in what they say about the gods and what they say of me. (5d6 – 6a5)

In this first attempted definition of piety, it is clear that Euthyphro is an advanced ethical thinker deserving of praise. Euthyphro affirms the universality of moral principles irregardless of kinship, nationalistic, or tribal relations such as those one enjoys with respect to one’s mother and father. In this regard, Euthyphro sounds like Jesus, when he remarks “[i]f any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, his wife and children, his brothers, and sisters– yes, even his own life –he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). The implication of this difficult saying seems to be that genuine moral uprightness requires a break from tribal and kinship relations– the Lacanian would add a break from identification with the master-signifier –so as to affirm the Jewish exhortation to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). So long as this break with what Badiou calls the logic of the encyclopedia is not accomplished, the dimension of the egalitarian universal cannot be encountered.

However, Socrates is quick to point out that there is both a problem with this definition of piety and more importantly with how it is defended. On the one hand, this definition fails insofar as it gives only an instance of piety (prosecuting someone for murder) and not the feature or rule that would allow us to identify all instances of piety. Interestingly, the Euthyphro ends in aporia without a definition, suggesting that perhaps piety is not a domain of knowledge and therefore not a domain of obligation with regard to the other (recall that the Oracle at Delphi is the mouthpiece of the god Apollo, the god of reason and truth). An important philosophical decision seems to be made later in the same dialogue when Socrates asks whether piety is pious because the gods love it or if the gods love it because it is pious. If the former, then we must await the revelation of the gods in order to know our ethical duty. If the latter, we can examine ethical questions without requiring recourse to the revelations of the gods. Socrates and Euthyphro both choose the latter option, and it is this decision that will mark all subsequent ethical theory to present and open the door for the Enlightenment critique of Church authority.

Of greater concern is the way in which Euthyphro defends his definition. Socrates quickly points out that Euthyphro appeals to myth, and remarks that he has a difficult time believing these stories to be true. In short, Euthyphro enjoins Socrates to accept as a duty something based on a myth that he cannot himself validate. This is an act of intellectual violence or disrespect to his interlocutor. So in this brief exchange the gauntlet of philosophy is thrown: break with myth so as to know through reason. Moreover, in the same dialogue Euthyphro has presented himself as an expert in all things pious, thereby defending his claims on the basis of his authority. In suggesting that he become Euthyphro’s pupil, Socrates effectively rejects the acceptance of authority on the basis of authority’s own claim to recognition, but instead calls for authority to legitimate itself.

Philosophy thus demands, in principle, a break from authority and myth. However, there is a genuine question as to whether this is possible. Insofar as the Lacanian subject is split, it is always decentered from itself. The manner in which the subject is decentered is structured in two ways: On the one hand, the Lacanian subject is not immanent to itself as a consciousness due to the manner in which the ego (not to be confused with the subject) is alienated in the imaginary, misrecognizing itself in its imago. The ego confuses itself with its image of itself rather than with its genuine being and is forever unable to coincide with this image. On the other hand, insofar as the subject is constituted in the field of the Other, it is alienated with regard to language such that it is not master of its own language. Because the signifier cannot signify itself, it follows that no origin or ground of language can ever be articulated that would meet Plato’s requirement for dialectic. For every signifier I articulate there will always be (n+1) or (n-1)… One more to say or one too few. The dream of a subject that would be immanent to itself and thus completely grounded such as we find in Descartes or Husserl is thoroughly undermined by the Lacanian subject. This goes straight to the heart of my concerns, for I recognize the validity of what I’ll loosely call “sociological thought”, undermining the dream of a subject immanent to itself (with the possible exception of Badiou), while also recognizing the philosophical ambition of breaking with doxa… If only as a critical regulative ideal.

