Speculating on the Edge of Psychoanalysis: Rings and Voids

In Speculating on the Edge of Psychoanalysis, Pablo Lerner questions, and takes a step beyond, the prevailing paradigm of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the sovereignty of language and jouissance. Arguing for the existence of a primordial real void outside and independent of language, Lerner re-thinks the structure and functioning of Lacan’s three orders and their complex interrelations. Silence, darkness, and emptiness are the names of the voids within the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, and, in the gaps between these orders, the voids converge. Thus, Lerner re-conceptualizes the fundamental structure of the field of subjectivity, offering radical and original perspectives on a diverse range of psychoanalytical, philosophical, and theological topics. Chapters span themes such as creation and poetry, death and solitude, intuition and mysticism, truth and being, pantheism and polytheism, the poetic art of interpretation, and introduces a new mathematical conceptualization of psychoanalytic metapsychology and the clinical structures. This volume offers new psychoanalytic perspectives of great interest for practitioners and scholars in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, theology, and literary studies.