“The Mirror Stage” contains a reference to an article by Roger Caillois on mimicry. This presentation will explore the role of Caillois’s concept of mimicry and the “temptation of space” in Lacan’s writing, while bearing in mind the contrasting theory of the “mimetic faculty” Walter Benjamin developed in the same years.

For Lacan, the subject of the unconscious is structured like a Möbius strip: internal and external form a continuum. The Lacanian unconscious, “structured like a language,” is not, as Freud would have it, an inner domain; conscious and unconscious processes coexist on one and the same surface. For clinical practice, the longitudinal cut corresponding to this “one loop that is two” provides a topological model of psychoanalytic interpretation not as a single intervention, but rather a double movement around the subject that reveals its structure, interrupts compulsive repetition, and opens the possibility of new signification.

The third part of Spinoza’s masterpiece Ethics deals with the “Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” In this crucial section the Dutch philosopher reveals, in geometric fashion (more geometrico), his largely revolutionary ideas on the mind-body relationship and on the role of “affects” in the formation of our identity and our moral sense. In particular, desire, as the most primitive “affect,” becomes the key to understanding what “ethics” truly is, transcending or overcoming earlier philosophical tradition.

The verb “to be” tempts subjects to think they can attain the wholeness of Being. But the symbolic order is founded on lack, as subjects discover whenever the jouissance they do obtain falls short of the one they expected. One can subjectivize this disappointment in two ways: by neurosis, which clings to the Other’s broken promise of being; or by desire, which leads subjects to construct a singular object (what Lacan called object a) that brings them a surplus of jouissance.

Nothing is more commonplace than transference in all its manifestations — love, hate and ignorance. And yet, for all its ubiquity, transference is the specific, fundamental tool of psychoanalysis. How can we situate and address it from the perspectives of both the analysand and the analyst?

For all their basic differences, clinical facts and scientific facts are remarkably close, and overlap in several areas. Both have a special relation to knowledge, with criteria based on validity rather than truth. As with science, the clinic’s kernel lies in repetition, revealing the real in all its variations. There, knowledge can be unknotted and reknotted differently. Yet, clinical or scientific discovery comes about as a result of an intrinsic logic and not by chance, within a mode of thought that reckons with each subjective position.