Lacan School Seminars, 2024-25
MOUTHW SH 🔗
a working group
“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 group 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.
Faculty: Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst
Dates/Times: Every other Monday, 5:30-7:30 PT, 8:30-10:30 PM, ET. Sept 16th, 2024 – April 14th, 2025
Location: Over Zoom
Contact: To join, or for more information: half.outside.it@gmail.com
Fee: $25 suggested per session, or tuition. None turned away.
Jean-Gérard Bursztein 🔗
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.
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.