MOUTHW SH

a working group

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“The other”—don’t use this term as a mouthwash.

Lacan, S II, ch 1.

 

We all know the experience of hearing someone – even ourselves – speak with what sounds like a mouthful of Lacanian marbles. Signifier, lack, objet a, big other, object cause, discourse, topology, desire, phallus, real, imaginary, symbolic, etc.; not forgetting, of course, that Swiss army knife of Lacanese:  jouissance. 

 

Prior to formal analytic formation, coming from a background of having taught yoga for two-plus decades, while I’d practice I’d ask myself:  what is this? what is happening? how could I tell this to others? It is a truism – one learns what one knows – and doesn’t – having to teach another.

 

And so, formation:  an ongoing act. The intention of this seminar is to offer the practice of saying something – metabolized in one’s own words – to others about the Lacanian ‘treasure trove of signifiers’. A counter to the pervasive reification of Lacanian grammar.

For our purposes, something – for you – encountered in your Lacanian reading or work which insists, remains obscure, opaque, meaningless, etc. – perhaps something it seems everyone else ‘gets’. 

 

Structure of the seminar:  meeting every other Monday, each session someone will volunteer themselves for something they’d like to work on; the off-week between they’ll announce what it is – something – term, concept, graph or image, etc. They’ll also supplement with relevant locations in Lacan’s Seminars or writings. They’ll open the session, speaking their relationship-non-relationship with this thing; and, we also having had the week to prepare, we will listen, reply, and work.

 

When the beginning of the group approaches, I’ll choose our first thing, so we’ll get to work right from the start. 

 

This is less a work about clarifying knowledge – we’re all rightly drawn to a luminous opacity – but more about the sucking candy of dogma dissolved in living speaking breathing mouths.

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Faculty: Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst

Dates/Times: Every other Monday, 5:30-7:30 PT, 8:30-10:30 PM, ET. Sept 16th, 2024 – April 14th, 2025

Location: Over Zoom 

Contact: To join, or for more information:  half.outside.it@gmail.com 

Fee: $25 suggested per session, or tuition. None turned away.

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Matthew Seidman [MFA, CalArts] is a candidate research analyst at the LSP, and a member of the California Circle of GIFRIC; he is also participating in SPIIRAL/PAS, a nascent GIFRIC-inspired Project for an American School. Poly-modal artist, analyst, instructor, yogi; 2023 marks his 25th year as a yoga teacher. He also hosts an analytic-framed movement workshop:  To Be And Not To Be, a Fundamental Rule movement lab. In all its modes, his creative work is mytho-erotic, recognizably Jewish, and via the body-that-speaks, moves through a devastated temporality (ethics) along a membrane cleaving poetry and pornography. He calls it traumedy. It has been published, staged, screened, heard and hung in the US, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. A selection of his work is collected at volcofsky.net – A’ Traveling Yeshiva Sideshow.