Writing For (a) First Cause
Complete Conference Summary
On the weekend of Saturday October 5th and Sunday October 6th Philosophy Portal will be hosting its fifth conference titled “Rosy Cross: Questions of Right, Power, Love and Freedom”. To register just click the “sign up” button on the home page for the conference.
In this post you will find a complete summary of the fourth Philosophy Portal conference, Writing For (a) First Cause.
2.1 Dimitri Crooijmans (
)I have lived the contradiction of wanting to say everything while simultaneously realising that it is an impossible task or shape to embody. Here Lacan’s Écrits is a work that does not so much fit into a whole that says everything, as it explodes the coordinates of classical geometrical surfaces with a non-orientable geometry, like the Klein bottle. What this work leaves us with is the style our own unsublatable and unorientable indivisible remainder.
This truth is also revealed in the work of Dimitri Crooijmans, and it really is a revelation in the sense of someone breaking out of their shell. Crooijmans’ style over the conference weekend was remarkable: the beauty of his slides, and the grace of his flow, were a total treat for everyone (and probably the result of mixing his exploration of hip hop in with his philosophical performativity).
Perhaps the most important point that I am taking away from his first presentation is a reversal of Aristotelian logic with Lacanian logic, namely that:
Transparency and clarity — the standard for correctness of style for Aristotle — can conceal the real of your subjective attitude, and thus, the true marker of good style, is not necessarily transparency and clarity, but rather to express oneself with stylistic tokens unique to your singularity (which may require sacrificing transparency and clarity)
This seems all the more useful considering that, the truth is, we cannot say it all. The person that wants to say it all, the person that wants to be totally or completely transparent and clear, far from being a beacon of truth, may actually be totally avoiding his/her truth.
That does not mean that keeping it real with real talk about real life is not inherently wrong or to be avoided — I in fact treat it as an important principle for keeping my reason in touch with truth — but the style or “stylistic tokens” by which you express truth, must be emphasised, as well as perhaps the timing and situation of the expression of truth qua unveiling (as we will get to more below). This path is being well-explored in Crooijmans writing history, where his philosophical work, unlike most philosophers, starts with a self-reflective examination of tantric sexuality.1 From this starting point he works through his own relationship to the notion of the child,2 towards both the mystery of the historical nature of infinity,3 and its relation to the historical necessity of love.4
2.2 Jason Bernstein (
)Jason Bernstein is attempting to think about the transformation or evolution of the “thing-in-itself” in the interpretations of the foundation of philosophy (from Plato) through German Idealism and psychoanalysis. Bernstein here reminds us that what is at stake in the movement of (our understanding of) the Thing-In-Itself (from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Lacan), is something like “the evolution of despair”. When we move from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Lacan, there is something of a progressive shattering of illusions. From Plato’s absolute idea to Kant’s transcendental a priori — a “Copernican Turn” — we move from an intimate contact with an eternal objectivity to a subjectivity without capacity to know objectivity (or the Thing-In-Itself), which truly did cause great despair and alarm for many Enlightenment philosophers and theologians alike.
We should not forget that — while many are aware of the despair that characterises the revolutionary “de-centreings” of science, from Copernicus to Darwin to Freud — we find equal despair in the revolutions of philosophy from Plato to Kant to Hegel and Lacan.
So what is the nature of the despair in the movement from Kant to Hegel to Lacan? It has to do with not only the removal of an external objectivity (Plato to Kant), but the removal of the certainty of Kant’s transcendental a priori categories.5 As Bernstein suggests, with Hegel, Kant loses the “stable ground” of “empty formalism” (i.e. the categories) for the confrontation with the derivation of categories from the Nothingness of our Being. We may not be able to “embrace the void” but we can certainly try our best to sublate it (Hegel) or sublimate it (Lacan).
Lacan here helps us think through (from Plato to Hegel), that what we think we have lost, a truth whether objective or subjective, is in fact something we have never had, but something we have rather created to deal/cope/tarry with, the evolution or historicity of, our own despair. We might even say that, if “progress” for Hegel is the deepening of contradiction (of our categories of the understanding), “progress” for Lacan is the confrontation with the deepening of despair, or perhaps, deepening anxiety as the truth of our being.6
2.3 David McKerracher (
)The work of the creator and founder of Theory Underground, David McKerracher, can be found throughout this book. However, he is still a new dick source and a central one in leading us towards all new anxieties. This is because his project involves opening us all towards a process of moving from “scene to milieu” as an intellectual vanguard. In both the Science of Logic conference and anthology, Logic for the Global Brain, McKerracher launched the idea that our little internet theory scene cannot remain a scene (i.e. we cannot remain “scene kids”), but must evolve into a genuine intellectual milieu.7 Certainly the path from scene kids to an intellectual milieu will involve a messy path of deepening contradictions and anxieties.
Why would we do it? Why not stay in — what McKerracher calls — “affinity groups” that can just reify the sameness of identity without really tarrying with the negativity of real differences? Because affinity groups are ultimately culturally impotent, they do not really ever develop the force needed to advance a real idea. Real ideas must tarry with the real, and that can never collapse back into a self-similar identity, but must be a process moving always into otherness (inclusive of contradictions and anxieties). To become an intellectual vanguard is to become a force capable of asking and re-asking itself, not so much “What is to be done?”, but rather “Why didn’t that work?”. If we have the confidence to ask ourselves “Why didn’t that work?”, we open up the conditions of possibility for both sublation and sublimation.
McKerracher gives an example derived from the What Is Sex? course we co-led last year focused on Alenka Zupančič's great work. An intellectual vanguard must be able to work with the constitutive contradictions of a field, like for example the contradictions between Zupančič notion of sexuality as an ontological negativity, and Butler’s notion of gender as a socially constructed performativity. What is the relation and political consequences of this constitutive contradiction of the contemporary field of theory?
An intellectual vanguard should be able to lead the way in tarrying with such contradictions, as opposed to backing down from thinking their difference.
2.4 Jurij Jukic (
)This practically connects to one of the most surprisingly beautiful experiences of the conference: Jurij Jukic’s presentation on “Cold Love”. Jukic represents someone who embodies the spirit that I try to teach with at Philosophy Portal, that is the spirit of someone who really uses the knowledge of the courses, to connect with the personal contradictions of his own life, in a way that can be positively shattering.
