Abstract
The commentaries on sessions VI and VII offer an examination of how castration and atopia, the two major elements of Lacan’s analysis in Seminar VIII of Aristophanes’ and Agathon’s speeches from Plato’s Symposium, function as two crucial negative moments in Lacan’s topology of desire, which inform his understanding of the real and its function in knowledge. By developing how castration and atopia operate in relation to the tragicomic dimension of Aristophanes and Agathon’s speeches, the tragicomic itself is understood as an indicator of the unique capacity of eros as “a sign that one is changing discourses.” This shift from the tragic to the comic, marks the point of failure out of which the figures of Socrates and the analyst as ‘subjects supposed to know’ come to be.
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Ballas, A. (2020). First as Comedy, Then as Tragicomedy: Castration, Atopia, and Ab-Sex Sense—Commentary on Sessions VI and VII. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32742-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32742-2_5
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