“We are beings born of a surplus jouissance, as a result of the use of language. When I say, ‘the use of language,’ I do not mean that we use it. It is language that uses us.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Sex is not constructed—but it is a technology (and misfires in all human efforts at construction). Victor Tausk extends Freud's notion of man as 'a prosthetic god,' a god of machines, by arguing that sexual excitement is our originary experience of a technical apparatus.

"What matters for Lacan is that even in this very reduced, very simple model of language, a 'grammar' of units emerges and with this grammar comes the experience of impossibility."

Readings for next week’s Session 5, “Psychoanalyzing Cyberspace,” have been uploaded at: academy.netadao.zone With Nusselder we will examine the Internet through Lacanian theories of desire, presence/‘liveness’, and the virtual.

"For me, no contemporary philosophy can be considered important if it has not measured itself, at one point or other on its path, against the Lacanian interpretation of philosophy." -- Badiou

First of all, let's get rid of this average person, who does not exist: they are a statistical fiction. There are individuals, & that is all. Of all the patients I've seen on my couch in forty years of listening, none of them in any measure resembled the others. J Lacan

JAM is no sociologist (does he claim to be one?), but as a psychoanalyst his claim should open your ears to the structure of psychosis Lacan tirelessly pursues and its preeminence under capitalism.

RIP Mari Ruti

“If the universal is for everyone, this is in the precise sense that to be inscribed within it is not a matter of possessing any particular determination.” —Philosophy in the Present

Man is always cultivating a great many more signs than he thinks. That's what the Freudian discovery is about.

Freud isn't a humanist. I will try and explain to you why.

“In the final analysis, psychoanalytic theory thinks the great categories unpinning the subjective tress: the letter, the identity of inertia, the meshwork of the Same by the Other, the operatory plurality of the identical, the image.” —Briefings on Existence

“Psychoanalysis is something else. What exactly? I define it as a symptom – one that reveals the discontents of the civilisation in which we are living. It is certainly not a philosophy. I abhor philosophy; it has been such a long time since it has ...

Economy for Lacanians.

RETVRN to Freud

Discussing Freud, Lacan, Hyppolite, Zupancic, Virno, and Ruyer.