The Topological Ethnology of the Tempietto Donald Kunze 2024-01-19 | This study of the tempietto type, in terms of the "polythetic set" and topology, is about the flow of forces in culture that create laminations of ideas, uses, and forms. This video was made for a presentation to the PhD Seminar at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center on January 19, 2024, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Paul Emmons and help of Camila Mancilla Vera (ABD). Thanks to Claudio Sgarbi for bringing the case of the shrine of Vaginatus to my attention.
Polythetics for Lacans Phase 2 Donald Kunze 2026-08-23 | A true materialism needed to advance Lacanian psychoanalysis matches the object of study with the method of study, in a 1:1 of effectiveness grounded in cultural logic (the polythetics of ethnology and a polythetic methodology). The polythetic set focuses on the role of the inside frame in creating an ambiguous "choice space" where the subject and signifier exchange their objets-a within a toroidal topology of self-intersection and non-orientation. The A=/≠A of non orientation uses the induction puzzle aspect of the frame-in-the-frame to include the viewer with the viewed and allow us to see one image as the "unconscious" of another. This video follows up early analyses of "Las Meninas," which had pointed out the presence of a left-over margin as the place where geometry became topology. Polythetics goes beyond this to suggest a model in the fundamental polygon of the torus, which justifies thinking of this margin as a void.
A Polythetic Method for Demonstrating Jacques Lacans Visual Thinking Donald Kunze 2026-06-28 | The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had an incredible visual imagination. He used diagrams, drawings, photos of archaeological specimens, and famous paintings as study sites to find, within the "dilation" of the visual cone of vision, objects that played a double role as visible and "glyphic," unsettling the visual order presumed by perspective, experience, and convention. This is a pilot version of a lecture for the LacanToday conference in Ghent, Belgium. Comments and suggestions are welcome. For a transcript of the narrative, go to https: bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/9/19778/files/2026/06/polythetic-method.pdf
The Sheela-na-gig and the Polythetic Method Donald Kunze 2026-06-18 | This is a STUDY VIDEO without a narration track. It argues that the Sheela-na-gig motif in folklore is broadly applicable to a variety of cultural, ethnological, and psychoanalytical situations. In a few weeks a narration track will be added and a few more visuals included, so hang on. The death of Carlo Ginsburg made me think about the practices that, in every culture, take place "sub rosa," how they are usually run by women, and how they involve codes and lots of mathematical tricks. We owe an enormous debt to Voudoun, wicca, Hoodoo, and other traditions which have persisted through the ages to preserve an entirely different kind of thinking. In Russia, there is a joke, that "In Russia, the men do everything; the women do the rest." This rest is the essential remainder that preserves while it negates — the essence of Hegel's Aufhebung, eh? A silent video is sometimes better than a narrated one, since it requires the viewer to silently add a commentary. I hope this might work in a Voudoun way, to access the kind of magic that comes of approving of ugliness.
Paul Guzzardo Zoom: Clarice Donald Kunze 2026-05-15 | Speaking from Buenos Aires as a U.S. exile-witness, Guzzardo approaches this not as abstraction but as lived terrain. The work traces a sequence of exposures: a programmer describing “code smell” inside a functioning system; a legal voice breaking down into procedural residue; an architectural archive reappearing as recursive enclosure. From the outside, what has emerged from this condition is not singular. It includes both the rise of Musk/Altman Al systems and the Trumpian deformation of the civic sphere. These are not separate developments, but parallel expressions of a system that continues to operate by recombining and cannibalizing its own remains. This zoom session (May 31, 2026) is inspired by Italo Calvino's "invisible city," Clarice. Visit: https://sites.psu.edu/ipsa/dispatch-from-clarice-inside-the-visible-city/
The Binding Void: The Induction-Inversion of Lacans ETHNO-topology Donald Kunze 2026-04-22 | Lacan’s many ideas about topology, perspective, and temporality come together in the idea of the induction puzzle, embodied by the EULER SPHERE, a double round whose void has a generative and legislative power for all speaking subjects. The induction puzzle begins with the mythological idea of the double, the splitting of subjectivity into rival twins, whose “basculating” relationship is required for the foundation of civic and social spaces. The circularity of induction is spherical, but like the founding twins, the authoritative sphere is also a double. Freud almost discovers the double sphere in his essay on the Three Caskets, but he fails to connect to the rich vein of references that would have, in the motif of the Sheela na Gig (the theme of the hag who converts to the beautiful goddess); yet he luckily arrives at the same conclusion: that the inversion-induction of femininity is about, not just death, but the death drive. Follow this lengthy and sometimes arcane argument to realize that psychoanalysis must extend the Freudian-Lacanian legacy to fully embrace the idea of the induction puzzle, whose “inside frame” can be found more easily in ethnology than formal mathematics. The author has benefitted from many conversations with colleagues: Iraj Ismailpour Ghoochani, Claudio Sgarbi, Quinn Foerch, Berrin Terim, Jodi LaCoe, Diane Cuelo, and Dan Warner. This project was inspired by Sheldon George and motivated by colleagues at iPSA (John Shannon Hendrix, Lorens Holm, Tim Martin, Andrew Payne, Angie Voela, and Francesco Proto). Thanks!
