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The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 1 - 28 AN IDIOTIC ACT: ON THE NON-EXAMPLE OF ANTIGONE Calum Neill Antigone, Medea, Selma Jezkova, Mary Kay Letourneau, Andrea Yates... Zizek has over the years utilised a number of characters, both fictional and existent, and usually female, to illustrate various aspects of his Lacanian-derived conception of ethics. The contexts in which these characters are to be located and the actions they engage in determine them, for Zizek, as suitable ethical examples. This article will focus on one such example, perhaps the most obvious: Antigone. For Zizek, the crucial aspect of both Sophocles' Antigone, the play, and Antigone, the character within the play, lies in what he, following Lacan, [1] terms her 'act'. [2] The term 'act', in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of "mere behaviour" [3] by the location and persistence of desire. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption, the Freudian Wo Es war, soil Ich werden. Where behaviour would describe the response to needs, for example, the act is defined by the impetus of desire. Desire makes the subject act and as such the weight of responsibility for the act committed lies with the subject. Desire cannot be treated as a given which would determine the subject's act without the subject's volition. The very subjectivity which would be taken to act cannot be described without the manifestation of desire which would allow its constitution. But such desire must always be particular to the subject; it is the subject's desire. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption in which the desire which is in one is manifest and thus brought into existence. The act in this sense should be understood to be coterminous with the emergence of desire; the act is desire made manifest. It is in this sense that the Lacanian act is always, necessarily, idiotic, in the etymological sense, wherein idios would designate 'one's own'.

The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 114 - 143 THE LOGICAL STATUS OF LACAN'S "FORMULAE OF SEXUATION" Geoff Boucher In this article, I propose to investigate the logical status of Lacan's formulae of sexuation, as expounded in Seminar XX. [1] According to Lacan, 'the sexed being ... results from a logical exigency in speech''. [2] But the question of the relation between "the logical demands of language" and human sexuality is the locus for a series of objections to the psychoanalytic project. According to the contemporary doxa, the individual finds himself located within the multiple language games that constitute social reality. This involves the radically contingent construction of gender identity through dramatic performances of social roles. [3] Such critics allege that there are as many sexualities as there are language games. They oppose the "radical translation" between incompatible social worlds to sexual difference as a transhistorical reality. [4] To insist, as Lacan does, that the relation of the subject to language necessarily includes an unconscious, masculine or feminine stance, seems, to such critics to be a naturalisation of culturally constructed gender characteristics. [5] So do Lacan's formulae of sexuation represent a return to biological essentialism? What are the epistemological claims raised by Lacan's metapsychological formalisations? I depart from the assumption that a relevant indicator of the scientific status of a theory is its crossing of certain "thresholds of formalisation". I briefly explain the relevant aspects of Lacan's two distinct unconscious "grammars". Then, I consider these proposals in the light of the formalization of "transconsistent logic" in the last twenty years. Recent work in logical analysis reveals that it is possible to render so-called transconsistent systems of propositions, ones that include contradictions or undecidability, as formal logical orders. My paper will test the hypothesis that Lacan's formulae have a valid - albeit highly general - logical status and can be regarded as valid theoretical formalisations. A complete formal reconstruction in logical notation will not be essayed. Instead, the paper will turn to the discursive implications of the logical status of sexuation. Once we have described the formulae logically, we can consider their relevance to human sexuality, and therefore the appropriateness of Lacan's decision to designate these orders "masculine" and "feminine". In what sense can "masculine" or "feminine" be ascribed to logical systems, or, rather, why would masculine and feminine unconscious processes exhibit logical differences?

The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 70 - 90 ON THE FRANCHISSEMENT OF ANXIETY IN LACAN'S SEMINAR X [1] Lieven Jonckheere Am I a Lacanian specialist in anxiety? I do not believe that any specialisation whatsoever makes any sense for a psychoanalyst: 'being a psychoanalyst' and 'being a specialist' are mutually exclusive. Nevertheless sometimes I am considered to be a specialist in the Lacanian theory and clinic of anxiety. Why? Long ago I was an assistant at the Department of Psychology of the University of Ghent (Flanders, Belgium). I suppose that at that time I must have been a model representative of the university discourse, because I had this crazy idea that it should be possible to read, understand, classify and combine, everything Freud and Lacan had written and said on any subject, for instance anxiety. So, I embarked upon a doctoral thesis on anxiety. Fortunately, in the meantime I had also started a psychoanalytic cure, for personal reasons, which of course had to do with my personal anxieties. As it happened, in the course of that analysis, something like a 'desire to become an analyst' surfaced. And from that moment on I developed this other, crazy idea that I should head for the analytic position on a double track: on the one hand pushing my own analysis to some kind of logical conclusion, but on the other hand I also stuck to my belief that studying anxiety was essential. Now, looking back, I realise that I was afraid that overcoming my own anxieties, in my own analysis, would not be enough to stand the anxieties I would be confronted with as an analyst. Of course, towards the end of my analysis I dropped that university desire to know everything about whatever, and especially about anxiety. Unfortunately in the meantime I had also successfully defended my doctoral dissertation, bunching 'all Lacanian knowledge on anxiety', and becoming known as a 'Lacanian-specialist-in-anxiety' in spite of myself. [2]

The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 63 - 69 A HISTORY OF THE SELF-CONTAINING STRUCTURE OF THE MIND [1] Kazushige Shingu There exists an epistemological tradition in which the mind is conceptualized as something that contains itself. Pascal's reed is contained within the thinking subject. [2] Kierkegaard's self entails a relationship in which the self relates to itself. [3] The Freudian subject of psychoneurosis is a being narcissistically attached to itself. [4] This conception of the mind as a self-containing structure originates in a period of Western history during which the presence of God withdrew, as if God had vacated his seat and gone on holiday. During this period, an awareness grew of the distance between entertaining a belief and true certitude of belief. One learned to doubt one's own belief. Belief no longer came to one of its own accord; instead, one had to obtain it by one's own devices, as in Pascal's Wager. Madness is inherent in this self-containing structure. As Pascal defined it, the thinking subject contains the entire universe, but what can this subject be, if it is not contained within the universe? Because it does not exist within the universe, it must be transcendent, and hence, divine. Yet to believe oneself to be divine is to be in proximity to madness. Moreover, the thinking subject must be "one," a unity, since it must have a discrete identity. But to the extent that it recognizes itself as being a reed within the universe, it is "two," doubled between the reed and the subject that thinks of the reed. Nonetheless, it still counts itself only once, and views these two categories of being as integrated within itself. Counting two things as one is clearly a deviation from reason, reflecting another way in which the self-containing structure of the mind leads to madness; it is itself a madness.

Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 48 - 62 FREUD, LACAN AND JAPAN [1] Kazushige Shingu Freud and Lacan on Japan Freud was born when Japan was still in its pre-Meiji isolation from the outside world, and during his younger days, information on Japan remained scarce. It is therefore hard to imagine that he encountered discourses that would have aroused his interest in the island nation. Nonetheless, Freud touches briefly on Japan in Totem and Taboo . In this work, Freud cites Frazer's quotation of Kaempfer's 1727 description of the Mikado as an example of how outrageous taboos have been imposed on kings. Freud reproduces and comments on Kaempfer's description as follows: . . . "The idea", writes Frazer, "that early kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for the subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of nature for his people's benefit. . . "An account written more than two hundred years ago reports that the Mikado... "thinks it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the ground with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go anywhere, he must be carried thither on men's shoulders. Much less will they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a holiness ascribed to all parts of his body that he dares to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is asleep; because, they say, that which is taken from his body at that time hath been stolen from him and that such a theft doth not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country."

