The Lacanian Review: Issue 14: On Repeat

Do you find yourself re-reading the same sentence ? Over and over again. Still not understanding it yet continuing to stare at the words that don’t make sense. Ever managed to get lemon juice in your paper cut, that same paper cut you got from re-reading the page that wouldn’t turn ? What about listening to that one track on repeat for hours after your girlfriend left you. . . Oops, I did it again. . . she said something about always ending up in the same toxic relationship pattern. So many efforts to give it one more try, just one more drink, a fresh name for that incomprehensible mess you stepped into. First time was an accident, the third time a symptom? How is consistency born of a contingency that can only be deduced by its traces ?

Sigmund Freud detected the essential nature of repetition in psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan advanced that concept several times over, zeroing in on jouissance at its core. With the developments of Jacques-Alain Miller, we can read the Freudian clues of fixation with the real that Lacan left us, the one that always returns to the same place, and with another stroke, the real he called lawless. For the 14th volume of The Lacanian Review, we wade into the intimate, yet alien, murky residue of fixation and its repetitions in the speaking body. We investigate what can be done with the jouissance which “remains unsocializable”, as J.-A. Miller formulates it. The fingerprint of enjoyment, the signature of a trauma, an encounter that leaves a mark where the sense is always missing. Repetition is something old, but also something new, something borrowed. Fixation, it turns out, is only you.