A group of psychoanalysts working mainly in Tehran have organized group discussions on the question of orthography in Lacan’s work. Iraj Ghoochani, a Lacanian educator and anthropologist, has proposed a series of zooms, conference collaborations, and translations of YouTube video materials into Farsi.
“Orthography” concerns mainly the relations of the Symbolic to the Real, “mediated” by the Imaginary in the Brunnian/inversive transformation of the Borromeo knot model of Lacan’s RSI. This conversion points to the mutual exclusiveness of the Real and Imaginary, which is a feature of the Graph of Desire and the central function of S(Ⱥ), the lack that is built into the signifier.
The Tehran group will develop their own agenda and generate their own materials, but the US group and its international affiliates hope that future collaborations will tie together their mutual concerns and lead to new innovations in both English and Farsi.
This collaboration enjoyed its first successful project at the VANDA Anthropology conference held at the University of Vienna, September 23–25, 2024, on the subject of the orthography of the Tiny House, where six members of iPSA, in the US and Tehran, presented work in an animated and successful session.
orthography
The orthography agenda seeks to address key questions:
§1 / What is Lacan’s orthographic insight and what makes it critical for his entire theory?
§2 / How does Lacan develop his rhetorical practice of mi-dire (saying things by half)?
§3 / What is the consistent logic by which Lacan develops the ideas of spaces and times created by the signifier of the subject?
§4 / Why is (ethno-)topology critical for Lacanian psychoanalysis?
§5 / Why is “evenly distributed (in)attention” critical for both topology and psychoanalysis?
§6 / What could be the face of a new Lacanian (ethno-)topology?
videos in farsi
Iraj Ghoochani has begun to translate videos posted on the YouTube channel @boundarylanguage. Two are available in Beta versions:
The Orthographic Cut: An Ethno-topological Approach to Psychoanalysis
Inversive geometry has the ability to transform our view of Jaques Lacan’s topology, making it less a matter of pure mathematics and more a central feature of the psychoanalytic value of ethnology. In this presentation prepared for a zoom with Iranian psychoanalysts, we use the L-Schema, Dracula, Antonello da Messina’s painting of St. Jerome in his study, and Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Circus” to develop the idea of the inversion circle, which shows how Lacan’s “toroidal logic” applies to instances of non-orientation critical to cultural formations.
Zairja: An Operator’s Manual
What is a zairja and how do you use it? This video serves as an “operator’s manual” for a 7000-year-old computer that, unlike the modern computer, combines chance and necessity into a composite AI model that employs the user’s own neural network to invent and explore new meanings. The Lalangue/Tiny-House Project requires participants to have at least one encounter with the zairja before joining any of the zoom seminars to develop original written essays on the connection of the (psychoanalytical) concept of LALANGUE (Jacques Lacan’s coined term to talk about language after you subtract the words) to the architectural phenomenon of the Tiny House.
The Ames Window Illusion: A Lesson in Projective Topology
The Ames window is a trapezoidal flat shape that, when rotated, produces the illusion of the window moving back and forth rather than in 360º. This is especially weird if an object is placed running through one of the window panes at a right angle. The principle here is about orthogonality and isomerics/isonomics, originally terms associated with the “balancing act” of the four humors, which worked for the sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric humors but not melancholy, because Black Bile was considered to be harmful in any amount. This has led melancholy as a diagnosis, ever since the ancients, to be the basis both of genius and prophecy, diabolical cunning and suicidal depression. Understanding the Ames window shows how non-orientation and self-intersection can work at the level of comedy, evident in the way that Charlie Chaplin’s chase scene in “The Circus” juxtaposes a linear idea of distance with a circular and oscillating one (between the Tramp’s near or far distance from the policeman). Fort/Da anyone? Thanks to the mellow voice of Iraj Ghoochani, this narration is in Farsi. Iraj has also contributed the ideas of orthology, inversive geometry, and rotational space (Dirac’s 2π/4π “Belt Trick”).