End Corps

Fourteen Recorded Lectures & Six Online Discussions!

Our series on Seminar XX ended with a bang on Friday. Several bangs, in fact: a concluding lecture in three parts, followed by a terrifically summative final discussion. What a way to end!

All told, the series yielded 14 recorded lectures, each designed to provide learners of every stripe — students, scholars, clinicians, you name it — with a step-by-step guide to this key text in Lacan’s later teaching:

As these lecture titles suggest, masculine and feminine modes of enjoyment figured largely throughout this series on Seminar XX. But it was a cluster of Lacanian trinities that fueled much of our thought:

• The first was modal and centered on themes of necessity, impossibility, and, slipperiest of all, “corporeal contingency.”

• The second was stone-cold Lacanian, but more sophisticated than I’d been led to believe: knowledge, jouissance, and the speaking body.

• The third, on which I’ve been musing ever since, was as existential it gets: ignorance, love, and hate. And since I expect you’ve also seen this one before, let me be precise: How does the neurotic passion for ignorance drive narcissistic approaches to love toward their most tragic telos: hatred of the Other? This is where Seminar XX ends — our series as well.

I had blast chasing these topics from one lecture to the next, but even more fun exploring their clinical and conceptual nuances with 50+ of the biggest brains and kindest hearts out there — and not once in a while, but in 20+ hours of live online discussions! If you’ve been looking for a vibrant community of Lacanians, look no further:

Andrew, Angelo, Ann, Ayoto, Benjamin, Chloe, Daniel, David, Dieter, Eleanor, Elijah, Erik, Fernanda, Frank, Gabriel, Gabriella, Geo, George, Gwen, Hamza, Henrik, Holly, Jisoo, Jonathan, Jordan, Julia, Kelci, Kolya, Manuel, Micheli, Miles, Milzbe, Nicole, Noah, Oliver, Peter, Phoebus, Pushpajith, Rachel, Rayneet, Rich, Risa, Rishab, Robert, (Other) Sam, Sandy, Shyra, Svetlana, Taryn, Terence, and Tiffi: THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS SERIES SOAR! And let’s not forget our special guest, the wild and ever-wondrous Derek Hook, who taught us how to soar as planarian worms!

I could go on about this group — indeed, don’t tempt me! — but time is short, so I’ll leave it at that, having the saved the best for last.

Plus, there’s our next series to plan . . .

* * *