Publications
Prologue to Bruno Bonoris’ “Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique in Freud and Lacan. What Does a Psychoanalyst Do?” [Excerpt]
"Bonoris’ book inscribes itself in the antipodes of the project to naturalize psychoanalysis: its approach is decidedly Lacanian. [...] For Bonoris, the subject is integrally a formal entity, an intellectual hypothesis or conjecture under which, or around which, there is, literally, nothing. If Bonoris’ first book examines the historical conditions of the emergence of psychoanalysis, his second book, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique in Freud and Lacan, elucidates the modalities or functions through which a particular subject is instituted in the specific context of the psychoanalytic clinic. These functions, for Bonoris, only exist within psychoanalysis understood as a symbolic device that is re-created (‘habilitated’) each time by the analyst’s acts (ultimately sustained by his ‘desire’): through his knowledge (savoir), the analyst institutes a practical field, i.e., a way of operating with the symptom. Hence Bonoris’ ‘methodological’ decision to address ‘the issue of psychoanalytic technique’ entirely within the domain of knowledge (savoir) and, in particular, as a question that refers essentially to the analyst’s relation to knowledge. Habilitating, desiring and, specially, reading and writing become the eminent ‘analytic functions’ through which the subject of each particular case is created. The significance of these functions for psychoanalytic praxis is superlative and the clinical consequences of this approach far-raging. Notice, for instance, that the psychoanalytic subject, so construed, has no body, no organs, and no brain. It is not a ‘psycho-physical’ individual. Furthermore, no natural properties inhere in it, from which it follows that it has no biological sex. Thus, an important merit of Bonoris’ book lies in its contribution to the criticism of naturalistic, vitalistic, and individualistic tendencies in mainstream psychoanalysis."
"A remarkable feature of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is its anti-naturalism: a frontal rejection of any attempt to think of the human in continuity with animality, that is, a domain in which being and living happen outside the universal medium of discourse. This anti-naturalistic trait, developed to its ultimate logical consequences, that is, thematized as a thesis and elucidated as a concept, is sufficient to establish a rupture, at the level of the epistemic, ethical, and ontological foundations, of Lacanian theory with respect to that of Freud, the post-Freudians, Freudo-Lacanism, and the attempts to inscribe psychoanalysis in the so-called “life sciences,” particularly through advances in neuroscience. Indeed, the anti-naturalistic feature of Lacanian theory is a direct consequence of what Alfredo Eidelsztein considers to be at the heart of this theory, namely, Lacan’s doctrine of the subject, which can be formally characterized as follows: the object of psychoanalysis is the subject, one that has the reality of discourse, one that the analyst creates as a complex articulation of signifiers whose meaning is elucidated by an analytical, speculative (but not arbitrary) operation that writes this subject as a text. If the subject is rigorously conceived as a new and particular genre of discourse, fundamental psychoanalytic concepts will have to be re-examined exclusively on this basis. In this view, the subject does not pre-exist its production in analysis, “the unconscious” is not an intrinsic or trans-historical feature of “the mind,” and the analytic act does not consist in an attentive, free-floating listening attitude out of which an adequate interpretation ultimately, mysteriously arises. In particular, the regime of affectivity and the allegedly bodily drives are conceived by Lacan as effectuations of the signifying order and their intelligibility revealed through an analytical interpretation of a highly specific nature, which, inevitably, reflect the analyst’s theoretical commitments. Clearly, the opposition between Freud and Lacan on these key issues of psychoanalytic theory and practice is maximal."
Prologue to my translation of "The Origin of the Subject in Psychoanalysis" by Alfredo Eidelsztein [Extract]
Los manantiales oscuros
[The Dark Springs]
“Nicolás Garrera-Tolbert’s Los manantiales oscuros [‘The Dark Springs’], his first book, opens us to a remarkable poetry, crossed by harsh and splendid images that reveal the extreme conditions of a survival where life and death, reverie and delirium, emerge for a few moments from the omnipresent ocean of oblivion and silence, telling us that those very brief moments of voice, of words, are exactly what we call ‘existence,’ ‘history,’ ‘world.’ We are born and die in the almost instantaneous glow that this poetry shows us, its filiation is the shadow, 'the rails of the night', as these dark springs tell us in their last line, but their militancy is the light."
Raúl Zurita
Phenomenology as Experiential Realism.
A Meta-Philosophical Proposal
"Subscribing to the new realists’ commitment to epistemological and ontological pluralism, which I link to their anti-reductionist and comprehensive stance on both levels, this paper sketches an idea of a realist phenomenology by following the thread of the concept of experience. This phenomenology shares with the new realisms (I) the urge to embrace (though never in the form of a synthesis) being in all its multiple manifestations and (II) a radical anti-reductionist stance, according to which the different approaches that thematize being in its irreducible instantiations are thought of in their productive tension and sometimes even in their agonistic interaction."
La ontología del significante en los fundamentos del psicoanálisis
[The Signifier's Ontology at the Foundations of Psychoanalysis]
"By 'naturalization' of psychoanalysis I [also] mean the set of the various ways in which the following thesis is rejected: that (...) the only 'object' (in the French sense 'subject-matter,' or the German 'Sache') of psychoanalysis is the subject, that is, the subject-of-the-unconscious (and never the unconscious as a substance or as hypokéimenon, which would imply a reification of it). The present essay aims to account for the ontological and epistemic status of this 'object' as being solely and exclusively an effectuation-of-language, that is, a logically articulated inscription of unknown-knowledge [saberes-no-sabidos] that constitutes the plot, the structure and, moreover, the very Wirklichkeit of the subject.”
The Origin of the Subject in Psychoanalysis.
Rethinking the Foundations of Lacanian Theory and Clinic
From my prologue to my translation of Eidelsztein's book: "[The author] shows that if the subject is entirely an effect of discourse, a phenomenon of language, then the notions of freedom, subjective responsibility, and jouissance [in J.-A. Miller's sense] have no role to play in psychoanalysis. Moreover, by unfolding the logical and clinical consequences of the “Ur-Faktum” [original, primordial, brute fact] of the primacy of the signifier in the speculative creation of the subject, Eidelsztein proposes an anti-individualistic, anti-substantialist, and anti-nihilist psychoanalysis. Accordingly, his conception of the cure is one that bets everything on the possibility of reconfiguring the particular (not singular, nota bene) subject of each case. Such reconfiguration coincides with the ex-nihilo creation of a new subject."