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S-Thesis
S has been conceived as a "trap" for the subject in much the same way Lacan considered the image a "trap for the gaze": soliciting one's look, the seduction of the image captures us in the act of seeing and spirits our scopic desire behind the mirror image -- there to cleverly upend it, returning it to us as a gaze that, as Lacan specifies, sees us from a point where we do not see it.1 Hijacked by a painterly technique that, exemplarily like Velázquez in Las Meninas, deftly turns the tables on the viewing subject, our desire to see is paraded before us in visual representation as an uncanny anamorphic object of enjoyment that smears the surface of our perceptual apparatus and dims every hope of a transparent "window" onto the world.
The technique in question here will be psychoanalysis, with its "trick" -- as one of the contributors to this issue has called it -- of free association that successfully effects an equivalent parlor-game on words, enabling us to glimpse traces of the subject as it stages its own disappearance within the coils of language. However, S is also committed to employing "free association" in its other sense as well: to freely associate with other techniques, discourses, theories as they solicit our collective attention and expose other facets of the speaking subject's desire.
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This first issue of S is devoted to aesthetics as a reminder that the S-point, the point of the subject as breach or gap in the field of discourse, is an instance that inevitably takes place, occupying space and time in some type of form. Indeed, Lacan's teachings can be considered a life-long series of attempts to extract the laws in accordance with which a subject performs this miraculous conversion or, perhaps better, "mathematization" into its representational representative: the non-signifying object (a) that, as the subject's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, appears only in its disappearing.
Of those laws, the ones chiefly summoned in this issue are geometrical perspective, the method by which three-dimensional space was captured in two-dimensional pictorial representation at the birth of a certain modernity; and its spectral other, projective geometry. Resuscitated in the seventeenth century by perspective's introduction of ideal points of infinity, this other geometry of ancient origin -- which would have to wait until the nineteenth century for proper formalization -- extends Euclid's laws to authorize the introduction of a topological body (and therefore, with it, an analytic scene) back into the emptied flattened lines of symbolic representation.
Explicitly or implicitly for the contributors to this issue, these two intertwined geometric histories afford a conceptual blueprint for tracing and exposing another face of the imaginary as disclosed here in works by Rembrandt, Brunelleschi, Montaigne, Joyce, Bruce Naumann, Jan De Cock and Alfred Hitchcock. Frequently relegated to a subordinate place within the Lacanian registers, the imaginary emerges from these readings as the key site of a contestation for which even the term "ideological" seems decidedly anemic.
This issue also inaugurates S's Dialogues, a section that takes advantage of the speed and ease of internet publication to enable readers to initiate a kind of return movement to authors whose words prompt them in this way. Also peer-reviewed, texts in Dialogues are the records of unexpected encounters between das Es and its Subject.
1 See for example, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965-1966, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts (lesson of 18 May, 1966).