Basculation Rocks! Lacans Theory of Everything, the 1/a (unary over objet-a) Donald Kunze 2026-04-02 | This long, and sometimes tedious, instructional video takes a look at the word "basculation" (French "basculer," to rock) in search of a single principle connecting the psyche's extension, the visual field, and the relation of desire to demand. Evidence from Lacan's Seminar XIV ("The Logic of Phantasy") and XIII ("The Object of Psychoanalysis") combines what Lacan called the slide-rule analogy of psychoanalysis' relation of the unary trait to the "objet-a" (object-cause of desire), as comparable to the 1/a considered as the Golden Ratio. This exegesis of Lacan's "ethno-topology" uses Velázquez's "Las Meninas" as a testing ground for the 1/a, where the virtualities of reflections, implied spaces, and a "unary image" within the painting combine to produce a master-plan for the relation of consciousness to the unconscious, within the perspectival field. This video is almost impossibly wordy and in parts boring and tedious, but the viewer gets, in return for all this suffering, a critical synthesis that bridges Lacan's earliest interest in induction puzzles (the Three Prisoners' Dilemma, written up in the essay on Logical Time, 1945) and his late concern for the Borromeo knot's near-infinite variability (the RSI seminar and later).
Lacans Mar26 Seminar Donald Kunze 2026-03-26 | This silent cartel study video examines two pages from the Gallagher translation of Seminar XIII, "The Object of Psychonalyais." It looks at the function of the screen, in terms of Xavier Audouard's (misunderstood) interpretation of Lacan's butterfly diagram of the look and gaze as two intersecting cones of vision. Audouard shows a criss-cross that inverts the subject's cone of vision dilation into the gaze, which is "simultaneous," thanks to the function of the forced choice, where the Other (A) and its Nemesis, Ⱥ, construct a 2-d "Euler sphere," where repetition is simultaneously a cancellation and preservation. This video is incorporated in a later video, "Basculation Rocks!" youtu.be/KNYcapqexzU
Basculation … Is Golden (a silent video) Donald Kunze 2026-03-26 | One of Lacan's "forgotten terms" is "basculation" (basculer, to basculate in French). It generally means to rock (back and forth), but as we see when we look at Lacan's "slide-rule analogy" in Seminar XIV, "The Logic of Phantasy," basculation plays a critical role in the construction of perspectival space. With the key ratio of 1/a, which we might think of as the unary trait in relation to the objet-a, Lacan relates two incommensurable ideas as incommensurable quantities, where the "a" is the point that makes 1/a the Golden Ratio. In his demonstration, Lacan shows how the "a" basculates within the unary 1 to reduplicate itself, with ever-decreasing intervals, towards what we could consider to be a "katagraphic" cut, which corresponds to the vanishing point at infinity. Like his 17c. source, Girard Desargues, Lacan LOCALIZES this infinity at the same time he globalizes it. It is literally the center of Pascal's "infinite sphere," whose periphery is nowhere and center is everywhere. This is a 2-d sphere — self-intersecting and non-orientable, the key to Lacan's solution to Freud's enigmatic note, "Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it." But, neither Lacan nor Freud were the first to think of this. Consider what we could call Western art's most famous induction puzzle, the "meta-painting" by Diego Velázquez, "Las Meninas." Here, basculation is accomplished by the repetitions of the image of King Felipe IV and Queen Mariana, as they triangulate the space of the room with golden precision. This is a lesson about repetition, coincidence, divergence, and emergence, all from 1656! This video was incorporated in a longer, narrrated video, "Basculation Rocks!" youtu.be/KNYcapqexzU
Saving Xavier Auduard Donald Kunze 2026-01-27 | Jacques Lacan called his friend Xavier Auduard on the morning of May 15, 1966, to ask him to make a short presentation during session 18. Audouard hastily assembled his notes and a few drawings. When he redrew his diagrams for the audience, however, they seemed hard to understand. The labelling was confusing and Lacan took them to be about binocular vision. This was not the case. Closer inspection shows that Audoard's thesis revises our view of Lacan's famous "butterfly" diagram from Seminar XI, where the look and gaze are related by two intersecting triangles representing cones of vision. Audouard used two criss-cross parallelograms to emphasize the role of "cathesis," the constancy that held the two