Lorenzo Chiesa

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?

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it? In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world. Agamben shows that, when combined with the idea of providence, this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics, from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, from the invisible hand of Smith's liberalism to ideas of order and security. But the greatest novelty to emerge from _The Kingdom and the Glory _ is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the work begun with _Homo Sacer_ reaches a decisive point, profoundly challenging and renewing our vision of politics

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.

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.

In Logics of Worlds , Alain Badiou discusses “four forms of change”: modification, fact, weak singularity, and strong singularity or event. Modification as “the simple becoming a world” is conceived as a change “without real change” . This possibly explains why, in the more recent Second manifeste pour la philosophie , Badiou opts for a tripartite division of change and only speaks of “three types of mutation” – fact, weak singularity, and event – omitting any reference to modification . In this paper I would like to dwell on some of the implications of the notion of modification as a change that changes nothing, but nevertheless underlies all other kinds of change, by focusing on the treatment it receives, from a different perspective, in the conclusion of Logics of Worlds dedicated to the question “What is it to Live?” Here Badiou states that the animal that man is “shift[s] almost constantly from one world to another” . I closely associate this effortless “shift” with “modification”, since no subjective dimension of creation seems to be involved at this level. We are dealing with nothing more than a natural “kind of objectal ubiquity” that is proper to the species homo sapiens . In spite of some terminological ambiguity, this should clearly be differentiated from any real change of world as incorporation into the new body of a truth. Moving from these premises, my first claim will be that an open thematisation of such a purely biological “shift” allows us to identify a series of tensions in Badiou’s notion of the ‘human animal’. I will then argue that Lacan’s own pronouncements on the human animal provide us with a valuable tool to think more thoroughly this basic form of change – which is not a change – in accordance with the theory of the body of truth advanced in Logics of Worlds; this will also entail a problematisation of Badiou’s own reading of the way Lacan articulates the connection between bodies, languages, and truths. Finally, I will show that a full appreciation of the “almost constant” shift of worlds that distinguishes homo sapiens from other animals can only reinforce the battle against the reduction of man to animality promoted by the reigning ideology Badiou defines as ‘democratic materialism’. To this end, I will sketch the contours of a fourth figure of the subject to be added to the three figures of the faithful, the reactive, and the obscure subject analysed in Logics of Worlds: returning to an intense page from Théorie du sujet that Badiou consecrates to Mallarmé’s and Lacan’s ‘structural dialectic’, I will tentatively name this fourth type of subjectivisation of body allied with the faithful subject, the ‘partisan’

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

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) has often been described as a ‘gothic’, if not straightforwardly ‘horror’ movie. While this claim could easily be challenged with regard to strict genre definitions, it is doubtless the case that the film deals very explicitly with fear, first and foremost the female protagonist’s fear of herself, which is placed at the top of the so-called ‘pyramid of fear’ drawn by her therapist/wanna-be-Saviour partner. My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects of the direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realisation that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts. Gynocide as male totalizing extermination of universal difference and genital self-mutilation as female reflexive hatred for the supposedly exceptional man mark the sadomasochistic extremes of the scene of the not-two, the frightening ob-scenity ( o-skené ), or off-representation, of human sexuality

This collection provides English readers with a critical update on current debates on biopolitics in and around Italian thought. More than a decade after the publication of seminal books such as Agamben’s _Homo Sacer_ and Hardt and Negri’s _Empire_, the names of, among others, Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, and Andrea Fumagalli have recently been brought to the attention of Anglophone scholars and political activists. Several authors have rightly emphasised the evanescent character of biopolitics, and the difficulty in providing a definition of it that could embrace all the conflicting theories of its most celebrated critics and supporters. The present collection is structured around the basic contention that bio-economy, human nature, and Christianity are the three visible contemporary manifestations of the theoretical object/problem of biopolitics in, respectively, Italian post-workerist economics, post-Marxist philosophical anthropology, and post-structuralist ontology. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki_