LRO 320: “Our Blind Spot”

Our Blind Spot
Gustavo Dessal | Madrid, Spain

In March of 1974 Lacan delivered a lecture in Milan that was premonitory in referring to a threat that no one was paying much attention to at the time. He addressed himself to an audience warning them that psychoanalysis had to face up a fact that was changing the history of humanity. He expressed it in terms that left no room for misunderstanding: something impossible to bear was being imposed on the planet, producing suffocating effects. A manifestation of the real that was literally beginning to suffocate us. Perhaps nowhere else in his work was Lacan more explicit about his vision of the future as the advent of unprecedented destruction. "Due to the fact of incessantly removing things that should only have descended from heaven, humanity is now being devoured by the real," is how he expressed it in that lecture.... [Read full article]