cones of vision (dilation) together. This is a rather visually boring video, but the thesis is potentially revolutionary. It suggests that Audouard gives us a visual means of connecting dilation and cathesis to the ancient phenomenon of "ostentum," the Roman type of divine sign that happened in visual perception. Ostenta have not disappeared with the times. Popular culture — film, literature, painting — depends on the logic of the ostentum to induce surprise and suspense. This video replaces the silent version recently uploaded. For a transcript of the narrative, and is explained in greater detail in a previous video, "The Butterfly and the Circuit: Shibboleth for the Imaginary," at youtube.com/watch?v=sWGCxrG5Mm8. See https://sites.psu.edu/boundarylanguage/files/2026/01/Audouard-text.pdf
The Psyche Is Extended — but HOW? Donald Kunze 2025-12-31 | This video elaboration of how the psyche is extended in time as well as space is really not for beginners. It presumes a reasonable familiarity with Lacan's L-schema, Freud's pithy note about how "Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it"; Lacan's formula for metaphor; and Freud's "parapraxis" (the forgetting of the proper name, "Signorelli"). On top of this, the argument carries into the idea of travel as involving three kinds of circularities; then it claims that circular triplicity relates to the dilation and cathesis of the Imaginary as evidenced in Lacan’s “butterfly diagram” in Seminar XI, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.” Really! It's not just "not for beginners," it's not even for puzzle-loving Lacanians with years of experience. Yet, there are benefits by comparing all of these models of spatial and temporal extension. The hope is that they may offer a polymorphic-perverse methodology for combining topology with ethnology and, in the process, aligning Lacan's theory of metaphor with that of the 18c. Neapolitan philosopher of culture, Giambattista Vico. If you're up for it, give it a spin but be patient and persistent. This is one of those projects that requires as much work from the viewer as the producer, maybe more!
The Butterfly and the Circuit: Shibboleth for the Imaginary Donald Kunze 2025-12-24 | This video is not for beginners! It as an attempt to convert some of Lacan’s most difficult materials into a new protocol of diagram relations involving the classic “butterfly” diagram of the look and gaze, the L-schema, and topological figures. This dense series of diagrams argues for an anti-historicist view of Lacan’s teachings. His first topological thinking begins with his early essay on Logical Time, with the use of inversion and induction in the production of cathesis as paralysis. None of this will make sense without considering how the line between the Analyst and Analysand in the clinical session amounts to a sagittal Imaginary, permeable and resistant. Each of these panels amount to a week or more of study, so don’t be discouraged. With time, some new themes, such as triplicity, cathesis, and dilation, will become clearer. A text of this video will be posted at bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/9/19778/files/2025/12/butterfly-circuit.pdf. An animated version of the butterfly's intricacies will be out in January.
Non-Orientation Matters! Ambiguity and the Other of the Perspective Hinge Donald Kunze 2025-11-30 | This silent video requires the viewer to fill in the blanks to tell the full story of a "topology" of ambiguity and anachronism based on the non-orientation of the forms of projective geometry. It is tough going! Torus logic comes to life through Lacan's use of a perspectival "prism" based on Girard Desargues' "perspective hinge," the seam between the viewer's verticality and the ground plane. Xavier Audouard attempted to demonstrate this hinge effect in Session 18 of Lacan's Seminar XIII (The Object of Psychoanalysis), but Lacan mistook Auduard's diagrams to represent binocular vision. To vindicate Audouard, this video shows that the viewer's screen image is presented as an objective imager, eclipsing and sublating the subjective image. The non-orientation of the objective and subjective images lead to an unexplored (and as-yet unexplained) phenomenon: the sorites, where maximal particularity becomes the basis for the exaptation of a new kind of universal, tied to the function of the SORITES, where the “treasury of signifiers” becomes symmetrical about the perspective hinge. This may be too much for a silent video. Apologies in advance for all the headaches this video may cause! Hopefully, a narrated version will appear before December 20, 2025.
