In the name of the Father : God in Lacan, Judaic or Christian?

This essay challenges the widespread notion that Lacanian psychoanalysis represents a 'Christianing' of psychoanalysis. It argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis brings to psychoanalysis a broadly "Averroist" attitude towards religion which develops out of and transcends Freud's position in Totem and Taboo. For Lacan, religious texts are an invaluable source of pre-psychoanalytic insight or another regal road into the champ Freudien: the dynamic of human beings' desire, in its co-conformity with language and Law. The text focuses on trying to decipher the missing content of the Names of the Father seminar: the seminar that "does not exist" (Miller, 2006) beyond its opening, esoteric and dramatic session. The force of doing this will be to show how much, and how fundamental, the things are that Lacan thinks the bible, and the first Abrahamic monotheism in particular, can teach us about human subjectivity and the instance of the Law that shapes it - insights which go to explain Freud's unmistakable attachment, despite himself, to the civilizational importance of his fathers.

Renaturalising : Lacan's ethics and Nietzsche's critique of platonism

‬This thesis examines how Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis might contribute to our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of Platonism.

The compositor of the farce of dustiny : Lacan reading, and being read by, Joyce

"We have learnt to see Joyce as Lacan's own symptom," writes Jean-Michel Rabate, "and as the sinthome par excellence" (2006, 26). This duality of Joyce as an unreadable text permeated with enjoyment and at the same time as an enigma that Lacan wants to decipher supplies the key to an understanding of Seminar XXIII. Lacan's addition to the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary of a fourth term, the Sigma (or sinthome) firms up his late shift from the speakingbeing (parletre, the Lacanian neologism that indicates the insertion of the human being into the signifying chain) to MAN (LOM, a Lacanian play on l'homme). Instead of the human being as inserted into the Symbolic Order, Seminar XXIII presents Joyce as inserting himself into language, tying the signifier to the body in a special, unique way. For Lacan, the sinthome is eccentric to the registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, yet it paradoxically links them when the Name-of- the-Father fails. The implication is carried in the concept of "nomination" that the Name-of-the-Father (or its structural equivalents, such as "Woman," "God" and "Joyce") makes language possible for the individual.

'To be or not ...' Lacan and the meaning of being in Shakepeare's Hamlet

This chapter provides a reading of Lacan's important reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet in Seminar VI, in the context of his developing thought on the neuroses, and obsessional neurosis in particular.  The article draws atttention to the way Lacan's focus shifts from Hamlet's 'Oedipal' relation towards his uncle towards his inability to fathom teh desire of his mother, Gertrude.  This interpretive optic opens up many scenes of the play, and strange transformations in the heor's conduct: his terrible hostility to Ophelia, and his 'rebound' at the moment that he leaps into her open grave, able at last to say 'It is I, Hamlet the Dane!" and undertake to do the task his father's ghost had implored of him.

Lacan Palestine : presentation and film screening

As part of the monthly 'Outside the Outside' series of presentation / screenings curated by Dirk de Bruyn and Glenn D'Cruz in response to the changing landscape of Dandenong's inner city rejuvenation, deBruyn will present Mike Hoolboom's recent 'Lacan Palestine'. The film will be preceded by a 20-minute multimedia presentation contextualizing Hoolboom's practice.