Erasure Land, Part 1

I just recorded the opening lecture in our upcoming miniseries on “The Psychoanalyst’s Knowledge,” and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with y’all, in anticipation of our first online discussion on December 1st.

At the center of this opening lecture is a simple diagram, designed to illustrate one of Lacan’s key claims at the start of the text we’ll be reading in this miniseries, Talking to Brick Walls:

“The analytic discourse lies precisely on the palpable frontier between truth and knowledge.”

At stake in this diagram are three domains connected by a single discourse. Inside the inner circle extending from S2 to objet a we find truth. Beyond the outer circle extending from $ to S1 we find knowledge. And in between, where a delta of impotence appears between S2 and S1, along with an arrow of addressivity from object a to $, we see a palpable frontier between truth and knowledge.

Is this palpable frontier akin to the “littoral zone” we discussed and developed in our recent series on Seminar XVIII, and which also appeared in our recent post on “Littoral Zones & Brick Walls”? Yes — but with some crucial new additions!

To further illustrate this correspondence, and in so doing ramp you up for the opening lecture on “The Psychoanalyst’s Knowledge,” here are some introductory remarks on the littoral zone from our recent series on Seminar XVIII: