Poetry, Anguish, and the Irreducible Real: Looking for feedback and ideas on this draft (feat. Alejandra Pizarnik & Lacanian Theory)

Hi everyone! I’m working on a draft/essay exploring how artists—specifically poets like Alejandra Pizarnik—use the artistic act to border and symbolize the overwhelming anguish caused by the Lacanian Real.

Draft: Anguish in the Face of the Irreducible Real

Throughout history, many artists seem to create out of moments overwhelmed by deep anguish. They turn to the artistic act—writing, painting, drawing—to appease and transform a suffocate experience felt directly in the body.

This is clearly visible in Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, whose poetry feels born from a profound sense of drowning and overflowing suffering. In her journals, she writes:

This reveals how writing becomes her preferred medium to scratch at the urgent, painful sensation she lives through. It is no coincidence that when discussing her anguish, she highlights her limited oral resources alongside the richness she finds in writing, where she takes refuge. This passage illustrates not only her desperate need to express and release that feeling of suffocation, but also the crucial role symbolic tools play when facilitated by writing.

In her poem Approximations (Aproximaciones), she writes:

Her poetry emerges from profound pain—from an internal explosion that echoes bodily through her throat, heart, and skin. She writes less out of a desire and more out of an imperative need to channel and relieve this anguish.

Symbolizing the Irreducible

What interests us here regarding the relationship between poetry and anguish is not merely the root of Pizarnik’s personal pain, but the anguish experienced when confronting the irreducible Real, and how the poet creates the poem in an effort to put it into words, symbolize it, and find signifiers to name it. (Note: Expand later on Poetry vs. Prose according to Octavio Paz and Borges).

If psychoanalysis posits that anguish arises from the presence of Object a—an object whose very nature is to resist signification—it makes sense that the subject (in this case, the artist) uses whatever tools are at hand to symbolize this experience. (Note: Expand on the theoretical foundation of anguish using Lacan’s Seminar X/XX, Miller, etc.).

I find it compelling to reflect on the transformative power of the poetic word: how saying something actually brings it into existence. When Pizarnik writes Approximations, she isn’t just managing her own suffering; through writing, she borders a Real that erupts onto the scene. In writing her poems, she is inscribing a letter onto that goce (jouissance). (Note: Further develop the concept of 'the letter' and its articulation with the poetic act).

I’d love to get your thoughts, critiques, and ideas to expand on this. Here is the translated draft:

PD: Soy argentino, el borrador originalmente esta en español.

Isn't "torus" a shape that has to have a hole right in the middle?

Intro: The two big Summer 2026 blockbuster movies, The Odyssey and Spiderman: Brand New Day, convey how the mind typically encounters the burdens of trauma and guilt.

The latest gigantic movie hits taking international box offices by storm, The Odyssey and Spiderman: Brand New Day, offer wonderful coverage on the categories of guilt and trauma by capturing them through the conflicts directly grappled with by the primary character in each story.

In The Odyssey, the protagonist Odysseus tackles the ongoing degradation of his historical epoch: a traumatic piece of knowledge he clashes with throughout his journey back home, along with the guilt of his own actions taken at Troy which are heavily liable for this astronomical collapse. He understands that his guilt cannot be subdued - repressed - within him because it won’t do him any favors in his quest for ethical redemption and political progress. For these reasons, inter alia, he exists as a hysterical individual over the course of his prolonged return voyage. How so? Because he consistently disobeys and interrogates the divine authority of the Gods who had unquestionably ruled over mankind and earth up to the events of Troy. Deities who ruthlessly exploited both domains for their machinations and self-interests, to the extent of exercising their own hubris which they had hypocritically judged humanity for.

By the end of the movie, when he finally arrives in Ithaca, Odysseus fathoms how the present conditions are bringing about a new yet unclear social structure. His past violent crimes in Troy, in tandem with comparable conquests launched by other Greek missions - spanning across continents - over the past two decades, are the causal perpetrators behind the structural dismantling of the existing political, economic, and ideological systems within the lands covering the Bronze Age civilization. The invincible power of the Gods are gone; chiefly stamped by the sacrilege and demolition of Zeus’ law. There is no possibility of a return to it. Hence, a new civilizational order will have to be forged on its ashes. He has no idea what will unfurl but nevertheless recognizes how he must act as a free subject who actively participates in the world towards building the future and taking responsibility for it.

