The Body-Event

Abstract

The text discusses elements of the materialist orientation, as it is elaborated by Lacan in the final phase of his teachings. This orientation presupposes a second return to Freud via Joyce and becomes most obvious at the point when topology substitutes the link between psychoanalysis and linguistics. Lacan subverts his “classical” elaboration of the logic of the symbolic order by orientating his teachings around the question of enjoyment and the real. Thereby he produces a new understanding of the unconscious, which is articulated in the conceptual split on the transferential and the real unconscious.