A New Lacanian Criticism (Part I) Donald Kunze 2025-11-24 | Lacan’s natural perspective, which all humans carry about with them as subjects who use signifiers and signifiers who use subjects, is about the visible and invisible in the most general of terms. It became particularly helpful when Girard Desargues developed a means of thinking about the here and there of our experience by means of a specific kind of topology called projective geometry. Here, there is a historical origin point, 1636, when Desargues published his controversial treatise. We shouldn’t confuse this with the kind of perspective Lacan says that all human subjects have simply on account of being speaking beings. This perspective is created by the interaction of two aspects of metaphor — sublation, when one signifier takes the place of another, and metonymic chaining, which creates a linear order of linked objects, agencies, and ideas. PART II OF THIS SERIES SHOULD BE AVAILABLE BY FEBURARY 1. 2026.
Revisiting the Butterfly Donald Kunze 2025-11-14 | Lacan's famous "butterfly" diagram of the relation of the look and gaze seems obviously to be two intersecting triangles, but in this highly abstract sideways view, with two intersecting cones of vision, what is the role of the screen? This short study video is made for those rare readers of Lacan who, venturing into Seminar XIII, "The Object of Psychoanalysis," have run into Xavier Audouard's presentation (which Lacan did not like). This opens the door to the idea that the diagram has many graphic options that critically affect the relation of the eye and gaze, viewer and viewed. There are no conclusions here, only a suggestion that, to appreciate Lacan's rich graphic legacy, we must learn to re-draw diagrams and understand the options. We should at least try to get into the mentality of Holbein and Dürer, who in the early 16th century, actively deconstructed the meaning of perspective devices.
The End of Historicism in Psychoanalytical Topology Donald Kunze 2025-10-21 | Richard Klein's keen-eye has observed two little figures that appear on the cover of the German edition of Freud's book, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Here are, Klein suggests, three little interior-8's (possibly) but a more interesting portrayal of a surface that loops around itself. IF ONE LOOKS ONLY AT THE EDGES, however, a very interesting thing comes to light. There are two "edge loops," and a central ring. Reduce these to their status as edges and you have what Lacan cites in Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome) as the "true hole" — a Brunnian braid of the Borromeo knot! From 1905 to 1975–76 is seventy years! What would a die-hard historian have to say about that? I think, thanks to Richard Klein, it's safe to say that historicism is dead. Lacan's topological thinking begins with the Three Prisoners' Dilemma (1935 — when he first heard this INDUCTION PUZZLE over a dinner table), and not Seminar IX as many have insisted. In fact, topology begins in psychoanalysis in 1905, with these three modest little figures. Thank you, Richard Klein! Be sure to read his introduction to his revised translation of DER WITZ UND SEINE BEZIEHUNG ZUM UNBEWUSSTEN. freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Freud_Jokes.pdf
The End of Lacanians Historicism: Topology begins with Freud! Donald Kunze 2025-10-19 | This short video has been enlarged and improved. See its "successor" at youtu.be/WFC3u8gnNpM.Thanks to Iraj Ghoochani and Claudio Sgarbi for their critical comments that allowed me to connect to the idea of Taarof (تعارف), the Iranian custom of balancing in relation to the evil eye. This makes it possible to say that ethnotopology is the logic of topology in psychoanalysis.
Representing nothing: Vico’s induction and inversion Donald Kunze 2025-10-16 | ABSTRACT: Giambattista Vico used the logic of the induction puzzle to structure his New Science and certain critical ideas within that science, such as the imaginative universal. Induction involves inclusion of the role of the rhetorical frame at the level of projected content, with a resulting inversion of agencies and actions, such as the viewer and the viewed, projection and introjection. Induction is widespread in the arts and literature (chiasmus, the inside frame, chiaroscuro, fugue) and is critical in works where apophasis and retroaction involve “topological” effects. For Farsi-speakers, see mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgzQcqRBZGwpZlhLHfQGnxpFPffML?projector=1, narrated by Iraj Ghoochani. نمایش هیچ. دان کونزه.چکیده: جامباتیستا ویکو از منطق معمای استقرایی برای ساختاردهی به «علم نوین» خود و برخی ایدههای انتقادی درون این علم، مانند «امر جهانشمول تخیلی»، استفاده کرد. استقرا شامل گنجاندن نقش چارچوب بلاغی در سطح محتوای فرافکنیشده است، که در نتیجه آن، وارونگی عاملیتها و کنشها رخ میدهد، مانند بیننده و دیدهشده، فرافکنی وGiambattista Vico a utilisé la logique du puzzle inductif pour structurer sa Nouvelle Science et certaines idées critiques au sein de cette science, telles que l'universel imaginatif. L'induction implique l'inclusion du rôle du cadre rhétorique au niveau du contenu projeté, avec pour résultat une inversion des agents et des actions, tels que le spectateur et le specté, la projection et l'introjection. L'induction est très répandue dans les arts et la littérature (chiasme, cadre intérieur, clair-obscur, fugue) et est essentielle dans les œuvres où l'apophasis et la rétroaction impliquent des effets « topologiques ».
