Derek Hook:
Okay, hello everyone.
It's a great pleasure today to speak to Christos Tombras, who's a colleague of mine from my time in London. And what Christos is going to be talking to us about particularly is his fantastic book, which is Discourse Ontology, Body and the Construction of a World from Heidegger through Lacan.
So it's great to have the opportunity to enter into a dialogue about certain of these topics, because one of the questions that sometimes emerges, for me at least, where I'm teaching in an institution which is friendly to phenomenology, is why should people who are well-versed in, say, Heidegger's philosophy, be at all interested in Lacan? And I think we'd be right in saying that it doesn't always seem to be the case that there are that many Heideggerians who would be interested in Lacan, so maybe our first question for Christos today then would be something like, why these two? Why this pairing? Why do we bring Heidegger to Lacan or Lacan to Heidegger? What motivated that for you in the book? Christos, if you could give us your thoughts.

Christos Tombras:
Thank you Derek. I think what one notices, reading Lacan, is that Heidegger is always present, either by name, he mentions him, or by terminology, in conventions he is using in his writing, you can see Heideggerian features all around Lacan. That creates a first question to me. Why is Lacan interested in Heidegger? And then I went into Heidegger himself, into his work, and I found that Heidegger was very critical of psychoanalysis, extremely critical actually. So this was a challenge for me to understand how Heidegger is so against psychoanalysis, and if that is the case, why is Lacan interested in Heidegger? And what made it more important for me personally, a practitioner of psychoanalysis, is that Heidegger's arguments against basic Freudian concepts are very strong, are arguments that you cannot really ignore. So it was a challenge for me to actually see how can these criticisms of Heidegger be responded to. And of course, I would call Lacan, who provides either directly or indirectly a kind of answer. So this was the starting point for me.

Dr Vanessa Sinclair, the welcoming host of the podcast Rendering Unconscious, has invited me to talk about my book, Discourse Ontology.

Of course we don't stay at that. It's a good opportunity to discuss more generally about language, philosophy, mathematics, and psychoanalysis, as well as about Heidegger, Husserl, Freud, and Lacan.

For the specific episode click here.
It is also available on SoundCloud, as well as at all the usual podcast streaming platforms. Links here.

Vanessa's main website page is at Rendering Unconsious.

 My book, on Heidegger and Lacan, was just published by Palgrave.

It has been quite some time since my last blog entry, but I thought I'd add a quick note about this very interesting upcoming conference on Psychosis and Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum, London.

It is organised in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project, a therapy service for people experiencing psychosis, and I am honoured to have been invited to participate in a Clinical Round-table on technique.

What follows is an edited version of a talk delivered on July 12, 2014, at the annual CFAR Conference. The theme this year was: “Sexuality: Phantasy, Discourse and Practice”. I participated in a panel on the general subject of “Sexuality and Phantasy”. My presentation was not prepared beforehand. This here is an edited transcription of a recording. As such, it tries, but fails in many ways, to capture the spontaneity and informality of what was said. But then, that’s the best I could do.

There you go.

Good morning.

I was wondering how to start today. I was considering the title of the panel, “Sexuality and Phantasy”, and struggled to think. What, if anything, could I add to the subject?

I realised this. I realised that whenever I find myself thinking about Sexuality, I find myself thinking of Descartes --you know, René Descartes, the philosopher.

Of course Descartes did not, as far as I know, write about sexuality as such --or about phantasy for that matter. But he did write about the mind-body problem.

This will be my starting point today.

This is a slightly edited transcription of a talk I delivered on April 5, 2014, at the “Workshop in preparation of the WAP Congress” of the London Society of the NLS. The theme of the congress is "A Real for the 21st Century". The Workshop, organised by Janet Haney, was structured around four entries from the upcoming English version of Scilicet. Each was presented by a member or friend of the London Society who participated in the process of translation and editing. My talk was in connection to “Shoah”, a paper by French psychoanalyst Philippe Benichou.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today here about some of the questions I found myself struggling with, while reading and translating “Shoah” by Philippe Benichou.

Benichou’s paper talks about the Shoah. You cannot wonder, Benichou writes, what a "real for the twenty-first century" could be, without mentioning that event beyond meaning, real, all too real, the Shoah.

I was captivated but also puzzled by the power of this depiction of the Shoah as an “event beyond meaning, real, all too real”.

I asked myself, what could this mean?

Attempting to formulate an answer, I found myself faced with further questions:

What is an event? What is history? What is a historical event?

And then: What is real in a historical event?

This is how I will begin.

It has been dubbed the “bible” of psychiatry, and indeed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is taken by many as exactly that. Every new version of this publication, prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, is considered to contain the latest and more advanced criteria for the classification and diagnosis of mental disorders.

Acceptance has not been unanimous, though. For many of its critics, the DSM has been too unreliable, far too prescriptive and yet quite vague, very much geared towards the compartmentalization of human behaviour, very much conforming to the wishes of the big Pharmaceutical companies –in short: very problematic.

The news, then, that after more than sixty years of near hegemony –at least in the U.S.– the DSM is pushed aside by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), cannot but be welcome. A research framework is being introduced for collecting data for a new understanding of mental disorders, a "new nosology", away from DSM.

Is there, at last, room for optimism? Are we finally about to enter an era of scientific psychiatry which will (hopefully) settle all disagreements and clear out all ambiguities for good?

It has been some time since I last posted something to this blog, but I guess you know how it is. Time --or rather, lack thereof-- has taken the upper hand recently.

I hope I will be able to post something soon, but in the meantime, this is just a short note about two lectures I will be giving in October and November, as part of Autumn 2012 Public Lectures Programme of CFAR.