The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages 29 - 47 ANTIGONE GOES BEYOND-THE-BEYOND: FROM THE MY LADY OF THE IDEAL TO THE MALADY OF THE IDEAL * Helena Texier The quicker it comes the better. I want to hurry death. I want to be free of the dread Of waking in the morning. Waking up at night. All I pray for now Is the dawn of my last day. Whatever the field of work, no-one whose door is fully open to the suffering subject will be able to avoid the encounter with the full deadweight of this tragic appeal to the possibility that death presents, and represents, as a release from - an ante-dote to - life. (From the obsessional to the suicide). The quotation given above will inevitably call someone to the mind of the practitioner here today, or perhaps it will echo something closer to home, a friend, a loved one, one's own self even. Many of the participants here today will still have fresh in their minds the Dublin experience of the Joyce-Lacan Symposium, which one entered under the gaze of the unbearable lightness (21 grams to be precise) [1] of the many hanging collars representing the many, many suicides. I take it that it is this tragic subject which the Forums invite us to consider here today in relation to Lacan's seminar on Ethics, a seminar in the course of which, as the Forums noted in their preliminary statement to us, Lacan doesn't give much indication at all with respect to practice. So we're left with the question of what might be the implications for practice in this Lacanian ethics. The question is posed with a sense of urgency made more keen by 7 the real of the practice. For example, the Forums invitation to take part in this gathering reached me in a week in which the headlines in Ireland had been laced with reports of escalating suicide rates amongst the young cubs of the Celtic Tiger, with accounts of a spate of connected suicides in a group of young people in one part of the country and of a young mother who brought two of her three daughters to a watery grave with her. In light of this, and bearing in mind the high incidence in our country of high speed car crashes in the dead of night involving young, often solitary, males, what is to be said for an ethics founded on death drive and the pure desire of a being-towards-death? Indeed, what is to be said for it in the wake of the beings-toward-death of September 11, prepared to go to the limit, to die for 'the cause with God on its side', or in the wake of the encounter with the suicide bomber which in the Middle East is a daily reality? What has the ethics of being-for-death to offer to the woman who this week says that the only response to life is to die and to save her children the pain of living by taking them with her? What, one asks, would Lacan's reading of Antigone be able to do for her? In short, how will an appeal to Antigone address what Lacan defines as the 'human factor', 'the Thing... namely, that which in the real suffers from the signified? [2]

The Letter, Issue 34, Summer 2005, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 105 - 128 JEAN GENET'S INQUIRY INTO LANGUAGE Michael Murphy Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan were Parisian contemporaries, and belong to the flowering of French intellectual life hothoused by the Second World War. On the nineteenth of March 1944, Lacan partied with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Bataille, Picasso and Braque. Four days earlier, the petty criminal, Jean Genet, was released from the Camp des Tourrelles in Paris, a known deportation centre for the concentration camps. He emerged as one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, and would never again be behind bars. For Genet, prison became a metaphor for language, and Genet used words to make his escape. His masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers, had already been written during the nine months Genet spent in Parisian jails in 1942. It was begun in the Sante prison at the start of the year, and finished towards the end of the year after his release from the prison of Fresnes. While Genet and Lacan come from different backgrounds, what they have in common is that they are fiercely original thinkers, with the result that in their lives they were provocative figures. Lacan chose a theoretical route, and Genet's pathway was through literature. Both were moulded by the elegant subtlety of their French heritage (langue), but they share in addition a profound interest in the nature of language (langage), about which they enunciate the same type of thought, which we can recognise as psychoanalytic. To give an example of Genet's work, here is a sequence in the translation by Bernard Frechtman, which I have re- punctuated to make it instantly comprehensible. It articulates clearly, without the jargon, ideas propounded by Lacan:

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 98 - 104 ST. TERESA, MYSTICISM AND THAT'S NOT IT': THE AGALMA OF HOMOSEXUAL AND HETEROSEXUAL DESIRE Bernard Kennedy Where can we place a discussion about the mystic while trying also to balance the intuitive and the sensible? In his seminar Encore, Lacan devotes some thought to this area and on this I dwell for this paper. '"That's not it" is the very cry by which jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected' [1] Lacan is involved here in a via negativa, the way of what is, by what it is not. It is a sure ground going back to many mystical writers such as John of the Cross, Juliana of Norwich, and her famous work The Cloud of Unknowing. He presents the mystical as an experiencing of ejaculation and not knowing about it. That's not it - that is not what was expected or sought - that's not it: that's it - is when it is it: so that's not it - is its opposite. That's not it - is the acknowledgement of the limit between desire and realisation, it can posit the empty gap, the hollow of being; between the expected and realised, and realisable, comes - that's not it. The overdrive of expectation and anticipation is not met within, in this context, the body - so it becomes: that's not it. Here it is where we look at the mystical position of Teresa of Avila and the texts of Bernard of Clairvaux.

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 91 - 97 WHAT KIND OF LOVE IS THIS? Florencia Fernandez Coria Shanahan I "I am mad about love." This is the phrase with which Mario localizes his suffering. Love drives him crazy, taking him, as he says "to the edge of danger". I first met him at the hospital where I was working when he was in his thirties. He had been hospitalized eight times in the previous ten years. He spoke to me saying that he wanted a "psychologist", and that he had already had "five". He said: "I need to develop the trust for talking; through psychoanalysis one can find what one wishes the most (...) I want to talk and, thanks to what you know, get to know which is the path I have to follow...". I accepted his demand for talking, not without introducing certain limits from the beginning. He referred to his father's death as a "radical" change in his life. This father had a singular "authority": organising Mario's existence. He described the subjective experience with which this death confronted him as "being left dislocated from reality"; since when, he said, he "lost the helm, the pattern that stabilises every person". His father's death, which occurred ten years before, left what Mario referred to as "a hole", which he attempts to cover, even today, with music, metaphysics and poetry. His "reality" changed from that moment on, and what he calls "to go without a compass" expresses the loss of the coordinates that sustained his world. The "superior being" that guided him was not there anymore.

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 72 - 90 TO WORK PERCHANCE TO LOVE Carol Owens To speak about love, Lacan says, is in itself an enjoyment, a jouis- sense. [1] So we must be enjoying ourselves today! And it is indeed at the level of the enjoyment that I want to focus our attention here on coupled- subjects who - for all that we may accept are - unrelated sexually, nonetheless persist in the direction of an enjoyment which they posit as commensurate with the couple-relationship. What I want to examine in particular are the ways in which the narration of couple-relationships may be said to abduce certain discourses, and in turn, the ways in which subjects take up a position in a discourse in order to provide themselves with a formula by which the sexual relationship may be written, and love, spoken. But, love is impossible says Lacan, and the sexual relationship drops into the abyss of nonsense. Zizek however has suggested that within the field of love, the love- object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy place, and that the role of this fantasy is to suggest a formula which makes up for the impossibility of love and the non-existent sexual relation. [2] Although as an aside in Seminar XXIII Lacan says that James Joyce and Nora have a sexual relationship, indeed he says 'it is a funny sexual relationship', [3] in Encore he is saying that the $ qua man 'never deals with anything by way of a partner but object a', which is the basis of the Lacanian formula for the fantasy, $ > a. He says: Men, women, and children are but signifiers. A man is nothing but a signifier. A woman seeks out a man qua signifier. A man seeks out a woman qua - that which can only be situated through discourse.4 A man as signifier only comes into play in the sexual relationship 'as castrated', in other words, insofar as he has a relation to phallic puissance. The $ who inscribes him/herself as Woman on the other hand, in the position of the not-all can have a relation to phallic jouissance, but that is not-all, there is more. She can choose between being in the phallic function or not being in it which Lacan describes as having a relation with the signifier of radical otherness (A)-

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 61 - 71 AN-OTHER' JOUISSANCE: UNMASKING THE 'VAMP-IRE' AND MARILYN MONROE Eve Watson According to Lacan, there is a fissure, an irreducible gap in the unconscious in the place of the absent signifier of woman and this is where feminine jouissance is located. Lacan also says that there is only one libido and that therefore there is no psychical representative of the opposition masculine/feminine. If woman functions as the Other and finds herself representing the phallic value, she comes to figure as the object of jouissance. The woman can be said to have access to 'an-Other' enjoyment. However, it is elsewhere that she poses the question of her own jouissance. [1] How is it that we can know about the operation of 'an-Other' enjoyment? It is by means of its failures that the phallic is revealed to be 'not-all.' Analytic experience indicates that the 'no!' of the hysteric is informed by a rejection of phallic enjoyment. The symptom of the hysteric often points to a denial of the role of the phallus. [2] Why is it that women seem to have a greater access to the non- phallic realm, i.e. the area we designate as the feminine? While admittedly women have not made any better sense of the feminine, (think of Dora's contemplation of the 'Madonna'), the man, who is more wholly subject to the arena of the phallic has a tough task in forming for himself an assessment of that which lies outside of it. His enjoyment is generally speaking co-relative to the function of the signifier, whereas some of woman's enjoyment lies 'perversely' outside of the phallic realm. Woman, the 'not-all,' uses the phallus as the means of access to the Other for both sexes, i.e. the phallus, as imaginary object, attempts to bridge the gap between the two sexes. In other words, she unchains the Other's desire. We have only to think of 'Sugar Kane' Kovolcic, Marilyn Monroe's character in the film, Some Like it Hot, to consider how easy it is for a woman to unleash desire, to function as a sublime object a. Let us turn now to the idea of vamp and the vampire.

