Volume 3, Issue 1, December 2021

The cover shows an engraving by David Jones made in 1927 while staying with the Benedictines of Caldey (later Prinknash Abbey).

Volume 3, Issue 1, December 2021

Cover Page

ISSN 2732-5849

EDITORIAL: John Gale

ARTICLES

Dentro-Fuori l’Estetica Trascendentale. Interiorità kantiana Della Psicoanalisi Ed Estraneità Esicoanalitica All’Esterno Critico

Alessandra Campo

Alessandra Campo is a research fellow in theoretical philosophy at the University of Aquila. For several years she has been dealing with the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, in particular regarding the metaphysical and cosmological implications of Freudian-Lacanian theory (Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze). More recently, her research has been devoted to Kantian philosophy, with particular reference to the metaphysical causal link presented as a ‘fact of reason’ in the Critique of Practical Reason and as an ‘anticipation of perception’ in the Critique of Pure Reason. She is the author of several essays and collaborates with several journals. She edited the volume L’uno perverso. L’uno senza l’altro: una perversione? (Textus, 2018) and with Simone Gozzano, Einstein vs Bergson. An Enduring Quarrel on Time (De Gruyter, 2021). She is also the author of two monographs: Tardività. Freud dopo Lacan (Mimesis/Altro Discorso, 2018) and Fantasma e sensazione. Lacan con Kant (Mimesis, 2017/Aesthetica, 2020).

Vestigia Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, pages 3-35

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Lacan is right. Kantian transcendental aesthetics must be revised. His space is imaginary, egoic, mental. No real is found there. However, this must not be attributed only to Kant’s recourse to Euclidean geometry, the only one available in his time. The idealism of transcendental aesthetics depends above all on the exclusion of sensation: the only contact with a transcendental, unconscious outside and inside. The contrast between these two dimensions stands at the empirical level of perception, a feeling of which one is aware, fantasmatically. Something that Freud suggests in the essay ‘Negation’. The original archicorism of the subjectivity that he describes is a modification that produces an anesthesia, or insensitivity, in the light of which the meaning of his aphorism – psyche is extensive, but knows nothing about it – is clarified.

The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz

John Shannon Hendrix

John Shannon Hendrix writes mostly about psychoanalysis in relation to architecture. Books include Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan, and Architecture and the Unconscious, co-edited with Lorens Holm. He is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture. He teaches classes at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 36-59

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Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is a compound German word used by Sigmund Freud in his essay ‘The Unconscious’ in 1915, and is a concept developed in psychoanalytic theory in the Freudian-Lacanian field. It was translated in the Standard Edition as ‘ideational representation’. Vorstellung and representation have philosophical roots in Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Brentano. The word is taken to mean in Freud the combination of the Sachvorstellung, thing presentation or image, and Vortvorstellung, word presentation in language, which takes the place of the affect (drive, instinct, libido, emotion) in the unconscious. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is key to the relation between the dream thought and the dream image in the dream work described by Freud. According to Jacques Lacan, words in language cannot adequately represent the elements of affect, so the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is rather that which takes the place of the representation, constituting a gap between affect and representation, thus méconnaissance and the objet a. Lacan associates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the signifier in language from structural linguistics, and thus with the subject, defined in the gap between signifiers, as that which is represented by one signifier to another. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is key to the relation between conscious thought in the Imaginary order of Lacan, and unconscious thought in the Symbolic order. Given all this, the concept remained undeveloped by both Freud and Lacan, and is in much need of further development in psychoanalytic theory.

The Virgin Capture Myth in the Hunt of the Unicorn during the Middle Ages

Angelica Federici

Angelica Federici is a Digital Humanities Research Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University on female religious patronage in late medieval Rome. Her research focuses primarily on the role and perception of women during the Middle Ages.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 60-80

