Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Math Indict24.Lacan’s turn to math expands his vocabulary beyond intersubjective communication and affords new communicative tools for an explanation of psychoanalysisLundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 15-16) But to argue for a complete displacement of rhetoric in Lacan’s work, one would have to grapple with relatively late proclamations regarding rhetoric that I alluded to earlier: for example that the “universe is a flower of rhetoric” (Seminar XX, 1972) and that the “psychoanalyst is a rhetor” (Seminar XXV, 1977). Mathematization appealed to Lacan because it afforded him a vocabulary for understanding the subject as an effect of certain repeatable relations without implicitly reaffirming meaning and intersubjectivity as the primary loci for subjectivization. Thus, in accounting for the production of the subject as a formally determined effect of a set of relations that precede it, math offers Lacan a “desubjectivized” mode for talking about the production of the subject as an effect.61 The question in this “formulation” of the subject is the status of the mathematical representations in each of these schemas. Lacan is not claiming that the subject is a result of math; rather he is claiming that one can talk about the production of the subject as if it was mathematical. Thus, mathematical description is a metaphor that has the benefit of figuring the subject in desubjectivized terms, outside of the conventional vocabularies of intersubjectivity and social construction. Math affords Lacan an account of the figural economy that produces subjects, relates them to other subjects, and that authorizes the subject’s discourses without installing a given in advance subjectivity or process of intersubjective exchange as the efficient cause of the subject. Thus, it is fruitful to read the turn to mathematization in Lacan’s work as part and parcel of the project of framing the subject as an effect of tropological processes, albeit by means of a specific vocabulary of rhetorically saturated math tropes to emphasize the subject as an effect of relations that determine it without necessary reference to the a pregiven subject or intersubjectivity that mediates these processes. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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