Much has been written about Lacan’s Marx, about the way in which Lacan reads Marx, appropriates his ideas and reinvents them, transforming and Lacanizing them. What is not so clear is the impact of Marx on the development of Lacan’s thought and especially the way in which Lacan was Marxized, transformed and possessed by Marx, to the point of engendering a kind of Marxist who would certainly not be recognized as such by his followers.

Ever since Deleuze and Guattari brought attention to it, Artaud’s concept of a “body without organs” (from his 1947 play To Have Done with the Judgment of God ) has been overused as a metaphor for individual and collective rebellion. Yet many other lessons remain in his “absolute materialism” and the painful, powerfully revolutionary conflict he waged with the pervasive presence of matter — from physical objects to the soul, thoughts, and even God.

The Name-of-the-Father articulates the structure that gives rise to the subject, formed by the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. According to Lacan, its function acquires respectability and authority by binding its name to a desire-causing object. We will examine the intrinsic relation between the law and desire.

As global armed conflict seems once more imminent, we will examine from this perspective the articulation between psychoanalysis and politics. We will return to Freud’s thought on impending war, and consider how psychoanalysis can trace an ethico-political trajectory that dissipates violence and cruelty.

In his dialogue On Divination, Cicero writes that the Pythagoreans cultivated the practice of “observing voices”: “not only the voices of the gods but also those of men, which they named ‘omens.’” Building on discussions at Après-Coup in 2022 and 2023, this presentation will explore the conditions in which sudden speech events have become objects of attention in ritual, literature, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, yielding insights into omens, slips, and epiphanies.

Lacan countered the long-disputed biologism of Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” with “the unconscious is politics.” Yet he never separated what the unconscious elaborates from real bodies, for instance of sexual organs in their copulation, with regard to their defective sexual jouissance. Noting that what is called the sexual relation, le rapport sexuel, precisely is not one, and that something else has been substituted in it, something he termed plus de jouir, we can surmise that it’s there that politics begins.