Jukic, inspired by the presentations on Lacan’s “Seminar on “The Purloined Letter””, isolated one dimension of the L Schema — the imaginary relation between the ego and the other — to explore the way we can linguistically hurt each other in intimate partner relations (crucially: without meaning to). Here best friends can easily become our worst enemies. In fact, perhaps the precondition for a worst enemy is something like a best friend?
Such worst-enemy/best-friend dynamics are constitutive of the ego-other imaginary relation — like when we can oscillate from “loving someone more than anything” to “hating someone more than anything” — because in such a relation we are dealing with two people who are trying to find the truthful signification of their being in and by recognition from the other. When the other does not recognise us the way we want, or when we do not recognise the other the way they want, Jukic reminds us that we find a “disgusting pain”. However, Jukic also emphasises that this “disgusting pain” is also (potentially) “liberating”. It depends on our reflexivity.
Perhaps this has something to do with Bernstein’s suggestion that the movement to Lacan’s Thing-In-Itself is related to the “evolution of despair”. Freedom hurts, it is painful, and it moves through our most intimate imaginary relations with the (mis)recognition of the other on our quest to discover the truth of signification. How are we to walk or navigate this path?
Jukic’s advice: we must learn to not get what we want, we must learn to accept that even if we got what we think we want (the other recognising us in the way we want), we will not necessarily be satisfied, completed or fulfilled. Moreover, we distort and manipulate both our self and the other in the process, we do violence to them. In Lacanian terms, we “steal their signifier”, or steal their conditions of possibility for their own signification. This happens in intimate partner relations all the time, it is even constitutive of them.
Either way, if we can learn better to not get what we want, but rather to really know the other, we start the true path towards desire to drive. As “disgustingly painful” as it is, riddled by deepening contradictions and anxieties, it is the true path.
He ended his presentation with an important axiom: “Only the other shall reveal your weakness, lest you lose yourself in morals.” It is easy to see why it is so easy to recoil back into narcissistic isolation when the other disappoints our desire, and why this movement is sometimes reified as “spiritual”. What is most difficult on the path of truth is accepting the other who reveals our weakness in breaking the imaginary relation, of what we thought we were for the other, or what we thought the other was for us.
2.5 Owen Cox (
)I am regularly shattered by what Owen Cox discovers along the truth of his path.8 Throughout his journey with psychoanalysis, he has been seeing contact between its teachings and Thelema — Aleister Crowley’s occult spiritual philosophy, or even new religious movement — which works with what it calls “True Will”. At the same time, Cox sees this movement as not a regression to pre-scientific or pre-modern religious worship, but a radically modern scientific attempt to reconcile our culture with libido, developing a “science of the occult” which is not reducible to superstition.
For Cox, he sees Freud and Crowley as (weird) “brothers”, and the connection is admittedly an interesting one. Was not Freud someone who strove to make a science out of psychoanalysis? Was not Freud seen by many scientists as building a strange little cult out of the libidinal drives? While Freud remained committed to clinical work, while only leaving the clinic to speculate on issues of anthropology, sociology, and theology; Crowley was not so much confined to the clinic as working directly with esoteric cult dynamics. Perhaps there is something interesting to be found at their intersection, perhaps even something that is missing in the current discourses on “Freudo-Marxism”, that is the connection between psychoanalytic and communist thought?
The question that provokes Cox is the question of whether Crowley and Thelema can be reduced to a Western variant of “Eastern Tantra”, an esoteric yogic practice crucial to both Hinduism and Buddhism. Cox suggests that there is a possibility that both Crowley’s work and Thelema have the possibility to be more explicitly political and artistic, opening up a key differentiation from Eastern Tantra. Moreover, he sees in Crowley and Thelema a potential practical application, that is the re-invention of the ideology of “12 Step Programs” so common throughout the West. While Cox admits that “12 Step Programs” “work”, they work on the condition of not being true to this “weird little part of me” (let’s call it the intensities of the “obscene partial object” — which will be relevant later). This “weird little part of me” is what Lacan may have called “what is in me more than me”.
To put it in simple terms: “12 Step Programs” “work” on the basis of repression of a profound energy by way of a strict formalistic code. Well that energy is something that both Freud and Crowley wanted to work with. Freud in his “talking cure” and Crowley in his “occult science”. What do we do with the excess of our desire? Moreover, Cox’s message is profound for today in suggesting that, perhaps, it is the “sciences” of psychoanalysis and Thelema that open us to working with the parts of ourselves that cannot be replaced by the performativity of machines. Maybe what Freud and Crowley are working with is actually the energy that centres true religion?
The questions that he leaves us with are concretely historical: the counter-culture energy of the 1960s is arguably in debt to the works of both Freud and Crowley. However, the legacy of the 1960s is deeply ambiguous. What do we do with this excess of desire? How do we make a new and better culture that includes it rather than simply repressing it?
2.6 Davide Pasti
Davide Pasti is a doctoral student influenced in connecting the work of the Slovenian school with the work of Aleister Crowley. From this connection, Pasti brings a striking originality in his connections between these two fields, connections that work on the religious and metaphysical contradictions that appear in the doctrines of the Thelema. He started his presentation by emphasising that there is a deep contradiction in Crowley’s notion of True Will, that appears in its relation to a Divine Plan and link to a superior intelligence. As a result, Pasti suggests that one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of Thelema as a spiritual or new religious movement, is the obscurity of its main concepts, as well as the way they come into contradiction with the “Event of Christianity”.
Much of Pasti’s work centres around how the obscurity of Thelema can be overcome, as well as how the contradiction between Thelema and Christianity can be overcome. He suggests that the Event of Christianity opened our culture to the idea that the “carnal appetite” was “sinful” and in “need of redemption”. Consequently, for Pasti, this means that the passions as “device” or “object” get “suspended” or “stuck” and “cannot work anymore”. One can easily see that the problem that Pasti is identifying and developing has overlaps with the questions that Cox leaves us with.
Further on in his thinking, Pasti suggests that what is at stake in “getting unstuck” or “unsuspending” our “sin” is what leads us towards a “traumatic encounter” with the “desire of the other”. For Pasti, we must fully confront this trauma because it is only in confronting it that we can realise the abyss of the big Other, and the fundamental contradictions of the symbolic. Here Pasti’s big metaphysical project seems to be an attempt to compare Crowley’s “crossing the abyss” with Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy”, as both involve the traumatic confrontation in the “desire of the other”. What results, for Pasti, is Hegel’s Absolute Knowing, and the conditions of possibility for a “materialistic theology”.9
2.7 Edie Hitchcock
From here we make our first proper visit to the clinic, with Edie Hitchcock. Hitchcock is actively thinking in-between clinical paradigms, she is not ideologically married to any one way of seeing, but rather seeks to find the connections in the contradictions between different clinical paradigms, which I think is very valuable. She is also a practising clinician, which should command a certain respect from those who are more focused on the theory side, and less connected to the clinical side.
What interests her is a re-examination of the structure of desire, and seeing affect in light of this re-examination. She suggests that affect and desire share the same structure, and that working with naming affect, can function as a way to uncover unconscious desire. Moreover, she seems to direct most of her clinical attention to a big problem in modern society: that many contemporary patients suffer with “everyday psychosis”.10 This “everyday psychosis” is not something that psychoanalysis has been traditionally capable of dealing with. It is common knowledge among many Freudian and Lacanian clinicians alike that psychosis is “non-analysable” (on the basis of the mechanism of foreclosure of the symbolic). Since analysts are “practitioners of the symbolic”, how can one treat a psychotic, if the defining feature of psychotic foreclosure is that the “symbolic does not work”?
Hitchcock herself notes: those struggling with everyday psychosis “have not entered the symbolic in a weird way”. She suggests that we find a “different split” in psychosis (than the one conventionally emphasised by Lacanian psychoanalysis), a split that requires a new symbolic structure in order to transition into becoming more neurotic (the split which constitutes the patient of traditional psychoanalysis). Can we say the psychotic is split from the symbolic where it fantasises that it has access to the real, whereas the neurotic is split by the symbolic feeling like it is at an infinite distance from the real?
In either case, for clinical work to focus more on helping the subject build a new symbolic structure to transition to becoming more neurotic, affect naming may be an important part of the equation. For this, Hitchcock emphasises that the “subject’s singularity” cannot be “crammed” into whatever the analyst has experienced before. Hitchcock is here fighting for the clinical emphasis on particularity, and the importance of particularity over a generalisable universality. It is only in recognising the particularity of the subject in affect naming that the subject can discover their own singularity and become a speaking subject that de-stabilises an imaginary wholeness.
In closing, for Hitchcock, affect should be thought of as “signal”, and that this position starts where Freud ends. She suggests that “if affect is a signal”, then it follows that “affects like desire signals unconscious links to a fundamental lack”.
2.8 Phillip Shinn
We are next introduced to the weird particularity of Phillip Shinn and his presentation titled “Confessions of a Dangerous Horse Boy”. In this presentation he grounds his work in the context of his own childhood. Shinn grew up becoming connected to the symbolic of his situation in the idea of being a “horse boy”, which combines all of the anxieties and powerlessness of being a small boy, with all of the confidence and sure-footedness, as well as obstinate rudderlessness, of a big horse.
He notes that there is something interesting in certain animals having a collaborative spirit with humans, and that the interesting collaborative spirit with the horse involves a fundamental augmentation of bipedal locomotion. The horse allows us to “compress” time and space to move to different sites. The metaphor that Shinn connects to this collaborative augmentation is not a Deleuzian line of flight outside the symbolic, but rather a “horsepower” that leads to “emotional agility” that may represent something like “Lacanian stewardship”.
Throughout his presentation his stewardship seems mostly inspired by twisting two questions from Alenka Zupančič work What Is Sex?:
How do you formulate a comedic love relation?, and
Where do adults become from?
The first question seems to be related to getting the registers of the imaginary-symbolic-real to “jive/work together” in a way that allows both the contradiction of moving to the abyss and a deepening wholeness. The motion of this jiving is something that Shinn playfully refers to as an “auto-po-eros” (a play on autopoiesis), which signifies an individual remaining enigmatic to their partners to keep desire alive, while also not being so enigmatic as to create unnecessary traumatic downsides. In this way, for Shinn, “autopoeros”, opens us to a form of emotional agility and stewardship which avoids some of the pitfalls of “attachment theories” of intimacy (secure, anxious, avoidant), which are more about our relation to closing separation and gaps, as opposed to playing with separation and gaps in a way that is true to desire.
The second question seems to circle around the singularity of subjectivity within a community, which involves the tying of the sinthome (enjoyment) to a Borromean knot of rings, in a way that transforms symbolic symptoms. He refers to this process of creating new enjoyments as “hyperstitional” — which not only connects his ideas to the ideas of the occult practices mentioned above, but also to the work of Nick Land and Michael Downs course on Land at Theory Underground.11 For Shinn, these hyperstitional moments of creating joy are related to how an adult can become in confrontation with the meta-crisis of our civilisation. In this “sinthomic”/”hyperstitional” process, we embody a form of optimism that is not just reducible to a naive progressive narrative.12
2.9 Chetan Anand
Social theorist and professor Chetan Anand invites us to think about a very important question in the context of our purposes in this book: why does psychoanalysis keep falling out of the clinic? What do we do with this weird excess of psychoanalysis? Do we ignore it or do we interpret this falling out of the clinic as evidence that it has a deep significance beyond the confines of the clinical setting? Here we have to remember that from the beginning of psychoanalysis, clearly visible in Freud, we see that psychoanalysis quickly becomes a field of knowledge that has dramatic consequences for everyday life, social anthropology, and theology. This only continues in the work of Lacan and the contemporary work of the Slovenian school.
Here Anand is committed to struggling with the Slovenian school, and specifically the work of Slavoj Žižek, as centring a psychoanalytic problem of shared social space. Furthermore, Anand claims that philosophers who became antagonistic with psychoanalysis, like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, gave up on shared social space and the impossible problems it produces. To approach this space, Anand thinks the structure of the symbolic-imaginary-real as a Borromean knot, as well as the nature of the symptom-sinthome, are crucial for social thought. To be specific, what this structure and nature reveal is a singularity of excessive enjoyment that disrupts the condition of possibiltiy for shared social space.13
For Anand, when we enter the space of singularities and their excessive enjoyment we seem to be entering a space that is other to dialectical thought. We enter a space of a slipping of boundaries, a space of not having any permanent time or location. While the Name-of-the-Father functions to structure social space and time, the “All” of any Master Signifier is always incomplete, partial, disturbed from within by the nature of singularities and their enjoyment. This also gives us a clue to the difference between neurotics, who repress this enjoyment in order to keep the order of social appearances, and psychotics, who live in direct contact with the affirmation of a complete reality of enjoyment without lack or negativity.