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 51 - 60 A TWIST IN THE TALE Aisling Campbell In considering the topic for my presentation today, my first thought was that by discussing The Village [1] would give the ending away and spoil it altogether for those of you who have not seen it. It is a movie with a "twist in the tale" at the end, like the other movies I will discuss, The Sixth Sense and The Others. The twist, as usual, adds an extra frisson of anxiety to whatever frightening things we have already seen; we are often asked, as we leave the cinema, not to give the ending away to others who have not seen it. As well the risk of reprisal for revealing the end, the other risk of writing about any movie is that Zizek has already done so and has said virtually all there is to be said about it! The popularity of these movies bears witness to the fact that the twist is structural to the subject. In all of them, the ending throws an entirely different perspective on the subjective discourse of the main characters and retroactively shows up their inconsistency; the twist in the tale reveals the retroactive nature of repression and the dependence of the subjective discourse on this inconsistency and on an ignorance of it. The movies reveal the subject as structured like a Moebius strip - literally with a twist - in which the border, where inside and outside are shown to have a common surface, is the locus of anxiety.

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 36 - 50 A COMMENTARY ON LACAN'S HAINAMORATION AND AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AFFAIR OF LOVE BETWEEN JAMES JOYCE AND NORA BARNACLE Patricia McCarthy In keeping with the title of this year's congress - On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, I am launching my own questions about love and feminine sexuality by talking firstly about a neologism of Lacan's - hainamoration - the sense of which he developed over the course of two sessions of his Encore seminar. I will quote the definition of hainamoration from the session of 20th March 1973 because here he renders its sense at its clearest: One could say that the more man attributes to the woman a confusion of himself with God, namely, of what she enjoys - remember my schema from the last time, I am not going to do it again - the less he hates; and at the same time, I said that I was equivocating on hait and est in French. Namely, that in this business, moreover, the less he loves. [1] Hainamoration versus ambivalence As you can imagine, the yield of sense in this complex sentence is richer in the French because of the equivocation Lacan refers to around il est and il hait both sounding the same but having two meanings 'he is' or 'he hates'. That apart, the sense of the sentence seems to be that the more a man confuses himself with what a woman enjoys, the less he is/hates and the less he loves. Put differently, this is to say, the less a man confuses himself with what a woman enjoys, the more he is/hates (il est/il hait) thereby being more capable of loving. What should startle us about this condition for love between a man and a woman is Lacan's absolute contention that to love must also be to hate, one being the inverse or l'envers of the other; hence this 'made-up' word hainamoration comprising hatred and amore (yes, the same amore as in Dean Martin's great song When the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie, that's amore!) About this term then, I can definitely hear you say 'I don't think it'll catch on!' Nonetheless Lacan is suggesting that hainamoration has to be a better word than what he refers to as the 'bastard' term of ambivalence. You have to agree, ambivalence certainly robs hate of its full measure and for that reason it may not serve us as well as hainamoration. Freud, Lacan further claims in this same session, aligned himself well with Empedocles, for whom the God of the Supreme Good must be the most ignorant of all,precisely because he doesn't know anything about hatred. Knowing only about love, he continues, God's ignorance about hatred is what Christianity later transformed into 'floods of love' and it has taken psychoanalysis to remind us that 'one knows nothing of love without hatred'. This then is a first stab at how a man might love a woman, to which I will return...

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 22 - 35 COURTLY LOVE TO COURTNEY LOVE - STILL NO SUCH THING AS A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP? Pauline O' Callaghan Lacan's references to courtly love in his twentieth seminar Encore of 1972-73 may seem intriguing and anachronistic at first. What can be the relevance of a medieval code of morals, which quite possibly was merely a literary movement, to the problems and difficulties of the relations between the sexes in the twentieth century, relations which, according to Lacan in seminar XX, are not working out? [1] Lacan also wrote extensively about courtly love in his Ethics seminar of 1959-60. I propose to look at the issue of courtly love and some of the theories about its significance, and to ask what its appeal was for Lacan, and what relevance, if any, it has for us now in attempting to understand the issues raised in Seminar XX, issues such as love, desire, limits and feminine jouissance. If we take the two most famous statements from Seminar XX - 'The woman does not exist' and 'There is no such thing as a sexual relationship', and interpret them very loosely, then the connection with courtly love may seem clear enough. For in some ways the woman might as well not exist in courtly love, she is an ideal locked away in her Ivory tower, like the Lady of Shalott, rather than a breathing walking person, and the relationship between the knight and his Lady, although erotically charged, was usually chaste. Courtly love poets spoke to their Lady, or about her, in the exalted language usually reserved for a deity, or indeed for the Virgin Mary, with whose worship their poetry frequently seems to overlap.

The Letter, Issue 33, Spring 2005, Pages 1 - 21