Publications and Articles
Robert Groome, Towards a Topology of the Subject, Aesthetics
and Sublimation, Umbr(a), University of New
York at Buffalo, 1999.
Purchase from Amazon.com
Robert Groome, The Phantom of Freud in Classical Logic,
Science and Truth, Umbr(a), University of New York at Buffalo,
2000.
Purchase from Amazon.com
Events
Seminar
Topology
by the Way of Masks
Museum of Jurassic Technology
(Upstairs Auditorium)
9341 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA
New Cartels Forming For 2008
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Interventions
A NEW ORIENTATION: CERTIFICATION
OF LACANIAN ANALYSIS AT PLACE
The Psychoanalytic Post-Graduate Certification at P.L.A.C.E. provides
a formation and certification in Lacanian analysis. It is open to anyone
possessing a Master’s Degree in a parallel field (psychology, literary
critique, philosophy, logic, mathematics, linguistics, neurobiology, history,
etc.) and on special circumstances to those who have qualifications that
may have been acquired on a nonstandard basis (a personal analysis, life
experience, etc.). Final acceptance is only made after an individual interview
with the applicant by the directors of the school and clinic.
Our goal is to make room in the United States for a contemporary
psychoanalytic practice in Lacanian analysis by providing a background
in the development and construction of a psychoanalytic theory, topology,
and principles of the clinic. Our intervention is particularly oriented
to those working in the field who are searching for an alternative to the
current digressions of psychoanalysis into social work, counseling, therapy,
and educator in the humanities.
For complete information on curriculum and course description go to:
Cartel-Clinic-School
Govern, Educate, Psychoanalyze ?
1- Three Untenable Professions
Freud listed three professions as 'untenable', that of the educator,
the politician, and the psychoanalyst . Nonetheless, he also noted there
are always candidates looking to fill these positions. They are even
positions that are reputed to be advantageous; that is not to say, that
neither the governor, nor the educator, nor the psychoanalyst would have
the slightest idea of what it is to govern, educate, or psychoanalyze.
No doubt, they end up having just a bit of an idea – as the current governor
of CA shows – but these 'intuitions' are rarely developed.
Here, the 2008 of PLACE cartel aims to ask: What
is it to educate? govern ? or psychoanalyze ?
Does one have to have a "conception of Man" to educate, govern,
or psychoanalyze? Do these ideas of education vary according to
the ideas that one can have of the 'essence' of Man ? Or is
this 'conception of Man', with a tighter grip, actually a defense against
something more important: a certain anxiety that one is seized with when
attempting to educate, govern, or psychoanalyze? Is the goal of
education to make and complete the individual? Or does one more
or less always end up educating oneself to the extent that one can ? At
what point does the formation of a school and education naturally introduce
clinical and therapeutic questions? If an educator, just as a therapist,
is someone who thinks they are there to help others, how is this perspective
guided by a conception of Man ? No doubt, a certain amount of education
is necessary for humans to support being around each other, but what is
lost in such attempts to educate through socialization?
What is the difference in this regard of governing/educating
to analyzing? Does the analyst, unlike the therapist, attempt
to teach anything or do good for anyone? Does psychoanalysis fall back
into psychotherapy the moment it acquires a conception of Man ?
What does a conception of Man, whether spiritual, behavioral, genetic,
etc., serve to trivialize the moment it is taken as a given ?
Initial probe: the moment the recognition of desire
is misrecognized as a desire to be recognized as a type of ego – the
educated man, the good citizen, sports hero, artist, balanced kid,
etc. – the problem of desire is assimilated to what deviates from the
norm: the uneducated man, uncivilized, unathletic, unartistic, unbalanced,
etc. What is artificial – or in-human – in such descriptive typologies
is obvious. For example, today it can not be determined whether
the yearly augmentations of mental syndromes found in the DSM-X (the psychotherapist’s
Diagnostic Statistics Manual) are the result of the discovery of more mental
disorders (biological or cultural), or the result of an increasingly abusive
conception of Man.
