2012

Unless indicated otherwise all activities take place in:

Jan van Eyck Academie

Academieplein 1

6211 KM Maastricht

The Netherlands

http://www.janvaneyck.nl/

Wednesday 6 June

What Oppositional Geometry Underlies the Lacanian Matheme of Sexuation?
Alessio Moretti

There seems to be an old and profound conceptual link between the
logical notion of universality and that of sexual difference. This
becomes clearer still if, to express it, one passes through the
conceptual and formal notion of 'opposition'. Following Freudian
theory's series of elaborations on 'sexuation', rendered possible by
the emergence of the psychoanalytic approach, centered on the
unconscious ('the reign of the illogical'), Lacan has sought to
formally and subtly fix, by means of 'mathemes', the 'very strange
relations for which logic fails us', without for all that arriving at
a single, absolute and definitive solution: what this has given us, in
its initial and principal phase, centered on the notion of
'quantifier', are his famous 'formulas of sexuation', and so the
'Lacan square' (a disquieting version of the 'square of opposition')
on which they hang; ultimately, this seems to open, by trial and
error, onto the geometry of Borromean knots. During his
'quantificational' phase, Lacan grounds his work of a few essential
bases: Aristotle-Frege, Peirce and Jacques Brunschwig, all of whom
have discussed the square of opposition and the strange paradoxes that
it involves. We propose that in failing to ground his work on the
'logical hexagon' (discovered around 1950 by Jacoby, Sesmat and
Blanché) Lacan has commited a prejudicial error, one which has been

repeated in our own time by virtually all of his commentators and
followers. There are two reasons why this error is a grave one: the
first is that the hexagon of oppositions is the true mathematical
place of the square (the latter being a very incomplete fragment of
the former), in which, alone, the paradoxes can be dissipated; the
second is that it has recently been discovered that the square and the
hexagon of oppositions both belong (along with infinitely many other
geometrical forms) to a new branch of mathematics, 'oppositional
geometry' (2004), which it would seem imprudent to ignore in studying
the Lacanian question of the possible formalisations of sexuation.
Refocussing the debate concerning the formal apprehension of sexuation
on the oppositional geometry issuing from the hexagon, and recalling,
as the mathematician René Guitart has recently demonstrated, the
generalised notion of a Borromean object recovers, precisely, as a
particular and significant case, the notion of the hexagon of
oppositions, we propose that what we are faced with is the true
geometrico-oppositional matheme of sexuation, in Lacan's sense.

Auditorium

6-8 pm

Thursday 3 May

The Coûfontaine Trilogy (Paul Claudel), part two

Auditorium

10.30 am - 12.30 pm

Thursday 5 April

Discussing Lacan's analysis of Paul Claudel's trilogy - The Hostage, Crusts, and The Humiliated Father - we will see how a possible way out of being kept hostage of a disintegrating symbolic order can be conceived. As a related question we will also discuss the structure of being caused by x, while at the same time being asked to be the support (subject) of x, or, put differently, to love what one abhors.

Auditorium

10.30 am - 12.30 pm

Wednesday 7 March

We continue our question of how and why Capital owes you nothing. In order to do so we will discuss passages from 17th century authors on pure love.

Auditorium

10am-12pm

Book launch

Michaela Wünsch (former JVE researcher) presents her edited collection on Jacques Lacan's Seminar X: Anxiety (Turia + Kant, 2012)

204

10pm

Wednesday 8 February

It is clear what provoked Lacan's interest in Pascal's wager: the stake one puts on the table is one's own life, and this life is lost as soon as one enters the wager – and one has always already done this, vous êtes embarqués. (cf. the whole discussion of ‘le problème des partis', which for Pascal can only be solved if one considers the stake as lost) Pascal's ‘life' is the Lacanian object a, that life that is given up in order to become a subject of a non-existent Other. Which reminds one of a Christian tradition of pure love, according to which my life is already lost – corrupted and sinful – and instead of blaming God for this rather saddening condition, I lose myself in this objectal position, trying to get rid of any remainder of self-love. Then I am capable of pure love, sacrificing myself for the love of God, not expecting any form of reward (that is to get saved by the unpredictable grace of God). This is rather perverse, but nonetheless an accurate description of our current ideology: the market owes you nothing. You may be temporarily useful as an employee, salesman, or artist, but that does not change what you are: a superfluous, useless, shrieking body sick with vanity. Between the despair provoked by an Other that is always ready to get rid of you, and the unconditional love one is invited to feel for this Other, there are you, waste.

Auditorium

2-4pm