Lacan Toronto is a diverse group of clinicians, academics, students, counselors, and others interested in reading the works of Jacques Lacan. Since 2001 the group has met to read Lacan and, since 2003 sponsored lectures and readings. The session of December 15, 2024, focuses on an “ethnological” approach to Lacan’s famous interest in topology. The speaker argues that the non-mathematician has the option of beginning with the evidence of cultures: myths, folklore, rituals, works of art, music, written literature, architecture, etc. using the concept of the inversion circle, the mathematical counterpart to Lacan’s extimité.
A series of resources has been assembled around the use of the inversion circle in the arts, focusing on cases where the use of inversion geometry is incontestable and critical to the outcome of the work. Participants in this workshop are asked to browse through these examples before the session, which will begin with a brief summary of Session 7 of Lacan’s Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, which treats Canto XXX of Dante’s Inferno.
Resources for the Session
There is always something funny in Lacan’s idea of LACK as the “dark matter” of subjectivity. The positive assessment of the void marks the beginning of psychoanalysis proper, and both justifies and requires a topology that is simultaneously about culture. Culture, however, is based precisely on the reification of lack, both at the level of the signifier and in the re-assessment of the broad spectrum of natural phenomena defined by presence and absence: light/dark, day/night, life/death, near/distant, visible/invisible. In the case of logical binaries, it is all too easy to domesticate the function of negation in the opposed terms, but cultures like nothing better than to imagine opposites as antagonistic forces, aligned within the generic cosmic struggle of good against evil. Negatives thus have names: Thanatos (death), Penia (poverty), the invisible (Hades), Satan (evil) …. If Lacan’s dictum, Real > Structure > Topology, is to hold true, then we should undertake our study of topology from the point where the Real becomes the Real for the human subject, namely in the metaphoric mentality of the first humans, and then follow the evolution of this mentality to the point where the conceptual terminus of modernity finds its destiny in the option of return. Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
Materials for the Seminar
- “Is There a Possibility for a New Lacanian Topology?” This question is posed in a position paper, “Ethnotopology.”
- Prospectus. The session introduces the idea of the inversion circle as a means of engaging Lacan’s topology at the level of ethnology and artistic production. Inversive geometry redefines the meaning of structure by applying Lacan’s extimité to a new idea of logical time, suggesting that Lacan was “thinking topologically” as early as 1937.
- Bibliography. This is a selection of resources useful for approaching Lacan’s topology through the idea of the inversion circle.
- Biography. The guest lecturer for the December 15 session, Don Kunze, is an independent researcher with a background in architecture, geography, and the philosophy of culture who has been reading Lacan as a “serious amateur” since 2012.