READING GROUP:
Topic: Seminar X: Anxiety
Discussion lead by Meera Lee, Ph.D., LP,
Time: Sept 27, 2026 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82826952007?pwd=LhdN048pn5I8NdIMYVXGqq2bSA6Iya.1
In his tenth seminar, delivered from 1962 to 1963, Lacan stated that anxiety is “that which does not deceive” and is “not without an object.” Situated between the preceding seminar on identification and the subsequent seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Seminar X marks a transitional point in Lacan’s teaching, as he moves from the symbolic and the signifier toward the real and affect and, consequently, develops the idea of object a more fully. In this ten-week teaching seminar, we will read Lacan’s Seminar X to understand these axiomatic formulations of anxiety in the context of this crucial shift in his teaching. We will begin with Freud’s two essays, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” as Lacan himself begins his seminar in response to the former. We will then proceed to a close reading of Seminar X and conclude with two contemporary commentaries on Lacanian anxiety by Jacques-Alain Miller and Éric Laurent.
Each seminar will consist of a lecture followed by discussion.
~~~
TEACHING SEMINAR:
Title: Psychoanalysis, Antiphilosophy and the Logics of Time and Truth
Presenter: Arka Chattopadhyay, Ph.D.
Time: Sep 27, 2026 02:30 PM – 4:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/95692229311
Description: This talk will discuss Alain Badiou’s thesis that psychoanalysis is an anti-philosophy from which philosophy dialectically affirms itself. I will analyze Badiou’s reading of the psychoanalytic act’s irreducibility to time. He calls this a “nontemporal guarantee of time” or a “spatial metaphor of eternity.” The question remains if we can disjoin space from time and whether Badiou’s thesis falls into self-contradiction when he himself considers eternity to be part of temporality in Images of The Present Time (2014, 2023). Why does Badiou think that ‘logical time’ is not sufficient to ground temporality in psychoanalysis? Why does he consider the psychoanalytic act to be atemporal in its ultimate concentration on the topological cut? The talk will raise these questions by close-reading Badiou’s 1994-1995 seminar Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (2013, 2018) in which he zooms in on this question of temporality as the key difference between philosophy and psychoanalysis as anti-philosophy. We will see how this logic of time interacts with Badiou’s critique of Lacan’s logic of truth where the desire for formalization meets the desire for matheme on the side of the analyst who hastefully formalizes in order to tackle anxiety. For Badiou, that there can be no knowledge of truth and none of the Real, not to mention that there is no truth of the Real is a triple-negation operating as Lacan’s anti-philosophical signature. If knowledge of truth is unattainable, does it mean that the psychoanalytic discourse which places the S2 of knowledge in the position of truth can never attain itself? The talk will critique Badiou’s critique by situating ‘ignorance’ as a form of knowledge and argue that jouissance without knowledge and knowledge without subject mark the psychoanalytic act as variations in truth or ‘varity.’
Bio: Arka Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He has published academic work in several edited volumes including Frontiers of South Asian Culture, Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature and in journals like Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal of World Literature, Filozofski Vestnik etc. Arka is the founding co-editor of Sanglap and Anthem Book Series Co-editor for Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury UK, 2019) and Posthumanism: Politics of Subjectivity (Orient Black Swan, 2025). He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013, Roman), Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. (2017, Brill), Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (Bloomsbury India, 2020) Ecological Entanglements (Orient BlackSwan 2023) and Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury US, 2024). He has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship 2022-2023 & Harry Ransom Centre Fellowship 2023-2024. He has guest-edited an issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2025) on the plastic turn in humanities.