Writing For (a) First Cause

Lacan's Écrits, his writings, represents the height of his psychoanalytically-informed philosophy. Writing For (a) First Cause is an anthology that results from an extended mediation of these writings. This anthology operates at the site of the intersection between psychoanalysis and philosophy, avoiding both "pure philosophy" cut from the clinic, as well as the "clinical core" without philosophical reflection. Throughout the anthology you will find several texts which are engaging the dimension of the subject's lack as the truth of first causation, and then writing from this standpoint. This standpoint does not seek to obliterate or make irrelevant traditional metaphysical causation, but seeks to articulate how one might think about these dimensions from the standpoint of the subject as first cause.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on the Écrits by Cadell Last

Editor’s Note by Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose

Foreword by Cadell Last 

Introduction: Stakes for Psychoanalytic Philosophy by Cadell Last

Chapter 0: Love of Truth by Samuel McCormick 

Chapter 1: The Écrits in a Nutshell: Desire to Drive by Cadell Last

Chapter 2: The Love(craft) that Moves the Sun and Other Stars by Daniel L. Garner (O.G. Rose)

Chapter 3: The Clinic in the Culture: On the Effect of Affect-Naming by Edie Hitchcock

Chapter 4: From Écrit to Embodiment: Lacan's Journey from Signifier to Toroidal Information by Mark G. Murphy

Chapter 5: Lacan’s Crazy Wisdom by Thomas Hamelryck

Chapter 6: Full Speech, Empty Speech, and the Riddle of the Loneliest One by Joris de Kelver

Chapter 7: The Cruelty of Love by Sinziana Ravini

Chapter 8: How to Hystericise a Perverted Society? by Cadell Last

Chapter 9: Simulating Sexual Difference: Lacanian Perspectives and the Turing Test in AI by Davide Pasti

Chapter 10: Driverest: Withdrawal through Sublimation by Łukasz Silski

Chapter 11: Lacanian Stewardship by Phillip Shinn

Chapter 12: From the Exoteric to the Esoteric (and back again?) by Matthew Stanley

Chapter 13: “A Striking Negligence”: The Maternal Ordeal in Lacan by Cleo Kearns

Chapter 14: What Doesn’t Work by Dimitri Crooijmans

Chapter 15: Towards a Comedic Relation by Phillip Shinn

Chapter 16: Immortal Drive Beyond Deconstruction by Cadell Last

Afterword by Cadell Last

Note on the Écrits (Extended) by Cadell Last 

Anthology Authors

  • Cadell Last

    Creator/founder of Philosophy Portal, author of Real Speculations

  • Daniel L. Garner

    Philosopher and co-author as O.G. Rose of Belonging Again

  • Samuel McCormick

    Teacher, scholar, lecturer on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Communication Studies

  • Edie Hitchcock

    Psychotherapist in private practice and advanced candidate at Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute

  • Mark Gerard Murphy

    Psychoanalytic theology, author of The Direction of Desire

  • Thomas Hamelryck

    Specialist in Bayesian modelling and probabilistic machine learning, renegade Girardian

  • Joris de Kelver

    Creator/founder of Multiversity, Zarathustrian steward of the commons (Wooncoop)

  • Sinziana Ravini

    Psychoanalyst, journalist, magazine editor (Paletten), writer, and curator

  • Davide Pasti

    Doctoral candidate, Machine Learning Specialist at GCAS College Dublin

  • Łukasz Silski

    Underground theorist, Lacanian psychoanalysis

  • Phillip Shinn

    Actor, poet, and philosopher

  • Matthew Stanley

    Writer, educator, creator/founder of Samara Diagnostics

  • Cleo Kearns

    Anthropology, continental philosophy, and religious studies

  • Dimitri Crooijmans

    Creator of Actual Spirit and objet lil a