How to convey the lexical and temporal paradoxes of psychoanalytic practice—their proper potencies and potentialities, their urgent stakes—in plague times?

Summary: The author describes his personal relationship with the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (who died in August 2021), based essentially on interviews, conversations and correspondence. And it is one of these published conversations that the author uses to illustrate Nancy’s philosophical relationship to those authors cited by Nancy himself as essential to philosophical modernit…

Summary: This is a transcript of a talk that was supposed to be delivered to the “Toronto Cultural Hub” Afghan community on September 5th, 2021. Dr. Mir Mahdavi’s invitation for this talk came just two weeks before the North Atlantic Alliance withdrew from Afghanistan, effectively clearing a path for a return to Taliban rule. Thus, this presentation was originally meant to discuss psych…

This essay revisits Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek’s book Opera’s Second Death, exploring the figure of history that arises from their joint intent to, as Adorno once put it apropos of Wagner, realize the fractures that traverse the opera-form. In particular, the essay homes in on the conceptual manoeuvres whereby Dolar and Žižek’s limn opera’s elective affinities with a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, paying special attention to the ways in which operatic incarnations of voice and femininity stage a thinking of excess with striking political overtones.[1] Dolar’s contribution to this co-authored work explores a fracture within history – revealing Mozart’s operas as the dramatic site for the antinomies of Enlightenment subjectivity in its sexual and political dimensions, as they emerge in the revolutionary transition between two epochs. Žižek’s study of Wagner, in a complementary, which is to say dialectical way, lays bare the fracture of subjectivity itself – in the guise of the asymmetrical difference between sexual positions, but above all in the feminine figure of excess that is so central to opera. It is from this double fracture that this essay tries to reconstruct a psychoanalytic interrogation of how history cuts through the subject and resonates in the voice.

The epistemology of psychoanalysis suffers from an irreconcilability between the formulations of the functioning of the psyche in terms of the courses of the excitation and of subjective wishes and sensations. Freud postulates a pseudo-linear correlation between these levels, stating that qualitative sensations are simultaneously effects of the courses of the quantity and irreducible to them. The unspecified nature of this covariation opens up an epistemological no man’s land between them, accompanied by a conflict over which perspective will occupy it. Freud effectuated a metonymical substitution of “wish” for “accretions of excitations”, displacing the status of cause from the quantitative to the qualitative, resulting in the latter’s occupation of the in-between zone. It is argued that this enables the pleasure principle to act as a compromise formation serving to keep the fundament together, hence functioning as an “epistemological symptom”. It is also argued that this symptom is linked to a constitutive “primal repression” of the principle of constancy, and that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” might be grasped as the lifting of this repression and the partial dissolution of its symptom.

Integrating Spotnitz’s joining technique and Eigen’s distinction-union structure deepens clinical understanding of preverbal communication. This assimilated formulation helps to organize and work with defensive expressions configured around the early catastrophic experience of the infant. Taking the narcissistic transference as a starting point for the clinical work, Spotnitz’s and Eigen’s constructs are explored and combined in order to augment each approach and shed light on intervening. The join and the distinction-union structure both point to a therapeutic process that is beyond the binary of self-other, and are shown to mutually function by the nature of their structural association.

Although multitudes of contemporaries use psychoanalysis to explain their actions to one another, we hardly manage to discern a social phenomenon in the widespread recourse to this analytical idiom. For we have grown accustomed to the asocial image of psychoanalysis articulated by S. Freud: it would be born in a radical self-observation, by an individual who discovers her repressed desires by freeing herself from the expectations of others. This image ultimately has its roots in a Cartesian conception of the relationship to oneself, according to which it precedes any relationship to others. However, this hypothesis has been the subject of sharp criticism by J. Dewey and G. H. Mead, who argue that the relationship with oneself develops through interactions with social partners. The confrontation of their “emergent” theory of the mind with the one implicit in the asocial theory of psychoanalysis enables us, by placing the analytical soliloquy in the context of the interaction in which it emerges, to replace this asocial conception (which in the end is nothing but a hypostasis of this soliloquy) with a more realistic approach of psychoanalysis.

The article examines the haptic dimension of the relation between the Subject and the Other. It speculates about the complex affective dynamic in the wake of Covid-19 (especially the first wave in 2020) that hovers between fear and anxiety as the scansion of a broken ‘social bond’ of inter-subjectivity. From Lacan and Anzieu, I build psychoanalytic notions of the skin and the touch that hold on to the slip-bridge between the unconscious subject and the Other. This Other is not asocial and as the article argues, the status of the Other undergoes notional shifts from the animate to the inanimate and assumes political implications for social hierarchies.

This essay offers a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is read not only as a modern field but also as a colonial project. The attempt is not to reject psychoanalysis altogether, for it contains within itself the potential for its own liberation. Rather, the aim of the critique is expanding psychoanalysis beyond its comfort zone within modern epistemology by way of the decolonial theorizing of Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

Review of Lieber, Emma. The Writing Cure. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 160.

Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 198

Review of Tombras, Christos. Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan. Palgrave, 2021. Pp. 232.

Review of Milner, Jean-Claude. A Search for Clarity: Science and Philosophy in Lacan’s Oeuvre (Translated by Ed Pluth). Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. 160

Review of A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2020, Pp. 286