Monday 15 June 2009

OBJECT DAY

10:45-11:00 Dominiek Hoens (Jan van Eyck Academie)

         Introduction

 

11:00-12:00 Marc De Kesel (Radboud University Nijmegen)

        The Subject Does not Dance Without an Object: On the Genesis of Lacan's

        object a in Seminar VI

 

12-00-13:00 Thomas Brockelman (Le Moyne University, Syracuse NY)

        The Other Side of the Canvas: Lacan flips Foucault over Velazquez

 

13:00-14:00 lunch

 

14:00-15:00 Christian Kerslake (Middlesex University, London)

        The objet a in the Cahiers pour l'analyse: Miller, Milner and Leclaire

 

15:00-15:30 coffee

 

15:30-16:30 Lorenzo Chiesa (University of Kent)

        Subject, Object, Zero: A Critical Commentary on Jacques-Alain Miller's "La

        suture"

 

16:30-17:30 Jelica Sumic (University of Ljubljana)

        On Badiou's Objectless Subject

 

18:00-19:00 drinks

 

19:00          dinner

 

         Johann Heinrich Füssli, The nightmare (1782 [detail])

 

Marc De Kesel is a senior researcher at Radboud University in Nijmegen and teaches Philosophy at Artveldehogeschool in Gent. He published numerous essays on Bataille, Nancy, Lacan, Blanchot, Derrida, on psychoanalysis, politics and aesthetics. Recently his close reading of Lacan's Seminar VII, Eros and Ethics, was published by SUNY Press.

 

Thomas Brockelman is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, USA. He is the author, most recently, of Žižek and Heidegger: the Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism (Continuum: 2009) but also of The Frame and Mirror: on Collage and the Postmodern (Northwestern: 2001) and of numerous articles in aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory and political theory. Dr. Brockelman was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2007.

 

abstract: Departing from an event in Jacques Lacan's 1966 Seminar, "The Other Side of the Canvas" develops our understanding of the "object of psychoanalysis" through Lacan's Auseinandersetzung with Michel Foucault on the topic of Velazquez's painting, Las Meninas. The interpretation, which Lacan develops in the context of Foucault's use of the picture within his just published Les Mots et les choses, occurs in part in Foucault's presence and what is, to all appearances, a friendly "dialogue" between the two thinkers. In fact, though, my paper shows that Lacan offers a radical alternative to Foucault's understanding of Velazquez. With that alternative, seen in the context of Seminar XIII as a whole, Lacan lays the groundwork – in an opportunity he doesn't explicitly take up – to dispute Foucault's 1966 theses regarding modernity and its contemporary crisis. In this way, Lacan's conception of the properly psychoanalytic object can be shown to host a Lacanian alternative to postmodernism.

 

Christian Kerslake is currently a research fellow on an AHRC-funded project to digitise the Cahiers pour l'analyse at the Centre for Research on Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London. He is also the author of Deleuze and the Unconscious (Continuum, 2007), and co-editor of a volume of essays on philosophy and psychoanalysis, The Origins and Ends of the Mind (Leuven , 2007).

 

abstract: 'The objet petit a in the Cahiers pour l'analyse: Miller, Milner and Leclaire'. The journal Cahiers pour l'analyse was a laboratory for the elaboration of Lacanian theory from 1966-69, published by a group calling themselves 'The Circle of Epistemology'. The founding theoretical statement in the first volume of the journal was Jacques-Alain Miller's 'Suture', which was subjected to intense analysis and reflection in the ensuing volumes by a number of prominent theorists, including Serge Leclaire, Jean-Claude Milner, Francois Regnault and Alain Badiou. In this presentation I would like to discuss the different meanings of the concept of the 'objet petit a' generated in the course of the Cahiers project by Miller, Milner and Leclaire. I will take as my main text the discussions between these three thinkers during Leclaire's seminar, as published in the third volume of the Cahiers.