In relation to governing and educating, the profession
of analysis is new, and the analysts have very well realized the
difficulty of their position. So much so, that many fall back onto
the position of the educator and governor in improvising forms of psychotherapeutic
counseling. In fact, like the current governor of California, this pirouette
does not prohibit certain improvisations from achieving effects,
even if those involved would have little idea of what it is they are doing
or if these effects are towards a progress. What is this generalized,
" I do not know how any of this works ..." or ignorance, which the modern
educator, governor, and analyst is engaged ?
II – The Discourse of Science: From Conception of Man
to Place of the Subject
Our cartel would like to situate these questions
in theory and practice, while extending the question to that of the
scientist – which Freud never attempted, but was accomplished in Lacan’s
reading of Freud.
What is the anxiety of the scientist? What is it when at the beginning
of 2008 both Cloned Beef and the movie Legends arrive on the
market place? What is it that the scientist, in the wake
of a certain ignorance of the effects of their theory, must at strategic
points be restricted by ethical committees ? But with a second
take, might these anticipatory scenes of destruction and horror themselves
be a way of defending against a certain anxiety? Is this anxiety
a way that the scientist recognizes, beyond his/her knowledge and its
possible horrific effects, that there is is something real in what
s/he is working on ?
What is this real ? How does the anxiety and ignorance of
a real confront the educator, governor, psychoanalyst, and scientist –
not simply as what works or achieves itself in the successful "conception
of Man", but in what does not work with such conceptions ?
Our first cartel seeks to put the Lacanian notion of the real to
the test, while developing its ramifications for those involved in education,
government, science and psychoanalysis. We will conclude by showing
how it has become possible with Lacanian anlaysis not to confuse a Place
of the Subject with a Conception of Man.
The Topological Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Part I : The
Art of Psychoanalytic Speech
The
Generalized Borromean
A Topological Sketch Of Lacan
June 26th, 2006 Le
Monde:
For the first time, the graphic oeuvres and manuscripts
of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) will be put on sale,
Friday, June 30th in Paris, at Art Curial.
Exhibited since the 23rd of June at the Hotel Dassault,
some 130 pieces are visible at www.artcurial.com.
[Jacques Lacan enters into the Market Place of Art/
Clarisse Fabre]
What has been said?
This collection of largely topological work has been
offered by Jean Michel Vappereau and is estimated
450,000. Euro. It is not surprising that the family of
Lacan is opposed to the auction, as they have kept under close
guard any effective reference to Lacan’s topology.
Jacques Roubaud, student of Raymond Queneau, and
member of OULIPO, describes the collection as follows:
"in regard to these documents, there appears a Lacan very
well different than the easy caricature that is often
made of him by opinion. We see him impassioned to do something
else besides saying what one thinks [...] so that one
demonstrates to oneself what can not be said".
Roland Dumas, former head of state and family friend
of J.M. Vappereau, wrote as an introduction to the
auction catalogue:"The Borromean Knot became for Lacan
simultaneously a symbol, an instrument of research
and an eternal interrogation".
Yet, Vappereau explained that Dumas wanted him to
give his collection to the National Library, but he
preferred that it circulate in the public at the level
of an art auction, and not merely, or no longer, in the halls
of a society of souls (museums, libraries, universities,
etc.). Vappereau has further indicated that he intends
to use the monies received from the auction to buy an apartment
in Paris to house and exhibit works of psychoanalysis.
What are the ramifications?
What are the implications when psychoanalysis today
can claim to fabricate and transmit something like
an object of art, and no longer simply offer itself as
‘applied psychoanalysis’, i.e., a critique of art and society?
No doubt, just as the purists might not stand the
idea that a sacred object of art would be offered
for sale, or that a genius of culture would find his
je ne sais pas quoi made calculable in an auction,
there will be those who will bemoan this public sale as a desacralization
of the oeuvre of Lacan, just as they have always been scandalized
by Lacan’s use of short sessions and the abandonment
of the couch for a more delicate topology. Yet, is Vappereau’s
strategy a Warholian gesture to commercialize Lacanian
psychoanalysis to the highest bidder? Is this a sale "without
conscience"? Or with a tighter grip on the subject,
is it an attempt to reveal precisely where psychoanalytic
topology finds its point of application: a place where semblance
is not merely dreamt of, culturized, and critiqued, but constructed,
calculated, and deciphered in a work of what used to be nameable
only in the guise of an Art event?
From Art and Political Economy to Topology
and Psychoanalysis
If we follow Lacan, then "art is the place most close
to the symptom", which is to say, that what is called
art discovers a symptom where truth is lacking, if not
opposed to, a transmission of knowledge. Moreover, we must
simultaneously recall how Lacan constantly brought this
out in a reference to Marx’s conception of alienation:
"Marx discovered the symptom" and "the symptom has a political
order". Yet, if the symptom has an order, it is not merely
in a politics of action or the calculation of a vote, but
in the calculation of an incalculable: that is, in the calculation
of a surplus value produced in an act or work. It is true that
Marx had only attempted to bring out the problem of a symptomatic
truth by using the differential calculus of his age, but his
calculation not merely of an economy, but a political economy,
set the stage for what Lacan would begin to trace with a more supple
mathematics of topology and knot theory. While the surrealists,
post, and neo-freudians had gone beyond atomistic psychology by
theorizing the free energy of free association as the key to
a dynamic theory of the dream-image (and no longer as a secondary
waste product), they were hampered by a method that confined the
scope of deciphering to either an interpretation of culture or natural
science. Lacan, on the contrary, had rendered account of the formal
basis of such a deciphering succinctly by paralleling Poincaré’s
and Cantor’s definition of modern mathematics:
I do not know if I have already said it somewhere
but mathematics is the art of giving the same name
to different things. (Poincaré)
The essence of mathematics resides in its liberty.
(Cantor)
Join to this Poincaré's definition of topology
as a "theory of badly drawn figures" and one very
well has an introduction to Lacan’s project for
topology and psychoanalysis. (to be continued on this
site and in our seminar below).
Part II -
A Topology of the Man without Qualities
Aug. 4, 2006
Lacan was preceded by Freud who, in the generalization
of Marx's theory of work, maintained that it
was not a concept that could be regulated to the domain
of an alienated consciousness of labor relations, but denoted
a work of the signifier that had moved into the dream. For
with Freud's theory of the dream, one does not go to sleep
to rest, but in order to ‘work’. Otherwise said, Freud explains
that the dreamer is someone who, in preparing for sleep, removes
his clothes, wig, false teeth, etc. and enters into work just
as Musil’s "Man without qualities": a pre-reflexive subject, glued
to an economy, where judgment is lacking, where a work of the
dream and not the dream becomes primary. In displacing the function
of the interpretation from the dream to its work, Freud reveals a certain
'machine of vision' productive of a series of functional values without
anything human. Or rather the value of 'humanity' is only recognized
negatively through an incalculable: a market collapse, 'magical thought',
an intuition, a 'slip of speech', an unexplainable of 'genius', etc.
Yet, if the royal road to the unconscious was still for Freud by
way of the dream, an analysis of the work of the dream would lead Lacan
(and Althusser) to formulate a more positive case of the perfect worker
as the achievement of an absolute dreamer: the disenfranchised
of our modern cities, the immigrant worker to the land of plenty, the
artist become careerist (the 'Rimbaud effect'), art become merchandise
(the 'Warhol effect'), the analyst-analysand become therapist-client,
all of whom, once torn away from the place of their birth achieve a
peculiarly modern form of success in the dream of public recognition.
If one could still at the time of Freud call the professional
success of both the artist and analyst a sublimation,
by the time of Lacan it had already received the denomination
of a sinthome .
Lacan's topology began to respond to the
Man without Qualities, not
by a critique of aesthetic values, sensation, error,
and intuition, but in a psychoanalytic interrogation of
the function of the trait and writing. Thus, the question
became rephrased: instead of speaking of the truth of art in terms
of transcendence, what would it mean to begin to bring out its immanence:
a certain Thing or chose-psy that begins to be calculated
– as uncalculable surplus or jouissance – in the world of art ?
What is the complicity between sublimation and psychosis ? between
Qualities without a Man and the Man without
Qualities?( Freud implies that, at least in part, the art
'event' relies on the recognition that the artist is showing the
audience that s/he is able to live off an enjoyment and is not subject
to its renunciation in order to be employed).
