Beyond Principle; or, Put A Socket In It: Reading Lacan, Seminars I & II, 1953-1955

A year-long, bi-weekly seminar, reading Lacan’s first two Seminars. Beginning again.

Each session will be a chapter of the Seminar. This will not be a reading-aloud-together class – rather, each is expected to have read, and – following a mode in this early Lacan – each session will – usually – begin with a participant presenting questions and thoughts about the chapter.

We will also read in their entirety Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle; and – aloud, together – Sophocles’ Oedipus At Colonus.

It is notable that Lacan, in these first, foundational, remarkable teachings, is at play in the metaphors of light and reflection – and ends, almost thirty years later – like Oedipus himself – in haptic blindness, feeling his way with his hands, signifying with string. Like Oedipus – his end audible in this, his beginning.

We read – we are – within the veil of ‘our time’, in which the signifier – structurally empty – is evacuated of this emptiness – thereby making speech expulsion of the other from the contract of sense making. A symptom of Capitalist discourse, yes – but not only:
An enlisting of the signifier into the function (already nascent) of suicide vest – speech as detonation destroying communal agreements of meaning.
This the regime of the demand of the drive: to eliminate difference.
The fissure that is difference is, as a legacy, lived as identity: the mass found in the scan of the person known as ego.
So, in such a time – ours – a return to the initial caustic applied to the seeming substantiality of that mass, which was Lacan’s return to the letter of Freud.
A threshold, as was Seminar III, to psychosis – here in ‘our time’.
Towards tuning an analyst’s ears to a register of speech as solvent – a hearing speaking – these two Seminars are exemplars.