Lecture 2 on THE DRIVE Now Available!
Yesterday’s second session on THE DRIVE was lit.
Seminars 7, 8, and 11 figured largely throughout, giving us lots to say about sublimation (and desublimation), Aristophanes (and Alcibiades), the beyond of psychoanalysis (and Lacan’s claim that there’s only ever one kind: the training analysis).
But so were two key essays in Écrits:
A close reading of Lacan’s second Rome discourse, “Position of the Unconscious,” allowed for a fascinating discussion of topology, transference, the unconscious, sexuality, libido, the real (and the unreal), mammalian birth, respiratory erogeneity, and, as none of us are likely to forget anytime soon, the form and function of the egg in Lacanian meontology.
Lacan’s little essay “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire” was no less momentous. In this often overlooked essay at the end of Écrits, we found a crystalized definition of the drive: “Misadventure of desire at the hedges of jouissance, watched out for by an evil god.”
Which in turn allowed us to double down on three fundamental conclusions, each more illuminating of the drive than its predecessor:
The cause of desire is the object of the drive.
There are two pathways to the drive, both readily apparent in the graph of desire: one beset with Anxiety and another by way of Alcibiades.
If the drive is the beyond of analysis, “limitless love,” as Lacan puts it at the end of Seminar 11, is the beyond of the drive.
Suffice it to say, I think you’re going to to enjoy this: