Abstract
This commentary focuses on Lacan’s enigmatic word—agalma. Lacan begins the session right where the last session ended, that is, with the word “agalma,” which many in his audience apparently didn’t quite catch. Agalma is an ornament or a piece of jewelry. But while this is technically correct, Lacan thinks it only scratches the surface of what the Greek word is expressing. For him, it seems to be a topological concept (more on this to come), and he suggests that we should think a bit more about why one would ever want to “bejewel” oneself in the first place.
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Reference
Lacan, Jacques. 2015. Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and Translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity.
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Pluth, E. (2020). Agalma: Commentary on Session X. 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_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32742-2_9
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