Psychoanalytical Notebooks

24/08/2024

"Lacanian anxiety is a way of accessing the real, a way of accessing what cannot be resolved by the signifier. In this sense, it is far from being a disorder.”

Dossia Avdelidi, “Anxiety Between Desire and Jouissance,” Psychoanalytic Notebooks 42.

Coming soon.

15/08/2024

“Consent, obedience and anxiety—these three subjective experiences undergo transformations in analysis. It is by crossing the point of anxiety that the analysand can be led to a new relation with desire, allowing him to glimpse what he has obeyed up to now, and also leading him to no longer give ground on his desire.”
- Clotilde Leguil, "Consent, Obedience, Anxiety in the Treatment"

In Psychoanalytic Notebooks Issue 42: The Point of Anxiety

Coming... soon!

17/06/2024

Issue 41: a-Normality

Out now!

There is an obvious commotion in the field of normality today. For example, the widespread rejection of norms imposed by the Other is reflected in the language of the young, especially on social media: people with boring, mainstream tastes are deemed to be “normies”, descendants, perhaps, of the uncool “squares” of the American 1950s. These “normies” are pejoratively described as “basic”, meaning derivative, trite, unoriginal. This suggests the contrary expectation: paradoxically, that everyone should aim to be exceptional, and are entitled to be recognised as such. The rejection of the Other’s norms can also take the form of attacks on those who previously categorised and policed the abnormal, whether psychiatrists, lawmakers, scientists, or politicians. “Experts” of all kinds now find themselves prefaced with the disparaging qualifier “so-called”, the knowledge they possess being experienced as an encroachment on personal liberties (as the Covid pandemic made clear). Hence the related heightening of sensitivities to traces of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia in language that could be seen as anything other than maximally inclusive of the full rainbow of diversity, or as anything less than affirmative of the universal right to jouissance promised by the market.

To counter the misconception that psychoanalysis is involved in normalisation, we have chosen to entitle this issue of the Psychoanalytical Notebooks using the signifier “a-normality”. The “a-normal” is precisely not the abnormal. The abnormal remains caught within the infernal loop of the normal and the pathological. But nor is “a-normality” naively anti-normative, i.e., against any and all norms. The anarcho-libertarian dream of a world completely without norms misrecognises that the fundamental problem faced by the parlêtre is not the oppressive Other prohibiting jouissance by pathologising it, but rather that of jouissance itself. Neither abnormal nor anti-normative then, the “a-normal” is that singular “object a-nomalous” that an analysis brought to its conclusion can produce by separating the One from the Other. The “a-normal” is thus the “aberration”, as Lacan puts it, involved in wanting to take up the position of a psychoanalyst, which is after all a very strange kind of desire: in this sense, the “a-normal” is what we hope to hear an echo of in testimonies of the Pass.

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17/06/2024

28/06/2022

’What seems to me, afterwards, to be the thread is the emphasis on the very impossibility of the question “What is woman?”. Lacan indicated this as early as the beginning of his teaching: “Becoming a woman and wondering what a woman is are two essentially different things […] it is because one doesn’t become one that one wonders and, up to a point, to wonder is the contrary of becoming one […] Her position is essentially problematic, and up to a certain point it’s unassimilable.”

How did Lacan, and Freud in his own way, situate this “unassimilable”? In order to approach it, we have to get rid of a certain number of obvious ideas, such that of a male/female bipolarity is founded in anatomy or inscribed in the unconscious. The active/passive polarity merely “metaphorise[s] that which remains unfathomable in sexual difference”.’

Anne Lysy

26/06/2022

‘Inexistence only becomes a question on account of already having a response – the twofold response, certainly, of jouissance and of truth – but it already inexists. It is neither through jouissance nor through truth that inexistence assumes a status, that it may inexist, in other words that it may come to the symbol that designates it as inexistence, not in the sense of not having existence, but rather of only being in existence through the symbol that would make it inexistent and which, for its part, does indeed exist. As you know, this is number that is generally designated as nought. This shows very well that inexistence is not what you might think it is, namely nothingness, for what could come out of nothingness? The answer to that is nothing, of course, except belief.' Jacques Lacan, 19 January 1972

02/02/2022

‘Lacan posits in this text that topology “is” structure. In this topology the base is the torus and the Moebius strip. It is the turn that makes the hole. The hole is built from the turns of demand, which turn around a void. This void makes a hole, but a hole that is imagined, and thus leaves the real of the drive tainted by imagination.’ Philippe La Sagna and Rodolfe Adam, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38

20/01/2022

"The letter, always in the singular, draws ‘the rim of the hole in kowledge.’ The hole is the consequence of the failures that occur as soon as a living being makes use of language [langage], as soon as he inhabits it by speaking. A certain number of effects then occur that Freud named the unconscious, which accompanies the one who speak, like his shadow." Éric Laurent

17/01/2022

"This really was pulling the rug from under their feet, at a time when the locus of the Other belonged (and still does) to the ABCs of what has crystallised as Lacanianism... Now, what has not been glimpsed, and in any case not explained, is this – the Other does not exist, means exactly that the One exists. It is another way of saying Yad'lun, which Lacan had thrown forth as a jaculation and which I transcribed in this way in the Seminar that would end up being published. Had this been noticed? What is this One that exists when the Other does not exist? It is the One of the signifier." JAM

17/01/2022

"Today we are going to have fun! It is a question of making you understand something, and you only understand where you take pleasure in it. What I am about to say amuses me, and I hope it will amuse you too. This is not self-evident, as several of you have told me that you are not very comfortable with references to philosophical literature. This is obviously not likely to stop me." JAM

17/01/2022

"The signifier One is not one signifier among others, and it surmounts that whereby it is but be-twain these signifiers that the subject is supposable, by my so saying. But this is where I recognize that this here One is but knowledge superior unto the subject, that is, unconscious insofar as it manifests itself as existing - the knowledge, I say, of a real of the One-all-alone, all-alone right where relation would be said." Jacques Lacan, Report on Seminar XIX