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“The first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan himself” – Reading...
Suture is a Lacanian concept, but not a concept of Lacan’s. According to Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller’s paper, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’ was “the first great Lacanian...
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Shades of Subjectivity – I
This is the first of four articles on subjectivity. Or more precisely, the first on four ‘shades’ of subjectivity because, with so much Lacanian ink having already been spilt on this topic,...
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Shades of Subjectivity – II
This is the second of four article on the subject of subjectivity (the first is here). Just as in the last article we opposed subjectivity to objectivity, so here we can oppose subjectivity to...
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Shades of Subjectivity – III
In an attempt to separate subjectivity from identity in the last article, one of the questions we were left with was whether the subject simply exchanges an imaginary alienation (in the rivalrous...
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Shades of Subjectivity – IV
About half way through his fifteenth Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan suggests to his audience that Freud’s contribution to a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity can be summed up in the...
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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – I
1. The Absent Father Case in point: Man of Steel I start this short series with what is perhaps the most consistently ubiquitous and easily noticeable of all cinematic clichés to harbour Lacanian...
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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – II
2. The Male Exception Case in point: Zodiac, The Usual Suspects, all Bond films, almost all movies about unsolved murders committed by men, and virtually any superhero film of the last 10 years For...
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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – III
3. Horror Movies and the Mirror Image Here’s a horror story in just two sentences: This sends a chill down most spines. The ideas that it plays on – the duplication of the image, that specular...
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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – IV
4. The Subject Supposed to Know and the ‘Magical Negro’ The ‘Magical Negro’ is a cinematic cliché in itself. The term was coined by director Spike Lee to denote a cinematic trope in which a black...
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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – V
5. Men in Love Case in point: Friends with Benefits ‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ is a slightly odd translation of Lacan’s well-known maxim Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. In the...
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Lacan avec Funakoshi
From the symptom to the sinthome The title of this short article will resonate with readers of the Écrits,but rather than Kant or Sade here I am going to argue for why Lacan should be read with another...
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The Deepest Secret
In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him:...
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On Absent Mothers
Hip hop, it is sometimes claimed, is born of an absent father. If this is true perhaps rock music is born of an absent mother. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Elvis, Jimmy Hendrix – to name just a few –...
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Inside Out and the ‘Science’ of Emotions
No film in recent years has had quite as much input from the field of psychology as Disney and Pixar’s latest offering, Inside Out. Charming though the film is, its portrayal of emotional life tells us...
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Pornography and the Paradoxes of Pleasure – On the ‘Identity of Perception’
“It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like I was there again.” – Evan...
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What’s so Unconscious about the Unconscious?
What does it mean to say that something is ‘unconscious’? The idea of the unconscious is the single biggest differentiator separating psychoanalysis from all other ‘psy-’ practices. Fidelity to a...
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Amuse-Bouches I – The Yerodia Case
This is Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, helping Lacan into his car as he leaves his seminar in March, 1980. And this is Yerodia again, around the time of the international arrest warrant issued against him...
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Amuse-Bouches II – Testimony and the Pass
Who is ‘allowed’ to tell your story? Are you and you alone the only one that can represent your unique experience, past, and identity? Or is it sometimes okay – perhaps even better – for someone else...
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VIDEO – What’s so Unconscious about the Unconscious?
A few months back I wrote a rather long article tracing the historical debate about the nature of the unconscious in psychoanalysis across three key turning points – 1915, 1928, and 1960. It was a bit...
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Amuse-Bouches III – The Obsessional Subjunctive
It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this. First, the definition of a particular...
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