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The unicorn makes his first appearance in 400 B.C. in the writings of Ctesias (ca. fifth century), a Greek physician working at the Persian court of Artaxerxes (465-424 B.C.) and Darius II (423-404 B.C.). However, the lore of the unicorn was not established until the third century with the appearance of the Physiologus, literally ‘the scientist’, written by an anonymous writer in Alexandria and considered by modern historiography as the father of all Bestiaries. The object of the Physiologus was to discuss the properties of animals as vehicles for Christian morality. According to the Physiologus, the unicorn is a small kid like animal that can be captured only through the agency of a virgin. The unicorn is attracted by her scent and once he sees her jumps into her lap and falls asleep. Only at this point can the hunters proceed with his capture, leading him forth to the palace of the king. The popularity of the virgin-capture myth was contemporary to the growing cult around the Virgin Mary and to the emergence of courtly literature in Europe during the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth century. The secularisation of the virgin-capture myth and its adoption into Troubadour poetry exacerbates women’s problematic role inside the legend and its misogynistic reading by contemporary sources. The virgin is both and object of purity and the betrayer of the unicorn. The erotic quality of the encounter is justified by the mother-son relationship which seems to be at the core of most psychoanalytic readings of the cycles. It can be observed in a number of images in which the unicorn is portrayed as being small, meek and fragile. He is not the great beast described by Ctesias but rather the one we encounter in the Physiologus. While these interpretations are effective, they tend to offer a point of view which is always masculine in content and intent. We are bound to ask the question: What about the v/Virgin?

Lacan and the Pythagoreans: a note on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, 5: 14^th December 1960

John Gale

John Gale is a philosopher and psychoanalyst, and the founder and President of the International Network of psychoanalytic Practices (INPP). Formerly a Benedictine monk, he lectured in philosophy and patristics before leaving the priesthood. He was a trustee and director of a number of organisations in the field of therapeutic communities and psychosis. He was Development Editor and Deputy Editor of the journal Therapeutic Communities for seven years, and is currently a member of its International Editorial Advisory Group. He is also a member of the reviewing panel of the British Journal of Psychotherapy and of the Scientific Committee of the journal Avances en Psicología Latineoamericana. John has edited a number of books including Insanity and Divinity: studies in psychosis and spirituality (Routlegde, 2008) and published around 60 papers in various academic journals including Studia Monastica, the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, The British Journal of Psychotherapy, Critical Psychology, Organisational and Social Dynamics, the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and Current Psychiatry Reviews. He has also participated in discussions at Pratiques psychanalytique, the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana, and the Federacíon Psicoanalítica de America Latina. He speaks regularly at conferences and has given papers at universities and institutes in the UK and abroad including the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex University, the Freud museum London, Brunel University, and Paris VII. His interests span philosophy, psychoanalysis and spirituality, and the main references in his work include the notions of language, silence, tradition, absence, mysticism, madness, place and dwelling. Foremost literary references in his work are to Stoic and Neoplatonic writers and texts from Late Antiquity – e.g. Clement of Alexandria, the Apohthegmata Patrum, Evagrius Ponticus, Augustine – the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Werner Jaeger, Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 81-99

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This article endeavours to provide the context to a digression in Lacan’s Seminar viii concerning the Pythagoreans, within the Vorlage of the history of ancient medicine. This shows the philosophical and historical richness that lies behind the Lacanian corpus, while illustrating the manifold pitfalls that await the uncritical reader who may take Lacan’s text merely at face value. First, the author suggests that Lacan’s investigation into the meaning of ἔρως and desire in Plato’s Symposium, cannot be separated from Platonism as it has come down to us, in the Western tradition, from Plotinus and Augustine. Second, through a careful reading of the Greek sources, the author sets forth the scholarly arguments concerning the topics which form the core of the passage of Lacan under review. Namely, (i) the hagiographical nature of Iamblichus’ De Vita Pythagorae and the VP of Porphyry upon which it was based, the teaching of the later Pythagoreans (notably Alcmaeon of Croton and Philolaus) and the references to the Pythagoreans found in Aristotle; (ii) the erroneous, nineteenth century, distinction between a Hippocratic or Coan and Cnidian school of medicine; and (iii) John Anderson indirect influence on Betrand Russell’s Wisdom of the West, especially in the light of Russell’s mistaken view that the religious and mathematical aspects of Pythagoras’ thought are a unity.

