Brice Marden, African Drawing 23, 2011-2012
Workshop
Barred Letters: $ or The Subject without Subjectivity
Erik Porge
Saturday, February 28, 2026 • 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
How must we define the status of the letter in psychoanalysis if the latter is a practice grounded in speech? All speech contains a letter, as equivocations or slips of the tongue reveal. Freud showed their range in the formations of the unconscious; Lacan defined their specific status as intermediary between the function of individual speech and the field of language on which knowledge rests. He labored long on this, from his early “schizographs” to “Lituraterre” and to identification with the symptom via the Borromean knot. To do so, he relied, for his reading of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am,” on its contrary, “Either I don’t think or I’m not,” underlying the split in the subject ($), to which we can't impute any essential subjectivity.
Mandatory reading: Lacan: “Lituraterre,” Autres écrits or Seminar XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas de semblant, 1971, class of May 12.
Suggested readings: Lacan: Seminar XIV, 1966-67, The Logic of the Phantasm, classes of December 21, 1966, January 11 and 18, 1967; “Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire,” Écrits. Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VI, part 3. Porge, Erik: Se compter trois, Le temps logique de Lacan, Chapitre “Après coup, Certitude et contingence dans le temps logique” (érès, rééd. 2024).
Location: In-person in NYC and online via Zoom.
Fee: $80; For students with ID: $20. Registration details to follow.
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Erik Porge practices psychoanalysis in Paris and is a founding member of the association L’instance lacanienne and the editor-in-chief of the journal essaim. He is a faculty member of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. Among his many books are the recent Amour, désir, jouissance. Le moment de la sublimation (2020), L’incurable de la vérité. Un réel de la psychanalyse (2022), and in English translation, Truth and Knowledge in the Clinic (2017).