In this way, it could be that the reason why psychoanalytic knowledge keeps falling out of the clinic is because the clinic itself was never able to contain and resolve all clinical structures, even if we have to deal with such minds in the real of social history.
2.10 Jyoti Dalal
Sociologist and educational theorist Jyoti Dalal focuses on the concept of loss, and specifically the relation between a subject and the nature of attachment with a lost object as situated in relation to the Oedipus complex, the Name-of-the-Father and truth.14 Here she makes a traditional distinction between Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholy: while someone who mourns has lost an object that it knows (e.g. a loved person), the melancholic also struggles with loss, but does not know what one has lost.
Here Dalal suggests we get a clue to the nature of the unconscious if we look deeper at the ambiguities of melancholia as it relates to the relation with the lost object. She suggests that what we find is a self-reproach, anger and hatred directed towards the ego itself, cycles of self-punishment. In this sense, if the mourning subject has lost a known object outside, the melancholic has lost their very capacity for the externalisation of their self as ego. From here Dalal hypothesises that melancholy is a potential path towards psychotic foreclosure because their symbolic relation to externality is lost.
This process is potentially related to the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father, in the sense that, what the melancholic has lost, and does knot know it, is primal fusion itself. In other words, the melancholic has not processed the pain in the figure of separation with the maternal figure, which has prevented the entry of the Name-of-the-Father to support this process of transformation. Because the primal fusion has not been processed it becomes difficult for the melancholic to breathe, everything becomes too close, and pain and grief engulf the subject.
What is needed, according to Dalal, is the introduction of a third as a way to create distance and separation from the pain of the unprocessed primal fusion. She hypothesises that a potential candidate for this third is the role of public rituals that allow a space for melancholy to transition towards mourning. Dalal’s idea is that without public rituals the path from melancholy to mourning is blocked, because the capacity to grieve the loss of the primal fusion is itself lost. Here she rests on the work of psychoanalyst and attachment theorist Donald Winnicott, in suggesting that public rituals can function as transitional objects or spaces.
Dalal ends her reflections with a note on our relation to truth. For the psychotic, the symbolic is not accessible, which has created barriers for resolution of this psychic structure in psychoanalytic settings. Dalal suggests that psychoanalysis has perhaps not considered a different type of access to truth in the work of the melancholic, that does not so much require the talking cure, but rather spaces of public ritual that can reintroduce the symbolic via a different route.
2.11 Sahil Sasidharan
Psychoanalytic theorist Sahil Sasidharan is interested in developing a psychoanalytically informed philosophy that can wrestle with the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler and specifically his idea of technics.15 Sasidharan thinks this is important also for the link between psychoanalytic thought and Marxist thought as it relates to technique as a formulation of practical construction of an objective world by our species being.
The danger of technique, well-known by Marx himself, is that in the machine, man abolishes his own formal activity, and makes nature work for him. The idea underlying this process is that the more man controls nature, the more he can subjugate it to his will, processing nature through a multitude of machines. However, in this process, he is pushing nature further away, or even kills it, and thus ceases to relate to nature in a living way.
From this position Sasidharan is looking for a more human way to view our relation to technics, and also a technical way to look at the human. He asks a question for the future of the psychosocial and its relation to technics: how does political technology engage with a technological politics? He sees this question as opening the doors to a theory of the evolution of technics lodged between our biology and technology. Where he situates this theory of technics is thus not in the process of mechanising nature, but rather in a knowledge of our action, a knowledge of our techniques and formulations and constructions.
Here Sasidharan starts to rely on Žižek’s own critique of Hegel as it relates to sexuality in order to adapt Hegel to the world of psychoanalysis, as well as Marxism. Here we have to entertain the idea that the reason why man attempted to control and subjugate nature through machines was because this process was a way for him to escape the fact that sexuality is not a natural foundation for our being and our lives, but rather where we encounter a foreign and alien passion that can destroy our being and our lives. Sasidharan suggests that it is in the enjoyment of technics where we try to domesticate this excess. But perhaps with a deeper knowledge of technics, that is our action, techniques, formulations and constructions, perhaps a new form of individuation might be possible.
Thus, for Sasidharan, applying psychoanalysis to the project of technics, opens a link between the singularity of our individuation process, and the transindividuation of our species-being, which does not reduce nature to machine, but formulates a new technological politics.
2.12 Kalyani Vaishnavi
Psychoanalytic theorist Kalyani Vaishnavi is interested in the way that the surface of being fictionalises the truth. We often think the truth of being is in the depths, where we find the true eternal self. But this discourse on the depths obfuscates the reality of our lives and the unfolding of our lives on the surface of being. She notes that we should pay attention to the contradictions we can find in, for example, video games, where a weak man will dramatise his being as a strong man. Here the truth of the weak man is on display, not in the depths, but right on the surface.
Here the main message is that we should be more reflexive about the nature of the masks we wear. While the depths of our being is a mess of affects and emotions, there is truth in a mask we decide to construct and display to the world, and the mask which we decide to develop in relation to the intersubjective or trans-subjective dimension of being, whether physical or virtual. While the postmodern world is right to assert that there is no “real self” beyond/behind appearances (in the depths), the postmodern temptation to assert that this means there is no real site of truth is false. The idea that the site of truth is in the appearances itself, means that we cannot escape truth even if there is no beyond/behind the appearances. This is perhaps a truth too terrifying for most, and may even be the reason for the postmodern turn towards the abandonment of truth.