Repetition or Containment? Responses to Wounds in the First World War: Robert Graves, Ernest Hemmingway and Wilfred Bion

Chris Nicholson

Dr Chris Nicholson is the Head of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. A Senior Lecturer teaching on several programmes, he has devised two new degrees, BA Therapeutic Care and BA Childhood Studies. Before joining the Department, he worked in a range of children’s services for over fifteen years, principally therapeutic communities for traumatised adolescents, developing an assessment service, a provision for leaving care, and with colleagues, setting up the Junction Young Person’s service for Colchester MIND. His 2010 book, Children and Adolescents in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic Approaches, draws on these experiences. Chris’ research centred on life and key writings of the poet Robert Graves in the light of his traumatic WW1 experiences. His other interest are in psychoanalysis and literature, therapeutic communities and experiential forms of learning. He sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of two Journals, the Robert Graves Review, and the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities. Chris sits on the Executive Board of the charity, The Consortium of Therapeutic Communities and the Children and Young Peoples’ Advisory Board for the Community of Communities at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He developed the Core Competency Framework for Therapeutic Communities, and has pioneered Active Education Events, a variant model of group relations conference. Chris also provides training, consultation and supervision to therapeutic services in and the UK, Greece and India.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 100-118

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This paper considers how internal divisions enforced by WW1 are exemplified by the physical and psychological war wounds suffered by three key figures, Wilfred Bion, Ernest Hemmingway and Robert Graves. This wounding inculcates a repetition of wounding seen in either their writing or lives centred around concerns with guilt and masculinity. The paper draws critically upon biography, autobiography and literary works using a psychoanalytic lens, and particularly Freud’s developing conceptualisations of trauma, to better understand the motivations and forces shaping their writing and lives. A triangulation between these three examples creates a thinking space to propose a generalised case that may illuminate the kinds of internal conflict that young men who are wounded, physically and psychologically, whilst fighting may be facing, and to consider what leads to the positive or negative outcomes they experience.

The drive to exhume

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor is a psychoanalyst in Paris, Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne, Director of the review Topique and heads the International Association for Interactions of Psychoanalysis. She is the author of 20 books and 200 scientific papers, her main axis of research being the interactions between psychoanalysis and civilisation.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 119-137

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Time in psychoanalysis has always to do with the dimension of the posthumous, uniting life and death, present and past, in the form of reviviscency. It implies a perpetual return to a buried object, which never ceases to manifest itself alive again. I propose here to revisit the archaeological metaphor by bringing it closer to the methodology of archaeologists.

Bergson and the Horror of the Void

Sergio Benvenuto

Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and philosopher, and lives in Rome. He is researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CNR) in Rome, at the former Institute of Psychology. He is the president of Institute Elvio Fachinelli (Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis). From 1995 until 2020 he was the editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis (EJP), he is member of the Editorial Board of American Imago, Psychoanalytic Discourse and Philosophy World Democracy. He is a contributor to journals such as Lettre Internationale (Berlin), Journal for Lacanian Studies, L’évolution psychiatrique, Division/Review, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association. He has worked on Freud and Lacan, Wittgenstein and ethics, Plato’s philosophy of eros, theory of fashion, theory of populism, monotheisms (with J.-L. Nancy). His publications, in many different languages, include ‘Perversion and charity: an ethical approach’ in Perversion. Psychoanalytic Perspectives / Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2006); with A. Molino In Freud’s Tracks (Aronson, 2008); ‘Ethics, Wonder and Real in Wittgenstein’ in Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian Approaches, (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2013); What Are Perversions? (Karnac, 2016); and Conversations with Lacan (Routledge, 2020).

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 138-154

View Article Abstract

There is no abstract for this article.

De la consigne a l’ouverture : impact de l’adresse sur la relation therapeutique

Muriel Rojas Zamudio

Psychoanalyst, practitioner in artistic mediations and art therapist, Muriel Rojas-Zamudio, is the author of several books and articles in specialized journals (Vestigia, International Transpersonal Journal, Rebelle (s), Génération Tao …). She is also trainer at CesHum (Paris) and within the Association of European Psychoanalysts (APE, Paris).

