Writing For (a) First Cause
Overview of Philosophy Portal's Fourth Conference (Day 1)
On Saturday February 24th and Sunday February 25th, Philosophy Portal hosted its fourth conference. You can find all recorded videos from the conference weekend at Writing For (a) First Cause.
This conference was inspired by the course on Lacan’s Écrits, which can still be enrolled as a recording: Lacan’s Écrits.
Special announcement: in the month of March The Portal will be focused on the concept of the “Sacred”, and will be inviting special guests Dr. Andrew Davis, Dr. Ruth E. Kastner, and Dr.
of . All members get special discounted access to a conference, Metaphysics and the Matter with Things, hosted by the Center for Process Studies and focused on the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist. To attend, sign up at The Portal.I live the contradiction of wanting to say everything but simultaneously realising that it is an impossible task. That is why I started Philosophy Portal’s fourth conference with a presentation titled “The Écrits in a Nutshell” (as a play on the great physicist Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell1), while eventually undermining the title itself by claiming that Lacan’s Écrits does not so much fit into a nutshell as it explodes the coordinates of classical geometrical surfaces with a non-orientable geometry, like the Klein bottle.2 I would say more, but I’ll leave that to
.3Well if we can’t say everything but are rather left with our own unsublatable and unorientable indivisible remainder, we better have style. This is something that
’s work revealed to me. And it really was a revelation in the sense of someone breaking out of their shell. Crooijman’s 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).4Moreover, it is not like he had nothing to say. Watttterrrr.
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).
Learning how to not say it all, but rather to say what you need to say in the right stylistic way, is important to keep in mind because, as Jason Bernstein (
) reminds us, what is at stake in the movement of (our understanding of) the Thing-In-Itself (from Kant to Hegel to Lacan), is something like “the evolution of despair”. When we move from (really) 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 revolutions 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 remove of the certainty of Kant’s transcendental a priori categories. As Bernstein suggests, with Hegel, Kant loses the “stable ground” of “empty formalism” (i.e. the categories)5 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, better anxiety as the truth of our being.6
New anxieties = progress!7
Good thing we have David McKerracher at
. He will certainly be responsible for opening us all to new anxieties with his central mission evolving from the project of “scene to milieu” as an intellectual vanguard. During the Science of Logic conference — 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. 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 most 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 great work.8 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.
This practically connects to one of the most surprisingly beautiful experiences of the weekend:
’s presentation on “Cold Love”. Jukic represents someone who really 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.Inspired by the presentations on Lacan’s “Seminar on “The Purloined Letter””, Jukic 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 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, its 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.
An other who makes me weak, is Owen Cox of
. I will happily be shattered by whatever Owen discovers along the truth of his path. Throughout his journey with psychoanalysis, he has been seeing contact between its teachings and Thelema, or Aleister Crowley’s occult spiritual philosophy or even new religious movement, which works with what it calls “True Will”.9 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 our 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?
Perhaps.
The question that provokes Cox is the question of whether Crowley and Thelema can be reduced to a Wester 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 has 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 simple terms: “12 Step Programs” “work” on the basis of repression of a profound energy by way of a strict formalistic code.10 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 is profound 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?
I don’t have all the answers, and perhaps no one does, but it was the right choice to have Davide Pasti follow Owen at the conference. Davide has been one of the brightest surprises in The Portal this year — someone who is absolutely possessed by the lineages of philosophy that we have dedicated our work in the first two years of courses — and someone who also brings a deep originality in his connections to the works of Aleister Crowley. Pasti is completely his doctorate on the works of Crowley, and is in some sense working 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 and 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” gets “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 think 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”.
After this deep dive into the occult waters of Aleister Crowley, we return, or rather, make our first proper visit, to the clinic, with Edie Hitchcock. Hitchcock became an absolutely integral part of the Ecrits course last year, someone who came to each lecture with a bright energy and an inquisitive nature. Perhaps even more importantly, 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 practicing 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 Hitchcock 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”. 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 be-come 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 “affect like desire signals unconscious links to a fundamental lack”.
After Hitchcock’s work, we are exposed to the utter particularity of Phillip Shinn’s “confessions of a dangerous horseboy”. Growing up Shinn was connected via the symbolic of his situation to the idea of being a “horseboy”, 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.
Weird combination!
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 be-come from?
The first question seems to be related 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 “autopoeros” (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. 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.
