Is it possible to mourn Auschwitz? "Kaddish" is the name for the traditional Jewish prayer of mou... more Is it possible to mourn Auschwitz? "Kaddish" is the name for the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning uttered on behalf of the dead by those left living. This name forms part of the title of a short "memoir-novel" by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész. It is the third book in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical fictions which began with Fatelessness (2004a [1975]), was followed by A Kudarc (Fiasco) (1988), and then Kaddish for an Unborn Child (2004b [1990]). Although disclaimed by Kertész as autobiographies in any strict sense, they however appear to mimic the autobiographical form in their reflection on Kertész's own experiences of the Nazi concentration camps-Auschwitz, Zeitz and
The manner in which Alice Kaplan speaks about the significance of 'Jew' and 'feminine... more The manner in which Alice Kaplan speaks about the significance of 'Jew' and 'feminine' in her autobiographical account 'French Lessons: A Memoir' are discussed. Passages from her text reveal how she uses it to tell her trauma of her father's death and the knowledge of the Holocaust, and also her interactions with French people.
I want to return in this paper to a question that remained with me after our discussion at the AC... more I want to return in this paper to a question that remained with me after our discussion at the ACP's Seminar on Formation in 2012, of 'La troisieme' [The Third], Lacan's Rome address of 1974. My question relates to the connection Lacan makes in that address between the Real of the third ring of the Borromean knot, which he names as the true Real, and the jouissance of life. In particular, I want to explore whether it is this Real of life that Lacan has in mind when he speaks of the symptom as coming from the Real. Is this Real from which the symptom emerges the Real that is radically outside the Symbolic, the Real that concerns, not the Language Unconscious, but the Real Unconscious, terms introduced by Colette Soler in her discussion of different moments in the teaching of Jacques Lacan (Soler 2009)? Or is it the Real intrinsic to the Symbolic, its limit point, the Real of 'there is no sexual relation', the non-relation that never stops not being written, the Real that therefore pertains to the Language Unconscious?
The article discusses the concept of 'New woman', a term that came up in Western societie... more The article discusses the concept of 'New woman', a term that came up in Western societies in the 19th century. Feminist historiography in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis is highlighted.
What is not remembered, Freud tells us, can often make its appearance in an acting-out, as the ag... more What is not remembered, Freud tells us, can often make its appearance in an acting-out, as the aggressive exhibiting, in Lacanian terms, of an object on the stage of reality. Taking up some ideas from the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as well as from the Belgian psychoanalyst Serge Andre, I wish to argue that during the period heralded as the beginning of the 1000-Year Reich, 'the Jew' was lethally actualised for elimination as that object which was impossible to remember-to become the hated ex-timate object of Nazi sacrifice.
The review and analysis of the two films 'Disgrace' and 'Samson and Delilah' from... more The review and analysis of the two films 'Disgrace' and 'Samson and Delilah' from the point of view of the two authors are discussed. The comparison between the two films and similarities and differences are highlighted.
In his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981), Lacan presented the drive ... more In his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981), Lacan presented the drive as the fourth of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the concepts he considered essential to the analytic experience. Curiously, given the degree of attention Lacan had so far devoted to the question of desire, and would continue to devote as he worked on his particular contribution to an understanding of the transference as a function of the analyst's desire, he chose the concept of the drive over that of desire as one of psychoanalysis's fundamental concepts. Why he did so in fact highlights the particular significance of the drive's relation to desire: that desire is the very destiny of the drives, the destiny of the relation of the subject to the real that the drives mythify. In 'On Freud's Trieb and the Psychoanalyst's Desire', written in the same year, 1964, Lacan stated.
Is it possible to mourn Auschwitz? "Kaddish" is the name for the traditional Jewish prayer of mou... more Is it possible to mourn Auschwitz? "Kaddish" is the name for the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning uttered on behalf of the dead by those left living. This name forms part of the title of a short "memoir-novel" by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész. It is the third book in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical fictions which began with Fatelessness (2004a [1975]), was followed by A Kudarc (Fiasco) (1988), and then Kaddish for an Unborn Child (2004b [1990]). Although disclaimed by Kertész as autobiographies in any strict sense, they however appear to mimic the autobiographical form in their reflection on Kertész's own experiences of the Nazi concentration camps-Auschwitz, Zeitz and
The manner in which Alice Kaplan speaks about the significance of 'Jew' and 'feminine... more The manner in which Alice Kaplan speaks about the significance of 'Jew' and 'feminine' in her autobiographical account 'French Lessons: A Memoir' are discussed. Passages from her text reveal how she uses it to tell her trauma of her father's death and the knowledge of the Holocaust, and also her interactions with French people.
