Contributors

To resume again...

Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

The Nora Whom Joyce "Knew"
D
AVID HAYMAN

The Desire of Lacan
J
ACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Couple
A
DRIAN DANNATT

The Diary of Kotpotus
G
ARY DAUPHIN

From Two Small Notebooks
R
APHAEL RUBINSTEIN

Benita Canova
R
ICHARD FOREMAN

Ronald Jones
J
ORGE JAUREGUI


























        

The Desire of Lacan

 

Jacques-Alain Miller
translated by Jorge Jauregui

"Lacan's utterances never allow one to overlook its enunciation. Unlike Freud, the audience-not embodying an unbiased listener-is rather a part of the demonstration to which it is bespoken. The author of the Écrits was someone who spoke while addressing his words to them for whom he was the actual referent. And that is what substantiated the uniqueness of an enunciation in concern with the unconscious coalescing the dimension of sense to jouissance.

Thus Lacan is able to posit a critique of Freud's Oedipus by disassembling its manlike dream structure ruled by the master discourse. He then introduces division and the objet a to convey, from the feminine side, the key to the onset of the analyst social invention.

Utterance, no matter its contents, enjoys a secular perfection called desire. Pleasure is now, in the present tense. Jacques Lacan names this tense persistently."
(German Garcia, "Prefacio," El Deseo de Lacan)

  I had the October 1991 Jacques Lacan Encounter in mind when I inaugurated the expression "The Desire of Lacan" in my Seminar in Paris, as well as the dilemmas inherent to all commemorations. The dead is exposed to a sort of contingent, compelling make-up which I deem unsuitable, apropos Lacan. He needs no make up. And this is how I find appealing enough to bring before my fellow members the idea of thinking Lacan, on the occasion of the X0. Anniversary of his passing away, from a different angle. Which doesn't mean that Lacan ten years after his death recedes. Just the opposite. I think Lacan is close, very close and perhaps too close to us, his disciples. If you would somehow push him away he could become Other to you, an unknown Other. I think that this suits significantly the desire of Lacan. And you could even state that he has hysteric attributes. The representation of hysteria proper is impuissance vis-à-vis knowledge, the bid of hysteria in the like of "enjoy my riddle," so it is with Lacan. With his work, with his Écrits, with his style, he is inducing scrutiny while prompting seminars, lectures and symposia to get the drift of what he meant to say. It is an almost world scale industry-the debates about the riddle of Lacan-of which all of us are a part. Let's say that this already accounts for Lacan's hysteria.

[…]

 

Lisa May-Post, detail from Shelter, photograph, 1996.



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