Jacques Lacan died in September 1981 at the age of 81. The French press, the mass media and several members of the French government all paid him tribute. For several years his name had been linked with that of Sigmund Freud, and he was often referred to as the French Freud. Students of medicine and the social sciences studied his writings, or pretended to read them. Even some secondary school ...

In Logique du Fantasme, Lacan argues that the compulsion to repeat does not obey the same discharge logic as homeostatic processes. Repetition installs a realm that is categorically different from the one related to homeostatic pleasure seeking, a properly subjective one, one in which the mark "stands for," "takes the place of," what we have ventured to call "an event," and what only in the mov...

There are very real limitations to any discussion of Jacques Lacan’s complex and voluminous commentary on Plato’s Symposium, not least in a paper of this length. The sheer number of connections that Lacan makes cannot be fully dealt with, nor can any particular point of interest be exhaustively discovered without drawing other issues into the fold. Nevertheless, what I have presented in this di...

Slavoj Žižek has made it his essential project to renew an understanding of G.W.F. Hegel’s subjectivity by means of the psychoanalytic theory and practice of Jacques Lacan. One crucial element in such an endeavor is Lacan’s notion of the lamella, a particular understanding of excessive desire as indestructible and exterior to the self. I would like to investigate Žižek’s characterization of the...

This paper takes up the question of secrecy and sovereignty in Derrida’s final seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign. Focusing primarily on Derrida’s readings of Lacan and Celan in Volume I, it argues that, for Derrida, we should distinguish between the lie (or what Lacan calls ‘trickery’ or ‘feigning feint’), and the secret (or what Celan calls ‘the secret of an encounter’), and understand th...

This paper constitutes an exploration of the construction of academic identity through a retrospective autoethnographic narrative analysis. In essentially experimental mode I set out to examine processes of identification evident in this account, and in particular, the understanding of desire that resonates within it for, it can be argued, without desire there is no identity. I began my analysi...

This article continues my earlier work of reading Jung with Lacan. This article will develop Zizek’s work on Lacan’s concept of objet petit a by relating it to a phenomenological interpretation of Jung. I use a number of different examples, including Zizek’s interpretation of Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Hans Holbein and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to describe the objet petit a and its relationship...