Lacans True Hole: a Speculative Application to Perspective and the L-Schema Donald Kunze 2025-10-09 | This short study video proposes that Lacan's "true hole," a Brunnian braid of the Borromeo knot presented in Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, opens up a new "perspectival" function within the L-Schema. This is entirely speculative, so apologies in advance to doctrinaire colleagues who regard the L-schema in strictly traditional ways. I tried to follow Bruce Fink's advice about what happens in Analysis at the level of the signifier and timing. The idea of an "atomization" of the Analysand's free association made sense, in that the Imaginary, within the "cone of vision," needed to be an aerosol, where every point is equidistant from every other point. This is possible in a multidimensional space of n-1 dimensions, but the reverse perspective can be produced only by squeezing this aerosol into a more structured state. But, the effects of reversed perspective have been described in a competent way by Pavel Florensky, and I wish to give him credit. I also wish to bring forward the role of dilation and cathesis in Lacan's axonometric representations of Desargue-style accounts of ocular (as opposed to optical) perception, involving a "perspective hinge." For the text of the narration, visit https://boundarylanguage.psu.edu/thesis-about-lacans-real-hole/.
Extimacy and the Induction Puzzle of Asylum Donald Kunze 2025-10-02 | If Lacan is correct, then the problem of asylum is structural, not just historical or social. While asylum begins as a retreat from danger, its economy can be set in reverse gear on behalf of racial purification. We can see this clearly in terms of structure, while empirical examples only muddy the waters. The matter concerns the functions and utilities of the boundary that, far from serving in the office of the wall, functions more as a Lacanian rim, a toroidal relation of subject and signifier that uses the void in ways that are ideologically undetectable but socially, ethically, and psychically catastrophic. I shall use two “pre-topological” concepts to define a new approach to the rim: (1) inversion geometry, the mathematics behind Lacan’s coined term, extimité, and (2) induction logic, present in Lacan’s thinking from Seminar I onwards. In short, this is the “defective instruction,” which is a puzzle presentation requiring reference to the rules of the game to be solved at the level of demonstration. Asylum, as refuge indistinguishable from imprisonment, requires psychoanalysis’s most serious theorizing. Without inversion and induction, we will miss the opportunity to say precisely what is going on in this age of universal estrangement. The extimité of the former and the forced choice of the latter command our attention. This speculative video moves beyond Lacan's topology, but with the implicit support of structures that he employed from the very first years of his theory career. APOLOGIES FOR THE MISSPELLING OF "EXTIMITY" ON THE OPENING IMAGE!!!! EGAD!!! This will be corrected by November 11, 2025.
The Unary Imaginary: How the Palindrome Introduces an Induction Puzzle into Psychoanalysis Donald Kunze 2025-09-27 | This is an entirely speculative venture requiring the viewer to have some knowledge of Lacan's Seminar XIII, especially sessions 15, 16, and 17, where Lacan borrows graphics from Girard Desargues' "prismatic" ocular diagrams featuring a "perspective hinge" between the ground plane and picture plane. Gauss's "palindrome solution," the creation of a constant sum within a number series, applies to the Imaginary of the analytical session as modeled by the L-schema. The induction puzzle is a logic of self-intersection, of the frame with the framed, as in the example "There are three erors in this sentance" (the third error is the fact that there are only two errors). Lacan's study of Logical Time uses a classic induction puzzle, the Three Prisoners' Dilemma. The palindrome also uses induction to prove Lacan's principle of "Ex falso, quodlibet sequitur" (Once the idea of error is revised/enlarged, anything is possible"). A follow-up video is under way to expand on the relation of the unary imaginary to topics such as anamorphosis and the gaze. A Farsi translation by Iraj Ghoochani can be found at youtu.be/xTqYTteAcvI
Dilation and Cathesis: A Perspective Approach to the (Lacanian) Induction Puzzle Donald Kunze 2025-09-08 | Lacanian psychoanalysis is haunted by a note Freud wrote in 1938, that Psyche is extended but is unconscious of this extension. We cannot think of extension in Euclidean terms, but to follow Lacan’s thinking on the matter, we must understand his topology in terms of an underlying logic, induction and inversion, the key to the way perspective is an ETHNO-logic. This video begins with Girard Desargues’ discovery of the perspective hinge, vision’s version of the abstract relations of symmetrical difference, chiasmus, topology forms such as the torus and Klein bottle, the katagraphic cut, and even Lacan’s Borromeo model of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary.
