Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology

This co-authored book aimed to produce a new account of applied psychoanalysis, by outlining ‘elements of a psychoanalytic epistemology’. It was initiated in a panel at the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society Conference at Rutgers University, NJ (2001).

Part One of the book (by Professor Dany Nobus) examined the epistemological legacy of Freud and Lacan, Part Two (by Dr Malcolm Quinn) focused on the ‘Four Discourses’ of Lacan’s Seminar XVII (1969-70), which express a relationship between knowledge and the social bond. This book was described by Jason B. Jones in 'The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 11 (2006), as ‘the most useful guide to so-called applied psychoanalysis that I have ever read.’

Quinn’s chapter ‘Reading Seminar XVII’ was the most extended engagement with this seminar in English, until the publication of the first full English translation of the seminar and an accompanying edited collection in 2006, both of which Quinn has reviewed for Journal for Lacanian Studies and are due be published in December 2007. Quinn and Nobus’ work on issues of psychoanalytic research methods in the book led to a successful joint application for an AHRC grant (lead applicant, Quinn) to conduct a two-year series of workshops with Doctoral Students at Wimbledon and Brunel University on ‘Doctoral Research Training in Psychoanalytic Theory in Art and Performance’.

Quinn’s contribution has led to the invitation to be co-convenor for the Arts (with Dr Sharon Kivland) as part of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies AHRC-funded Research Network Scheme ‘Psychoanalysis and the Arts and Humanities: A Multilingual Perspective’ (Director: Professor Naomi Segal).

Research Interests:

Politics and aesthetics, art and the social bond, psychoanalytic models of the social bond

Biography

Dr Malcolm Quinn (PhD and MA RCA) is Reader in Critical Practice and Research Co-Ordinator at Wimbledon College of Art, where he leads the 'Agendas, Agendas, Agendas' research initiative. His writing deals with relations of aesthetics, politics and social structures, with particular emphasis on psychoanalytic models of the social bond. He is a member of the AHRC College and an editor of Journal for Lacanian Studies.

Current Research

Current research is focused on art and the social bond, employing the psychoanalytic model set out in Jacques Lacan's theory of four discourses, in his Seminar XVII (1969-70). The four discourses of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst, express four different forms of the social bond. The four discourses are logical (i.e. not existential) forms of the social bond, constructed from Lacan's critique of the Oedipus myth (the father as the origin of the social bond) and of the myth of the commodity (calculation as basis of spectacular social links). An analysis
of the relationship of art practice and Lacan's four discourses is the subject of a seminar I am running with Dr Sharon Kivland at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, Birkbeck. Another outcome of this strand of research, is a review essay in Journal for Lacanian Studies dealing with two recent books, a new translation of Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Russell Grigg, New York and London: WW Norton and Co. 2007, and a book of essays Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis : Reflections on Seminar XVII, Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds.) Durham and London: Duke University Press 2006.

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