What is required is some gesture that is able to rigorously establish the identity of the subject with what is most other or foreign to it (the symptom, social constitution, objective conditions, etc). The best candidate I’ve seen for a solution to this problem is Hegel’s “identity of identity and difference”. As Hegel expresses this identity of identity and difference,

The disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them. That is why some of the ancients conceived the void as the principle of motion, for they rightly saw the moving principle as the negative, though they did not as yet grasp that the negative is the self. Now, although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the ‘I’ and its object, it is just as much the disparity of substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. When it has shown this completely, Spirit has made its exitence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and of the separation of knowing and truth, is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the ‘I’, it is self-like or the Notion. (Phenomenology of Spirit, 21)

When the analysand recognizes themselves in a slip of the tongue such as the statement “I cannot before myself”/”I cannot be-for myself”, subject is recognizing itself in substance. The analysand had intended to express the thought that he is unable to be prior to himself, but instead ended up saying, despite his intentions, that he cannot support himself. The work of the “negative” (relation) occurs when the analysand recognizes himself in this slip of the tongue, despite the fact that this slip was not what he intended. Similarly, when the sociologist demonstrates that the personal motives of individuals pursuing their own aims ends up producing economic inequalities such as the way in which American consummerism ends up reinforcing third world poverty and conflict despite the fact that the American consumer does not intend this result, a dialectical identity or an identity of identity and difference is being asserted between these large scale social organizations and these personal intensions. The truth expressed in the slip of the tongue (substance) differs radically from what the subject knows of himself (knowledge in the imaginary), just as the truth of one’s social actions (class inequalities) differs radically from what the consumer believes he knows of himself; yet there is nonetheless an identity between the two. Dialectic is able to demonstrate these relations. Even presuppositions themselves stand in a dialectical relation with the presuppositionless.

Yet while Hegel’s logic of the negative, his logic of alterity, promises a way of surpassing the difficulties posed by a subject that is no longer immanent to itself, there are two further problems: On the one hand, the Lacanian, unlike Hegel, rejects any claim that truth and knowledge can be brought into harmony with one another. Truth always outstrips knowledge, or we always say more than we intend to say. On the other hand, and what amounts the same, the Lacanian account of the real precludes any totality, whole, or completeness. What, then, would a dialectic look like that didn’t fall prey to the manner in which Hegel’s thought remains mired in the imaginary. For Lacan, the imaginary does not refer to the fictional such as an imaginary friend, but to the dimension of meaning, completeness, and the desire for wholeness. How is this to be philosophically surmounted? Or is there a discourse of the philosopher that escapes that of the master and enters the discourse of the analyst?

Well I’ve been fortunate enough to land at least one job interview at the American Philosophical Association conference in December. Hopefully there are more invitations to come. This isn’t half bad as my research focus is contemporary French philosophy, and U.S. philosophy departments tend to have a highly allergic reaction to anything French, instead allowing language, literature, and cultural studies departments to do scholarship in this area. At any rate, this is pretty good for having only sent out eleven application packets.

Although this is happy news, I’ve found myself in the midsts of a massive anxiety attack, following me about for days. I tossed and turned all night, filled with anxiety and feverish thoughts as to who I am. In short, I’m wallowing in the midsts of the question of fantasy Che vuoi? “You’re asking me this, but what do you really want?” That is, what is my research about? And when I ask myself this question, I am asking what it is about philosophically. In my fantasy life, things would be easy for me if I were pursuing positions in rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, or political theory– it’s always elswhere that things would work out for us –but explaining my work philosophically, that’s far more difficult. How am I to explain the relevance of Lacan to philosophy in a non-dogmatic fashion, free of difficult jargon, that isn’t simply about ideology critique a la Zizek? I feel as if I need some pithy statement of my philosophical project that resonates with more traditional philosophical questions in epistemology and ontology, but when I try to articulate such a project I suddenly feel paralyzed like a deer in the headlights. “My work is focused on differential and relational ontology.” “I’m interested in the manner in which the formation of reality emerges from the impossible-real of irreducible antagonism. By the impossible-real I mean…” “I’m focused on questions of how it’s possible to break with socio-historical mediation so as to articulate a truth.” “I’m interested in the consequences that follow from the death of God. By the death of God I mean… Here I’m thinking primarily of the function God serves in Descartes’ third meditation, and implicitly in the work of other philosophers that posit a whole…” “My work primarily revolves around the thought of Badiou, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Ranciere, and Zizek because…” “I’m interested in the relationship between the symbolic, imaginary, and real from the perspective of how our relationship to reality is organized, and am interested in the role desire and intersubjectivity play in questions of epistemology and our relation to being…” “I’m interested in questions of emergence and self-organization such that…”

