This paper will focus on the ethics of experience and the centrality of inscription to both the consideration of ethics and the designation of experience, seeking to show how inscription problematises questions of inclusion and neutrality. The paper will return to Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis and, in particular, the figure of Philoctetes, whom Lacan mobilises at the end of the seminar to illustrate his argument for the centrality of the concept of desire to ethical consideration. Rereading Sophocles’ Philoctetes, along with Martin McDonagh’s Banshee’s of Inisherin and Aimé Césaire’s Notes of a Return to my Native Land, the paper will posit the impossibility of neutrality and, through doing so, seek to investigate more critically the place of desire in ethics.

By exploring and staging scenes of reading, this paper poses a question concerning how we may learn from the internalisation of other people’s fantasies: how they may provoke, collide with, and disrupt our own. The paper draws upon Sigmund Freud’s writings, including ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, and ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ to conceive a relation between reading, fantasy, and learning. I relate this to Jean Laplanche’s presentation of the cultural site as the location of “ordinary” transference, an encounter with an enigma: a response to an address. Responding to calls for a ‘Copernican’ criticism (from John Fletcher amongst others), I consider spaces and temporalities of reading.

The paper will take an experiential approach to this by reflecting on two of my own readings of Jane Eyre. The first, when I was eight years old, and later, as a postgraduate student in my twenties. My first encounter with the text appears driven by what I remember as a kind of sensory imprint; the heavy texture of the cream paper, the way in which I sat curled up on our pink velvet armchair, a particular illustration in the book (showing Rochester's first appearance in the story). The slowness of my reading, and the increasing sense of joy in my unique discovery of the text. It is only writing this now that I realise this memory is a repetition, even mirror image, of the opening scene of Jane Eyre itself. Like Freud’s ‘screen memory’, my first reading appears luminous and as a form of concealment. The second scene of reading made conscious much of what was hidden within my first: namely, the loss of my father, and the structure of paternal fantasy which shapes the novel. Through this, I suggest that 'scenographies’ of reading are associated with both learning and mourning.

In September 2023, Lara, an author and comedian, and Camille, an illustrator and graphic designer, collaborated on a joint artistic residency as part of the Transat Program by the Ateliers Médicis, within the gynecological and breast cancer surgery department of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris.

Their research aims to bring forth new images and narratives of the female body afflicted by illness through a dialogue between visual arts (collages) and the art of language. Viewing the body and identity as a collection of fragments that form a cohesive whole, and illness as an explosion, a disunification of being (cf Claire Marin), they employ collage techniques and fragmentary writing as mediums to reclaim power over affliction and as tools for connection. They delve into the transformative power of the act of creation on lived experience. They will spend three days a week in a hospital room converted into a studio. Yet, in reaching out to patients, are they not ultimately interrogating and transforming their own lived experiences, their own past, their own traumas? What dynamics are at play in this immersive experience?

This presentation aims to bear witness to an experience and its limitations. It serves as an example of experiential learning (creation of tools) and provides a platform for reflection on the potency of images as narrative conduits, on the modalities of encounter, on creation as both a mode of action and thought, and more broadly, on the role of art in both caregiving and crises (of the subject).

After Mai 1968, unions appeared useless to many academics, especially those who saw their strikes as intervening in the radicality of the occupational. This has left research into unions, from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, at the bottom of the agenda for radical action.

While Lenin has become an important touchstone for modern scholars, I shall argue using his remarks and Todd McGowan's theorisation of Universality. We can develop new ways of continuing his universalistic legacy., by repeating his interest in unions.

Could the union, in playing the role of the 'manager of discontent' create a productive relationship with the worker, facilitating non-belonging, seeing their incompatibility with the worker's identity?

While this will not always be the case, more research into union radicalisation from a psychoanalytic perspective could explore whether certain unions create a new worker consciousness with a radical potential.