Lacan And Science

The current volume represents an exciting collection of essays critically examining the relation between modern science and Lacanian psychoanalysis in approaching the question of mental suffering. Lacan & Science also tackles more widely the role and logic of scientific practice in general, taking as its focus psychic processes. Central themes that are explored from a variety of perspectives include the use of mathematics in Lacanian psychoalanysis, the importance of linguistics and Freud's text in Lacan's approach, and the central significance attached to ethics and the role of the subject. Constituting an invaluable addition to existing literature, this comprehensive volume offers a fresh insight into Lacan's conception of the subject and its implications to scientific practice and evidence.

The current volume represents an exciting collection of essays critically examining the relation between modern science and Lacanian psychoanalysis in approaching the question of mental suffering. Lacan & Science also tackles more widely the role and logic of scientific practice in general, taking as its focus psychic processes. Central themes that are explored from a variety of perspectives include the use of mathematics in Lacanian psychoalanysis, the importance of linguistics and Freud's text in Lacan's approach, and the central significance attached to ethics and the role of the subject. Constituting an invaluable addition to existing literature, this comprehensive volume offers a fresh insight into Lacan's conception of the subject and its implications to scientific practice and evidence.

Lacan critiqued imaginary intuition for confusing direct perception with unconscious pre-conceptions about people and the world. The emphasis on description goes hand in hand with a rejection of theory and the science of the unconscious and a belief in the naive self-transparency of the world. At the same time, knowing in and of the Real requires a place beyond thinking, multi-valued forms of logic, mathematical equations, and different conceptions of causality, acausality, and chance. This book explores some of the mathematical problems raised by Lacan's use of numbers and the interconnection between mathematics and psychoanalytic ideas. Within any system, mathematical or otherwise, there are holes, or acausal cores and remainders of indecidability. It is this senseless point of non-knowledge that makes change, and the emergence of the new, possible within a system. This book differentiates between two types of void, and aligns them with the Lacanian concepts of a true and a false hole and the psychoanalytic theory of primary repression.

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work. Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. And though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric, rhetoricians have been hesitant to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan’s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies. Lacan’s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies—that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe. As Lundberg shows, Lacan’s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.

Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion offers a lucid overview of the French psychoanalyst's work. In five sections--"The Structure of the Subject," "Epistemology," "Four Discourses," "There is No Sexual Rapport," and "God is Real,"--the book maps out Lacan's thought for the lay reader with unmatched clarity. It does this by building from Lacan's graph and formulas, which are often misunderstood. This formalization acts as a pedagogical tool of wonderful economy, offering a broad overview without neglecting the essential details. The chapters are summarized by a general graph that visually demonstrates Lacan's rigor and coherence. The book examines often-neglected aspects of Lacan's work, like problems in the history of science, epistemology, and religion, in order to show Lacan's relevance to today's world. It makes the case for Lacan as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, whose reach extends beyond the discipline of psychoanalysis. Indeed, Lacan's thought should lead readers into a reexamination of philosophy, literature, art, politics, economy, and desire. In his introduction, Alexandre Leupin writes: "If the unconscious exists, then Lacan is the only twentieth-century thinker who has drawn the consequences of Freud's discovery to their ultimate limits. I propose here what some will take as bombastic hyperbole: Lacan's radical reevaluation of human thinking is comparable to Einstein's." Though Lacan's thought is making tremendous inroads in countries of Latin culture, it has been slowly fading from public awareness in the English-speaking world. Often Lacan has been nothing more than a pawn in the bundling of contradictory doctrines labeled as "French thought"; or he has been reduced to a means of exchange between psychoanalysts or specialists in the humanities. Leupin's contention is that what Lacan said or wrote is of interest to the general public and that his consignment to oblivion is reversible. This book demonstrates that Lacan's thinking has vast implications, not only for college professors or practicing psychoanalysts, but also for scientists, epistemologists, and every man and woman.

"The current volume represents an exciting collection of essays critically examining the relation between modern science and Lacanian psychoanalysis in approaching the question of mental suffering. Lacan & Science also tackles more widely the role and logic of scientific practice in general, taking as its focus psychic processes. Central themes that are explored from a variety of perspectives include the use of mathematics in Lacanian psychoalanysis, the importance of linguistics and Freud's text in Lacan's approach, and the central significance attached to ethics and the role of the subject. Constituting an invaluable addition to existing literature, this comprehensive volume offers a fresh insight into Lacan's conception of the subject and its implications to scientific practice and evidence."--Provided by publisher.

This edited collection examines the contemporary relevance of Lacan’s 1965 essay “Science and Truth” to debates on science, psychoanalysis, ethics and truth. In doing so, it re-considers the established understanding of its argument that psychoanalysis is the only science for the human subject. Over fifty years after Lacan attempted to formalize the relationship between science and psychoanalysis in “Science and Truth,” this volume returns to the categorically systematic yet deeply puzzling ideas of this lecture-turned-essay. The volume begins with a rigorous analysis of the formal logic animating the cogito, which serves as a foundation for the remainder of the book to force a confrontation between the themes laid out in “Science and Truth” and the cultural, intellectual, political, economic, and, of course, scientific movements that we face today. The following five chapters examine various contemporary phenomena, including the destabilizing forces of post-truthism and political nihilism, the ‘non-science’ of filmic depictions of science, the prosopopeia of Lacan’s so-called secular Name of the Father, the pseudoscientific discourse of involuntary celibates, or ‘incels,’ and, finally, the alliance between science and capitalism that has developed out of the Covid-19 pandemic. This project offers an important contribution to contemporary debates about science and ethics that will be of interest to academics working in psychoanalytic and critical theory, and the philosophy and history of science; as well as to clinicians.

Clinical and philosophical perspectives on key issues and debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis.