Jean-Gérard Bursztein

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A Lacanian psychoanalyst practicing and teaching in Paris, Jean-Gérard Bursztein has written a number of books, only a handful of which have as yet been translated into English. Relatively short works of about a hundred pages, each restates, renews and adds his own speech to the logics & topologics of analytic discourse introduced by Lacan. 

 

His texts published in English by the old French house Éditions Hermann, are absolute marvels of bad translation – an added dis-torsion akin to the refraction in session of hearing an other:  natal tongue is the first translation.

 

Bursztein’s writing makes vivid Freud’s unresolved concerns with spatiality and time and their renewal via Lacan’s working through the Borromean and Moebian; he saturates these structuring forms with an immediacy of the human, offering a felt-sense of their clinical efficacy. He diligently keeps the notion of incest at the core of this theoretical work, a rarity in most analytic discourse of our moment; his persistent questioning of the unconscious as an ‘ethical’ concept is something demanding engagement, marking Lacan’s 1959-60 Ethics seminar as the turning point away from this social-collective frame, towards one which ultimately, and more acutely, affirms the non-place of the clinical encounter and the singularity of each analysand’s – and analyst’s – savoir.

 

In this bi-weekly seminar, we’ll work from Bursztein’s text Subjective Topology; A Lexicon; but access to two others  – The Unconscious, Its Space-Time and My Lexicon of Psychoanalysis is recommended. 

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We’ll refer to a selection of Lacan’s Seminars, Écrits and other authors he cites as well.

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We’ll see how they speak to – and work on – us.

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Readings:

Bursztein, Jean-Gérard. Subjective Topology; A Lexicon, (2019). Trans. Nicole Testé. Paris:  Hermann.

Bursztein, Jean-Gérard. The Unconscious, Its Space-Time; Aristotle, Lacan, Poincaré, (2019). Trans. Richard Klein. Paris:  Hermann.

Bursztein, Jean-Gérard. My Lexicon of Psychoanalysis, (2019). Trans. Starra Priestaf, Nicole Testé, and Jennifer Yusin. Paris:  Hermann.

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Faculty: Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst

Dates/Times: Monday 5:30-7:30 pt, 8:30-10:30 pm et. Sept 9th, 2024 - April 7th, 2025

Location: Online bi-weekly via Zoom 

Contact: half.outside.it@gmail.com 

Fee: $25 per session suggested. None turned away.

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Matthew Seidman [MFA, CalArts] is a candidate research analyst at the LSP, and a member of the California Circle of GIFRIC; he is also participating in SPIIRAL/PAS, a nascent GIFRIC-inspired Project for an American School. Poly-modal artist, analyst, instructor, yogi; 2023 marks his 25th year as a yoga teacher. He also hosts an analytic-framed movement workshop:  To Be And Not To Be, a Fundamental Rule movement lab. In all its modes, his creative work is mytho-erotic, recognizably Jewish, and via the body-that-speaks, moves through a devastated temporality (ethics) along a membrane cleaving poetry and pornography. He calls it traumedy. It has been published, staged, screened, heard and hung in the US, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. A selection of his work is collected at volcofsky.net – A’ Traveling Yeshiva Sideshow.

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