READING GROUP: Lacan Demystified
Reading group is back! This spring we are doing things a little different. For each week we have selected one Lacan text, and one secondary text. Read one, read both, read neither, it’s up to you! What is most important is that every Monday at 8:00pm we will come together to try and figure out what this notoriously obscure figure was really trying to get at. If you have a question raised by the text that you addressed at the meeting, leave a note in the comments below.
This week (Feb. 8th) we will be discussing Lacan’s most famous paper on the “mirror stage.” What is it? Why should we care? Why did this make him famous?
This week’s texts (Read one, both, or neither!):
- Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Ecrits
- Neill, “Exegesis of: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
Free Pdfs of the readings can be found: HERE
Location: Bloomfield Crazy Mocha (4525 Liberty Ave).
Want some extra resources? Check out PEL’s episode on Lacan HERE, or their episode on Lacan and Derrida’s readings of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” HERE.
As a reminder, even though we have moved to thematic groups, there is no expectation that people participate in every week, so even if you can’t commit to the whole winter, you are still more than welcome to join us when you can.
OTHER EVENTS THIS WEEK:
- None this week
OTHER NEWS:
Dylan Trigg’s “On Non-Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty” is now available at our YouTube channel here:
LOOKING AHEAD:
Upcoming in Lacan Demystified
2/8 – The Mirror Stage
- Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Ecrits
- Neill, “Exegesis of: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
2/15 – The Lacanian Subject
- Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Ecrits
- Fink, “The Lacanian subject” in The Lacanian subject: Between Language and Jouissance
2/22 – The Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real
- Lacan, “Rings of String” in Seminar XX
- Delay, “The Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real” in God is Unconscious
2/29 – Feminine Sexuality
- Lacan, “On Jouissance” and “God and
Woman’s Jouissance” in Seminar XX - Butler, “Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade” in Gender Trouble
3/7 – Ethics and Psychoanalysis
- Lacan, “Kant with Sade” in Ecrits
- Zupančič, “The Lie” in Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan
3/14 – The Four Discourses
- Lacan, “The Master and the Hysteric” in Seminar XVII
- Žižek, “Four Discourses, Four Subjects” in Sic 2: Cogito and the Unconscious
Find all Pdfs Here
Pittsburgh Continental Philosophy Network 
Fink seems to think Lacan had second thoughts about Mirror Stage later in his work. There the stress was un the parent holding the child.
Also the Mirror Stage does not appear to figure in the etiology of Psychosis being over written by future relationship or lack with Law of Father
Do you think some of Lacanâs hostility to Existentialists is result of their being part of Resistance-or even on Concentration camp in Franklâs case- while he laid low.