Holmes will be a guest speaker at the Faculty Research Group in Critical Theory and Practice at Newcastle University.

Title: Object little ágalma: What Plato taught Lacan

Abstract: In the eighth year of Lacan’s seminar, he turns to Plato’s Symposium in order to develop his own account of transference love, naming the fundamentally odd relationship of the patient to the doctor, or of the analysand to the analyst. This reading of the Symposium marks Lacan’s only sustained reading of an explicitly philosophical text and it illustrates a decidedly psychoanalytic form of interpretation, identifying the points of rupture and disturbance in the text as the precise points of meaning. Working through Lacan’s reading of this most classic of philosophical texts, my paper will show that what is at stake in Lacan’s reading of the Symposium is not only the notion of transference but several other kinds of odd couplings, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Lacan and Plato.

For more information contact Dr Lorenzo Chiesa, email lorenzo.chiesa@newcastle.ac.uk