[This is the preface to my attempt to translate the first chapters of the Filipino novel Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao by Tony Perez] [Image of Cubao from Dennis Villegas] I took up the project of translating what at first seemed the whimsical choice of Tony Perez’s 1995 novel, Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, out of a fear and a hope,…
Category Archives: Lack N(Existing)t
Lacking means something, Lacking together. Existing in the Nothing, to Not is to Exist.
[Image from Common Sense Science] Parmenides of Elea changed the course of early Greek philosophy. His philosophy not only shifted the line of inquiry found in previous accounts (most notably in the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) from cosmology to ontology; the ontology he developed also defined all succeeding accounts as the standard to which…
In “This Sex Which Is Not One” (an essay in the book of the same title), Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine conception of feminine/female sexuality and proposes descriptions that come from a woman. Irigaray explains that within female sexuality, an opposition is set up “between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and ‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” in which “the…
[An example of a signifier that différance slides] [Presented in François Raffoul’s class on Contemporary French Philosophy at LSU in the fall of 2008; contains his additions and corrections] Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Différance” (perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been able to utilize” in previous…
This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
[The psychoanalytic couch; An Associated Press photo by Bob Wands] [Continues "Another Bar"] As a preliminary formulation, Fink sums up the process by which the subject is “alienat[ed] by and in the Other [as language]” and then “separate[d] from the [m]Other [as desire]” through the prohibition of the fOther (as law (i.e. prohibitive/symbolizing/socializing language)) as…
[Continues "Beyond the Bar"] Central to the psychoanalytic schema is that which thwarts/frustrates/disillusions the alignment/overlapping/matching/filling of the two lacks/desires (by two subjects, e.g. the mOther and the child), what Lacan calls the paternal function—the father in Freud’s Oedipus—which is associated with the primordial signifier, i.e. that which signals the subject’s entrance into language, the Symbolic…
[Mother and Child by Esther Leli] [Continues "The Barred S"] The coming-to-be of the Lacanian subject does not end with alienation. The process of becoming a subject, that is, goes beyond the location—the pointing out/to—of the place where it is not (the place where it can potentially be). Differentiating Lacanian psychoanalysis from structuralism strictly speaking,…
Bruce Fink presents in The Lacanian Subject his interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. In contrast to the ego (in its many guises: the individual, the conscious subject, the mirror image, the subject of the statement), Fink states that Lacan’s subject—the subject of the “return to Freud,” the true subject of psychoanalysis—is none other…
[A painting by Filipino Revolutionary artist Juan Luna, The Spolarium] Things have of late been stirring in the Philippines. The current President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (also referred to as GMA), is being challenged by a string of protests to step down from the post. Arroyo ascended to the Presidency in 2001 (same day as George…