Everything that falls from my lips ends up sounding vague, empty, or in need of too much clarification… Or I worry that I end up sounding like a posterboy for the typical postmodernist. What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other. “What is the philosophical project that defines me as a human being?” I think I’ll go curl up in a ball now. Fortunately I don’t need a job, so at least I have that going for me. I have terrific colleagues, am in an intellectually stimulating environment, have lots of things going on such as conferences in the work, and am generally very content here. About the biggest irritation is bs administrative things, but you find that anywhere. It’s much nicer to interview when you’re not facing the prospect of hunger and debtors.

Blah-Feme has posted a terrific paper on the neighbor. Excerpts:

This extraordinary passage gets to the heart of the Freudian project, and does so with remarkable efficiency and candour: the disavowal of any cosy or settled notion of man as thoroughly civilised, as only aberrantly or rarely violent, constitutes for Freud a devastating complacency at the heart of the modern political economy. To rest on the laurels of modernity’s putative civilisation is to slip at any minute into the darkest chaos.

What is striking here for me is the manner in which the neighbour is made to work here as a symptom, as a figure that holds together in one place the unbearable incommensurateness of living cheek-by-jowl with the other, of being of civilisation and yet recognising that that civilisation is coterminous with the most brutal and base instincts hat have not been laid to rest, despite modernity’s best efforts.

And

Lacan’s reference here, of course, is to Freud’s myth of the primal horde: the primal father forbids his sons sexual access to the women of the horde. The sons come together and murder the father, thereby learning the great power of collective agency. In that moment of violence, the men overthrow the primal father and change the order of things: from then they are doomed to mourn the father, evermore burdened by the guilt of their transgression and thereby, in honour of him who has been wronged, they reinstate the dead father as the father-God, totem-God. And it is here, in the howl of this bloody transgression that the neighbour is born: love him as thyself, for never again shall ye wrong him. “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”

The neighbour, then, is a symptom… and he emerges at precisely that moment when the horde’s men fall under the sway of the father-God, when they fall under the sway of law, as they pass fully into the symbolic order into which they are hurled as its subjects, subjected, in chains. They mourn for that which is lost and yet reinstate it, put it back in place, revere it. The father returns as a symptom. It’s as if he is always hiding in the car, just out of sight, presumed dead but about to return any minute, volver, volver…

In an exceptionally precise fashion he renders the symptom as a return of the repressed. Well worth the read.

Luke Fraser has recently posted a translation of Badiou’s early work entitled The Concept of Model. Enjoy!

Some of you might recall the enthusiasm I expressed over the victory of the democratic party in November. Indeed, for me these days the entire goal is to find a way to be a bit optimistic and affirmative in a world of critical and political theory that strikes me as having become fashionably pessimistic and self-indulgent. As in all things, optimism is quickly diminished when confronting the corruption of party politics. Nancy Pelosi has decided to bar labor representatives from meeting with freshman representatives to discuss the economic direction of the country, thereby giving the middle finger to labor in the United States. I think this is a lethal error, and that moves such as this account for the rising tide of religious fundamentalism in the United States. It is not by mistake that the same demographic that once made up the labor movements of the past is today aligned with the religious right. The rise of Christian fundamentalism can be plotted against the attack on labor movements in the United States, starting in the early seventies. In the face of globalization and perpetual layoffs, and a lack of political representation, the only option seems to be one of becoming Stoic and turning towards God. No wonder we are inhabited by such apocalyptic visions. It’s as if the United States has become Heideggerian, believing that “only a god can save us now”.

For years I have heard the same argument over and over again: “The democratic party may not be the best, but there’s no alternative. If you vote otherwise, then they will lose and things will be even worse than they are now.” This line of reasoning is an example of a forced vel of alienation– “your money or your life!” –and insures that nothing changes or is ever done. Concerted efforts need to be made to organize and create genuine alternatives to this status quo, and the spectre of this argument or line of reasoning needs to be demolished.

