Psychoanalysis is an experience of truths and lies in language. It is also a discourse, and it is a praxis. Lacanian Coordinates takes the reader from the beginning of Lacan's teaching, from the logic of the signifier and the Lacanian subject, to the drive and object a, qua object a, the paradoxes of guilt, and finally to the desire of the Other, love, and femininity. Volume One explores the points of Lacanian orientation that lead us to the particularity of the subject, and considers whether we find them not solely in the discourse of the universal, to which religion, science and philosophy testify, but also in the analytic experience itself.Volume Two - More Lacanian Coordinates - opens with the question of love that for Lacan forms a discourse of fragments and letters addressed to the one, which circumscribe the nonexistence of the sexual relation. Further, Lacan situates love in relation to knowledge, making ignorance, alongside love and hatred, the third passion. Lacanian discourse, as a social bond of speaking beings in love, can be considered between two passions: to want to know and to want not to know. Each position has the real impact on the subject, whether neurotic or psychotic, leading to produce different outcomes and solutions.
Industry Reviews
'Love is only for those who speak, Lacan said, and no one before him pursued this logic with more passion. This book acquaints the reader with the strings of love that Lacan unties before us: love with the signifier, with knowledge, and with hate. Combining references to analytic practice with figures from Augustine to Duras, the author discerns the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relation between the sexes. Following up on the trail of volume one of Lacanian Coordinates, Bogdan Wolf interweaves the crucial markers with which the subject's experience can be circumscribed. Moving from Love to Ethics (where Antigone is evoked in her act, position, and desire for death), we arrive at the Clinic. Here, the author explores the neurotic's belief in the unconscious, family romance, and the reconcilability of semblances between speaking beings, then the psychotic's management of the sinthome, the knot with which Lacan tied the collapsed image of the body, as in the case of Joyce. This passionate and evocative exploration awaits any student of Lacan and follower of the Lacanian orientation.'- Jacques-Alain Miller, Former President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis'Bogdan Wolf's book is a masterful teaching of difficult Lacanian concepts. In a style both rigorous and relaxed, he threads many coordinates through Jacques-Alain Miller's new treatment of psychoanalysis. His view of love is overwhelming, fleshing out Lacan's formula of the sexual non-relation. His depiction of Antigone's second death is unique in its portrayal of the sublime and anamorphosis. Wolf shows the obsessional's relation to the image, not to person qua person. He presents James Joyce's relation to language as a compensation for a de-imaginarisation of his body, presenting the clinic of psychosis beyond its Father's Name concept. His depiction of the three passions tied to Lacan's four discourses is original and stunning. Working with the Other, desire, hysteria, and so on, Wolf ends with the end of analysis as a working with one's particular sinthome. For anyone trying to access the difficult theories and clinical realities of Freudian/Lacanian/Millerian analysis, this is the book to read.'- Ellie Ragland, Professor of English and Honorary French Professor and Frederick A. Middlebush Chair at the University of Missouri, where she teaches psychoanalytic theory