I want to return in this paper to a question that remained with me after our discussion at the AC... more I want to return in this paper to a question that remained with me after our discussion at the ACP's Seminar on Formation in 2012, of 'La troisieme' [The Third], Lacan's Rome address of 1974. My question relates to the connection Lacan makes in that address between the Real of the third ring of the Borromean knot, which he names as the true Real, and the jouissance of life. In particular, I want to explore whether it is this Real of life that Lacan has in mind when he speaks of the symptom as coming from the Real. Is this Real from which the symptom emerges the Real that is radically outside the Symbolic, the Real that concerns, not the Language Unconscious, but the Real Unconscious, terms introduced by Colette Soler in her discussion of different moments in the teaching of Jacques Lacan (Soler 2009)? Or is it the Real intrinsic to the Symbolic, its limit point, the Real of 'there is no sexual relation', the non-relation that never stops not being written, the Real that therefore pertains to the Language Unconscious?
The article discusses the concept of 'New woman', a term that came up in Western societie... more The article discusses the concept of 'New woman', a term that came up in Western societies in the 19th century. Feminist historiography in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis is highlighted.
What is not remembered, Freud tells us, can often make its appearance in an acting-out, as the ag... more What is not remembered, Freud tells us, can often make its appearance in an acting-out, as the aggressive exhibiting, in Lacanian terms, of an object on the stage of reality. Taking up some ideas from the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as well as from the Belgian psychoanalyst Serge Andre, I wish to argue that during the period heralded as the beginning of the 1000-Year Reich, 'the Jew' was lethally actualised for elimination as that object which was impossible to remember-to become the hated ex-timate object of Nazi sacrifice.
The review and analysis of the two films 'Disgrace' and 'Samson and Delilah' from... more The review and analysis of the two films 'Disgrace' and 'Samson and Delilah' from the point of view of the two authors are discussed. The comparison between the two films and similarities and differences are highlighted.
In his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981), Lacan presented the drive ... more In his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981), Lacan presented the drive as the fourth of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the concepts he considered essential to the analytic experience. Curiously, given the degree of attention Lacan had so far devoted to the question of desire, and would continue to devote as he worked on his particular contribution to an understanding of the transference as a function of the analyst's desire, he chose the concept of the drive over that of desire as one of psychoanalysis's fundamental concepts. Why he did so in fact highlights the particular significance of the drive's relation to desire: that desire is the very destiny of the drives, the destiny of the relation of the subject to the real that the drives mythify. In 'On Freud's Trieb and the Psychoanalyst's Desire', written in the same year, 1964, Lacan stated.
What might induce a young woman to consent having her breasts excised (referred to in trans disco... more What might induce a young woman to consent having her breasts excised (referred to in trans discourse as 'top surgery’)—with the apparent consent of her parents—and concomitantly to change her name to one that is ambiguously both/neither female nor male? In this paper I want to consider a possible way of understanding such an act by looking at what Lacan says about ‘the little difference’ as he called it in his seminar … or Worse, the period when Lacan was beginning to formulate sexual identity in terms of the logic of sexuation. I will also draw on the significant distinction Colette Soler draws from Lacan’s formulation in her Seminar of 2017-2018, Des hommes, des femmes, between the a priori phallic attribution of sexual pre-identity deriving from the saying [dire] of the parents, and the a posteriori phallic function distributed to it via socio-political-cultural discourses.
Sydney Lacan Seminar: Psychoanalytic Discourse, Psychoanalysis, and the crucial gap between, 2020
With Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as numerical, that is, as composed of discreet elem... more With Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as numerical, that is, as composed of discreet elements called unary traits that are countable, not signifiers linked in a chain, each unary trait entailing in its very counting a countable loss as well as a gain of jouissance, the object a as both manque-à-jouir and as plus-de-jouir attains its special status as the stranger at the heart of the speaking being.
ABSTRACT FOR LCM/ACP COLLOQUIUM
September 2016
Psychoanalytic desire and the speaking body
Th... more ABSTRACT FOR LCM/ACP COLLOQUIUM September 2016
Psychoanalytic desire and the speaking body
The subject we have to deal with in analysis is a subject with a body, a body that enjoys itself, as Lacan’s term parlêtre indicates. In this paper I explore the implications of the turn in Lacan’s thinking about the body as a speakingbeing to consider what is at stake, particularly in relation to the social bond, in the ways bodies are made to enjoy today. I conclude with a consideration of how only a psychoanalytic desire, an ethical desire oriented to the singular real of the body of the parlêtre, has a chance of challenging this development.
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Papers by Esther Faye
September 2016
Psychoanalytic desire and the speaking body
The subject we have to deal with in analysis is a subject with a body, a body that enjoys itself, as Lacan’s term parlêtre indicates. In this paper I explore the implications of the turn in Lacan’s thinking about the body as a speakingbeing to consider what is at stake, particularly in relation to the social bond, in the ways bodies are made to enjoy today. I conclude with a consideration of how only a psychoanalytic desire, an ethical desire oriented to the singular real of the body of the parlêtre, has a chance of challenging this development.