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The Wolfman I
J-A MILLER

Reducing the Sophist to Silence
ALAIN BADIOU

The Jouissance Program…
ERIC LAURENT

Freud and the Object…
P-G GUÉGUEN

The Universal Eye…
GÉRARD WAJCMAN

Transcendental Black Metal
HUNTER HUNT-HENDRIX

Leave the Screen Empty!
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Mike Kelley,
Carroll Dunham,
Olaf Breuning
JOSEFINA AYERZA

Breuning imageOf Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Wolf Man,” as it proceeds directly from Jacques Lacan’s account, which in turn contains Freud’s records, “it is a matter of reinterpretation, understood by means of what happened fifteen years before.” The Wolf Man never acknowledged castration. However he did acknowledge it. He rejected castration much as he held to his theory of intercourse by the anus. Let’s say that he would have nothing to do with it, in the sense of having repressed it.
Let Alain Badiou in “A Brief Introduction” to Plato’s Republic have his say. “Publishing this fierce dispute in lacanian ink is appropriate, considering Lacan’s ambiguous attitude about the conflict between Plato and the sophists. Considering that the unconscious is structured ‘like a language,’ considering that the psychoanalytic cure is to a great extent a rhetoric of silence and words […] considering what is at stake in psychoanalysis, when all is said and done, namely, the real as the quilting point of a Subject’s truth, it is from Socrates and Plato that psychoanalysis derives.”
Eric Laurent recounts of a clinical presentation given by Lacan at Sainte-Anne. The case is a transsexual. Particularly problematic, a colossus with Herculean arms—the arms of Hercules Farnese—he wanted to undergo an operation and have his penis removed in order to finally become a woman. During the entire interview Lacan tried to suggest that his penis might be seen as a giant clitoris, which would spare him the operation, which was quite cumbersome. “This truly amounted, ultimately, to a use of the imaginary to try and treat a Real problem.”
For Pierre-Gilles Guéguen “the man of desire” is nothing by comparison to he who does not yield with regard to the cause that moves him. “We can consider, as Lacan did by the end of his teaching, that this cause is summoned up every time that, that which does not respond to the law, that what is lawless, ­appears. It takes Freud’s and Lacan’s courage to draw so close to this.”
Gérard Wajcman’s proposal contemplates a Lacanian strip-tease, “what I would call the dance of the eight veils—namely, that beneath the seven veils, beneath clothes, beneath the skin, beneath the muscles and beneath the bones and the skeleton, there is yet something, something else, something which supports and founds the whole edifice that is the body, the clothes hanger of flesh: what Lacan calls the objet petit a.”
In Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s lines there is an insistent push that separates the letters from the background, and it’s a music session: guitars, invisible hands… You read in the reverse of letters, as in a song. If the backbone of Transcendental Black Metal is the Burst Beat, “The burst beat is a hyper blast beat, a blast beat that ebbs, flows, expands and contracts, breathes.”
With Slavoj Zizek it’s about the void that does not result from an abstraction, from the concrete fullness of human existence, “this void is primordial, constitutive of subjectivity, it precedes any content which fills it up. And it poses a limit to the common-sense idea that our conversation with others should follow the path of straight sincerity, avoiding both extremes of hypocritical etiquette and unwarranted intruding obscene intimacy…”
Cathy Lebowitz and I talk about the art throughout the works of Mike Kelley, Carroll Dunham, Olaf Breuning.
— CL: You have reproduced a painting by Mike Kelley on the cover, this baby, to represent “The Wolf Man” issue of lacanian ink. How does the baby make you think of the Wolf Man?
— JA: The actual baby is having an erotic response. The erotic quality in its drawn breast, much as the green shape with pink intriguing pieces that holds him, invests him: when the Wolf Man regressed to the traumatic scene, witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the mother viewed from behind on her hand and knees—the Wolf Man’s factor, uncanny, even horrifying, reduces him to a toylike being.

lacanian ink 35 raises its glass in a toast to the Jacques Lacan University as it brings forth the Paris-USA Lacan Seminar’s auspicious institution. Divided at the onset, amidst countries, throughout languages, the subject’s genuine performative Act brings up Lacan in between “something always thinks, even if that which thinks is barred from consciousness…”


J.A.


Art: Olaf Breuning
Half Empty / Half Full - wall drawing, 2009
courtesy Metro Pictures, NYC.


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