I have been fighting a brutal cold for the last week, so I apologize for the disjointed nature of this post…

In an enigmatic passage from Seminar 11, Lacan remarks that “…the gods belong to the field of the real” (45).  This passage is all the more enigmatic in that later Lacan declares that “…the true formula of atheism is not God is dead –even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father –the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious” (59).  I’ve provided commentary on these two passages elsewhere, so I won’t repeat them in detail here.  In referring to the real, of course, Lacan is not referring to “reality”, but to the impossible.  As is so often the case in his thought, Lacan will speak of the real in a number of senses.  However here he…

Academic (I wish I had a better word) blogging is an adventure in deterritorialization.  Let us suppose that academic disciplines are systems.  For Luhmann, systems constitute themselves by distinguishing themselves from an environment as depicted in this (less than ideal) graphic:

The distinction between system and environment is self-referential in the sense that it is an activity (this distinction is an ongoing process that has to reproduce itself from moment to moment in the order of time in a temporality constituted by the system) that only occurs on one side of the system.  It is the system that distinguishes itself from its environment, producing an outside and an inside.  For the environment, by contrast, this distinction does not exist.  Here it’s necessary to note that Luhmann uses the term “environment” equivocally.  There is, on the one hand, the environment that exists as such.  This environment is what Deleuze and Guattari…

What can be said of Halloween as a symptom or form of surplus-enjoyment?  Perhaps that it is queer or a repudiation of what Lacan called the university discourse, or what we might call the dream of a big Other that exists.  It is unfortunate that Lacan referred to this discourse as the “university” discourse, for naturally this evokes connotations of universities (for a discussion of how Lacan’s discourse theory works, cf. the appendix to my article “Zizek’s New Universe of Discourse”).  While certainly we can draw on this discourse to understand what transpires in universities or what Kuhn referred to as “normal science”, it would perhaps be better to refer to it as the “universal discourse”.  Within the universal discourse, we have S2, the big Other or system of signifiers, addressing the objet a or anomalous; naming it and situating it in a system of social categories and identities.  In…