Lacan: Topologically Speaking

433 Pages·2004·15.218 MB·English

by  Ellie Ragland (Editor), Dragan Milovanovic (Editor)

the imaginary
LACAN:
TOPOLOGICALLY SPEAKING
edited L\A
ELLIE RAGLAND and DRAGAN MiLO\ ANOVIC
LACAN:
TOPOLOGICALLY
SPEAKING
EDITED BY
ELLIE RAGLAND
and
DRAGAN MILOVANOVIC
OTHER
Other Press
New York
Copyright © 2004 by Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic
This book was set in 11 pt. Berkeley by Alpha Graphics of Pittsfield, NH.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lacan : topologically speaking / [edited by] Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-892746-76-X
1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901-Contributions in topology. 2. Psychoanalysis.
3. Topology. I. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 1941- II. Milovanovic, Dragan, 1948 -
RC506 .L23 2003
616.89'17—dc21
2002029301
Contributors
Bruce A. Arrigo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Crimi­
nal Justice at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, with
Adjunct Professor appointments in the Public Policy Program and
the Psychology Department, respectively. Formerly the Director
of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the Cali­
fornia School of Professional Psychology-Fresno, Dr. Arrigo began
his professional career as a community organizer and social activ­
ist for the homeless, the mentally ill, the working poor, the frail
elderly, the decarcerated, and the chemically addicted. Dr. Arrigo
received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, and he holds
a master’s degree in psychology and sociology. He is the author of
more than 100 monographs, journal articles, academic book chap­
ters, and scholarly essays exploring theoretical and applied topics
in critical criminology, criminal justice and mental health, and
socio-legal studies. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eight
books, including Madness, Language, and the Law (1993), The Con­
tours of Psychiatric Justice (1996), Social Justice/Criminal Justice
(1998), The Dictionary of Critical Social Sciences (with T. R. Young,
vi CONTRIBUTORS
1999), Introduction to Forensic Psychology (2000), Law, Psychology,
and Justice (with Christopher R. Williams, 2001), The Power Serial
Rapist (with Dawn J. Graney, 2001), and Punishing the Mentally III:
A Clinical Analysis of Law and Psychiatry (2002). Dr. Arrigo is the
past Editor of Humanity and Society and founding and Acting Edi­
tor of the peer-reviewed quarterly, Journal of Forensic Psychology
Practice. He was recently named the Critical Criminologist of the
year (2000), sponsored by the Critical Criminology Division of the
American Society of Criminology.
Philip Dravers is currently completing his doctoral thesis “Fic­
tion and the Real in the Theory of Jacques Lacan” for the Univer­
sity of Oxford and teaches in the MA program in psychoanalysis at
Middlesex University. He has translated many psychoanalytic articles
from the French, including Lacan’s paper “British Psychiatry and the
War” and is also a member of the editorial committee of the journal
in which it appeared, Psychoanalytical Notebooks of the London Circle.
He has previously published articles on Lacan, Joyce, and Bentham
in both English and French and is currently researching the impli­
cations of the final period of Lacan’s teaching for issues of our con­
temporary scene, its subjectivity, and its clinic.
Jean-Paul Gilson is the author of La Topologie de Lacan: Une ar­
ticulation de la cure psychanalytique (1994). He is currently Profes­
sor of Psychology at McGill University in Québec. Previously he
attended Lacan’s seminars and is an analyst in private practice. He
is also the founder of the Ecole du Quotidien, a school for psychotic
children in Brussels, Belgium.
Jeanne Lafont, after an educational formation in Latin and Greek
(B.A./licence and M.A./maîtrise), turned toward psychology (B.A.
and M.A.). After receiving her diplomas in both fields, she obtained
a doctorate (DEA) in the Freudian Field at the University, Saint-
Denis, ex-Vincennes in 1981. She was an associate member of the
School of the Freudian Cause from 1981-1992, and today belongs
to Dimensions of Psychoanalysis, to the Association for a training
CONTRIBUTORS vii
in psychoanalysis, to EFEPS, to a Freudian ethics in social practice,
GERP “A,” and to a group of study and psychoanalytic research on
autism, AIPEC. Her published books include Topologie ordinaire de
Jacques Lacan, in the editions of ERES, in the collection Point Hors
Ligne (1985), Lacanian topologie et clinique analytique (1990), and
Les pratiques sociales, en dette de la psychanalyse (1994), as well as
Les dessins des enfants qui commencent à parler, reflexion sur l'autisme
et l' écriture, at EFEdition, Paris. She has also published numerous
articles in French psychoanalytic journals, such as Littoral, Grapp,
Transition, Analytica, and Revue de psychanalyse.
David Metzger is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Coordi­
nator of Jewish Studies at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Vir­
ginia. A former student of Ellie Ragland’s, he is the author of The
Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in
Aristotle and Lacan (1995), guest editor of Lacan and the Question
of Writing (a special issue of the journal Pre/Text [1994]), and co­
editor of Proving Lacan (forthcoming). His other publications include
forty articles and book chapters, two coedited volumes (Medieval­
ism and Medieval Studies and Medievalism as an Integrated Study
[Year's Work in Medievalism X] [1999]), and an edited collection,
Medievalism and Cultural Studies (2000).
Jacques-Alain Miller is Professor and Director of the Department
of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, and
the editor of Lacan’s Seminars. He has given a Course every year
since 1981 to an international audience. He is the Director of the
European School of Psychoanalysis and the World Association of
Psychoanalysis, as well as an analyst in private practice. He has
written numerous publications in various languages.
Dragan Milovanovic is Professor in the Department of Criminal
Justice, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois. He re­
ceived his Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice, State Univer­
