This book includes essays by some of the finest practicing analysts and teachers of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian community today. The writings offer an essential introduction to the later teachings of Jacques Lacan, illuminate the theoretical developments introduced by the later Lacan, and explore their clinical implications with remarkable acumen.

In his "Écrits," Jacques Lacan evokes the figure of St. John the Baptist with a raised finger that points, though we do not know to where it compels us: "What silence must the analyst now impose upon himself if he is to make out, rising from this bog, the raised finger of Leonardo's 'St. John the Baptist, ' if interpretation is to find anew the forsaken horizon of being in which its elusive virtue must be deployed." This is a clinical inquiry that psychoanalysis still pursues today: what is the direction of an interpretation, what is its aim, as we already recognize the impasses of the endless generation of meaning that can stagnate psychoanalysis? The "Aims of Analysis" explores the use of the "aim" to approach the clinical implications of the later work of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Through a close reading of key concepts from the later Seminars of Lacan, the work of Jacques-Alain Miller, and other contemporary psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation, Thomas Svolos demonstrates how psychoanalysis today is practiced beyond the normative conventions of the Oedipus Complex. Svolos writes about his own experience in analysis and the experiences of "Analysts of the School" who have given "testimonies of the Pass." In the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, Analysts of the School are those analysands who have given testimony to the end of their own analysis. It is a specific dispositif developed by Lacan aimed directly at how knowledge in psychoanalysis may be transmitted. Svolos originally delivered this Seminar in Miami in October 2019 for the Lacanian Compass, a group of the New Lacanian School dedicated to the development and promotion of the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis in the United States. The text-published by Midden Press, the publishing house of Lacanian Compass-is intended for clinicians, psychoanalysts, and readers of psychoanalytic theory of all backgrounds. Visit https: //www.lacaniancompass.com/midden-press for more information.

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is “literate in desire,” and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

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?

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

This groundbreaking volume highlights the contemporary relevance of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), whose linguistic reworking of Freudian analysis radicalized both psychoanalysis and its approach to theology. Part I: Lacan, Religion, and Others explores the application of Lacan's thought to the phenomena of religion. Part II: Theology and the Other Lacan explores and develops theology in light of Lacan. In both cases, a central place is given to Lacan's exposition of the real, thereby reflecting the impact of his later work. Contributors include some of the most renowned readers and influential academics in their respective fields: Tina Beattie, Lorenzo Chiesa, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Adrian Johnston, Katerina Kolozova, Thomas Lynch, Marcus Pound, Carl Raschke, Kenneth Reinhard, Mario D'Amato, Noelle Vahanian, and Slavoj Žižek. Topics traverse culture, art, philosophy, and politics, as well as providing critical exegesis of Lacan's most gnomic utterances on theology, including "The Triumph of Religion."

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.