Fall 2022 Seminar: Alienation/Separation
From Negation-Repetition to Alienation-Separation
Fall 2022 Seminar
Beginning Date: Sept. 24, 2022
Time: 10:00am to 12:30pm PST
Seminarist: R.T. Groome
History of the Seminar
Beginning with the problem of constructing Oedipus – the St. Christopher Dilemma – in 2018 we turned towards a resolution in situating Freud's investigations into negation and repetition until 2021. The 2022 Fall seminar will shift the focus to Lacan with an explicit construction of the operations of alienation and separation, then return to the Oedipus Complex to show how these operations provide, finally, a coherent and adequate construction of the Oedipus on the condition that they are constructed logically and topologically beyond the habitual metaphors.
The General Problem
We have discovered precursors to the first operation of alienation in the logical texts of Boole, Reichenbach, Carnap, and Heyting, while Lacan himself claims he is trying to formalize the turn from the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic to the 'Moment of Terror' in adding the second operations of separation.
The two logical operations of alienation and separation situated in ordinary language, correspond to respectively, two choices given to the Slave and the Master:
Slave: Liberty or Your Life / Alienation
Master: Liberty or Your Death / Separation
If the alienating choice of the Slave is that of life over liberty, then the alienating choice of the Master is the choice of death, but not a real death in the suicidal case, but a symbolic death which introduces what Lacan correlates to Freud's Vorstellungsrepresentanz or the 'Representative of the representation' as introducing a logical separation. Not only is alienation never made explicit in the contemporary post-neo-lacanian literature, but the turn to separation is always impressionistic. There are two reasons for this:
1- first, the seminars of Lacan that introduce these logical operations – Four Foundational Concepts of Psychoanalysis and The Logic of the Phantasm – are notoriously unreliable since they are written transcriptions of an oral seminar. To make matters worse, Lacan own writings in the Écrits – Positions of the Unconscious – are stated axiomatically and so condensed that many have taken this as a sign of deliberate obfuscation.
2- second, today's reception of the Lacanian corpus remains largely ineffective at the level of its didactic and clinic since the post-neo-Lacanian researchers have shied away from any explicit presentation and seem to prefer infinite commentary and metaphor as a way to 'understand' the text. Left at this level of ordinary language, any explicit presentation of alienation/separation is avoided and replaced with the modes of mimicry that have become so prevalent today.
Resolutions
Our Fall 2022 seminar aims to cut the infinite commentary and metaphor in three ways:
1- first, we will provide a critical and reworked translation of the crucial chapters of Lacan's seminars explicitly detailing the operations of alienation/separation. Again, both the French original and the English translations are corrupt versions. Once these texts have been stabilized, we will make the correspondence to Lacan's The Position of the Unconscious explicit.
2- second, we will give an explicit presentation of alienation/separation, first, in ordinary propositional and predicate logic, then in different modes of mathematical writing: Boolean Algebra, Bi-Heyting Algebra, Topological Algebra, and a Galois Group.
3- third, we will show why without such an explicit presentation even the most natural and 'intuitive' of psychoanalysts cannot but fail in isolating the symptom clinically.
Requirements and Background
The Fall 2022 presupposes no technical background in mathematics, logic, or psychoanalysis to follow its presentations. All that is required is a certain perseverance in reading the background texts and following the bi-monthly seminars.
Before the first meeting the participant should have read Chpt. XVI &XVII from the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964) of J. Lacan and Kojeve's In Guise of an Introduction (1947) to Hegel's Master and Slave Dialectic . We will concentrate on critiquing, re-translating, and reworking the two chapters of Lacan paragraph by paragraph into a logical and mathematical formalization. We will supplement this work with one other seminar, Logic of the Phantasm (1966), and one writing, the Positions of the Unconscious (1960-64).
The participant should have also started working on some modern primer of logic such as Quine's Method's of Logic. It will be helpful to get to the level of constructing truth tables, Venn diagrams, and various other decision-proof procedures and models.
If there are any questions, please contact the secretary at: PLACE@topoi.net