As an exercise provoked by Session 5 of Lacan’s Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, XIII Reading Group participants Ghoochani, Sgarbi, Terim, and LaCoe have undertaken to develop “thesis statements” about the many meanings and spins of this highly unusual session. Authors will attempt to use the iPSA style template in preparation for a special issue of Psyche Extended.

• Iraj Ghoochani, “Synesthesia and the Emergent Being“ (PDF); MS-Word version. THESIS: Synesthesia is traditionally understood as a condition where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway (e.g., seeing colors when hearing music). A Broader Concept involves extending this idea, to consider human language as fundamentally synesthetic, where the brain integrates the words/signifiers as voices i.e. sensory inputs to create a coherent experience of spatial order of significants as reality.
• Berrin Terim
• Claudio Sgarbi
• Jodi LaCoe
• Don Kunze,”Osculatory Function of Lacan’s Objet a” (PDF); MS-Word version.THESIS: That the inversion circle’s central role in Lacan’s topological thinking is key to understanding the objet a — the “object” of Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis — as a Real. At the end of Session 5 of Lacan’s Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis, Lacan cites the “osculatory power” of subjectivity. What if this power can be related to the “inversion circle” and what if this figure lies, in turn, at the foundation of Lacan’s topologies? The status of tangency in relation to the objet a depends on the inversion circle’s foundational role — something that has not been recognized in Lacanian scholarship. The double proof, of tangency in relation to the inversion circle’s functions, features the objet a in its role as an opening in the “firmament” of the inversion circle, the point where a circle touching both the center and perimeter converts into a line stretching to infinity in either direction. A sub-thesis requires that these “two infinities” are really chiral versions of a single infinity, another opening antipodal to this one labelled the objet a, making the inversion circle one of many in a concentric series of fractal inversion circles and their “odd and even” sequence of insides and outsides. Click here for a collection of passages relating to the inversion circle that Lacan related to the Injunction of Popilius.
• Francis Conrad, “The Innocence of Clothing.” THESIS: That the repression of the tramatic-Real in Freud’s example of Emma (Entwurf, 1895) provides a proper neurology of the inversion circle. Freud’s energetics thesis has general applicability in a theory of the signifier where hypotaxis (the effects of metaphor and the role of suppression and self-concealment) are joined to parataxis (the chaining of signifiers in metonymic chains. The graphic conjunction of vertical and horizontal aspects can be expressed either (1) as a circle or circuit, defined by the position of a vector in pure rotation or (2) as a series of linear, overlapping, wave-like elements temporally sequenced so that reversals (retroaction) and delay (suppression) constitute energy surpluses that must be expended. The essence of Freud’s example in Part II is that a trauma that cannot be “expended” at a particular stage of development can be “stored” until the subject is capable of an effective “discharge.”