 

Lorenzo Chiesa is Lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent at Canterbury (United Kingdom), Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Visiting Professor at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, University of Naples (Italy). He is the author of Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (MIT Press 2007), Antonin Artaud. Verso un corpo senza organi (Ombre Corte 2001), and has published widely on Lacanian theory and contemporary French and Italian philosophy. Chiesa sits in the editorial board of the Journal of European Psychoanalysis, and is a member of CLiC, Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (based at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands) and of AFIC, Association Franco-Italienne pour la recherche sur la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (based at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris). Currently, he is completing a co-translation into English of Giorgio Agamben's Il Regno e La Gloria: Homo Sacer, II, 2 for Stanford University Press.

 

abstract: In his seminal 1966 essay “La suture: elements de la logique du signifiant”, Jacques-Alain Miller compares Frege's notion of the zero with Lacan's notion of the subject of the unconscious: the zero relates to the series of numbers in the same way as the subject relates to the signifying chain. For Frege, the zero is the support of the series of numbers precisely insofar as the zero as the lack of the object can be counted as one qua number. Similarly, for Miller, the subject of the unconscious should be understood as an excluded excess that sustains the signifying chain: the exclusion of the subject – which is thus barred – from the Other amounts to the repeated representation of such an exclusion in the object a – as the object of the Other's desire – by means of the unary trait. In this paper I will show how, criticising Frege and going beyond the level of a mere analogy, Miller identifies the subject with the zero, and claims that the progression of natural whole numbers is itself made possible only by the repressed function of the subject. Formal logic misrecognises – or sutures – the formalism of the logic of the unconscious insofar as it does not – and cannot – take fully into account the fact that logic is always-already the signifier's logic, a logic generated by language as a symbolic intersubjective structure. While this critique of formal logic is compatible with some of the most profound implications of Lacan's logic of the signifier, the fact remains that, in his 1965-66 Seminar The Object of Psychoanalysis, Lacan seems to identify the object a – and not the barred subject – with Frege's zero.

 

Jelica Sumic is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of the Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. She taught at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris, and was a guest lecturer in Boston, Frankfurt and Paris. She is an author of Mutations of Ethics published in Ljubljana. She edited L'Universel, Singulier, Sujet for éditions Kime. She has written widely on political philosophy, ethics and psychoanalysis, and is currently writing a book on Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.

 

Friday 13 March 2009

Workshop with Aaron Schuster on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

"On nous objecte qu'en soustrayant le désir au manque et à la loi, nous ne pouvons plus qu'invoquer un état de nature, un désir qui serait réalité naturelle et spontanée. Nous disons tout au contraire: il n'y a pas de désir qu'agencé ou machiné." (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues)

An occasion to ask whether D&G are right in their critique of psychoanalysis, or whether the late Lacan is simply an elaboration of the theses put forward in their book.

Keywords: machines, desire, pleasure, (lack of) lack.

We are grateful for Aaron Schuster's brilliant commentary on Anti-Oedipus and for providing us with the text of his intervention here.

 

Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 October 2007

flyer: click here

Wednesday 19 September

 

09.30 – 10.00 Registration & coffee

 

10.00 – 10.30 Dominiek Hoens (Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht, NL)

 

10.30 – 11.45 Marc De Kesel (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL)

 

11.45 – 13.00 Kenneth Reinhard (University of California LA, USA)

 

14.00 – 15.15 Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA)

        

15.15 – 16.30 Mahdi Tourage (Colgate University NY, USA)

 

16.45 – 18.00 Samo Tomšic (Institute for Philosophy Ljubljana, SL)

 

18.00 drinks

 

Thursday 20 September

 

 

10.30 – 11.45 Lara Sels and Nadia Sels (University of Ghent, BE)

 

11.45 – 13.00 Charles Shepherdson (Tsinghua University, CN)

 

14.00 – 15.15 Tiers Bakker (University of Amsterdam, NE)

 

15.15 – 16.30 Zachary Rosenau (Independent Researcher, Philadelphia, USA)

 

16.45 – 18.00 Marcus Pound (Durham University, UK)

 

18.00 drinks

Respondents: Erik Borgman, Thomas Brockelman, Chris Gemerchak, Dominiek Hoens, André Nusselder, Georgios Papadopoulos, Johan Schokker, Aaron Schuster, Frank Vande Veire