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Derek Hook interviews Christos Tombras, part 3

3/4/2025

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I’m sharing transcripts from a discussion I had with Derek Hook in December 2021 for his YouTube Channel. We discussed Heidegger, Lacanian psychoanalysis and my book, Discourse Ontology. What follows is the transcript of our conversation, very slightly edited for clarity.

For the actual video (part 3), see here:
For part 1 and 2 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 3:
Heidegger's concept of 'das Man' (the They) can be both compared to - and contrasted with - Lacan's idea of the big Other. One crucial related idea, as Christos Tombras notes, is that the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (which is of course so crucial to Heidegger), is rejected by Lacan. The project of a Discourse Ontology, as outlined by Tombras, includes the attempt to formalize Lacanian concepts, to formulate the philosophical background of the account of the human subject as developed by Lacan. (DH) 

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Derek Hook interviews Christos Tombras, part 2

3/4/2025

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I’m sharing transcripts from a discussion I had with Derek Hook in December 2021 for his YouTube Channel. We discussed Heidegger, Lacanian psychoanalysis and my book, Discourse Ontology. What follows is the transcript of our conversation, very slightly edited for clarity.

For the actual video (part 2), see here:
For part 1 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 2:
How should we position both Lacan and Heidegger in relation to the project of ontology?  Is it the case that ontology might play a crucial role in furthering a Lacanian agenda, despite Lacan's own rejection of ontology? Stressing both incompatibilities and prospective overlaps between these two thinkers, Christos Tombras offers illuminating perspectives on these questions. Tombras also discusses the concept of discourse in Lacan's thought, before moving on to emphasize the role of truth (
aletheia) in Heidegger's philosophy alongside the role of primal affirmation (Bejahung) in Freud. Can we claim that there are moments where Freud is a Heideggerian without knowing it? (DH)

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Derek Hook interviews Christos Tombras, part 1

3/4/2025

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I’m sharing transcripts from a discussion I had with Derek Hook in December 2021 for his YouTube Channel. We discussed Heidegger, Lacanian psychoanalysis and my book, Discourse Ontology. What follows is the transcript of our conversation, very slightly edited for clarity.
​
For the actual video (part 1), see here:
For part 2 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 1:
What are the benefits of reading Lacan alongside Heidegger, and Heidegger alongside Lacan? Christos Tombras, Lacanian psychoanalyst and author of Discourse Ontology (Palgrave, 2019), offers his reflections on this question. Further questions emerge. How are we to use Heidegger today, given his association with the Nazi regime? Are Lacan and Heidegger not incompatible given Lacan's commitment to a kind of (psychoanalytic) ethics as opposed to Heidegger's commitment to ontology? Furthermore: might Heidegger's value to psychoanalysis be in part the result of the critical questions he directs at Freudian psychoanalysis? (DH)
Next->
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.

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Talking about Heidegger and Lacan at "Rendering Unconscious"

29/1/2020

 
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.

Discourse Ontology

20/5/2019

 
 My book, on Heidegger and Lacan, was just published by Palgrave.
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The Problem Of the Body

5/10/2014

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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.


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What is real in a historical event?

9/4/2014

 
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.


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Autumn 2012 teaching

3/10/2012

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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.



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Thinking with one’s feet

1/2/2012

 
_I was reading something on the BBC today, regarding the “decoding” by science of people’s “internal voices”. The article was about a new technique, whereby researchers are said to be able to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. I was reminded of an anecdote about Lacan, one of the most important post-Freudian psychoanalysts.

In 1975, during a lecture tour in the United States, Jacques Lacan spoke at MIT before an audience of mathematicians, linguists, and philosophers. Noam Chomsky, the already famous by then American linguist philosopher and activist, attending the lecture, asked Lacan a question on thought.

Lacan's reply was possibly not what Chomsky expected:

“We think we think with our brains”, Lacan said. “Personally, I think with my feet. That's the only way I really come into contact with anything, solid. I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something. But I've seen enough electroencephalograms to know there's not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain.”

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