Lorenzo Chiesa

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in which two influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito's theory, the article lays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racial difference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life. However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘flesh without body’, Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach, in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. The second part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relations between primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derived an alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact.

A philosophical examination of the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later psychoanalytic theory. In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom “There is no sexual relationship.” Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that “There is no sexual relationship” is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real “not-two.” The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility. Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution. For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a “para-ontology” yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?

Introduction to the special issue of Cosmos and History, 'The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics'. This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role within contemporary Italian thought, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’, the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and delineate paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’. The Italian Difference features texts by Antonio Negri, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Gianni Vattimo, Roberto Esposito, Matteo Mandarini, Luisa Muraro, Mario Tronti, Alberto Toscano, Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Chiesa.

While a significant amount of research has recently been carried out that investigates the similarities and differences between Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan#39;s theories of the subject, less attention has been paid to the direct relationship between the latter and Badiou#39;s set-theoretical ontology. This article applies some of the most important conceptual propositions advanced in the first two Parts of Being and Event to the key psychoanalytic issue of the identification of the conscious and unconscious subject as expounded by Lacan in his ninth Seminar, L#39;identification. More specifically, this article aims to show how Badiou#39;s notions of the quot;count-as-onequot; and the quot;forming-into-onequot; can profitably be put to work in order better to understand Lacan#39;s notions of the quot;unary traitquot; and the S1, the quot;master-signifierquot;. What is at stake in both cases is the relationship between structure and metastructure, presentation and representation. Furthermore, this article provides an outline for a set-theoretical formalisation of the relation between consciousness and the unconscious as developed by Lacan in L#39;identification. Lacan#39;s breaking of the solidarity between unity and totality allows him to work with parts: from the inexistence of totality as a one follows the possibility of thinking the part as quot;partial systemquot;. Lacan identifies this system with the unconscious. Applying a number of set-theoretical axioms, this article argues that the existence of the unconscious as partial system ultimately relies on the in-existence of the void, or, more specifically, the existence of the void as part that in-exists as element.

Is what psychoanalysis calls the ‘absence of the sexual relationship’ the basic transcendental invariant of the speaking animal? Or should it be understood as a historical product? Also, assuming that language is structurally incomplete, and therefore that Homo sapiens cannot avoid the dialectic of semblance and truth, does this necessarily entail that the absence of meta-language always correspond to the absence of the sexual relationship? In this article I will show how, in his Seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lacan develops two different narratives.

This paper analyses Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, showing how it should not be confined to the field of a negative critique of biopolitics. In his work, Agamben cautiously delineates a positive figure of homo sacer, whom, according to him, we all virtually are. Such figure would be able to subvert the form in which the relation between bare life and political existence has so far been both thought and lived in the West. How and when is this passage from negative to positive sacredness historically accomplished for Agamben? Is such transit after all thinkable? These are the two basic questions he both unintentionally formulates and leaves undecided in his book Homo Sacer. Agamben further elabourates his investigation of biopolitics in the book he dedicates to Saint Paul, The Time That Remains. Chiesa suggests that, in this volume, the figure of homo sacer as earthly hero is transposed onto that of the messianic man. This can only be achieved by means of an elabourate Christian—and more specifically Franciscan—development of the ontological notion of ‘form of life’. Problematically enough, Agamben is able to carry out a transvaluation of biopolitics only in the guise of a bio-theo-politics.

This paper analyses Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, showing how it should not be confined to the field of a negative critique of biopolitics. In his work, Agamben cautiously delineates a positive figure of homo sacer, whom, according to him, we all virtually are. Such figure would be able to subvert the form in which the relation between bare life and political existence has so far been both thought and lived in the West. How and when is this passage from negative to positive sacredness historically accomplished for Agamben? Is such transit after all thinkable? These are the two basic questions he both unintentionally formulates and leaves undecided in his book Homo Sacer. Agamben further elaborates his investigation of biopolitics in the book he dedicates to Saint Paul, The Time That Remains. Chiesa suggests that, in this volume, the figure of homo sacer as earthly hero is transposed onto that of the messianic man. This can only be achieved by means of a detailed Christian—and more specifically Franciscan—development of the ontological notion of ‘form of life’. Problematically enough, Agamben is able to carry out a transvaluation of biopolitics only in the guise of a bio-theo-politics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World Of Desire:Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic TheoryLorenzo Chiesa (bio)The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953-1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow Homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to the domain of animal instincts, human desire can only be adequately understood against the background of an evolutionary enquiry on the emergence of language, one that problematises both the implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinism and the logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence endorsed by natural scientists as different as Stephen Jay Gould and Adolf Portmann, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic immanently arise.1 Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what, especially in Seminar I, Lacan repeatedly refers to as "the world of the symbol," or "the symbolic world"—a crucial phrase, rich with philosophical implications, to which critics have not yet [End Page 200] paid sufficient attention.2 The most important point to be grasped here is that the symbolic order is a world in the sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, a uni-verse, it compensates for the failure of a strictly 'natural' relationship between man as animal and his environment. Yet, in performing this function, the Symbolic also amounts to nothing other than 'human nature' tout-court.3 In other words, the Symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environment that must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.4 For this reason, the very opposition between nature and culture is as such put into question and re-proposed at a different level.5Lacan's seminars and articles of the early to mid-1950s are usually read from the standpoint of the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech in their relation to the Kojèvian dialectic of the recognition of desire. While not underestimating the importance of this first formulation of desire as desire of the other, I intend to dwell especially on its biological presuppositions, since Lacan will maintain them—often to the point of taking them for granted—even after abandoning the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech. This will also enable me to show that the supposedly Hegelian Lacan of this period is already preoccupied with a materialist explanation of language and of human desire as desire for recognition, both of which are framed within the context of a virulent anti-teleological, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist polemics.It is, however, paramount to pre-emptively specify that my new approach to Seminars I and II does not intend to deny the impasses of Lacan's early notion of desire as a desire for recognition, which I have thoroughly discussed in Subjectivity and Otherness.6 In brief, the problem with Lacan's appropriation of Kojève is that, at this stage, the mutual recognition of one's desire is identified with the subject's fully successful integration into the symbolic order. What is not sufficiently stressed in this way—yet not entirely overlooked—is the incompleteness of the latter, the fact that man's pseudo-environment presents itself as a totality only insofar as it is structurally not-all. The [End Page 201] elaboration of a meticulous theoretical distinction between need, demand, and desire carried out in Seminars IV and V, as well as a direct confrontation with the Real as the not-all of the Symbolic in Seminar VII, will later oblige Lacan to reconsider this harmonic view. By the early 1960s, full integration in the Symbolic will be explicitly regarded as impossible and the dialectic of desire will consequently be focused on the level of the subject's mapping of himself as falling onto the object of the repressed fantasy.IIAccording to Lacan, man is born prematurely, that is, with "foetalised traits,"7 which are especially...