Proposed panel for the Eighth Annual Conference on Psychoanalysis and Social
Change, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, October 25-27, 2002,
Emotions.
Anxiety: The Opposite of Desire?
The object is never for [the subject] definitively the final
object, except in exceptional experiences. But it thus appears
in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated,
and which shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within
the world -- an object which by essence destroys him, anxiety,
which he cannot recapture, in which he will never truly be able
to find reconciliation, adhesion to the world, and perfect
complementarity on the level of desire. It is in the nature of
desire to be radically torn.
-- from "The Dream of Irma's
injection (conclusion)," Seminar II
The later sections of Lacan's second seminar treat, in embryonic form,
what would later become pillars of his approach to psychoanalysis: desire,
the agency of the letter, the all-encompassing presence of language, and the
big Other, expressed in the famous L-Schema. At this very early point in
Lacan's career, he was supposedly fiddling with reinterpretations of Freud,
yet there is little mention of some psychoanalytic concepts that typically
fall under the rubric of the neuroses -- anxiety's absence among them,
puzzling given Lacan's discussion of anxiety's necessary twin, Verdrängung.
As Lacan later devoted an entire seminar year to the topic of anxiety, and
seemed to precipitate a break in his thought (beginning with Seminar XI,
nothing would be quite in the same with Lacan), the concept of anxiety
appears to have been an epistemological problem for him; it ultimately
closed the door on the first phase of his career, and gave way to the
pared-down stylings of the second, largely freeing Lacan from his
more formally philosophical moorings.
This panel proposes to flesh out the subject of anxiety, treating
Lacan’s work prior to Seminar XI. All approaches relating to this topic
are welcome, though they should lean towards contextualizing anxiety in the
encounter with the Other, owing to the broader drift of the conference; no
doubt the final version of this panel will be even further refined from the
above description. Papers should be roughly 20 minutes in length. Send a
200-300 word abstract, along with paper title and professional affiliation
to:
mojo@rice.edu
Marshall N Armintor
Department of English
Rice University
Deadline for submission is July 25th, no exceptions.
For more information about the conference, check out the link below:
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~dilger/academics/etc/grads-list/msg01106.html
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