For Vaishnavi, the symbolic other, the self that is performed in a mask is the realest self we have. Here we can find truth, in the classic psychoanalytic dimension, of slips and bungled actions. We perform the truth of our identities on the surface. So how do we get deeper with the truth if it is all on the surface? Here Vaishnavi suggests it is in the dimension of full speech (as opposed to empty speech). In full speech we are closer to the enigmatic truth of our desire, whereas in empty speech we find our speech increasingly alienated from our desire. In full speech, we can possibly deepen the surface itself.16
2.13 James Wisdom (
)James Wisdom has been developing his ideas at Philosophy Portal since the beginning of the work. In this development he has often taken the opportunity to develop his philosophy in relation to famous works of art.17 While in his first attempt he uses Malevich’s Black Square, in this attempt he uses Courbet’s The Origin of the World, which simply depicts the open legs of a woman revealing directly her vaginal sex organ.
Wisdom inquires as to why this painting escapes a pornographic status, as well as inquires as to why Lacan never addresses this painting. He asks us: what makes this painting so difficult? How do we penetrate into the deceptive surface of this painting? He suggests that it may have something to do with representing emptiness, the sexual non-relation, or the woman that does not exist. Here we have to confront the fact that, while sublimation of our sexual instincts/drives is not only possible, but creative and generative; we are nevertheless left with an emptiness that is determinative and always bringing us back to a new origin or beginning.
Thus, for Wisdom, shamelessly and openly displaying a naked woman’s vaginal organ, represents not only the asymmetry of the phallus, the fact that the “Other” “maternal phallus” does not exist, that we lack true complementarity, but that also, we become possessed by the place of this lack in death. We are possessed by death, we are possessed by death drive, and we find this possession in the woman’s body as our origin. However, the site of this origin escapes pornographic reduction because pornography dresses up this lacking origin, frames it and fetishises it as the hidden incestuous object, as opposed to staging the void itself.
2.14 Łukasz Silski
Underground theorist Łukasz Silski’s drive became agitated by Lacan, which started to get his desire moving. He had been stuck under the coordinates of the possible and the impossible governed by the reality principle. In this tension he would dream about a full fantasmatic world. However, what agitated Silski’s drive in Lacan, is the recognition that this full fantasmatic world is nowhere, and more, that you have to go nowhere to get it. This nowhere is one of the names for the drive.
For Silski the full fantasmatic world is only rational when it conforms to the antagonism and the limit of the reality principle. Thus, we cannot will through our desire the actual full world because it only exists in conformity to the reality principle. In contrast to this futile effort, we have the condition of possibility, in the hole of the drive, for grace as a pure gift.18 Why? Because in the grace of the drive you lose the rational calculus of reality, of taking into account how something will effect you in the chains of cause and effect, and instead you just do move. The movement of the body is itself a creative ex nihilo, which is also possibly the sublimation of the anxiety of the void into the world.
In short, in encountering Lacan, Silski recognised that while the world “is”, the subject “isn’t”: the subject is a negativity. Here, while desire tries to imagine a full world in relation to the struggles of the reality principle, the subject of the drive accepts the reality of the subject as negativity, and circulates this negativity itself. After this transition, one finds that most models, discourses and ontologies are about filling this negativity and obfuscating the lack that is subjectivity.
2.15 Nicole Foerster
Psychologist Nicole Foerster offers us a mess inspired by the Écrits. She notes from the beginning of her work that she had struggled to make concise points in relation to this text, in part because it is new, and in part because the Écrits is inherently a difficult text. Her background is in psychology, health care and behavioural health, with also a private interest in religion, which, for Foerster, is perhaps best expressed as a silent thing. She offers the insight that to become an expert on religion is always to be at risk of becoming enraptured by an illusion.
Here she invokes Lacan’s idea: “God is unconscious”.19 Thus, what experts on religion miss is that they are trying to become masters of what cannot only not be mastered, but which masters them; trying to become experts at what cannot be reduced to expertise. Here Foerster finds inspiration in the work of philosopher of psychoanalysis Richard Boothby, and specifically his work Embracing the Void, which does not try to master the theological, but rather embraces the impossibility of it and the death drive in it.20 For Foerster, when we become too certain of our religion and our belief, it causes people to get wrapped up in fundamentalism of what comes after death, that the capacity and the necessity to do good in this life, is lost and ignored.
To avoid this religious fate, Foerster again brings our attention back to the more silent types of religion, the forms of religion that do not express certainty in propositions, and the forms of religion that broaden the original intention of religion. The point of engaging a more psychoanalytic direction for theology is to recognise that we are unable to perceive our own unconscious and our own unconscious motivation. This inability can impede our spiritual growth if we are not aware of this self-reflexive dimension of lack. For Foerster, this means that to start to truly engage the religious and theological dimension, is to dwell in this uncertainty and unknowing, to free ourselves from certainty and knowing. Here she suggests that prayer can be a therapy for freedom, and an antidote to our neuroses.
2.16 Matthew A. Stanley (
)Writer and creator of Samsara Diagnostics, Matthew A. Stanley, focuses his engagement with psychoanalysis on the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric. The distinction between the exoteric and esoteric is roughly equal to the distinction between for the general public and for a smaller specialised group or audience. For Stanley, an exoteric teaching is a discourse that is at once necessary for development and maturation, as well as to be discarded or thrown away once its job is done. In this sense an exoteric teaching is like a ladder to reach a higher standpoint, and once it has served its function, one does not need the ladder anymore. He uses psychoanalyst Donald Winnocott’s notion of children’s objects as transitional phenomena vital for human development in order to support this argument.21
In contrast, the esoteric is more exclusive, specialised and impenetrable, even inherently mysterious. Once one has traversed the exoteric one can enter the esoteric. Here we enter into the struggle of kicking away the general discursive ladder and learning how to climb on our own. For Stanley, the difficulty all stems from the fact that life is not only hard, but made more difficult in relation to the reality of our own desire to do things our own way. To do things our own way, is to successfully inhabit the esoteric after traversing the exoteric. Stanley offers the metaphor of the exoteric teaching like milk, and the esoteric teaching like clarified butter.
Here Stanley suggests that analysis plays a potentially powerful transition from exoteric to esoteric for the subject. In the analytic encounter the analyst refuses to become an interlocutor for the subject’s exoteric discourse or simply the patient’s speech. This speech takes the shape of who they are shaping their speech for. In not engaging the subject in the way that the subject wants to be engaged, the analyst allows the subject’s speech to fail into the void of itself. In the end, this analytic encounter can help someone encounter the contradictions of their own speech and potentially traverse the fantasy of the other to whom their speech is directed. In the emptiness of the exoteric discourse, one may start to enter into a new esoteric insight, which is both terrifying and liberating.
