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PROGRAMME
London Society of the New Lacanian School Programme 2020-2021

Please also visit the LS2 Calendar which is being updated throughout the year

UPCOMING EVENTS

For further events, please check the full programme by clicking on the PDF link at the top of the page.

Events for this Month

The details of these events can be found below with links to tickets. You may also wish to visit our Eventbrite Organiser Profile Page where you can follow us. (Ticket information will be updated shortly)

 

NLS SEMINAR SERIES
Reading Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore

NLS Seminar Series

Those of you who followed our online reading of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII (April - July 2020) might recall that in it, Lacan draws the line at any suggestion that the Freudian discourse might be based on biological facts of sexuality. Indeed in 1935 Freud wrote: “I object to all of you (Horney, Jones, Rado, etc.,) to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly between what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to establish a neat parallelism between the two […] I would only like to emphasise that we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology".[1] But Seminar XVII is also the seminar in which Lacan distances himself from Freud by qualifying the Oedipus complex “strictly unusable”, criticising him for choosing to pursue his theory of the Oedipus instead of being oriented by the knowledge gained “from all these mouths of gold” of Anna, Emma, and Dora. [2] We follow Lacan in his path beyond the Oedipus complex, opening up to the field of jouissance and the question of its feminine mode which, Lacan declares, Freud abandoned. In fact, Freud could go no further insofar as he encountered the rock of castration.

The field of jouissance—­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­a field Jacques-Alain Miller named ‘Lacanian’ by giving this title to the chapter elaborating on it in Seminar XVII—highlights the cut between libido and nature. It is what the formulas of sexuation will come to articulate in Seminar XX insofar as the side chosen by each speaking being is not akin to any biological given or socially constructed gender but is instead a choice of jouissance. Having left behind Freud’s famous question about woman’s desire (what does a woman want?) , Lacan provides a metaphor instead: “[Woman] lends herself to surplus jouissance because she, the woman, plunges her roots, like a flower, down into jouissance itself". [3] Thus Lacan uses his most political seminar to introduce what will come to be articulated in the subsequent seminars, and especially in Seminar XX, as the not-all, opening the path to the singular which characterises the ethics of our orientation.

Seminar XX is a seminar dedicated to the psychoanalytic themes of sexuality, love, desire, and jouissance. Most of Lacan’s famous aphorisms are found in it: the formulas of sexuation, the Other jouissance, supplementary jouissance, the not-all, and Woman does not exist. With Encore Lacan introduces a novel approach to sexuality that constitutes a break from traditional knowledge and its organisation around binaries. How can we think differently to man / woman? How can Lacan help us understand gender fluidity in today’s civilization? What are the consequences of the fact that there are women and not the Woman; a “Feminine principle” rather than a jouissance monopolised by women? [4]

We are inviting everyone to join us in our reading of Encore, which is a logical continuation of Seminar XVII, but also constitutes part of our preparations for the WAP’s Great International Online Conversation: “Woman does not exist" [5], which brings together the seven schools and friends of the WAP in a great conversation of epistemic and clinical significance. It will no doubt also have resonances with the NLS congress theme: Fixation and Repetition. [6]

Peggy Papada

All meetings will take place online. Advance registration for each seminar is required.

To register for the reading of Chapter V 'Aristotle and Freud: the Other Satisfaction' with Susana Huler on Sunday 12th December please CLICK HERE

For more information about this and other activities of the London Society of the NLS please visit our website at www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk

LS SEMINAR
Psychoanalysis, Trans & Gender, with Fabian Fajnwaks

NLS Seminar Series


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LS SEMINAR
The Castration Complex, Fixation, Repetition

NLS Seminar Series


The seminar, by Susana Huler, will be held over six meetings in a format that includes short interventions from colleagues who have been invited to bring their reading of some key texts ( see bibliography at the end*). It will be an occasion to dialogue and discuss in our community - from a particular angle - the different aspects of the forthcoming 2022 Congress of the New Lacanian School, which is on the theme of ‘Fixation and Repetition’.


On Saturdays 14:30-16:00 (UK time) | Online & In person


DATES:

13th November with Evangelina Bailo

18th December with Colin Wright & Philip Dravers

12th February with Roger Litten

19th March with Oriol Cobacho

7th May with Gabriela van den Hoven

11th June with Peggy Papada


ARGUMENT

It is an original helplessness that pushes the infant to face the urgencies of life through repetitions that have their beginnings in points of fixation. Freud tried, in 1937, to clarify the limits of the psychoanalytical treatment: the circumstances of their endings were particularly problematic, as the refusal to accept castration would be, for both sexes, a motive for repetitions and the refusal of change. This was “a bedrock” that would be thoroughly investigated by Lacan, who would make the end of analysis and its theorization a real compass for the analytical work.

We see in analysis the repetitions that form systems. Whilst one of these systems is what Freud called the “castration complex”, we can discover as well, with the help of the late teachings of Lacan, the system of repetitions that he called “sinthome”. Conceiving symptoms as sinthomes became possible when jouissance was apprehended as outside the law of the Oedipus Complex: jouissance as a real without law that obeys only the Freudian Wiederhollungszwang, the compulsion to repeat, to strike again and again.

Susana Huler


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*Central texts to approach these themes in the seminar are:

Freud:

From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The ‘Wolf Man’, 1914)

Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919)

Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)

Lacan:

Seminar IV (on Little Hans) (1956-57)

The Signification of the Phallus (1958)

L’Etourdit (1972)

The Sinthome (1976)

Miller:

The seminar on the Wolf Man (1987-88)

Donc (1993-94)

The Being and the One (2011)

 

LS SEMINAR
A Study Seminar of The One-all-alone (J-A. Miller)

NLS Seminar Series


Tickets for the series: £50

This seminar will take place in person (London) on Saturdays between 11am and 12:30pm. 

Dates:

2021: 13th November, 18th December, 

2022: 12th February, 19th March, 9th April, 7th May and 11th June

Places for this seminar are limited. In order to participate, please contact the London Society secretary Colin Wright at ls.secretary1@gmail.com. 


NLS SEMINAR SERIES - TEACHINGS OF AN EXPERIENCE, by Véronique Voruz
A series of 5 seminars in conversation with Dossia Avdelidi, Florencia F.C. Shanahan, Anne Lysy and Alexandre Stevens

NLS Seminar Series


The pass is an interpretation Lacan made to the analytic community.

Analysts are not produced by the acquisition of knowledge, or any amount of clinical experience. According to the Lacan of the Proposition of 67, an Analyst of the School is the logical product of the analytic discourse taken to its ultimate consequence; and it entails profound subjective reconfigurations for those that pursue it to its end.

In the past decade, the mechanisms for the nomination of AS in the various Schools of the WAP have worked well to the extent that there have been many more nominations over the past decade than in the years that spanned the Proposition and the re-actualising of the pass by Jacques-Alain Miller and Éric Laurent in 2010 within the ECF.

Having completed my mandate in October 2018, this seminar is dedicated to exploring, in the after-effect, what teachings can be drawn from the unprecedented experience that Lacan invented in order to set the analytic discourse distinctly and irrevocably apart from all other human practices of the social bond.  

The purpose of this series of seminar is two-fold: to evaluate the dispositifs of the pass and the mandate, on the one hand, and to extract a modicum of knowledge on the constitution of human reality, on the other.

In the opening seminar, I will present the mechanism at its origin as well as current debates around the pass.

In the intermediary seminars, I will elaborate three points that have stood out for me as retaining considerable opacity during the experience of the mandate.

The first point concerns the question of destiny. What is destiny for psychoanalysis, if indeed speaking beings are to the utmost extent determined by the signifier and the jouissance that it carries? What is the share of belief in the actualisation of said destiny? How to disentangle destinal fiction from sinthomal fate? And what can be separated from, and what can’t?

The second has to do with the gaze and its implication in the constitution of the scopic field. Each one of us lives in an “image-world”, as Lacan put it in The Lacanian Phenomenon, or again, as he told Catherine Millot in a private conversation, “a world is the dream of a body”. What awakening is there from one’s scopic reality?

The third concerns the function of nomination: the nominations that pepper the course of an analysis, those that come from familial others, the ones we attribute to ourselves over the time of the experience, and finally, the nomination to the function of AS – two letters that irreversibly mark the speaking body that receives their imprint.    

The concluding seminar will consider the continuing pertinence of the procedure in its clinical, epistemic and political dimensions, out of the teachings of an experience.

Véronique Voruz          


Dates

18 September 2021 – Opening
23 October 2021 with Dossia Avdelidi
27 November 2021 with Florencia Shanahan
29 January 2022 with Anne Lysy
28 May 2022 – Conversation

Tickets for the 5 seminars: £50

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Please note: Ticket sales will end at 15:30 UK time on the 18th September 2021.

 

Cartels: Fixation and Repetition & “Woman does not exist"

Woman does not exist

Dear colleagues and friends of the London Society,

Two of the main themes we’ll be working on during 2021-2022 are the theme of next year’s NLS congress, Fixation and Repetition, and the theme of the Great International Online Conversation of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, “Woman does not exist”. As part of our preparations, we are organising an online reading of Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore, details of which will be revealed soon!

We are encouraging everyone to form cartels on the above themes so that you can actively participate in their development by pursuing your own questions.

There are many resources available already so that you can start thinking about the question you might wish to pursue:

Find the argument of the NLS congress, by Alexandre Stevens, President of the NLS, here: https://www.amp-nls.org/nls-messager/towards-the-nls-congress-2022-argument/ and on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/7XZ73C22AeQ

The argument for the WAP’s International Conversation, by Christiane Alberti, chair of the “Grandes Assises”, is available in print and video form here: https://www.grandesassisesamp2022.com/en/la-femme-nexiste-pas-2/

For further assistance with cartel work, please contact the LS members responsible for cartels: Sophia Berouka, sophia_berouka@hotmail.com & Oriol Cobacho, oriolcob@gmail.com

We look forward to a rich year of work around these exciting themes!

The Bureau of the London Society

ANNOUNCING