The Logic of Phantasy and the Psychoanalytic Act: Lacan Seminars XIV and XV (1966—’68)

We are living in an area of civilization where, as they say, there is free speech, namely that nothing of what you say is of any consequence. You can say anything whatsoever about someone who may well be at the origin of some indecipherable murder or other: you can even create a play about it. The whole of America ... crowds into it. Never previously in history would such a thing have been conceivable without the theater being immediately closed. In the land of liberty one can say anything, because this has no consequences... we have even seen psychoanalysts questioning the future of the trade.

So Lacan, 1968: The truth is fractured. Me, the truth, I speak

...in the two years between these resonant utterances Lacan undertook, as the watershed of May ’68 approached, a search for models that would advance, with the most discrete steps, away from refined or renewed forms of positivism towards what he called exercises of skepticism. This (re)search would take up, he said, the misunderstandings and fragmentary things, still so alive, that tradition has bequeathed to us—not simply as brilliant jugglings between opposed doctrines but as veritable spiritual exercises, corresponding to an ethical praxis, imposed by the clinic. He sought, as do we Lacanians today, a rubric that would give veritable density to the theory that remains to us.

This search reached its apotheosis in the forging of a radical ‘algorithm’ that aimed to articulate the logic always at work, between a divided subject and the object cause of desire, in the mixed blood of conscious and unconscious scenarios, originary fantasies, grammatical transformations and infinite substitutions, myths, drives, history....

What does it mean to act psychoanalytically, and what is the logic of the psychoanalytic act? How does acting out inhere in repetition, and how does analytic play diverge from alienation and passage-à-l’acte, where a subject might fall, as Lacan says, off the stage and into the world?

We’ll spend the next two years in a close line-by-line reading and discussion of Lacan’s Seminars XIV (1966— ‘67) and XV (1967— ‘68):  The Logic of Phantasy and The Psychoanalytic Act in English translation, alongside French versions of the texts.

Enrollment limited. Please write organizer directly if you are interested in participating.