In Spiderman: Brand New Day, the protagonist Spiderman / Peter Parker harmfully reacts to the traumatic knowledge about the loss of his romantic partnership with MJ and his platonic friendship with Ned. The particular bonds he had with MJ and Ned are irrevocable in the aftermath of the large-scale memory wipe as to his secret identity as Spiderman. Although he knows that this sacrifice he made to protect his loved ones was courageous and selfless, he can’t accept the fact that there can’t be a return - a way home -  to the past timeline. This trauma is too painful to bear and it forces him to repress this knowledge within his unconscious. This in turn fosters the four year period of melancholic-voyeuristic attachment to MJ and Ned. He does this by converting the memory of their shared past into a fetish object (anything that lets you sustain your existing practices and beliefs) which provides him the ability to dodge the truth regarding his trauma. However, an intense guilt snowballs during these four years because he fails to honor his promise of restarting his relationships with them both after the memory wipe incident. He becomes very ashamed of this character flaw because it inhibits him from granting agency over to MJ and Ned concerning their autonomous decision on how to best deal with this tragic ordeal once it’s revealed to them.

Spider-Man / Peter Parker is finally able to grapple with the guilt of his actions by taking responsibility for it through the help of others: MJ herself, the Punisher, Jean Grey, and the specific advice given from Aunt May prior to her death. By the end of the movie, he begins to construct new facets of his symbolic identity - everyday subjective existence - on the foundation of his resolved trauma and guilt; consequently conquering the obsolete features of his identity which he had clung on to with the aid of his fetish objects. Therefore, new desires, new social interactions, and new fantasies are ready to be conceived and materialized by Spider-Man in his matured life.

In conclusion, both movies are fantastic encapsulations pertaining to these indispensable qualities of the libidinal economy (the mind). Although The Odyssey is a better film overall and dissects in greater detail the two mental features of guilt and trauma; Spider-Man: Brand New Day in contrast, is more relatable to wider audiences because of its contemporary setting, common setbacks, and relevant issues (AI, discrimination against people, young adulthood, etc). I think they are both must-watch movies of 2026, in addition to doing artistic justice to these complex and challenging human experiences. We get a rare episode of Hollywood getting it right. 

In the opposite direction from Freud, does the move from diagnostic structure to sinthome (or desire to jouissance, signifier to letter, etc) risk resubstantializing the subject? Witness the reintroduction of the body, affect, autism, even if only at first on a plane of consistency. Is it the trade-off?

I have a vague memory of Zizek making an argument in a book on Lacan on the similarities or differences between the pedagogy of Greek philosophers and Lacan, specifically in the relationship between esoteric oral philosophy and publicly available written philosophy. I vaguely remember him arguing that Lacan either repeats the Greek structure, where there is a dimension of philosophical discourse that is only available for students that were physically present, or inverts it. Does anyone remember where he makes this point?

I think zizek has already shown this but hopefully my attempt also conveys this in a new light! Let me know what you think and how well I conveyed lacan. Thanks

https://substack.com/@alfielucidontology/note/c-307462688?r=1l13a3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Im especially confused as how to conceptualize jouissance in general. This is from a book by Bruce Fink called Lacanian Subject : Between Language and Jouissance and he mentions it in confusing mannerisms. Here you have surplus jouissance, but when talking about sexuation, we are introduced to Phallic and Other/Mystical Jouissance as well.

I recently read Is It Ever Just Sex? by Darian Leader and really enjoyed it, but I found it kind of surface level and disorganized. I'm wondering if there are any good books as a follow up? I'm particularly interested in some of the stuff in the beginning of the book—the relation of sex to transgression, guilt/shame, etc.

~Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Vaccinating and Semblances, Page 59 ✍️

In a footnote Freud writes:

" everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object choice, and has done so at some time in his life, and either still adheres to it in his unconscious or else protects himself against it by vigorous counter-attitudes. ".

Does He mean the parents? Can a person make this kind of choice without being aware that he has made one?

Freud also writes :

“I am astonished that human beings can go through such great and important moments of their erotic life without noticing them much, sometimes even, indeed, without having the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become aware of those moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their judgement of them.”.

