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
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New Lacanian School
