Lacan: Topologically Speaking

Description

The study of topology examines the way something can change shape while still retaining the same properties. Jacques Lacan devoted the last part of his teaching to the topology of the subject. During the 50s, he gauged the topology of surfaces (torus, Moebius strips, Klein bottles, crosscaps) and from 1972 on, he studied the topology of knots (Borromean, the sinthome). Showing that bodily and mental life function topologically, he did what no one had done before: he added to the logic of how representations function, the logic of jouissance or libidinal meaning that "materializes" language by making desire, fantasy, and the partial drives ascertainable functions of it. For Lacan, topology is neither myth nor metaphor. It is the precise way we may understand the construction and appearance of the subject. Space is multidimensional in terms of both meaning and logic.

Lacanian topology answers questions of post-structuralism while revealing the flaws in its theories. It also advances a 21st-century teaching that obviates symbolic logic and its positivistic assumptions. Applications are made to the clinic, to literature, and to the social sciences.

The authors collected here include world renowned Lacanian topologists such as Jacques-Alain Miller, Jeanne Lafont, Jean-Paul Gilson, Pierre Skriabine, Juan-David Nasio, Jean-Michel Vappereau, and several new theorists from the United States and Europe.

About the Author

Ellie Ragland

Ellie Ragland is the Fredrick A. Middlebush Professor of English, and former Chair of the Department of English at The University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of numerous critical works, most recently The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan (SUNY-Albany, 2004). She edited the first Lacan English journal, Newsletter of the Freudian Field for eight years and is now coeditor of (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies.

Dragan Milovanovic

Dragan Milovanovic is Professor of Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany. He has authored, edited, and coedited more than 16 books and numerous articles on postmodern perspectives in criminology, law, psychoanalysis, and social theory. In 1993, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Division on Critical Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. He is the Editor of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.