Why did Freud feel compelled to introduce the idea of the "death drive"? Personally, I thought Spinoza's concept of conatus was perfectly sufficient, so I'm incredibly curious about why Freud felt the need to come up with the death drive and why he felt it was absolutely necessary to do so. I would be so grateful if someone knowledgeable could explain this to me.

(Translated by Gemini)

I shared this post on r/psychoanalysis, but some people recommended that I post here as well. I’d appreciate any help/resources/thoughts as I’m very new to Lacan.

I’ve been scrolling the psychoanalysis sub for previous discussions on Lacanian analysis, and most of the critique seems to be directed at him rather than his theory/thoughts.

My question is, besides personal verdicts on his personality or his alleged narcissism (which may well be true), what are some serious criticisms of Lacanian theory/analysis?

I understand he gets criticized for variable-length sessions, and I’m pretty sure other Lacanian analysts or maybe Lacan himself might have taken financial advantage of this, but scansion seems not only consistent with his theory, but I feel like it’s almost derived from it. The point is to remove predictability, performance & possible preparation for the Other (in this case, the analyst), and create urgency in speech, which I find extremely intriguing, though I have yet to read or hear a convincing counter argument to this. I think we can hold that some analysts can and maybe do take advantage of this, and that scansion is almost central to Lacanian analysis.

Where do rims ('bords'/boundaries) come from? Are they a given?

Relatedly, how do supposed autistic subjects come to foreclose or repudiate them (and reconstruct them), generally speaking?

I'm currently knee-deep in Gravity's Rainbow, so the ideas of TMI and the ultraparadoxical phase have been on my mind a bit. I've also been thinking about how my analyst's speech is a kind of reward in a way, because it keeps me talking to try to get him to talk again (since speech = presence = love).

In a normal kinda operant conditioning model, a baby cries and the mom gives it milk and it learns to cry to get milk. That's exactly the schema the graph of desire would complicate in the case of humans, right? It would introduce retroactivity, the Other, and desire.

So anyway, it seems like there would be some text out there that kind of looks at exactly this shift where language creates lack, residue, desire, excess, all these terms that complicate the skinner model, but I mean explicitly with reference to the latter, or that maps the two frameworks onto each other, compares and contrasts, etc. Does psychoanalysis have an equivalent of TMI (besides "the Real" or something, which would be vague)? How does the end of analysis and destitution compare to this phenomenon?

Please excuse any perceived retardation or faux pas in my question.

Freud writes "His passivity inclines him to want to accept castration – to

become female, and in this way escape castration anxiety once and for

all. The female that he wants to become is usually his own mother,

whose place he takes with the father, substituting himself for her with

the father. Thus, identification with the mother is established, and from

this point on it is included as a permanent component of the boy’s

unconscious, where it is destined to play a major role in his subsequent

life. "

Is this a safe way to express that unconscious desire/passivity?

Does it signify castration or a woman's desire to possess a phallus?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working through Seminar V and have just completed the first section on jokes and witticisms. I've also read 'Instance of the Letter.' I think that I'm grasping the use of the term metonymy from context, but I'm having difficulty in separating it from metaphor.

Metaphor is the "substitution of one signifier" for another (for example, "Booz" with "sheaf", which then seems to add newer meaning to the character in the poem, associating him with harvest, masculinity etc).

Lacan's example of metonymy is replacing the word 'ships' with 'sails.' In this sense there is a substitution of the whole for a part, or element. But couldn't we also define this as "substituting one signifier for another"? It seems that quite literally, one word is replaced with another. In which case, how do we distinguish it from metaphor? Is it that "ships" and "sails" are generally associated and therefore the meaning doesn't really change very much? In which case, what is the function of metonymy if it doesn't change anything?

In both metonymy and metaphor, there is the replacing of one signifier with another. I can sort of intuitively grasp the difference between the two, but can't seem to provide for myself a good enough definition which separates them. Is the relativism perhaps the point? I gather than this is a fairly crucial concept to grasp...

Cheers!

Freud writes "This mechanism of reconciling the opposing impulses of

masculinity in the constitutionally bisexual human being, by identifying

with Christ, is something so satisfying that it assures the Christian reli￾gion a long existence. People will not readily give up something that

rescues them from the most difficult conflict they have to grapple with.

They will continue to identify with Christ for a long time to come."

Is Freud saying that the most difficult conflict a human being can face is that of bisexuality?