Month: July 2013

 About half way through his fifteenth Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan suggests to his audience that Freud’s contribution to a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity can be summed up in the latter’s idea of castration. Rather than getting hung up on the old Freudian term ‘castration’, for Lacan this simply means that the subject does […]

 In an attempt to separate subjectivity from identity in the last article, one of the questions we were left with was whether the subject simply exchanges an imaginary alienation (in the rivalrous world of semblables and imagos) for a symbolic alienation (in the Other of the signifying network). We noted how the shift in Lacan’s […]

  This is the second of four article on the subject of subjectivity (the first is here).   Just as in the last article we opposed subjectivity to objectivity, so here we can oppose subjectivity to identity, both in ordinary parlance and in psychoanalytic terminology. Subjectivity is not reducible to identity. Identity is a purely […]

  This is the first of four articles on subjectivity. Or more precisely, the first on four ‘shades’ of subjectivity because, with so much Lacanian ink having already been spilt on this topic, attempting a comprehensive treatment of subjectivity would cover too much familiar ground and present too little that is new. The aim of […]