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 155-176

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A partir d’une expérience d’art-thérapie éclairée par la psychanalyse auprès de personnes dites déficientes mentales, cet article interroge l’effet de l’adresse sur le psychisme de l’adressé et les potentialités qui en découlent dans le cadre d’une psychothérapie.

Mots clés : art-thérapie, langage, déficience mentale, psychanalyse

The lack in Transmission: variation on psychoanalytic training

Fernando Castrillón

Fernando Castrillón Psy.D. is a personal and supervising psychoanalyst and Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Elvio Fachinelli Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis, based in Rome, serves as faculty with the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) and is on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society. He is also a Professor in the Community Mental Health Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and served as the founding director of the CIIS practicum site The Clinic Without Walls. Recent articles include ‘No Leaders/No Masses: Virtuality and Contemporary Group Life in the Shadow of Freud’ and ‘Denying Death its Due: Ecological Discourse, Technology and the Unconscious’ (European Journal of Psychoanalysis). His latest book is Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society (Routledge, 2021), was co-edited with Thomas Marchevsky. Dr Castrillon maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 177-182

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Closely following Lacan’s comments on analytic training and transmission in his Variations on the Standard Treatment and putting them in engagement with his observations regarding the psychoanalytic institution in L’Étourdit, I advance a set of arguments regarding the vexing issue of psychoanalytic formation, particularly in the U.S. and the implications for clinical practice. I argue that, in the U.S., at least, we all too often refuse to engage in the kind of attempt at a larger cultural rapport that might allow ground for an analytic discourse counter posed to that of the capitalist, thereby providing an aperture, an opening in an otherwise closed horizon seemingly bereft of castration and its generative possibilities. The salutary implications for the clinic are evident. What if we were to expand the bounds of the clinic such that the psychoanalytic institution approached those in formation in much the same way as we might approach each other at a conference: listening to a dire that haunts a dit, a saying irreducible to what is said, on the part of those attempting to work with the impossible, namely the dire of Lacan and his texts, and ultimately the dire of Freud, which may come to hold us. This could be a group shorn of the imaginary obscenity of the group-effect, foregoing both the Master’s and the Capitalist’s discourse, and thereby revealing the lie that turns capitalism ever faster. A psychoanalytic association firmly ensconced in the discourse of the analyst as social bond that opens up to the impossible.

NOTES & STUDIES

Contagion, Influence and Inspiration

Vered Lev Kenaan

Lev Kenaan is professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She is the author of Pandora’s Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Wisconsin, 2008) and The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Classical Texts (Oxford, 2019). She is the editor of the Literary Journal, Dappim: Research in Literature.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 183-190

View Article Abstract

There is no abstract for this article.

Two Pathways: Thinking Sublimation with David Jones

Luke Thurston

Luke Thurston is Director of Postgraduate Research in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, UK. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, the author of Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism and James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, and the translator of Jean Laplanche’s The Unfinished Copernican Revolution. His current project is a study of modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on May Sinclair and David Jones.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 191-209

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This paper returns to the unfinished Freudian concept of sublimation, exploring two contrasting postwar efforts to finish it theoretically – by Winnicott and by Lacan – in the light of questions raised by the work of modernist poet-artist David Jones on how to relate trauma, sexuality and art. Winnicott’s theory of culture as a medium for playful self-realisation is explored as one response to the ambiguous Freudian notion of a pathway from the sexual to the non-sexual, alongside a reading of parts of Jones’s In Parenthesis that represent the wartime trenches as a sacred, redemptive space, a sublime opening at odds with conventional understandings of wartime experience and war trauma. It is noted that this idea of the poem as a sublimation of war trauma is consistent with many accounts of Jones as redemptive or self-therapeutic. This, however, it is argued, is to misrepresent the power of Jones’s art, to overlook its anti-hermeneutic dimension. It is that dimension, the argument concludes, that the Lacanian approach to sublimation, where it is linked to the late Freudian problematic of the death drive, makes uncannily visible and allows us to gain a fuller sense of Jones’s significance.

