The Lacanian Review Nr 15

THE LACANIAN REVIEW 15

“CUT”

In my Rapid Eye Movement sleep, I dreamt the song lyrics: It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . It’s the end of

the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine.

What is the status of the world today? Doomed? Or is everything just fine? Although The Lacanian Review

15 was brought out by the climate crisis as a particular paradigm or symptom of discontent in the world today, we also

examine various other forms of twenty-first century anxiety and malaise.

Amidst utopian fantasies, ideals of progress, war, discourses of catastrophe and impending doom, and fictions

of the end of the world, what is the place of psychoanalysis? Within those, perhaps all we can do is make a cut. Hence,

the title for TLR 15: “Cut.” Short and simple, to function as a cut in itself.

Inherent in the image of the globe is an imaginary form of wholeness, and yet various events and

contingencies puncture that belief in the bubble, in particular, the climate crisis. Insofar as the world is constructed—

“this world that is but a dream of each body,” Jacques Lacan says—cuts can perforate the imaginary, perhaps just

enough to allow us to see that the world is always only ever, as the R.E.M. song says:

. . . the world as we know it . . .

Inevitably, any attempt to make a world confronts us with waste. Lacan’s equivoque im-monde has

contemporary resonance: the world (monde) is polluted (immonde). From the letter as waste or remainder, outside of

meaning, to waste as a form of the real in the twenty-first century . . . We explore the complexity of waste: the risks

of a subject identified with waste, and yet the potential of this very thing—finding a way to do something with, and

even, as Jacques-Alain Miller proposes, elevate to the dignity of a practice, this waste object.

Lacanian cuts are distinctive. And they can be on the side of life. Stemming from the desire of the analyst

and through a horticulture of analytic action, rooted in an ethics, cuts can be life-generating. It is perhaps ironic that

precisely by way of demonstrating the very impossibility of living, psychoanalysis can also make it possible to find a

way to make the world—each one’s singular world—a bit more livable.

Cristina Rose Moro, Managing Editor

The Lacanian Review No 15: “Cut”

CONTENTS

Editorial

Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff, What Works is the World

Cristina Rose Moro, Cut

Death Dream

Jacques Lacan, Improvisation désir de mort, rêve et réveil

Jacques Lacan, Improvisation: Desire for Death, Dream and Awakening

Neighborhood

Jacques-Alain Miller, L’amour du prochain Saint Martin et Salomon

Jacques-Alain Miller, The Love of One’s Neighbor, Saint Martin and Solomon

Jacques-Alain Miller, Conspiracy

Im-monde

Guy Briole, The Dignity of Waste

Éric Laurent, Climate Catastrophe, the Anxiety of Scientist Scholars and the Anxiety That is Ours

Geert Hoornaert, Residual, You Say?

Jacques-Alain Miller, Some Remarks on Climate Catastrophe

Guy Briole, The Inexorable Logic of War

Jacques-Alain Miller, Some Remarks on the Logic of War

Civilization and Anxiety

Daniel Roy, Anxiety and Treatment

Patricia Bosquin-Caroz, Believing in It

Réginald Blanchet, Living in Catastrophe

Katty Langelez-Stevens, Conspiracy Theories: Holding On to the Compass of the Real

Neus Carbonell, Being a Body, Being a Symptom

Jacques-Alain Miller, Some Remarks on Being a Body

Spheres

Natalie Wülfing, Making a World

Luc Garcia, CO2 Mon Amour

Dominique Rudaz, Is Bitcoin for Real?

Nature / Cut

Robert Buck, Nature / Cut

Donald Moffett, Artist Folio

Jim and Lucia LaVilla-Havelin, Dear René

Paulina Pobocha, Donald Moffett + Nature Cult + The McNay

Jeff Goodell, Why We Love Our Oak Tree

Eileen Myles, RE: Tree Canopy

Marlene McCarty, Earth Life

Grant Worth, Heirloom Mixtape

James Corwell, Exploring the Future of Food: A Global Perspective on the Grapes of Wrath

Rachel Monroe, Ghost Variation

Pete Dandridge, Flight

Suzanne Weaver, The Future Is Undecided

Brett Story, Canary on the Skull

Hannah Fenster, Assertive, but Full of Holes

Lidia Yuknavitch, Neuron

Tenzin Robert Thurman, The Nature Cult Picnic of Donald Moffett

Luna and Coyote, Welaunee Is Our Nature-Cult

Elizabeth Rogers, Ope