2.17 Daniel L. Garner (
)Next we enter the work of another long-term contributor to Philosophy Portal, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose.22 Garner has been working with Lacan in an innovative way. He has been trying to think of both Dante’s movement from Inferno (Hell) to Paradiso (Heaven), and also H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrous beasts that can destroy us, reduce us to insignificance, as models for how to deal with desire.
Garner notes that the process from Inferno (Hell) to Paradiso (Heaven) is one marked by a process of unveiling. He suggests that the “art of Beatrice” in relation to Dante is crucial here, because Beatrice represents “heaven” for Dante with her “smile”. But the crucial paradox is that if we “see Beatrice’s smile at the wrong time” or in the “wrong way” we can become “reduced to ash”. In short, the best of things can become the worst of things (marriage, friendship); the people who are closest to us, and whom we love the most, can also hurt us the most, and thus become a nightmare.
What is so terrifying in this dynamic is that the higher we ascend to heaven from hell, the more danger we face. This is because the higher we ascend the more power we have to create something beautiful (heaven-like), but also the more that power can produce something terrible (hell-like). What is required more and more on this path is a type of “letting” from “control”, i.e. let the unfolding unfold beyond our “big bright ideas”, and cultivate the courage to “become-other”. One also gets the idea that we have to befriend the idea that heaven will not be like we think heaven will be. Heaven will be other to our concept of heaven. We have to “let” (rather than control) to enter heaven,23 which may remind us of both Jesus’s statement that we must become like children to enter heaven, but also Nietzsche’s idea of the spirit child (which is more of a letting than the control of the camel and lion).24
There are two more crucial ideas that I would like to emphasise from Garner’s presentation:
Task-Based to Voice-Based Society: we have a huge problem of moving from Hell to Heaven in regards to our movement from a Task-Based Society (agricultural, industrial era) towards a Voice-Based Society (where we have to learn the art of voice-craft with the other).25
Incompleteness Remaining Incomplete: we accept the fundamental nature of incompleteness re: complete oneness, but how do we make sure we keep incompleteness from becoming another completeness? The paradox is at the level of philosophical performativity itself.
2.18 Thomas Hamelryck
We encounter another familiar name to Philosophy Portal in the work of computer scientist turned renegade Girardian theorist, Thomas Hamelryck.26 Hamelryck’s engagement with Lacan involves a meta-critique of academic Lacanians who he suggests misunderstand Lacan’s “crazy wisdom”. Hamelryck suggests that what goes unnoticed by many academic Lacanians is that Lacan was writing and teaching in the style of “crazy wisdom”, i.e. not just teaching the unity of madness-freedom, but embodying it in his work as a form of wisdom. Hamelryck notes that the crucial aspect of “crazy wisdom”, informed by the spiritual tradition, is that it is a “method of madness” and a “madness of method” that can never be copied or reduplicated. Crazy wisdom teachers are masters of “surprise”, “contradiction”, and “ambiguity” that leave little room for mimicry.
Consequently, for Hamelryck, there is something in the critique of academic Lacanianism when we look to the works of Alan Sokal, who critiques Lacanianism as an anti-scientific form of obscurantist non-sense;27 as well as Camille Paglia, who critiques Lacanianism for being “poured like Ketchup over everything”.28 Hamelryck suggests that if Lacan himself were to see the work being done with his work, he would laugh, and think “I tricked them well”. In short, for Hamelryck: if you are copying a crazy wisdom teacher, you don’t get the point of the crazy wisdom teacher. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have your own style. For Hamelryck, academic Lacanians just don’t get their own master, and they are just imitating someone who cannot be imitated without destroying the message.
I for one think that Hamelryck is bringing something important to the table with these critical observations. They in fact represent a line that is very difficult to walk, a line between recognising the greatness in the works of a man like Jacques Lacan (or anyone else who functions as a master), but also not being so overwhelmed by this greatness that you simply regurgitate this greatness. The key is to find the inspiration to become your own singularity, to push your limits in madness and method, and to become your own unrepeatable difference. I hope that in this work, whether I am focusing on or inspired by Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan or anyone else, my work and my style are my own. Moreover, I think one of the things that career academicians can often miss is that the people they idolise, in this case Lacan, were often career outsiders, tarrying with their own madness, often hated and banished or excluded from the in-circles of their time. Lacan was of course no exception to this rule. Lacan led a very strange and difficult life, was often ex-communicated from the core psychoanalytic circles of his day, and forced to create his own way, and his own schools.
In this precise sense, in the same way that the Freudians of Lacan’s day despised Lacan, it could be that the “true Lacanians” may be the people on the outside of contemporary academic “Lacanian circles”, and not on the inside. History is a funny thing.
2.19 Alex Ebert (
)Alex Ebert has also been creating with Philosophy Portal since the beginning of our course work.29 In this contributions for the Écrits, he focuses on the first experience of our limit as subjects, which produces a split between the interior and the exterior. For Freud, as for Lacan, this represents the trauma of birth itself, and the opening into division from the primordial fusion and absolute interiority of the womb, as well as the abyssal lack of the drive. In the embodiment of the drive and its insistent repetition, what I lack is precisely the embodiment of this total interiority of the womb.
Here Ebert calls our attention to a dynamic inspired by Frequency theory of the relationship between our desire to fill the lack with a totalising space in which no dynamism is possible, and the lack itself which opens a dynamical space.30 It is for this reason that when our drive fails, that is when our desire to fill lack with a saturated space, fails, we succeed and find a strange satisfaction that contradicts our intuitions and our desires. Ebert refers to the drive to saturate space the drive to make the exterior an interior, and not just any interior but the interiority of the memory of the absolute interior of the womb. In this way, much unreflexive motion is directed at making an absolute interiority by exterior acquisition of an object.
With this system of thinking in place, Ebert suggests that we can make sense of all static organisations as an expression of this unreflexive motion, whether marriages, nation states, cults, or die hard fan bases. What all of these static organisations have in common is the movement which can be described as forming an absolute interiority by way of an exterior acquisition of an object. In this sense, marriages, nation states, cults, and die hard fan bases represent the desire to reconstitute the absolute interior of the womb. He nominates this process the “static drive”.
