In my Rapid Eye Movement sleep, I dreamt the song lyrics: It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine.

What is the status of the world today? Doomed? Or is everything just fine? Although The Lacanian Review 15 was brought out by the climate crisis as a particular paradigm or symptom of discontent in the world today, we also examine various other forms of twenty-first century anxiety and malaise.

Amidst utopian fantasies, ideals of progress, war, discourses of catastrophe and impending doom, and fictions of the end of the world, what is the place of psychoanalysis? Within those, perhaps all we can do is make a cut. Hence, the title for TLR 15: “Cut.” Short and simple, to function as a cut in itself.

Inherent in the image of the globe is an imaginary form of wholeness, and yet various events and contingencies puncture that belief in the bubble, in particular, the climate crisis. Insofar as the world is constructed—“this world that is but a dream of each body,” Jacques Lacan says—cuts can perforate the imaginary, perhaps just enough to allow us to see that the world is always only ever, as the R.E.M. song says:

. . . the world as we know it . . .

Inevitably, any attempt to make a world confronts us with waste. Lacan’s equivoque im-monde has contemporary resonance: the world (monde) is polluted (immonde). From the letter as waste or remainder, outside of meaning, to waste as a form of the real in the twenty-first century . . . We explore the complexity of waste: the risks of a subject identified with waste, and yet the potential of this very thing—finding a way to do something with, and even, as Jacques-Alain Miller proposes, elevate to the dignity of a practice, this waste object.

Lacanian cuts are distinctive. And they can be on the side of life. Stemming from the desire of the analyst and through a horticulture of analytic action, rooted in an ethics, cuts can be life-generating. It is perhaps ironic that precisely by way of demonstrating the very impossibility of living, psychoanalysis can also make it possible to find a way to make the world—each one’s singular world—a bit more livable.

Cristina Rose Moro, Managing Editor

Brief

Do you find yourself re-reading the same sentence? Over and over again. Still not understanding it yet continuing to stare at the words that don’t make sense. Ever managed to get lemon juice in your paper cut, that same paper cut you got from re-reading the page that wouldn’t turn? What about listening to that one track on repeat for hours after your girlfriend left you. . . Oops, I did it again. . . she said something about always ending up in the same toxic relationship pattern. So many efforts to give it one more try, just one more drink, a fresh name for that incomprehensible mess you stepped into. First time was an accident, the third time a symptom? How is consistency born of a contingency that can only be deduced by its traces?

Sigmund Freud detected the essential nature of repetition in psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan advanced that concept several times over, zeroing in on jouissance at its core. With the developments of Jacques-Alain Miller, we can read the Freudian clues of fixation with the real that Lacan left us, the one that always returns to the same place, and with another stroke, the real he called lawless. For the 14^th volume of The Lacanian Review, we wade into the intimate, yet alien, murky residue of fixation and its repetitions in the speaking body. We investigate what can be done with the jouissance which “remains unsocializable,” as J.-A. Miller formulates it. The fingerprint of enjoyment, the signature of a trauma, an encounter that leaves a mark where the sense is always missing. Repetition is something old, but also something new, something borrowed. Fixation, it turns out, is only you.

Brief

With a series of exceptionally new translations of Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller, The Lacanian Review takes you into the space of the real unconscious and the last teachings of Lacan reinterpreted to approach the urgency of our contemporary moment.

Punch line

Amazing! Freud’s good old Ego has become the star of the net: a symptom of our times, as Lacan anticipated. Ego as symptom, delights of the ego, ego at the end of analysis… with the compass of Lacan’s « Joyce-the-Symptom », these readings are necessary in a chaotic world where the Ego is campaigning to replace the Father.

Presentation

It is amazing!

First, because of its theme: the EGO, the self. Yes, you’ve read correctly! The good old Ego, which we got from Freud but which has become the star of our modernity. From selfies to social networks, it’s holding forth, babbling on. It « expresses » itself unashamedly, without compunction. It opines, judges, without ever stopping watching: in short, it’s become a symptom, which is what Lacan had anticipated in his Seminar XXIII by means of his clinical approach of the work of Joyce.

Second, because of its contents. TLR 5 includes Lacan’s conference « Joyce-the-Symptom », translated for the first time in English. With it, we publish the reading that Éric Laurent gave of it in Dublin, at the NLS Congress. And Ego-symptoms, Ego-delights, Ego at the end of analysis, without forgetting Lacanian Politics, which is more necessary than ever to orient ourselves in a chaotic world, in which the Ego is campaigning to replace the Father.

The Lacanian Review is the journal of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.