Thanks to the labors of Iraj Ghoochani, selected video narrations have been translated and narrated in Farsi. Completed translations are collected in a special channel. Below is a duplicate list with video descriptions. See the original full channel content here.
In “Melancholy and Jouissance” the argument is that melancholy is a part of the oldest medical system in the world (humoristic); although the version we know comes from Empedocles, there was undoubtedly an older, shamanistic version that was based on seasonal change, not logical opposition. Video producer-designer Iraj Ghoochani has produced a version in Farsi.
This is a fairly technical (Lacanian; topological) thesis about how we may combine three of Lacan’s “squares”: the R-Schema, the L-Schema, and the Fundamental Polygon of the Torus. Bone up on these diagrams using Lacan’s Seminars II (the L-schema), “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1959, included in the Écrits), or XIV for the fundamental polygon of the torus. You won’t get much help in the video. What justifies these overlays is the idea of a space of rotation, where a vector, to return to its origins, must complete a 4π circuit that reinters the sphere at the precise moment it seems to leave it. Next trip? On the the formula for metaphor to see what can be done there! Translated and narrated by Iraj Ghoochani.
The Orthographic Cut: An Ethno-topological Approach to Psychoanalysis
Inversive geometry has the ability to transform our view of Jaques Lacan’s topology, making it less a matter of pure mathematics and more a central feature of the psychoanalytic value of ethnology. In this presentation prepared for a zoom with Iranian psychoanalysts, we use the L-Schema, Dracula, Antonello da Messina’s painting of St. Jerome in his study, and Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Circus” to develop the idea of the inversion circle, which shows how Lacan’s “toroidal logic” applies to instances of non-orientation critical to cultural formations.
The Ames Window Illusion: A Lesson in Projective Topology
The Ames window is a trapezoidal flat shape that, when rotated, produces the illusion of the window moving back and forth rather than in 360º. This is especially weird if an object is placed running through one of the window panes at a right angle. The principle here is about orthogonality and isomerics/isonomics, originally terms associated with the “balancing act” of the four humors, which worked for the sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric humors but not melancholy, because Black Bile was considered to be harmful in any amount. This has led melancholy as a diagnosis, ever since the ancients, to be the basis both of genius and prophecy, diabolical cunning and suicidal depression. Understanding the Ames window shows how non-orientation and self-intersection can work at the level of comedy, evident in the way that Charlie Chaplin’s chase scene in “The Circus” juxtaposes a linear idea of distance with a circular and oscillating one (between the Tramp’s near or far distance from the policeman). Fort/Da anyone? Apologies for my IT friend’s voice, the Etonian James, with a bit of trouble with foreign words and emphasis.
From Victims to Fictims: Topology as a Cure for Narcissism’s Allegiance to the Big Other
This video is keen to address the theme of the victim, but it also aims to point out what is Lacan’s unique contribution to this subject, which I believe is topological. The key is narcissism, and the way allegiance to the Big Other lies at the bottom of our problems. Aggression and humiliation are two sides of the same coin, as everyone in academia knows. Administrators used to be the passive ones, faculty were assertive. Now the tables are turned. Edmund Bergler, who coined the phrase “writer’s block,” came up with the idea that aggression and humiliation were linked in a cycle connected to parentage, and Lacan admired his book and cited it in Seminar XIV. I’m going to use it to show how narcissism allows us to overlook the defects in the Big Other, and how our failure to signify these defects interrupts Bergler’s cycle. [Video presented at the October 2023 meetings of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.
The Zarjaj as Clinic: Operator’s Manual
What is a zairja and how do you use it? This video serves as an “operator’s manual” for a 7000-year-old computer that, unlike the modern computer, combines chance and necessity into a composite AI model that employs the user’s own neural network to invent and explore new meanings. The Lalangue/Tiny-House Project requires participants to have at least one encounter with the zairja before joining any of the zoom seminars to develop original written essays on the connection of the (psychoanalytical) concept of LALANGUE (Jacques Lacan’s coined term to talk about language after you subtract the words) to the architectural phenomenon of the Tiny House.
In Process: Rear Window: “ex falso sequitur quodlibet” — from falsity, everything is possible
This soon-to-be narrated video is about the relation of the “ex falso” principle to anamorphosis, projective geometry/virtuality, and the function of the fourth wall both in spatial folding as well as artistic reception/understanding. Hitchcock’s 1954 film is a masterpiece both in terms of the cinematic history of the single-set drama and architecturally, in the way the plot spells out how projective space works, converting Euclid’s “impossible” vanishing points into objects of desiring. “Rear Window” teaches us to desire by showing how desire is “in the air,” a way we breathe in an atmosphere, a TEMPO.