Being the narcissist that I am, I use a webtraffic service to monitor traffic on this site, which gives me all sorts of nifty information about how many visitors I have a day and where they are from. This provides me with some evidence that I exist, thereby supplementing the failure of Cartesian immediacy now that we know the subject is a perpetually displacing void. I’m gratified to see that the traffic on this blog has steadily increased since I began using the service two months ago, but also sometimes find myself disturbed by the websearches that led people here and, more recently, by certain repeat visitors. Don’t get me wrong, repeat visitors are the true measure of any blog, but this visitor in particular has my mind awhirl with paranoid fantasies. About a month ago I wrote this post on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and ever since then I have been repeatedly visited by someone in Herndon, Virginia. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not prone to paranoid fantasies and have never gotten worked up about net deception, but this visitor is particularly interesting. You see, this visitor signs on without fail at the precise moment I sign on whenever I check my web traffic. They sign on at the precise minute I sign on. How is this possible unless they are somehow monitoring traffic to my website and perhaps my traffic in particular? Perhaps the webmap is simply recording my visits, but why would it record them in Herndon, when I’m located outside of Dallas?

Having done a little research on Herndon now, I’ve discovered that it is located outside of Washington, D.C. and is one of the emerging hubs of internet technology. Of course, this particular visitor doesn’t seem particularly advanced technologically, as they’re using Windows ME and have a monitor that measures 600 x 800 (don’t worry, the webtracking service does not give me your name or personal information, nor does it give me much more information than what I’ve just listed). Anyway, being the self-important narcissist that I am, this odd occurance generates fantasies in my mind that I am now being watched by the government and homeland security for having written on Marx. Now, the important point isn’t whether the fantasy is true (unlikely I think). This is, after all, just a fleeting thought that passes through my mind. Rather, when encountering a fantasy such as this, a fantasy of one’s relation to the Other or how the Other regards you, the question to ask is what sort of desire this speaks. Returning to the theme of my name (here and here), I’ve sometimes wondered how the signifier “Paul” functions in my unconscious with respect to the Biblical namesake. I confess that I have a great admiration for Paul’s revolutionary work in walking from one end of the world to the other, and the manner in which he was able to become nameless by being all things to all people. Wouldn’t I need an oppressive empire to do such a thing? Perhaps part of the reason if find Lacanian psychoanalysis so appealing is that there’s a genuine practice attached to it and a concerted effort to further its growth around the world, all of which feeds mightily into my Pauline fantasy. Moreover, is there a way in which such a dark fantasy– a situation that could be very costly were it true –allows me some jouissance that I’m otherwise forbidden or punishes me for some jouissance that I already enjoy. When analyzing fantasy, the point is not to focus on the fantasy itself, but rather what the fantasy would render possible were it to take place. Often fantasies are extremely disturbing to those that have them and are not pleasant scenerios that make up the space of daydreams. The place to look in fantasy is not so much these masturabatory daydreams, but rather in the thoughts we have about how others are evaluating us and seeing us. Clearly there’s something megalomaniacal in this fantasy, as it inflates my importance by seeing me as worthy of government scrutiny. But perhaps, were such a scenerio to occur, other things would become possible that were not formerly possible for me. Or perhaps I’m just punishing myself for not having yet responded to N.Pepperell’s beautiful, challenging, and provacative recent posts (here and here). Certainly these are grounds for being sent to a secret European prison or Guantanamo Bay, and certainly such punishment would relieve me of some guilt.

I really must be mad to write these things on a blog. I hope no one is watching.

