Haider Ali — The Subversion of the Subject and the Graph of Desire

Concluding his course on Lacan's Seminar XI, Haider Ali will offer a synthetic lecture on Lacanian metapsychology and, specifically, the graph of desire as it appears in "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire." The graph of desire is one of Lacan's most intricate topologisations, offering as close to a totalising view of his system of thought as possible. In it, the operative triad of need-demand-desire produces, reshapes, and surpasses the orders of the symbolic, imaginary, and real—and, in doing so, illustrates Lacan's theory of the subject. The lecture will accordingly engage the topics of (1) psychoanalysis and science; (2) truth and knowledge; (3) need, demand, and desire; (4) phantasy and the objet a; and (5) the lack in the Other, the drive, and jouissance.

Haider Ali is an MA student in English literature at McGill University. His primary area of focus is seventeenth-century English poetry, with an especial focus on Andrew Marvell and the figuration of the 'subject' (in relation to nature and society), but his work extends to mediaeval Italian poetry, French theoretical antihumanism, and Islamic and Christian mysticism.