Workshop on Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, Sexuation and Gender Studies

In his 1997/98 course on the Lacanian Orientation, The Partner-Symptom, Jacques-Alain Miller helps us to clarify the central clinical and conceptual shifts introduced by Lacan in Seminar XX: Encore.

If previously - and paradigmatically in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, through his reading of the act of Antigone - Lacan had conceived the access to jouissance in terms of a transgression, in Seminar XX, this transgression is emptied of its phallic weight: jouissance, a specifically feminine jouissance that Lacan later extends to all subjects, is, instead, everywhere.

In other words, if jouissance was previously conceived as the beyond of an essentially narcissistic love, with Seminar XX, Lacan's perspective is reversed. It is jouissance, at least in its masculine, phallic forms, that is autoerotic, autistic; and love, which in the feminine is indissociable from another kind of jouissance, that opens up the possibility of an approach to the Other as such. As Lacan says, 'love supplements the non-existence of the sexual relationship'.

These are some of the definitions - and questions! - that will guide our work this year. As always, this work will take as its basis Lacan's texts, but, crucially, in order to also amplify their insights into the fields of philosophical, literary and artistic production. The workshop will be organised around the monthly presentations of its members and, occasionally, other invitees.

Sonia Arribas; Vicente Palomera; Howard Rouse

Sessions:

10 ^th October (room 20.237), 14 ^th November (room 20.237), 5 ^th December (room 20.237), 16 ^th January (room 20.137), 13 ^th February (room 20.137), 6 ^th March (room 20.237), 3 ^rd April (room 20.237) 15 ^th May (room 20.237), 5 ^th June (room 20.237)