Hello. This is Kent Johnson. I just wanted to say that Robin Hamilton,
trying to correct a typo, and with the best of intentions, has made a change
in the text which renders the second paragraph even more difficult to
understand than it originally was. In any case, Zizek's intention is quite
clear in the original, uncorrupted version.
kent
>From: Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Delete if required (LACAN)
>Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 14:31:49 -0000
>
>The following, from a post on subsub, is the Introduction to the Lacan
>Dialogue.
>
>I pass it on as-is, without comment. Apologies to those already on subsub
>for cross-posting.
>
>Robin
>
>INTRODUCTION
>
>On or around the 20th of February, I was sent, by Jacques-Alain Miller
>(who,
>I should say, rarely engages with electronic mail) a series of
>"psychoanalytic" exchanges between three so-called "Jacques": the famed
>Jacques Lacan; his almost equally-famous disciple Jacques-Alain Miller; and
>a clinical patient Jacques Debrot, a fairly obscure and obviously brilliant
>American poet and doctoral student at Harvard University (whose very
>institutional name functions as a kind of Law in the cultural unconscious
>of
>at least five-hundred million people across this
>soon-to-be-hit-by-a-giant-asteroid planet that we inhabit).
>
>I am unsure as to the origin of these writings, and --like the
>British-Poets
>Listserv, which would appear to have had a rare form of *panicosis
>colectividae* in reaction to them-- I am equally unsure of their true
>purposes (though the triple name flakes-off as if from archetypal flint,
>albeit not Jungian, heaven forbid) a bizarre form of pure poetry, a
>Sokalian hoax-thrust under the guise of an-as-yet-unclassified expression
>of
>hysteria, which may be read, in fact, as unconscious homage (whomever the
>Authors may be) to the dead Father, Lacan. I have my crime-suspicions, of
>course, and they are legion.
>
>Nor can I say, with absolute certainty, if the exchange is the work of one,
>two, or many, even though the epistles forwarded to me carried the address
>headings of one "Kent Johnson" and one "Jacques Debrot," neither of which
>name had previous familiarity to me, as they did not to anyone else on the
>editorial board of *lacanian ink*. http://www.lacan.com/covers.htm
>
>All things considered, it seems clear that this dream-like repartee has, at
>the very least, the participation of Jacques-Alain Miller, my friend and
>former psychoanalyst. I say this hesitatingly, but with a good deal of
>pride: The inimitable style is there, here and there, if one parses the odd
>syntax. And there is, too, an extended subliminal slippage (even at
>phonemic-pun levels), between Lacanian theoretical/clinical matter and
>"obvious" dilletantish garbage, for the "correspondence" to be anything but
>the brain-child of someone deeply-in-the-know. Thus, I say, going out,
>perhaps on a ceibo limb, that Jacques-Alain Miller is the primary author of
>these psychoanalytic exchanges... I am in awe, if a bit befuddled at the
>same time. And so I can offer little more, I fear, besides my happy
>pleasure
>at this blue-bolted jouissance, than the most banal, genetic speculation.
>
>But the way we speculate about the unknown (Das Unbewusste, as Alain Miller
>draws from Freud in a letter to Debrot) will tell us in itself much about
>the structures and patterns of the psyche, about its limitations and
>prejudices, about its paradoxical claims to science even as it is impelled
>by the neurotic desires of the aesthetic.
>
>As a movie by Hitchcock, I leave it all for others to analyze.
>
>--Slavoj Zizek
>(Belgrade, February, '01)
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