A series of narrated and silent videos have been made available on YouTube to address the problem of the English text’s generally imperfect transfer of graphics from the French transcript.
Differential Diagnosis for Architecture and Space, Too?
This short silent video compares graphics from Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XIV on ‘The Logic of Phantasy’ (1966–1967) to consider connections to the more famous L-Schema and discourse mathemes. The “toroid” movement from repetition (demand) to positions inside the Symbolic (“acting out”) or outside the Symbolic (“passage à l’act) suggest a broader significance of the classic differential diagnosis made in Analysis, between psychotic and neurotic uses of signifiers. Can differential diagnosis also apply to the crisscross (toroidal) relations of spaces in architecture and the landscape?
Cathetus: The Spooky Correspondence between the Viewing Point and the Vanishing Point
From Brunelleschi to Lacan, cathetus (the apparent parallel movement of the vanishing point as the observer moves at a right angle to the orthogonal line of vision) has raised interesting questions about the status of the picture plane as a place of anamorphosis. Behind this everyday phenomenon is a complex set of relations that extend to the foundations of psychoanalysis. Lacan touches on cathetus when he uses the analogy of the slide-rule to explain how the Other, known as “the Big Other,” or Autre in French is related to the little other, the indefinable idea of the lack or gap that Lacan designates as the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. Many thanks to Camila Mancilla Vera for her ideas about the stereogram’s relation to projective geometry and emergence.
Jacques Lacan’s Slide-Rule to Projective Infinity
It is novel to introduce an engineer’s pocket calculator into psychoanalytical discourse, but even more bold to claim that it can ventilate the confusions, collapses, and muddles in theories! But, Lacan does not make claims thoughtlessly. In fact, a patient reader of session fourteen of Seminar XIV, “The Logic of Phantasy,” will realize not just the efficacy of the slide-rule example but Lacan’s ingenuity in re-thinking this mechanical device as a way of opening up, first, the way the Fibonacci number series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …) relates to the unary trait and, second, how the Fibonacci ratio (Ø) relates to projective geometry.
The Logic of Phantasy: Lacan’s Slide-Rule Analogy
In his seminar XIV on the logic of phantasy, Jacques Lacan makes two references to the now-obsolete calculating device known a the slide rule. First he says that the subject advancing toward the sexual act is not thinking of theory or, of that matter, of failure; but the fact remains that the law of pleasure involves the failure of jouissance and the common, quite common, experience of dissatisfaction. Later Lacan defends the slid-rule as a means of seeing the novelties in the structural order of phantasy, a means of ventilating theory and avoiding muddles. But, what does Lacan mean with his example of the slide-rule? In session 14, there is an actual set of graphic illustrations that use a slide-rule logic, but they are complicated, and the English translation by Gallagher repositions, short-changes, or gives incomplete versions of the examples in the French text. This video doesn’t explain everything, but it does show what Lacan’s slide-rule is about and how it works in relation to the Fibonacci Golden ratio, which Lacan calls the “mean and extreme,” because it is something that happens inside an interval and outside as well.
Lacan’s Seminar XIV (The Logic of Phantasy): the slide-rule
In this silent video, visual arguments are put forward that Lacan’s “slide-rule” metaphor was more than an idle analogy.
Illustrations from Session 14, Seminar XIV (Logic of Phantasy)
This silent video compares illustrations of the French transcript and English translation (Gallagher) to note discrepancies and re-orderings that hamper interpretation. Finally, the Fibonacci ratio linear computation of odd and even powers of the objet petit a is returned to the reference polygon of the torus Lacan uses to define the “repetitive function of sublimation,” in relation to Freud’s famous Signorelli Parapraxis.
Stereogram Experiment
This silent video uses a series of diagrams to connect the stereogram (flat patterns that produce 3d shapes when the eyes stare at an infinitely remote point in the distance) with the presence of a ‘second virtuality’ within the perspectival virtuality of Euclidean space. This is not an abstract presence, but one that is embodied within art, literature, film, poetry, and architecture. In Jane Campion’s film, ‘The Power of the Dog’, the bond between the echt-cowboy Phil and the ‘inductee’ Peter is their shared perception of an anamorphic image of a dog ‘inside and outside’ the distant mountain range. This is not an abstract bond, but a force that structures the places and times of their encounters, and lead Peter to devise and execute Phil’s murder. Projective geometry’s non-orientation and self-intersection is not abstract, but the basis for inscribing the Real with in the uncanny breakdowns of the Imaginary and Symbolic, recalling Freud’s principles of cathexis and parapraxis.
Visualizing Lacan’s Seminar XIV, The Logic of Phantasy
In this part 2 of my notes about the missing illustrations in Gallagher’s translation of the original French transcripts of Seminar XIV, session 12, I want to move beyond a simple addition of what is missing, and even beyond an attempt to annotate those missing pieces. I would like to advance a thesis that is general for all reading of Lacan, a thesis that should be good news to architects, artists, and others who are good at visualizing but bad at conceptualizing. This is a way of reading Lacan that tilts the playing field to the advantage of visualizers by animating and re-drawing what Lacan has presented in his lectures, on the blackboard, but which have had trouble surviving the transcriptions and translations.
LACAN: Reading Lesson 12, Seminar XIV
The diagrams tell a story-in-a-story in this seminar on Phantasy Logic. The reversal of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as a Venn diagram into an Euler circle diagram plays out through the positions of the “passage à l’acte” and “acting out” to converge on the forced choice. This ultimately leads to a theory of how two virtualities combine as a template for architecture’s foundation rituals.