I received the following email from a fellow analyst in Argentina and thought it might be productive in generating some discussion here on the blog. X writes:

Dear Levi: I have been reading the lacan yahoo groups since long. Also I have been practicing Lacan theory as much as clinical practice since the seventies. You remark very accurately that since Millerian politics has taken over the majority of the lacanian groups all over the world we have seen the expansion of millerian psychoanalytical point of view..are you sure they follow Lacan’s theories on its foundation? Any way My concern (the reason I write to you) is that I have seen Lacan APPLIED to anything on the market from Sufism to cinema, to fashion to Japanese to….cuisine??. I would like to know your view since in my country (Argentina), the country of the thousand analysts, so to speak has not developed such an over explanatory religion as I can imagine in the Us. Is it my perception wrong? it has to do with Zizek simplifying ideas, fashionable impronta?Is the Universitary discourse predominance?. As a practitioner, I see this direction as been very dangerous to psychoanalysis worries me.As Freud warned us. Psy. is not a religion. We must be aware of that. Sorry for my english syntax and grammar. I hope you find my question interesting enough to answer me.

I’m not sure I have a whole lot to add to your observations and hope that you don’t find my writings on psychoanalysis to exemplify these characteristics. First, I do not at all disagree with your observation that there is a sort of Lacanian religion emerging in the United States. I think the way in which you pose the question already suggests an answer. You point out that Argentina is the country of a thousand analysts. In the United States we have nothing comparable to this omnipresence of practicing analysts. What passes for therapy in the States is usually some “guru” or master that purports to have knowledge of the brain and how to live one’s life successfully if only the proper behavioral activities are followed and the proper drugs are taken. I exaggerate, but not much. In short, we have no living practice of analysis.

I think the absence of a living practice of analysis has profound consequences as to how Freud and Lacan are received in the United States. I cannot speak for you, but in my experience practicing as an analyst one of the most striking things is the manner in which you never completely know what is going on with your analysands. As analysts we listen, we ask questions, we make enigmatic remarks that can be taken in a number of different ways, and we’re continuously surprised by what our analysands have to teach us. As I see it, the role of the analyst, the position of the analyst, is an extremely humble position. Or, rather, it is a position that quickly leads one to humility. The analysand might place us in the position of the subject supposed to know, but we are certainly not subjects that do know. Over the course of analysis we do gain a bit of knowledge from our analysands, we do learn, but that knowledge is never complete for as Lacan says “the truth can only be half-said”… It reveals to the same degree that it conceals.

We take our bearings from Freud and Lacan. Their experience orients us. But, in his ecrits “The Position of the Unconscious”, Lacan is careful to point out that the unconscious changes with discourse about the unconscious, such that we are forever encountering new symptoms in the clinic and such that we find that interpretations or interventions that might have been successful ten years ago no longer seem to produce effects today. As such, I cannot help but feel that the analyst is very much a Socratic figure who relates to others with an awareness of his or her own ignorance. This, I take it, is one of the central distinctions between an analyst and a therapist. A therapist is not ignorant, but knows… Yet the knowledge of the therapist is a knowledge in the imaginary. It is an imaginary mastery of the patient.

Returning then to the theme of Lacanian theology in the United States, I think one of the central issues is that the vast majority of Lacanian theorists work with “analysands” that do not talk back. Those of us in the States who have not undergone analysis or who do not practice analysis work primarily with non-responsive texts such as novels, social phenomena, films, and television shows. Freud, of course, thought that such cultural analysis was of vital importance for building psychoanalytic knowledge. Both Freud and Lacan gave masterful analyses of various cultural artifacts such as Oedipus Rex and Plato’s Symposium, and helped to advance our understanding of the symptom by these means (my view is that psychoanalysis is a transcendental theory of the conditions under which the symptom is possible). However, they were also practicing analysts, and one of the central things we quickly learn in the analytic setting is that just when we think we have an understanding of what is going on the analysand throws us a curve ball that violates all our expectations. That is, there’s a dialogical dimension to analysis such that the analysand responds back and this is lacking in the interpretation of cultural artifacts. Absent this dit-mension of response, psychoanalysis easily becomes a discourse of imaginary mastery, generating the attitude of a university discourse that is confident it is able to interpret all formations of the unconscious and culture.