Such an interrogations become necessary
once it is recognized that the correspondance between the
society of souls (the state, universities, libraries,
museums, art-fairs, economy, etc.) and the artist has never
been antagonistic, but supportive, despite the complaints. For
the triple correspondance between religion, philosophy,
and art are an attempt to give a sign or value – a morality,
an idea, a secret truth, a dollar sign, etc. – to the Work (oeuvre)
or Event. Yet, could we not interrogate this work, its enjoyment, act
and nomination immanently, as such, and not merely in the retroactive
transmission of values and ideals of the artist ( as achievement
of the soul, as genius of culture, sublime creature, hero, transcendence,
etc.). In such conditions, speaking of the art object as the becoming
conscious of its truth -– through a critique of semblance and
quality – no longer suffices or rather it has become routine: the
image of Man transcends into Qualities without Man:
the shocking, the beautiful, the unique, the secretive, etc. .
What must be asked today is what is their connection ? Are they
only held together in the mirror of art – ultimately in a commerce
of values – just as it is promised in the mirror of psychotherapy?
Or more importantly, is it possible to map out an Event and Act that is
constantly effaced at the moment one begins to speak of its sign, values,
ideals,qualities, etc. ? Said otherwise, must we pose with Musil,
that the Man without Qualities discovers himself in
Qualities without the Man or can we begin to pose
the problem of the Event, Act, and Trait otherwise
?
To begin to respond to this problem
in a less thematic way, we abbreviate it here with Lacan's
structural axiom of the subject of the Trait:
the signifier represents a subject for another
signifier ?
(to be continued
at monthly seminar and upcoming articles)
R. Groome
Summer 2006
Santa Monica
The Writing of Catastrophe:
From Natural Disaster to
Social Psychosis
(a work in progress)
Why is it so difficult
to speak and write of Catastrophe ?
Every epoch asks this perenial
question: Why have we lost our artists, philosophers,
journalists, scientists, and statesmen who would be able
to write one verse, play, or analysis of Catastrophe that would
enlighten the public ? Where are our modern day
tragedians ?
Our brief article would
like to sketch a response to this difficult question
not simply by talking about Catastrophe, but by opening a dialogue
with Catastrophe, that is to say, by making room for a discussion
on the difficulties of speaking and writing of Catastrophe.
For in every natural and cultural catastrophe there is
an Other Catastrophe that goes unheard of or is misread
by the common journalistic and humanitarian response to
disaster.
(continued)
Open Letter to Badiou [9/2004]
0 - From Psychoanalytic Classicism
to the Topological Baroque
Badiou's readings of Lacan
are sufficiently important to have elicited a recent
series of conferences in 2003 at UCLA entitled: Lacan and the
Real, Lacan's Anti-philosophy, and The Mathemes of the Real,
and in 2004 at UC Irvine. Owing to the unusual perspicacity
of the commentator as much as to the exceptional difficulty,
if not incomprehensible nature of the Lacanian corpus, his
readings give rise to several problems.
(Badiou continued)
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in France Today [6/2004]
In September of 2003 the
French National Assembly voted unanimously and without
public debate for a bill known as the “Accoyer Amendment” to
regulate the practice of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis,
in France. The following articles and interview, translated
from Le Monde, came in response to what seemed to psychoanalysts
to be a hasty and ill-considered move on the part of the French
legislative body.
(Accoyer continued)
• Regulate the Unconscious? [pdf download]
• On the Social Utility of the Ear [pdf download]
• Interview with Paul-Laurent Assoun [pdf download]
Thinking Wrongly about Freud [5/2000]
(What every schoolchild should
know . . .)
By Ika B. Roub
The reception of psychoanalysis
in the grand public is a baffling episode in the intellectual
history of the twentieth century, an episode which is
not finished and will have no doubt to be followed closely in
the twenty-first. As such, the Los Angeles Times and
the Skirball Cultural Center, are to be applauded for presenting
a series of articles on Freud and psychoanalysis (3/30-31/2000)
and a family art workshop on "Freud: Inkblots and Dreams" (at
the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles,
CA)
(Skirball continued)
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