Skip navigation.
P.L.A.C.E.
Contact address:
1223 Wilshire Boulevard, #1514 - Santa Monica
CA 90403-5400
TEL: 323-913-1650
PLACE@topoi.net



Events

Seminar

Topology by the Way of
Masks (check schedule with secretary)
Upstairs Auditorium
9341 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA

Cartels
projective geometry
logic (currently full/but see published cartel notes coming shortly on this site

Projects

Referrals - Referencing practicing Lacanian psychoanalysts in California and the US.
The Work of Pierre Soury: On Cartels and Speech
Unpublished seminars- 1979; Translation by B.B.

The work of P. Soury is little recognized in the anglo-phile accounts of Lacanian analysis.  The following pages begin to form an introduction long overdue.

Small Groups and the Large Groups

    I am interested in the practice of small groups and have little interest in the reality of the large group. In particular, I have little interest in the operation or in the institution concerning a large number of people.
    As for this opposition between small and large groups, my criteria is ternary: the one, the small number, the large number. I elaborate no more.
    After riding myself of these problems of the large group, I arrive at problems of the practice and experience of the small group.

Click here for complete article


The Topological Dénouement of the Cure

                           


Historical Background

If Jacques Lacan had been interrogating the limits of Freudian psychoanalysis from the beginning, it was not until 1956 with D'une question préliminaire a' tout traitement possible de la psychose ( Of A Preliminary Question To Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis) that he showed the necessity of reformulating the problem in a topological presentation that went beyond an "abstract theory of the faculties of the subject"1.


Although Lacan continued to purify what he called the "ideology of psychoanalysis" through a topology of surfaces, it was not until February 9th 1972, in his seminar Ou Pire, that he changes to a theory of knots and announces his discovery of the Borromean Rings. What remains invariant in this transformation is the insistence that the use of such topological structures consists not in illustrating the theory of psychoanalysis, but of initiating a practice of psychoanalysis itself:

For is not structuralism what permits us to pose our experience as the field where it speaks? If yes, "the distance to experience" of structure disappears since it [the structure] operates not as a theoretical model, but as the original machine which puts in scene the subject. (Remarques Sur La Rapport De Daniel Lagache, Lacan, 1958-60)

By the time of R.S.I., Lacan corresponds the three closed chords of the Borromean Lock to the Real, Symbolic, and the Imaginary, while noting this tertiary grouping of rings was only a minimum and required a fourth ring that was only implicitly indicated in Freud's use of the term psychic reality. Further still, by explicitly equating this fourth ring with the Nom-du-Pere and the Oedipus complex Lacan isolates it as what analysis comes to operate on: "To be knotted otherwise, this is what is essential to the Oedipus Complex and it is precisely on what analysis operates." (R.S.I., January 14th 1975)

Dénouement of the Sinthome

A Space Of Which One Has No Idea

 from La Peinture Cubist (1945-57) by Jean Paulhan  

(a work of translation in progress by R. Groome)

If visual space is superior to tactile space, it is because with a little goodwill one can give it three dimensions.
                                                                -Henri Poincare, Derniere Pensees, III, 3.

There is a celebrated, but laconic thought of Pascal that insists in being understood on the diagonal: Is it necessary to lend a trompery to things that are not foolish?  Neither Pascal (nor anyone else) ever supposed that painting in general was vain because it limited the appearance of an object. He wanted to say — and he precisely said it — that painting was not vain, but a sort of painting, a particular species of painting which contents itself with appearance and fooling the eye — trompe-l'oeil — “What vanity that painting draws admiration by resemblance to things that one does not admire the originals". Where it logically follows his call for a painting that does not attract by resemblance admiration and therefore escapes the vanity of that which does. In sum, Pascal prefers a painting that doesn't resemble too much. He would also like to get rid of nenuphars (water-lilies) and false windows.

Paulhan continued

La Topologie Perdue de la Psychanalyse


Independently of the propositions on culture and nature that thematize the field of psychoanalysis, Lacan has constructed its discipline in a formalization — a collection of principles logically anterior to any particular content: a topology (Greek topos [place] + logos [discourse/reason/logic]) which has become a basis on which to achieve Freudian psychoanalysis in its theory and practice.

Topologie Perdu continued


The Use of the Borromean in Psychoanalysis
(in preparation)

The pages that follow begin to introduce the topological work of ©PLACE/2007.  They are first draft texts appearing monthly that have not yet received a final pass by the committee of redaction; at which time we anticipate their publication in a collated form.
The page is currently in preparation.