Join us for a presentation of the latest book by diplomat and acclaimed writer Dr Milan Balažic Enjoyment, Knowledge, Power (Pasadena, 2017).
Balažic is the author of eight monographs on Lacanian psychoanalysis and its relations to politics, science, and philosophy. His latest book brings Lacan’s vast opus to the field of politics by emphasising the main topics of the late Lacan’s teaching: anti-philosophy, mathematical logics, topology, and linguistics.
From Review by Dr Nina Krajnik:
This book by Dr Milan Balažic Enjoyment, Knowledge, Power brings together a vast collection of previously unpublished references from the Parisian archives of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and is the first work in the Slovene space to treat his late teaching with precision, marked by relations between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and mathematical logics. Interlacing the questions of the three impossible professions (analyzing, governing and teaching), the book presents an opening for the new – both in psychoanalytic conceptualisation, and in its clinical procedure.
The work can be read as a commentary on Lacan’s famous writing L’étourdit, reminding the reader of the possibility of subversion of discursive practices and their own position, while addressing the future psychoanalyst with training through mathematical, linguistic, anti-philosophical, and topological paradoxes.
What connects this knowledge with psychoanalysis? What is the interlacing of mathematical logic, and psychoanalytic teaching? What are the clinical consequences for a mathematician or scientist, and of course, how does psychoanalysis open space for changes in the flow of unforeseen historical cuts?
For Lacan, history was measured by analytical discourse, where the real emerges in the symbolic, and paves the way for change. “Truth is capable of change thanks to the coordinates and contingencies in its history. But through many truths, the one all alone manifests. What manifests itself is the place of truth as having logical cause,” writes Jacques-Alain Miller.
In that, Balažic’s work on questions of logics and mathematics sets up new coordinates, where the real subverts the symbolic horizons of knowledge, power, and enjoyed sense, while guiding one of the main psychoanalytic topics of 21st century with propulsive expression.