Extimity, Co-anamorphosis, and Narrative Surfaces

Don Kunze

Don Kunze taught architecture studio, theory, general arts criticism, and seminars on theory, film, and landscape architecture at Penn State, University at Buffalo, LSU (Landscape), Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (Virginia Tech); and conducted workshops at South Dakota State University, Frankfort University of Applied Sciences, and Carleton University. He is the author of a book on Giambattista Vico and maintains on-line publications dealing with psychoanalysis, virtuality, the uncanny, and critical theory.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 210-222

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This essay aims to confirm Jacques-Alain Miller’s claim, that Lacan’s concept of extimité colors the entirety of his work. To do this, I must extend Mladen Dolar’s equally ambitious claim for anamorphosis, to meet extimity in a double circuit. My proof begins with an answer to Lacan’s question in Seminar VII (paraphrasing), ‘What was anamorphosis before it was anamorphosis?’ The obvious answer – the uncanny – is too general. Within the uncanny itself is a topology of temporality that allows Lacan to show how time is sustained by means of non-orienting, self-intersecting projective (2-dimensional) surfaces. Although extimity is typically explained as a spatial phenomenon, it is equally or even primarily temporal by means of the uncanny’s modern representatives, devices of fiction, such as the plot point, that regulate time spatially. Because the space of the psyche is already radically temporal, this may be a moot point. This is the ‘extension’ in Freud’s saying, Psyche ist ausgedehnt. Or, perhaps, Weiß nichts davon: it ‘knows nothing of it’.

The Extraneity of the Inside and the Intimacy of the Outside

Massimo Filippi and Emilio Maggio

Massimo Filippi is a full professor of neurology at Vita e Salute University, Milan, Italy and has worked for many years on the question of the animal from a philosophical and political perspective. He is a member of the editorial board of Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista and collaborates with Il manifesto and the Corriere della Sera. He has published more than a hundred essays in books and journals and the following volumes (alone or in collaboration with others): Ai confini dell’umano (Ombre Corte 2010), I margini dei diritti animali (Ortica 2011), Natura infranta (Ortica 2013), Crimini in tempo di pace (Elèuthera 2013), Penne e pellicole (Mimesis 2014), Sento dunque sogno (Ortica 2016), Altre specie di politica (Mimesis 2016), L’invenzione della specie (Ombre Corte 2016), Questioni di specie (Elèuthera 2017), Genocidi animali (Mimesis 2018) e Il virus e la specie (Mimesis 2020). He also edited Nell’albergo di Adamo (Mimesis 2010), Corpi che non contano (Mimesis 2015), a monographic issue of ‘aut aut’ entitled Mostri e altri animali, Jean-Luc Nancy, La sofferenza è animale (Mimesis 2019) and Divenire invertebrato (Ombre Corte 2020) He has also translated several books.

Emilio Maggio studied mass communications theory and technique; he deals with cinema and expressive instances of the entertainment industry. He has carried out research and dissemination about sub-cultural and counter-cultural expressions. He is member of the editorial board of the critical anti-speciesist journal Liberazioni. Together with Massimo Filippi, he is the author of Penne e Pellicole. Gli animali, la letteratura e il cinema (Mimesis). He collaborated on the digital version of the journal Alfabeta and currently contributes to Dinamo Press, Opera Viva Magazine, Effimera and specialist cinema magazines Lo Specchio Scuro and Filmidee.

Vestigia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 223-234

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Traditionally, philosophical anthropology has argued in favour of the human as a superior animal. Against this ideological presupposition, in this paper we will argue instead for a critique of that said approach. Firstly, we will deconstruct the way man places himself above and at a distance from objects that, for lack of an other, become his. Secondly, we will analyse the way through which man’s gaze separates the living from the non-living, without forgetting the way this translates into political practices, namely those of inclusion and exclusion, as well as denouncing the ‘decisionist’ and theological-political characters of this perspective. In the third section, the posthuman is proposed as a paradigm of the crisis of this fundamental binarism, as the politics of hybrid bodies brings into question this separation. From section four on, we will associate this new politics with the ethics of horror as well as those of the obscene proposed by the cinematography of the new flesh, where the inside-outside dichotomy is further challenged. Lastly, it is through the on camera/off camera dialectic that we will come to identify the binarism in question in relation to the cinematic shot.