sity of New York at Albany. He has written numerous articles on
postmodern criminology and law. He is the author or coauthor of
viii ( ON I RIIIIJIORS
15 books. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the
Semiotics of Law. The focus of his research has been in psycho­
analytic semiotics, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, edgework, and
constitutive criminology/law. His forthcoming books are Criminal
Criminology at the Edge, Sociology of Law (3rd edition) and a coau­
thored publication, The French Connection.
Juan-David Nasio, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is Director of
Studies at the University of Paris VII (Sorbonne) and Director of the
Séminaires Psychanalytiques de Paris, a major center for psychoana­
lytic training and the dissemination of psychoanalytic thought to
nonspecialists. He is a former member of the École Freudienne of
Jacques Lacan and worked closely with the renowned child analyst
Françoise Dolto. He is the Editor of the Psychoanalysis Series at
Éditions Payot. The author of eight books on psychoanalysis, Dr.
Nasio has published numerous articles and interviews in leading
publications and has participated extensively in French radio and
television broadcasts. He lives in Paris, where he practices psycho­
analysis with adults and children.
Ellie Ragland is Professor and former department Chair of English
at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in
French and Comparative Literature from the University of Michi­
gan and has taught at the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis (1994-
1995). Now Frederick A. Middlebush Chair, she is the author of
Rabelais and Panurge: A Psychological Approach to Literary Character
(1976), Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (1986),
Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (1995), and
The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan (2004). She coedited
Lacan and the Subject of Language with Mark Bracher (1991) and
edited Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan (1999). She is the Editor of
the Newsletter of the Freudian Field, now (Re)-Tum: A Journal of
Lacanian Studies, and author of over 100 essays on Lacan, psycho­
analysis, literature, and gender theory. Her forthcoming books are
Proving Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Force of Evidentiary Knowledge,
coedited with David Metzger, and The Logic of Structure in Lacan.
CONTRIBUTORS ix
Pierre Skriabine is a psychoanalyst who is a member of the School
of the Freudian Cause in Paris and presently is a part of its working
Council. An engineer and architect by professional training, he
underwent a psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. After the death of
Dr. Lacan, he underwent a psychoanalysis with Eric Laurent. He has
practiced psychoanalysis in Paris since 1986. Author of over 100
articles and lectures, bearing not only on logic and topology in Lacan’s
teaching but also on the clinic—for example, the clinic of depres­
sion or on psychoanalysis in Japan (he is the Secretary of the Franco-
Japanese Group in the Freudian Field)—Pierre Skriabine is also
coauthor of several collective works. He has been particularly in­
terested in the topology that is at the foundation of the refinement
that Lacan produced of his teaching in the last years of his Seminar.
Luke Thurston is a Research Fellow in Languages and Literature
at Robinson College, Cambridge. He is the author of Impossible
Joyce: Psychoanalysis and Modernism (forthcoming) and the editor
of Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (2002). He
has translated works by Jean Laplanche, André Green, and Roberto
Harari and is currently working on a study of Fernando Pessoa.
Jean-Michel Vappereau was invited by Lacan in 1988 to give a lec­
ture on the Borromean knot. Since that time, he has constructed a
modification of the canonical classical Logic, manifesting a new type
of negation. His construction is a topology of the subject that per­
mits him to situate Freud’s Letter 52 to Fliess in relation to Lacan’s
schemas L and R. He has also started a movement that defines a
new topological invariant, linking the work of Pierre Soury to that
of Lacan. He teaches a course in topology, linking Paris to Buenos
Aires. He has also edited a series of teaching works, Tee (1985),
Essaim (1988), Etoffes (1997), and Lu (1998).
Véronique Voruz lectures in law and criminology at the Univer­
sity of Leicester (UK). She has been studying Lacanian psychoanaly­
sis since 1996 and her doctoral thesis, “Psychoanalysis and the Law
beyond the Oedipus,” strives to map the continuity that binds the
X CONTRIBUTORS
subject to the political from the perspective of contemporary psy­
choanalytic theory. Her previous publications include an engage­
ment with the Seminar Lacan dedicated to the work of James Joyce
(“Acephalic Litter as a Phallic Letter,” in Re-inventing the Symptom,
ed. L. Thurston, 2002) and an analysis of the relationship between
linguistics and legal responsibility, which draws from the Mem­
oirs of President Schreber, the source of Freud’s paradigmatic case
study of psychosis (“Psychosis and the Law: Legal Responsibility
and Law of Symbolisation,” in International Journal for the Semiotics
of Law, 2000).
Zak Watson finished his M.A. degree in Comparative Literature at
the University of Georgia, writing a thesis on Herman Broch’s The
Death of Virgil. He is currently in the Ph.D. program in the English
department at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Also forth­
coming is his essay, “The Foundation of the Subject in Relation to
Knowledge” in Proving Lacan.
Contents
Introduction: Topologically Speaking xiii
Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic
1
Topologically Thinking
1. Topology and Efficiency 3
Jeanne Lafont
2. Mathemes: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan 28
Jacques-Alain Miller
3. Lacan’s Topological Unit and the Structure of Mind 49
Ellie Ragland
II
Topology of Surfaces
4. Clinic and Topology: The Flaw in the Universe 73
Pierre Skriabine
5. Objet a and the Cross-cap 98
Juan-David Nasio
6. Floating between Original and Semblance 117
Zak Watson
7. Interpretation and Topological Structure 134
David Metzger