The Secret Substance

By | October 11th, 2018|LRO 96|

If popular wisdom baptized money as "the excrement of the Devil", the cunning of Luther (whose bowel movements inspired the Reformation, according to the biographers) consisted in robbing money from the devil and having it blessed by God. This gave the green light to capitalism, which is not without reason is doing much better with [...]

The gadget-Eros

By | October 3rd, 2018|LRO 94|

The gadget-Eros [1] “Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire.”[2] However, in a universe of sexual consumption, where the sex market is particularly extended and can be accessed in a variety of ways, the love partner is assigned a new status. Along with the spread of the ready-made fantasy, the subject’s relation to jouissance [...]

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal as Symptom?

By | September 29th, 2018|LRO 93|

States began treating civil populations like data sets in the late 1990s.[1] In 2002, the National Security Agency (NSA), established its Information Awareness Office (IAO), whose motto is Scientia est potentia – knowledge is power. Since knowledge was now being produced in “ones and zeroes”, the agency understood it had to reorient its gaze.[2] A [...]

Millenarianism 2.0

By | September 26th, 2018|LRO 92|

Discourses on technology are capable of generating far more delusional metaphors than the field of science. These metaphors have fostered the creation of identity groupings, "communities of jouissance", which make the fetishization of technology into the foundation of a mystical preaching. Part of the explanation is that technologies reach much more extended spheres of human [...]

Turning One’s Back

By | September 22nd, 2018|LRO 91|

Psychoanalysis has shown us that the parlêtre’s life is based on the disharmony which exists between the sexes, on the impossibility of complementary enjoyments since in fact we make love with our unconscious. This is the idea condensed in the Lacanian aphorism: there is no sexual rapport. But certainly, a little movement of the body [...]

Art and Fiction

By | September 19th, 2018|LRO 90|

Art and Fiction Kan Yasuda’s 'The secret of the Sky' In Short  Surprise! To encounter the work of art The secret of the sky (1996) by Kan Yasuda, means to face “the sovereign image”[1] in Naoshima Island ![2] Beyond the phenomenology of perception, the visitor is invited to fall upon the significantised element. Freud and Lacan [...]

The tea of the master and the tea of desire. A short story in the light of Lacan’s Seminar XVII

By | September 15th, 2018|LRO 89|

Amantine is the heroine of the exceptional short story À Clairmont by Maryse Battistuzzi.[1] She is an old lady with a particular whim that makes other people wonder: when taking her tea she invariably leaves a small quantity in the bottom of her cup. To Amantine, to consume those last sips would doubtless amount “to [...]

Right To Your Left And Left To Your Right – The Need For A New Shaking

By | August 31st, 2018|LRO 85|

There is a surprising paradox in the political life of post-communist societies. Surprising to traditional political values. The totalitarian communist parties in our countries have become socialist by name and conservative by stand. In the revolutionary process of transformation from a one-party state to a multi-party system, from a state-owned economy to a market economy, [...]

What does the translator translate?

By | August 17th, 2018|LRO 83|

We are all translators, readers, interpreters. We are all translated, read, interpreted. Translation, reading, interpretation, occupy a central, crucial place in our existence since before we are born and beyond death. The current debate on abortion, for instance, can be reformulated and elucidated as a debate on the freedom of translation, of reading, of interpretation: [...]