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Werken van Lorenzo Chiesa

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Even though Lorenzo Chiesa's first book is on my list, somehow I ended up reading this one first.

There are obscure writers about Lacan, and there are somewhat less obscure writers about Lacan - Chiesa largely falls in the former camp, based on my reading of this book. Never mind, I have read enough Lacan to handle this difficulty, I think.

Chiesa's thesis is original enough: he aims to look at Seminars 18-20, in which Lacan develops the logical notion of the "not-all." This "not-all" is, more or less, a challenge to totalizing forms of logic or absolutes. The "not-all" is a kind of Lacanian incompleteness theorem, the idea that something always eludes the process of signification.

I rather enjoyed Chiesa's preface, in which he locates the usefulness of this idea in terms of theology. The "not-all" allows us to think toward an atheism that is free of the problems of the "death of God," a new "para-ontology." So far, so good.

It was the middle chapters of the book that I really had difficulty with, not so much because I didn't understand them, but because I revile the language of gender and sexuality that Lacan deploys and Chiesa follows. I think I understand Lacan's theory of sexuation pretty well, on the surface, but it still boggles my mind a) why it has to be framed in terms of gender, when clearly it undermines all standard notions of gender or even sexual preference to the point where these terms are meaningless, and b) what any of this has to do with sex at all.

If we were talking more generally about desire, including but not limited to sex, then I could understand. But why are sex and gender the privileged form? That seems to me an unwarranted blind spot of the whole theory. I like sex, for sure, but if I were honest I would say my neurotic desires are probably far more clustered around, say, food - why isn't that a privileged zone of desire?

The other puzzling thing about Chiesa's book is that he doesn't clarify the logic of what he is doing until you get to the conclusion! That's where he outlines the influence of Frege on Lacan, on how they are using the logic of zero and one to think through similar problems. As such, the "not-two" comes from the fact that zero is counted as a beginning, a starting point, and yet it remains zero, so that if you were to add zero and one together they remain "not-two" even though they are a binary.
If only Chiesa had told me this at the beginning, instead of going on about sexuation and phalluses, everything would have been so much clearer!

I do admire what Chiesa is trying to do in this book. It is bold and ambitious, and charts new territory by exploring the difficult realms of the later Lacanian seminars. But too often it fails to discover a voice and language of its own, and that makes it, by its own logic, rather less than what it sets out to be.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
vernaye | May 23, 2020 |

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6
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74
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½ 3.5
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15
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