The Lack(anians). Use and Misuse of a Concept between Psychoanalysis and Science

The concept of lack in Lacan can be understood as a clinical concept and as being one of the fundamental conditions of the parlêtre and one of the privileged ways in order to conceptualize subjectivity as a desiring manque à être. As we can see from the debate that occurred during the years of the Cahiers pour l’analyse, though, lack can also acquire a more formalized meaning: in Jacques-Alain Miller’s seminal article La suture: éléments pour une logique du signifiant published in 1966, it becomes a building block in order to address “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse.” Miller believes that lack serves the purpose of conceptually grounding the act of cancellation that the discourse of science operates on the subject of the unconscious; an argument that will be echoed in Lacan’s text La Science et la vérité of the same year. The consequences of such an understanding of lack has been extremely burdensome in the way Lacanian psychoanalysis has addressed its relationship with science for many years up to the present. In this intervention, we discuss the importance of such a concept for psychoanalysis and why it is a symptomatic point through which the relationship between psychoanalysis and science is articulated

The Discourse and the Capitalist. Lacan, Marx, and the Question of the Surplus

In the seminar XVI, D'un Autre à l'autre, in 1968/1969, Jacques Lacan claimed that there is an homology between the function of object a in the unconscious and the Marxian notion of surplus-value. Both concepts in fact revolve around similar axes: their reluctance to be localized in a certain place of the structure and their connection with the notion of surplus. In Chapter 7 of Das Kapital, Marx seems to imagine a purely mythical pre-capitalistsociety where production is only devoted the pure satisfaction of basic survival needs and where labour is still controlled by the worker according to a certain purpose: with the irruption of the surplus in the capitalist mode of production the very qualitative dimension of the production and reproduction of commodities and human beings is commanded and organized by the pure drive of abstract accumulation. In order to rearticulate the incessant capitalist drive for abstract wealth, the symptom relies on the unsurpassable contradiction between labour-power and living-labour: essential in orde

Sardaigne. Polyphonies de la Semaine sainte

Il y a des villages, en Sardaigne comme ailleurs, qui se donnent plus de mal que d’autres pour préserver les traditions vocales qui leur appartiennent. On ne sait pas pourquoi : certains disent que dans le village à côté, les gens chantent mieux parce que l’eau y est meilleure, d’autres admettent qu’une pratique du chant développée finit par donner ses résultats ; d’interminables discussions naissent ainsi. Une chose est certaine : dans ces villages où le chant est organisé, en général, par d..

Tradition - trahison ?

Deux possibilités s’offrent à celui qui, comme moi, oriente sa recherche vers le répertoire des chants traditionnels de sa région natale : soit consulter les recueils publiés à la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe, soit entreprendre sa propre enquête de terrain. Mon étude des fonds documentaires a débuté alors que j’étais étudiant à Paris, loin de toute réalité locale, par l’examen de trois périodes correspondant aux publications d’Emmy Fisch (1917), à celles de Hanns in der Gand (1933), ..