The Letter, The Cut, The Sinthome: three works-in-progress in psychoanalysis by PhD students 

Tuesday, April 21: 17.30 – 19.30 o’clock at OMHP room A 008

“The Formal Pleasures of the Unclosed: or, Why Cutting Hurts So Damn Good,” Lars Klute 

*Twenty-one cuts for a twenty-first birthday. On that day, artist Chen Zhe did not carve the number “21” into her skin but a series:*

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In the beginning, there is no counting – only ever one-more cut: one-more, one-more, one-more... but never the One cut. Repetition without arrival.

This presentation tarries with the not-yet, the almost-there, the ever-renewed et cetera of lines carved into flesh. Blood as cathartic object gives way to the cut as formal operation: stroke, seriality, rhythm. The sequence of incisions, in this reading, becomes the site of libidinal and ontological cathexis. Taking as its point of departure a single photograph that artist Chen Zhe took on her twenty-first birthday, alongside her short writings and interviews, this talk asks: what does it mean to be bound to the open wound rather than to a healed, regenerated body? To inhabit a perpetual suspension of closure instead of a fantasy of recovery?

Lars Klute is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His PhD research investigates the libidinal relations between body and medium through the form and theme of cutting, drawing primarily on a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework and examining mediated practices of self-mutilation, cosmetic surgery, and perversion. Alongside this project he maintains an ongoing research interest in trans visibility and queer analysis.

“Letters and the Grammar of Lost Address,” Omri Bar-Adam 

What does it mean to write ‘you’ to someone who can no longer receive it? This talk thinks through acts of homosexual melancholic address – the letter that stages its own impossibility: the writer reaches outward through the second person while the lost object presses inward, becoming the shadow that falls across every word.

Omri Bar-Adam is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin, currently visiting ASCA for research. He works across literary theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and gay studies, and teaches courses on early gay literature. His research explores homosexual melancholia and develops a critique of queer theory.

An Angelic Sinthome, Samuel-Ludmila Feline-Constantin

“Transsexuals want to be­long to the sex of the angels” Catherine Millot writes and writes that this was said to her “most vehemently”. The appearance of an angelic passion. With her book Horsexe (1983) Millot both inaugurated the tendency of Lacanians to define transness as a psychotic structure and she was the first to suggest transess could function like a sinthome – the fourth ring in the Borromean chain that knots the subject together, the symptom that should not be dissolved in analysis. It is also to the sinthome Patricia Gherovici turns in her effort to depatholigise transness within a Lacanian framework, describing it as “a singular invention allowing someone to live.” This talk will trace how the sinthome emerges as the site of conceptual convergence between these opposing arguments, and will use the figure of the angel to interrogate the way Gherovici perceives “[t]ransition as a reconciliation with life” – does transness need to be on the side of ‘life’ to be worthwhile?

Samuel-Ludmila Feline-Constantin (they/them) is in their second year of a phd at ASCA (University of Amsterdam). They are writing on transness and anorexia trough psychoanalytic and Marxist frameworks and are a co-founding member of the Queer Formalism Research Group.