Jacques Lacan Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Capitalism

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

If somebody really hasn’t already raided the loot, maybe the administration will show us how it’s done

May 20, 2025 • by Justin Joque

The Trump-Musk right repeatedly insists on revealing the true state of the world and of digging this true world out from under the distortions of liberal modernity. From Pizzagate to attacks on DEI, there exists a constant insistence on revealing what is hidden, mediated, and obfuscated. But nowhere is the ...

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

Gender

The Making of a Girl

New School Alum Melissa Febos uses memoir to understand the startling shame of becoming a woman in the eyes of others in this excerpt of her book Girlhood

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos

"I got my period when I was ten, and I’d been reading Judy Blume books for a while so I knew it was coming," said Tanaïs. "And when it came, I wasn’t prepared for it anymore." A 2011 American Association of University Women (AAUW) school survey shows that early development ...

Psyche

Trauma and Race

A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 16, 2020 • by Sheldon George

On November 23, 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. During a verbal exchange with Davis over loud music being played by Davis and three friends, the shooter, a forty-seven-year-old white male named Michael Dunn, pulled out ...

Psyche

The Reign of One’s Own Desire

An interview with Sheldon George on his book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 15, 2020 • by Sheldon George and Daniel Gaztambide

Daniel Gaztambide (DG): Would you mind unpacking some of the Lacanian concepts you draw on to understand racism and Black identity, such as jouissance and object a, for a general audience? Sheldon George (SG): Jouissance is often translated from the French as pleasure or enjoyment, but it is most properly an excessive pleasure, a destructive ...

Uncategorized

Transgender Psychoanalysis

Lacan, sex, and sinthomes

June 26, 2019 • by Sheila L. Cavanagh

--- On April 20, 2016, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek described “transgenderism” as an attempt to undermine sexual difference. In other words, he contended that transpeople are reducing what is, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, an unavoidable sexual impasse to an identity-based human rights discourse (that fits nicely into the neo-liberal capitalist order).[i] He suggested that ...

Feature

The Portable Phallus

An excerpt from Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

September 28, 2018 • by Mari Ruti

In Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life Mari Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical ...

Feature

An Interview with Mari Ruti

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

September 27, 2018 • by Mari Ruti and Josh Maserow

In Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life Mari Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical ...

Feature

Feminists Say

Gagging on rape

August 13, 2018 • by Vanessa Place and Cassandra Seltman

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...

Feature

Neoliberal Horizons in Subjectivity

An excerpt from Jorge Alemán’s latest book

October 20, 2017 • by Jorge Alemán

It’s definitive to admit that when it comes to the symbolic order of language, in its distinct variants and modes of appearance, we must always distinguish two different dimensions. Firstly, we must indicate the “dependence and subordination” of the speaking being, with respect to the structural and ontological order of ...

Feature

Freudian Theory and The Pattern of Fascist Propaganda

Part 3

October 5, 2017 • by Jamieson Webster

Adorno is quick to pick up what I think of as the central theme for my remarks and touches on a great deal of what I have worked on in Freud and Lacan, namely on the question of love and family. Adorno says that Freud’s article is prophetic probably because ...