The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (Short Circuits)

by Lorenzo Chiesa (Author), Lorenzo Chiesa (Author), Stockholm Inst Transition (Author)

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Paperback
2016
$52.81

A philosophical examination of the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later psychoanalytic theory. In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom There is no sexual relationship. Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that There is no sexual relationship is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real not-two. The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility. Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution. For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a para-ontology yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?

Synopsis

A philosophical examination of the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later psychoanalytic theory. In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom There is no sexual relationship. Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that There is no sexual relationship is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real not-two. The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility. Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution. For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a para-ontology yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?

$52.81

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
Edition: 1
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 13 May 2016
ISBN 10: 0262529033
ISBN 13: 9780262529037
Book Overview: Lorenzo Chiesa's The Not-Two admirably makes creative landmark contributions to both Lacanian studies and contemporary metaphysics. On the basis of an unpacking of Lacan's treatments of sexual difference from the early 1970s unprecedented in its attentiveness and elegance, Chiesa builds toward a compelling novel ontology motivated by the fundamental question: What must being or nature be so as to eventuate in the distinctively dysfunctional entities that are the sexed human subjects of psychoanalysis? -- Adrian Johnston, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico at Albuquerque Love is a cosmic principle; conflict and love have been taken to govern the world; love has been known to seek for the One. In The Not-Two Chiesa addresses questions of sexual love, as he takes up themes from Lacan's work in this illuminating study of what it is that counts between women and men. -- Bernard Burgoyne, psychoanalyst; Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University

Author Bio

Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the Genoa School of Humanities and the author of Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan and The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, both published by the MIT Press. Mladen Dolar taught for 20 years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of a number of books, most recently (with Slavoj Zizek) Opera's Second Death. Alenka Zupancic, a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher, teaches at the European Graduate School and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and the Arts. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two and The Odd One In: On Comedy, both in the Short Circuits series, published by the MIT Press. Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic, is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Parallax View, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (with John Milbank), and Zizek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), these five published by the MIT Press.