Category: Blog

5. Men in Love Case in point: Friends with Benefits ‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ is a slightly odd translation of Lacan’s well-known maxim Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. In the French, Lacan uses a word that is so commonly employed in English that it doesn’t really need translation […]

4. The Subject Supposed to Know and the ‘Magical Negro’ The ‘Magical Negro’ is a cinematic cliché in itself. The term was coined by director Spike Lee to denote a cinematic trope in which a black character has a special – often mystical – insight or ability, which is then imparted to a white character. […]

3. Horror Movies and the Mirror Image Here’s a horror story in just two sentences: This sends a chill down most spines. The ideas that it plays on – the duplication of the image, that specular representations can’t be trusted, that one’s image is actually someone else’s – are ideas that Lacan explores again and […]

2. The Male Exception Case in point: Zodiac, The Usual Suspects, all Bond films, almost all movies about unsolved murders committed by men, and virtually any superhero film of the last 10 years   For the second of the cinematic clichés in this series we need to invoke Lacan’s formulas for sexuation from Seminar XX: Immediately […]

1. The Absent Father Case in point: Man of Steel I start this short series with what is perhaps the most consistently ubiquitous and easily noticeable of all cinematic clichés to harbour Lacanian overtones. To name just a few of the biggest films of the past 12 months, Man of Steel, World War Z, Skyfall, […]

 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 […]

Suture is a Lacanian concept, but not a concept of Lacan’s. According to Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller’s paper, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’ was “the first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan himself” (Badiou, ‘A Contemporary Use of Frege’, in Number and Numbers, p.25). In simple terms, the achievement […]