While I have a great deal of admiration for Zizek’s work and the manner in which he’s rendered the Millerian interpretation of Lacan accessible to a wider audience– someone on the list recently suggested that perhaps this was written by Zizek, revealing their ignorance of the secondary literature on Lacan and Miller’s appropriation in particular, indicating just how much Zizek has come to hegemonize the name Lacan and obscure a vast field of very talented clinical work done by analysts that have their feet on the ground (or bottoms on the couch) working daily with analysands –I do believe that Zizek’s work lends itself to this imaginary illusion of mastery and that Zizek himself often succumbs to this lure of mastery. From a clinical point of view this is very counter-productive as it closes off the unconscious by leading us to believe too readily that we know what it is speaking, rather than opening the unconscious by provoking desire through enigma as in the case of Lacan’s poetic use of speech in his late seminars which functions to evoke desire by rendering meaning (always a feature of the imaginary) enigmatic and elusive.

I thus find myself torn. As you know, Lacan left us with 27 years of teachings and experience. This material is extremely difficult and much of it is uneven as to its quality. Further, a good deal of it remains unpublished and the translations of these unpublished works are often inaccurate. Few save the most devoted will take the time to trudge through Lacan’s difficult work and engage in the intellectual labor of developing his thought. At present, Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States only exists as a theory, and has a very low degree of intensity as a practice. For the academic laboring under conditions that demand publication, there are diminishing returns when it comes to working directly with Lacan. Moreover, what is the American Lacanian to do? It’s nearly impossible to work solely as a clinician in the United States due to how therapy has here been structured via the mediation of insurance companies, government, and a particular ideology of medical science. Moreover, with the exception of a handful of institutions such as Duquesne (and increasingly Emory), psychology departments tend to see psychoanalysis and Lacan as a form of arcane quackery that has been thoroughly disproven or discredited. The only other option is for the defender of Lacan to shack up in social sciences (rarely) or humanities departments and to transform psychoanalysis into a form of cultural and political analysis. Thus, while I have a number of reservations about the predominance of the discourse of the master and university in many of our best and brightest Lacanian theorists in the United States, I feel that at present there is little alternative. However, I do feel that this work– while scarcely resembling a genuine analytic stance –is nonetheless laying the groundwork for a day in which genuine psychoanalytic practice might here be possible by introducing elements into the symbolic that create the potential for psychoanalysis to be received. It is for this reason that I am grateful for the work of figures such as Zizek and Miller. Zizek popularizes, while Miller codifies Lacan’s teachings so that they might become transmissible as a teaching. This, of course, also entails simplifications that lead to omissions and an erasure of other possible interpretations and readings. But it does seem as if progress is being made. Already an entire generation of analysts are emerging who would not have been able to practice at all a decade ago. There is Bruce Fink and students of his practice such as myself, Dan Collins, Yael Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Ed Pluth, and yet others such as Christina Laurita, and Tom Svolos, all of whom are practicing, making contributions to psychoanalytic theory, forming academic departments and conferences, and training other analysts. Right now the work of creating an infrastructure and space of the symbolic is underway, and this is a slow moving task that takes time.

Tom Svolos of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) and Creighton University Medical Center asked me to post this announcement to the Lacan list (you can read more about him and his work here and here). I thought it might be productive to post the announcement here as well. In working with him through the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workshops (APW) where I served with him on the planning committee, I have known him to be a talented analyst and Lacanian theorist. In my view, the growth of the World Association of Psychoanalysis in the United States has been one of the most exciting things to take place in the American Lacanian scene for some time. Since Jacques-Alain Miller finally chose to extend psychoanalytic training in its Millerian formulation to the United States two or three years ago, it has been tremendously exciting to watch the growth of this organization. What this symbolizes is a move away from Lacan and psychoanalysis being confined to academia, ideology critique, and literary theory, to the world of clinical practice, offering a genuine alternative to the order of Creon or that form of therapy that would call us to give way on our desire in the name of capital, so as to become good workers and spouses. In short, the plague is once again being brought to the United States, and I have high hopes that organizations such as the WAP and the APW will produce generations of analysts that spread forth across the land, enhancing analytic theory and practice and creating new possibilities of thought and practice outside analysis where none were seen before. I encourage anyone seriously interested in Lacanian theory to participate in this organization and the APW (in the near future I should be making an announcement for our next conference on Love). So without further ado:

Dear colleagues,