First Zoom Session
Dialog 1: The Neighbour
With Lorens Holm and Andrew Payne
Sunday 02 July 2023 • 12:00 noon (EST) New York • 5:00pm (GMT) London
This is the first in a series of dialogues involving participants in the iPSA book project. Lacan ┼ Architecture is a collection of ten essays by authors with long histories of engaging psychoanalysis in their architectural research. Authors of this collection will treat the spaces of Lacanian subjectivity from a variety of perspectives, in a series of in-depth extended essays. The first session, led by Lorens Holm (University of Dundee) and Andrew Payne (University of Toronto), engages with “Introduction to the Thing,” the first group of sessions in Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960).
- Pleasure and Reality
- Rereading the Engwurf
- Das Ding
- Das Ding (II)
- On the Moral Law
The zoom will be an informal open discussion of these and other topics touching on the architecturally central issue of neighbors and neighboring, stemming from Freud’s famous response to the Commandment, “Love Thy Neighbor.” As Kenneth Reinhard wrote (“Freud, My Neighbor.” American Imago, vol. 54, no. 2, 1997, pp. 165–95), “Lacan takes up the topos of the neighbor as the primary particle of ethical theory and traumatic experience left over from the dialectics of God’s death into modernity; the neighbor embodies both the remnant of Judaism in its Christian sublation, and of Scripture in its literary and philosophical secularizations. Lacan ‘s reading of the neighbor separates ethics from both the Kantian autonomy of ethical maxims and the modernist hermeneutics of suspicion that finds all moral systems ideologically compromised.”
iPSA members and guests are invited to weigh in on this most urban of architectural issues and most Freudian of Lacan’s interests in ethics.
Andrew Payne has asked, in “The Nebenmensch Thing,”
The notion of Nebenmensch thus associates two features of the other: his or her ability to hold together as a nucleus irreducible to its attributes and his or her allergy to analogical identification on the basis of my experience of my own body. One among several noteworthy features of this discussion is the way that it flouts the familiar distinction between persons and things. Here the other person serves as the very paradigm of that Thing that persists behind or beyond the attribution of any personalizing property or predicate and in imperious indifference to my solicitations and remonstrations. What might be at play in this subversion of our customary distinction between person and thing?
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