Friday, September 29, 12noon Galerie Rabus

Susanne Lummerding
So, if man is perhaps simply a woman who thinks that she does exist...:
Phantasm, symptom and the political

Taking account of the Lacanian notion of the non-existence of “woman” for rethinking concepts of Europe as well as social and cultural implications of digitalisation may serve to question presuppositions of identity and community as well as the dichotomy of “reality” and “mediation”. It is the very impossibility of a judgement of existence (Kant) articulated in Lacan’s statement that I want to discuss as the basis for understanding any claim to totality – that is, a closure of meaning – as a phantasmatic and necessary construct. I will therefore address the pivotal aspect of contingency as constitutive to the construction of reality. It is not an allegedly vanishing reality displaced by technological simulation that is at stake but approved paradigms sustaining the illusion of some “pre-discursive” reference. If we consider identity as an effect of these processes, there is political relevance in the impossibility of a closure of meaning for rethinking community, society, the other and the political subject.