Jean-Gérard Bursztein
a seminar
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.
We’ll refer to a selection of Lacan’s Seminars, Écrits and other authors he cites as well.
We’ll see how they speak to – and work on – us.
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.
Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst
Monday 5:30-7:30 pt, 8:30-10:30 pm pm, et.
Sept 9th, 2024 - April 7th, 2025
Bi-weekly over Zoom.
To join, or for more information: half.outside.it@gmail.com
$25, suggested. None turned away.
mouthw sh
a seminar
“The other”—don’t use this term as a mouthwash.
Lacan, S II, ch 1.
We all know the experience of hearing someone – even ourselves – speak with what sounds like a mouthful of Lacanian marbles. Signifier, lack, objet a, big other, object cause, discourse, topology, desire, phallus, real, imaginary, symbolic, etc.; not forgetting, of course, that Swiss army knife of Lacanese: jouissance.
Prior to formal analytic formation, coming from a background of having taught yoga for two-plus decades, while I’d practice I’d ask myself: what is this? what is happening? how could I tell this to others? It is a truism – one learns what one knows – and doesn’t – having to teach another.
And so, formation: an ongoing act. The intention of this seminar is to offer the practice of saying something – metabolized in one’s own words – to others about the Lacanian ‘treasure trove of signifiers’. A counter to the pervasive reification of Lacanian grammar.
For our purposes, something – for you – encountered in your Lacanian reading or work which insists, remains obscure, opaque, meaningless, etc. – perhaps something it seems everyone else ‘gets’.
Structure of the seminar: meeting every other Monday, each session someone will volunteer themselves for something they’d like to work on; the off-week between they’ll announce what it is – something – term, concept, graph or image, etc. They’ll also supplement with relevant locations in Lacan’s Seminars or writings. They’ll open the session, speaking their relationship-non-relationship with this thing; and, we also having had the week to prepare, we will listen, reply, and work.
When the beginning of the seminar approaches, I’ll choose our first thing, so we’ll get to work right from the start.
This is less a work about clarifying knowledge – we’re all rightly drawn to a luminous opacity – but more about the sucking candy of dogma dissolved in living speaking breathing mouths.
Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst
Every other Monday, 5:30-7:30 pt, 8:30-10:30 pm pm, et.
Sept 16th, 2024 – April 14th, 2025
Over Zoom
To join, or for more information: half.outside.it@gmail.com
$25, suggested. None turned away.
Freiheit macht Arbeit
Sem. XX, Encore
Freiheit macht Arbeit. Why this echo of the vilest of gates?
Hier ist kein warum / here there is no why.
This saying, attributed to Mengele יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ וְזִכְרוֹ and/or a kamp guard – is a saying – and a said – I’ve been in conversation with as a director and writer for many decades. The iron gate’s original inscription sustains, eighty years later, its incinerating power – not all iron-y – because it wielded social truth in service of social death. This twist-tie of phrase – is a dagger balanced tip-down on a human tongue.
Hier ist kein warum – this too is a twist-tie: rescue as preface to enslavement. This – this twisting – producing this – this vacuum – of speech, its effect spiked via the body – limns a corrida [bullring] inextricable, installed by the analytic encounter: vacuum out of which – ex nihilo – the ethical animal, the parlêtre, via sacrifice, is created.
So: there is no Y here.
Seminar XX – Encore.
XX; XY.
Double x?
Where there is a no-difference – why?
From the gurgle of lalangue where no-difference thrums, to the entry of the wh.y – reply to the incision of Law – indifference – the playfulness of it, all in its deadly seriousness, asked me to give it a roll.
What is love?
So I turned the lintel inside-out, and – was it true: freedom puts to work? – of a no why?
A presence of the labor force, or forced labor, of free association. Was it true?
From freedom to associate to a freedom from association?
And what of the link to the labor of which we each emerge – forced labor of maternity … XX?
I decided to hold this seminar, to find out.
In Freud, Lacan, Apollon – or whatever image – word or picture – holds you – no.w – the status of the feminine, woman – struck-through or not – is result of an event’s logic – seismic, irretrievable, body-world creating – separating réels, end middle beginning, into [a] order.
A rumor of an absolute fact, demanding proof – in act.
This Y of difference – as in yoga is said of the unsayable: neti neti – this is not it – stands in for it – as not. Lacan appended all.
Six years before in The Logic Of Fantasy, he said: sexual difference is only supported by the Bedeutung [meaning-fullness] of something lacking under the aspect of the phallus.
Our era [hear it how you do], having sat someone playing doctor in father’s chair – for now [but could a chair – or a father – exist without pre-occupation?] – occludes a truth of the human body: its nativity via the cut of speech.
An Other [body] – an absolute fact, rumored.
Its presence, a proximity never near enough – encloses in its traces – as corrida – a call our reading of this seminar will be attuning to.
The choice to offer a reading of this oral text, following, as it does, a collective reading last winter’s of Schreber’s Memoirs – a profound, unspeakably, text – evokes what Lacan says elsewhere in the seminar quoted above, about this Other: And that is why I cannot say this expression: “that it has no kind of existence”, but I can write it.
Lacan’s Seminar XX will be our primary text; we’ll also work with additional texts by Willy Apollon and Jean-Gérard Bursztein.
So, not through, but around a post of this gateless gate, I invite and welcome you.
(2023-24)
Reading Schreber
Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903) is a founding text of psychoanalysis.
My lsp experience has been – many read its analyses, but not the book itself.
So we will read Schreber, by Schreber.
Rather than seeking to apply theory to his text, we will listen to the Judge – hearing so much –regards speech, language and writing, sex & gender, the body & medicalization, culture, religion, race, fathers and names, and their discontents. In this listening, we’ll recognize structures of analytic teaching, and in his speech – in the existence of the book – reply to a demand at the foundation of all analytic work.
Supplementary works will no doubt call (and we’ll answer), but the Judge’s testament itself, in the NYRB Macalpine translation, will be our main work.
Mondays, 6-8 pm PST.
Fee: $25
(2022-23)