Lorenzo Chiesa Livres

In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom "There is no sexual relationship." Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that "There is no sexual relationship" is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real "not-two." The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility. --Publisher description

The book explores the evolution of subjectivity in Jacques Lacan's work, arguing against both "pro-Lacanians" and "anti-Lacanians" by presenting Lacan as a systematic thinker. Lorenzo Chiesa provides a philosophical analysis of the Lacanian subject's relationship to otherness, examining its development through the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real orders. He highlights the continuity in Lacan's theories despite apparent contradictions, ultimately portraying the Lacanian subject as an irreducible lack that challenges contemporary notions of subjectivity, bridging psychoanalysis and philosophy.