Ebert ends his reflections on the static drive with an idea related to sexual difference: perhaps, he suggests, women are less compulsive with this desire for an absolute interior to become attached to a world historical project. Ebert’s hypothesis is that women are less compulsive in this regard because they have an unfair advantage, that is that they have the capacity for the absolute interior within themselves already, i.e. the process that we call pregnancy. As men do not have the embodied capacity for pregnancy, we possibly externalise the desire into our world historical projects.
2.20 Russell Sbriglia
For those connected to contemporary continental theory spaces, the name Russell Sbriglia will be well-known; but for those who are not, Sbriglia is an up and coming academic whose work on Lacan intersects with literary theory.31 Thus, for Sbriglia, Lacan’s work is used to analyse literature and not for clinical psychoanalysis.32 That is, his unique path is related to seeing insofar as psychoanalytic concepts can be applied to the analysis of literature, which is certainly a unique and necessary work today. He is also someone who was introduced to Lacan through the work of Slavoj Žižek, and the Slovenian schools interpretations of Lacan, which also adds another philosophical twist.
This combination of interests and influences has led to Sbriglia being specifically interested in a Lacano-Žižekian concept of “extimacy”. Extimacy is the combination of “external” and “intimate” to signal a paradoxical type of external-intimate interiority unique to the psychoanalytic experience, but also readable in literature and cinema. Sbriglia’s work leads him to mapping the concept to the work of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities — which is apparently Melville’s attempt at a spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel, making it the perfect extimate object.
Throughout Sbriglia’s presentation he uses the concept of extimacy to analyse the structures of the “extimate thing” from “inner space” as related to narcissism. The content of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities makes for good content for this exploration in the sense that it orbits an incestuous passion between Pierre and his half-sister Isabel which ends in tragic death. For Sbriglia, Isabel is Pierre’s double in narcissistic (mis)recognition, the homeliness closest to my core, which is all the more threatening due to the insanity and madness that I find there. What is strange about the extimate object and its narcissistic link, is that what is most intimate, what is closest, is also something that can shatter and disintegrate our reality.
Thus, Sbriglia is correct to emphasise that Pierre’s desire represents the greatest contradiction, that our greatest desire is also our greatest fear. One could here link this notion to the idea that the best can become the worst, heaven can become hell, on our ascent from Inferno to Paradiso. In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, the path from desire to drive is such a treacherous one because it involves confronting that (narcissistic) “extimate thing from inner space”, to use Sbriglia’s terms, or that “obscene partial object”, to use terms often invoked in Žižek’s philosophy.
2.21 Samuel McCormick (
)Next we focus on Lacanian theorist Samuel McCormick, a professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University, as well as the leader of an online initiative dedicated to the work of Lacan titled “Lectures on Lacan”.33 McCormick’s work has been a great help for me in both teaching the Écrits,34 as well as making sense of the Écrits in the context of my personal life.35
He also represented a fantastic closing to the first day of the Écrits conference with a focus on the “love of truth” in the later Lacan. When we are committed to loving truth, for McCormick, this means that we have to recognise there is a “part of truth that can be said” and a “part of truth that cannot be said” (bringing us full circle in the context of the article as a whole). For McCormick, this is what the part of truth that can be said, says:
“I am the part of truth that can be said, but there is this other side of the story that cannot be spoken, I am powerless to say anything about this other side beyond this statement, the other side’s impossible, I can speak no further.”
McCormick uses the example of love letters as the example par excellence for the impossible truth. All love letters try to say it all but simultaneously reveal the truth about truth: that the All cannot be said, that there is this other side of truth that remains impossible, and “I can speak no further”.
Thus, McCormick suggests that “true love letters” are “statements of impossibility”, pronouncements of the symbolic-real, but not the real itself. “Not the real, but its name”, “discourse of the name of the real”.
Consequently, and in a brilliant series of connections, McCormick gives us the following formulas:
To love the truth is to love weakness
To love weakness is to love castration
To love castration is the essence of love
This is where we get the well known Lacanian axiom that “love is giving what one does not have”. To love is to reconcile with lack, to reconcile with limitation, incompleteness, and McCormick’s own brilliant word: our “impotentialities”.
When we think of our potential we often think we need to be “strong” to actualise it. But McCormick’s ideas of love rather suggests that to really actualise our potential we have to explore our weakness, the place where we are castrated by a painful loss. In that experience of a painful loss, we may be able to understand the essence of love, that opens us to a truer potential than the potential derived from our strength.
2.22 Mark Gerard Murphy
Lacanian theorist and theologian Mark Gerard Murphy has written extensively about the possible relationship between psychoanalysis and theology.36 In this engagement he is emphasising that we should reject both traditional as well as reactionary theology, as well as the psychologisation of the religious. For Murphy, both of these orientations or traps shift spiritual direction towards a capitalisation of the religious dimension in focusing on privatisation and optimisation of experience. Murphy is looking for a form of desire and spiritual direction that is beyond utility, and informed by an understanding of how language effects our yearning towards a necessarily apophatic dimension beyond commodification.37
To build an analytic theology that is both informed by language and the apophatic, Murphy relies on the mysticism of John of the Cross for the apophatic dimension, as well as Lacan’s analytic theory in terms of how desire is always already informed by language. When we think in this way, Murphy claims we realise that our spirituality is never divorced from our speaking, and thus we must accept the importance of conceptual mediation. He uses this direction to critique worldviews or orientations solely built on personal religious experiences and private languages that are inexpressible to others. When our religious orientation moves in this direction, Murphy suggests we risk becoming trapped in the imaginary over and above the arduous labour of the symbolic in intersubjective historicity.
To summarise Murphy’s overarching concern with mediation and language, he believes we must avoid both a traditional rubric moralism as well as a sentimental reductionist experientialism. He suggests that Lacan’s analysis of religion does not lead one in either direction; Lacan is not a traditional Catholic and Lacan is not an experientialist mystic. Lacan’s work points towards a mystical logic that comes out in the logic of the real, that is the actual intersubjective engagement with historicity itself. This involves the simple yet impossibly difficult dimension of speaking and listening seriously, and it is this simple yet impossible dimension, where we are really engaging religion.
