Encore: MLA Study Day on Lacan's Seminar

The Milltown Lacanian Association will hold an interactive, in person study day, on Lacan's Seminar: Encore.

From Jouissance to Love;

Is this a step too far for the embodied, speaking being?

This study day aims to come to terms with some of the many themes in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar (1972-1973) Encore.

In an effort to do this we will concentrate on the first 4 lessons from the 21st November 1972 to 9th January 1973.

These themes range from jouissance(s), to no sexual rapport, repetition, the body, the signifier, female sexuality, the Autre, satisfaction, the ethics of psychoanalysis - and finally love - as we all (mis)understand it.

Lacan, by way of a faithful return to Freud sometimes takes a significant detour. Guided by what he calls “a certain knowledge which is transmitted to us, in bits and pieces” (Lesson 1 Encore) he begins. An obstinacy disturbs, in the very first lines of the seminar - “I don’t want to know anything about it,” but with the assistance of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, he continues.

Are we there yet?

As this brief outline suggests there are many bends and seeming u-turns on this turbulent road, which echo for the adult - child as we negotiate its contours.

The day will feature presentations from the following speakers:

Helen Sheehan

Title: Encore: Reading Lesson One

Abstract: Why does Lacan introduce his Seminar Encore (21st November, 1972) with

“As it happens I did not publish the ethics of Psychoanalysis.” But, then he realises that what is at play here for him is of the order of what he calls “I don’t want to know anything about it.” Why is this so? This paper considers the significance of these two statements and examines the possible link between them.

Glenn Brady

Title: The Veil of Thought - What Blinds Us to Our Encore?

Abstract: There is something that covers over the fundamentals that form the basis of our so-called reality. Are the very things that order our ability to function as interacting speak-beings also the origin of the blinkers we adopt to avoid the call of our desire? Yet something insists.

This paper will examine the first four chapters of Lacan’s Encore to find what it teaches us about these fundamentals. In doing so, it will also examine writings of Freud to see what he provides as reasons for the motivations to cover over these origins. It will also investigate writings that have been at the core of promoting this covering over, in particular, Logic or the Art of Thinking, popularly known as The Logic of Port-Royal by Arnauld and Nicole.

Marie Charlotte Cadeau (Paris): Female perversion today

Eilish Griffin

Title: Jouissance; it serves no purpose

Abstract: What underlines the difficulties presented in secondary schools such as school avoidance, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, cutting, isolation, selective mutism, gender dysphoria, difficulty concentrating, defiance? And the approach - diagnosis, medication, prescriptive strategies to regulate – is it eliminating the singular? Is the demand for diagnosis in the field of jouissance? Is it a putting into action a not wanting to know? Confused boundaries, unclear limits, aggressivity, meeting demand after demand cause difficulties. If jouissance is linked to the drive, is linked to beyond the pleasure principle, to suffering, to death, what must put a limit on it? Lacan informs us that a body ‘only enjoys from corporalising it in a signifying way’, meaning, jouissance cannot escape language – an unsettling and hopeful truism. This paper focuses on a psychoanalytic understanding of the being of jouissance.

Janja Jerkov

Title: Beyond the Lacanian Vulgate: Rereading Encore as an Attempt to Refound Analytic Practice

Abstract: Lacan’s Seminar Encore marks the passage from a psychoanalysis conceived as a practice of the Symbolic and the signifier to a practice of the impossible and the Real. What thus emerges is a conception of the analyst’s knowledge that can in no way be grounded in any mastery of what takes place, in the attainment of any therapeutic outcome whatsoever, or in the satisfaction of a need.

At the heart of this movement lies the elaboration of the principle of jouissance, which is not a concept intended to enrich the analyst’s theoretical baggage. Jouissance serves no purpose. The analyst is called only to set its structure in motion, to follow its displacements and impossibilities, and to enter into the exercise through which jouissance continually undoes its own consistency.

Phallic jouissance, the jouissance of the Other, and jouis-sens do not constitute three distinct types of jouissance, but three dimensions of one and the same movement. Through the analysand’s sayings, this movement aims to bring the subject to the experience of a zero point, S(Aˉ), where they are confronted with the absence of any answer in the Other and may then, finally, invent an answer of their own.”

Emer Routledge

Title: The Myth of Love

Abstract: “If you want to know more about femi

Description supplied by the event organiser.