We enter the later evening portion of Day 1 with Daniel L. Garner of
. Garner has been playing with Lacan in an innovative way, trying to think 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. Note that this problem of how to deal with desire also came up in both Cox and Pasti’s interest in Crowley and the occult, as well as Hitchcock’s clinical working with everyday psychosis.Garner notes that the process from Inferno (Hell) to Paradiso (Heaven) is one marked by a process of unveiling. Here recall the emphasis from
on style as not necessarily being linked to a fully clear and transparent disclosure, but rather an art to be cultivated as singularity, which may also be linked to Shinn’s ideas of the be-coming of adults as an autopoeros. Garner 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 a statement that may also remind us of
’s work, the best of things can become the worst of things (marriage, friendship). The people who are closest to us, and whom we love the lost, can also hurt us the most, and thus become a nightmare.What is more terrifying: 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 has 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 to enter heaven, 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).
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).11
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.
The second presenter of the evening, computer scientist turned renegade Girardian theorist, Thomas Hamelryck, certainly won't let us forget the fundamental nature of incompleteness in the paradox of Lacanians perhaps misunderstanding Lacan’s “crazy wisdom”.
What goes unnoticed by many academic Lacanians, for Hamelryck, 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, there is something in the critique of academic Lacanianism, for Hamelryck, when we look to the works of Alan Sokal (who critiques Lacanianism as an anti-scientific form of obscurantist non-sense), as well as Camille Paglia (who critiques Lacanianism for being “poured like Ketchup over everything”).
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.
And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have your own style. This again connects to
’s opening remarks on the importance of style.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, 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 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 sense, the “true Lacanians” may be the people on the outside, and not on the inside, of contemporary academic Lacanianism, in the same way that many Lacanians perceive Lacan to be the truth of Freud, when in Lacan’s own time, Freudians often or as a rule, despised the work of Lacan.
History is a funny thing.
Heading into the final presentations of our first day, we have the work of Russell Sbriglia. Sbriglia is an academic with an interesting path.12 First off, his focus is on literature, and not clinical psychoanalysis. 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-Zizekian 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.
Sbriglia is thus 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 Garner’s 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.
In any case, a traversal of the fantasy qua crossing the abyss, to again reference Pasti’s work on Crowley, is necessary to truly embody drive in a way that does not lead to death, as it does in the novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.
Finally, we have the work of
of . McCormick’s work has been a great help for me in both teaching the Écrits, as well as making sense of the Écrits on the context of my personal life.13He 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). From McCormick on the part of truth that can be said:
“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.
And on that beautiful note, we entered into dialogue regarding the “State of the Relation Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy”, led by both Russell Sbriglia and Samuel McCormick. Sbriglia and McCormick each represented a different pole of the debate, Sbriglia the philosophical and literary aspects of analysis, and McCormick the more clinical aspects of analysis. The result of this difference ended up bringing much fruit to an overall beautifully fruitful start of the conference.
You can find the entire conference recordings here: Writing For (a) First Cause.
Special thanks to all our Day 1 presenters:
of , Jason Bernstein of , David McKerracher of , of , Owen Cox of , Davide Pasti, Edie Hitchcock, Phillip Shinn, Daniel L. Garner of , Thomas Hamelryck, Russell Sbriglia, and of .Special announcement: in the month of March The Portal will be focused on the concept of the “Sacred”, and will be inviting special guests Dr. Andrew Davis, Dr. Ruth E. Kastner, and Dr.
of . All members get special discounted access to a conference, Metaphysics and the Matter with Things, hosted by the Center for Process Studies and focused on the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist. To attend, sign up at The Portal.Hawking, S. 2001. The Universe in a Nutshell. Bantam Spectra.
If I wanted to be perverse I could have said something like: Lacan’s Écrits nuts into the hole of a Klein bottle, that is, if I wanted to be perverse, but I would never do that.
Cleo Kearns wrote a piece on my opening presentation titled “Digression: Cadell Last, Lacan, and Genesis.”
Something which has also interested Max Macken at
throughout his published writings at Philosophy Portal, 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 emphasises that we not only need to “forget” the Thing-In-Itself, but we need to “forget this forgetting” itself, see: Forgetting the Forgetting.
As long as you can sublate/sublimate them.
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press.
I have written on the intersection between magic and psychoanalysis earlier this year, see: What the **** is Xagick?
Empty Kantian formalism? 12 Step Program as transcendental a priori?
For a conversation between Dr. Sbriglia and myself, see: Subject Lessons, and also the summary: Subject Lessons.
For conversations between Dr. McCormick and myself on the topic, see: Reading Lacan’s Écrits 1, and Reading Lacan’s Écrits 2.
Thanks for the wonderful reflections on my presentation! I actually didn't realize that "stealing the signifier" takes away the ability of the other to signify themselves, which is why it ends up painful.
Looking forward to month 3!