2.23 Barry Taylor
Finally, we end our overview of the “Writing For (a) First Cause” conference with the theological reflections of radical theologian Barry Taylor, author of Sex, God, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.38 The central message that Taylor wants to share is that Christian theology has always been revitalised by what you might call risky encounters with things and ideas that are foreign to it.39 In this way, we could see a conference oriented towards the work of psychoanalysis as the perfect place to revitalise Christianity in the sense that psychoanalysis has always engaged the religious, but always from the outside, as a foreigner to religion.
Taylor suggests that if we take Lacan’s notion of religion and grace seriously, in his own conceptual terms, his work offers something important for theology, namely, that the defining characteristic of the real is that one cannot imagine it. This is particularly important if we reconsider Hegel’s central critique of religious consciousness that it is caught up in picture thinking. Here the contradiction of religious consciousness as caught up in picture thinking, with the real being beyond imaging, is perhaps the central contradiction we need to think at this level.
In developing this line of thinking, Taylor suggests that to be able to move with the real beyond imaging when we are creatures so dependent on images, is to move with grace. In this way, Taylor offers to us the possibility that grace is the point of contact between Christianity and psychoanalysis, which is not so much a theological problem to solve, but rather is the locus of subjectivity itself, the locus of subjectivity as the impossible real.
To watch the conference, see: Writing For (a) First Cause.
To attend the next Philosophy Portal conference, see: Rosy Cross.
Crooijmans, D. 2022. Hegelian Tantra: Edging the Absolute. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 107-132.
Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.
Crooijmans, D. 2024. Hegel's Concept of True Infinity. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 267-292.
Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.
See: Macken, M. 2022. Hegel’s Critique of Kant — Is Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Subjective? In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 133-151.
Perhaps this is why Bernstein suggests we not only need to “forget” the “thing-in-itself”, but we need to “forget this forgetting”, see: Bernstein, J. 2024. Forgetting the Forgetting. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 415-448.
McKerracher, D. 2024. Scenes vs. Intellectual Milieus. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 185-197.
For reference: Cox, O. 2023. A Message From Hell. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 207-230.
This can be connected with some of my writings on this topic, see: Last, C. 2022. Necessity of Absolute Knowing: Simplicity in Complexity, Philosophical Science, and the Nature of God. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-292.
This topic is getting more popular attention, see: Vanheule, S. 2024. Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers. Other Press.
For more information, or to join Michael Downs course on Nick Land, see: https://theoryunderground.com/courses/land-intro/ (accessed: September 30, 2024).
For more work from Shinn, you can find his first published contribution to Philosophy Portal here: Shinn, P. 2024. Es Ist So. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 491-506.
Anand has also explored this idea in a previous Philosophy Portal anthology, see: Anand, C. 2023. Thinking Jouissance in Nietzschean Negentropy. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 303-351.
For her first published works with Philosophy Portal, see: Dalal, J. 2023. Thinking Education in Nietzsche. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 429-442.
Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and time, 2: Disorientation. Vol. 2. Stanford University Press.
See: Lacan, J. 2005. The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The FIRST Complete Editing in English. p. 197-268.
See, for example: Wisdom, J. 2022. A Black Square: Reading the End of Art Through Hegel and the Negation of the Negation. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 197-208.
Which brings to mind the work of Mark Gerard Murphy’s ideas of the link between the Real and Grace at the intersection of Lacan and John of the Cross, see: Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. palgrave macmillan. p. 13.
Lacan, J. 1998. Tuché and Automaton. In: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. p. 59.
Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press.
See: Winnicott, D.W. 2018. Transitional objects and transitional phenomena 1—a study of the first not-me possession 2. Influential Papers from the 1950s. Routledge. p. 202-221.
See some of his work here: Rose, OG. 2023. The Overman and the Allegory of the Cave: The Problem of Intrinsic Motivation and Living as the Children of Zarathustra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 49-140.; see also: Rose, O.G. 2024. On Analysis Communitas. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 111-184.
Which here might remind us of the work of Thomas Winn, see: Winn, T. 2023. On from Zarathustra: From Becoming to Letting. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 683-705.
Which might remind us of the work of Dimitri Crooijmans, see: Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.
Here consider getting involved in the work of Tim Adalin, at
, see: http://voicecraft.network (accessed: October 1 2024).See his previous work published here: Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s Tantra and Girard’s Sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal. p. 171-205.
Sokal, A.D., & Bricmont, J. 1999. Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science. Macmillan.
Day, W.K. 1996. Oddities and atrocities: A preliminary study of Camille Pagli. University of Canterbury. p. 39.
We discuss his theoretical history with Philosophy Portal here: Ebert, A. 2024. History of Frequency Theory. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 201-220.
For more on Frequency theory, see: Ebert, A. 2022. The Sublation of Mathematics: Enter the Indeterminate Form. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 209-241.
See: Sbriglia, R. 2020. From Sublimity to Sublimation: Hegel, Lacan, Melville. In: Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism. Northwestern University Press. p. 227-247.
See also: SUBJECT LESSONS (w/ Russell Sbriglia). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/lsTHIeWu3x0?si=r6EvopyuAOwp8Btq (accessed: August 6 2024).
See: Lectures on Lacan: https://lecturesonlacan.substack.com/ (accessed: October 1 2024).
See: READING LACAN’S ÉCRITS (w/ Samuel McCormick). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/OTepDM6iJYg?si=N3qAcmaglRNtgN_v (accessed: August 6 2024).
See: READING LACAN’S ÉCRITS 2 (w/ Samuel McCormick). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/88H3uKeS7W8?si=P5jeZ2xm8I67aCB1 (accessed: August 6 2024).
See again: Murphy, M. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Palgrave Macmillan.
We have since built on this direction in preparation for the Christian Atheism course, see: CHRIST’S BODY (AND AN OTHER JOUISSANCE) (w/ Mark Gerard Murphy) / Christian Atheism Dialogues. Philosophy Portal. (accessed: October 1 2024)
Taylor, B. 2020. Sex, God, and Rock 'n' Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies. Fortress Press.
This is reflected in his own life history, see: SEX, DEATH, AND THE REAL OF LIFE (OR F***ING COMFORT). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/WQDjFF_mQyM?si=U8C1Hx68qkrt2C_F (accessed: August 6 2024).
Excellent writeup and great read, Cadell. It was a tremendous conference!