Las Meninas as an induction puzzle Donald Kunze 2025-08-24 | Diego Velázquez's famous "meta-painting" is perhaps the most famous induction puzzle in the history of western art, although no one has recognized this to date. To find out what an induction puzzle is, google the term and return to this SILENT VIDEO to look for how an induction puzzle can be created out of a shift in perspectival particulars. In short, the painter sets up an "ideal view," where the perspective center and physical center of the canvas coincide, then he adds space around this ideal to displace the vanishing point and horizon(s). The result is to connect the ambiguity about the content of the various canvases involved in the painting to an "irreducible remainder," the mirror in the back that seems to violate the rules of perspectival dilation.
Inversion-Induction: A Way to Think about Lacans Topology as a non-Mathematician Donald Kunze 2025-05-07 | This is the first of a series of instructional videos is to show how Lacan’s thinking depends on a special kind of visualization that we could call topology if we were mathematicians or inside-outness if we were not. Lacan coined a word for inside-outness, extimity in the English form, but as easy as it is to talk about gloves and puzzles, Lacanians in general have not picked up on this option to talk about topology without topology. Let’s try another approach, called the induction puzzle, where the answer is embedded inside the question. For supplementary materials and a list of instructional videos as the become available, visit https://boundarylanguage.psu.edu/topology-without-mathematics/. Enjoy the masterful Farsi translation of this video by Iraj Ghoochani: youtube.com/watch?v=JZBA5jQczjY
Induction-Inversion: Lacans Topology before the Torus Donald Kunze 2025-04-11 | This short silent video annotates the fundamental polygon of the torus to show that the logic of the inversion circle and induction puzzle are already present in a "toroidal" functional relation. With or without the literal 2d torus, Lacan's topology is implicitly toroidal, implicitly inversive-inductive. Pay attention to the initial cut between speaking and being, which initially creates a space of presentation, but then, after an "apogee," begins a space of demonstration. In effect, the SUBJECT appears in the space of presentation, while the SIGNIFIER takes over the space of demonstration, using a logic of instrumental convergence.
Inversion and Induction: a geometric cypher of melancholy Donald Kunze 2025-03-19 | This narrated presentation focuses on Lacan's division of the subject and signifier as the basis of his topology, with the qualification that this topology is really about inversion and induction, two "pre-topological" forces that shape ethnological uses of space and time. This video is available in a Farsi translation, youtube.com/watch?v=DGJZ6lCqzmU, narrated by Iraj Ismailpoor Ghoochani.
From Presentation to Demonstration: The Villarceau Key to Inversion Donald Kunze 2025-03-09 | If there is a logic to the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, it is a cultural logic, with topology already present. Here, our excavations should supply a new vocabulary. We should see in the paralysis of Prometheus, the extensive practices of bodily ornamentation and costume, and the elaborate rituals of marriage, new grounds for proclaiming the radical value of psychoanalysis. If Freud says that psyche is extended but knows nothing of it, we should proclaim a new unconscious that is nothing less than the cultural collective. The Villarceau cut into the 3-d torus (presentation) reveals the 2-d structure (demonstration), and the structure of the void shows us how to relate to the demonstrations implicit within the subject (Lacan's "between the two deaths") and the signifier (Freud's contronymic primal terms). For the amazing Farsi version narrated by Dr. Iraj Ghoochani, go to: youtu.be/ElJi9yoagjk.
The Villaraceau Cut: Lacans topologys relations to inversion geometry and, hence, ETHNOLOGY Donald Kunze 2025-02-18 | This silent video is a visual zairja to use when thinking of how Lacan's topological thinking was evenly distributed across the broad expanse of his work, from 1935 to 1980. Add your own narrative as you loop this video to consider two of the most ethnological of Lacan's and Freud's ideas, "between the two deaths" (an interval common to all cultures) and the contronym (words combining opposite meanings, said to proliferate in early cultures. Both of these ideas are present in the Villarceau cut, which converts an ordinary 3-d torus (bagel, donut, bicycle tire) into a 2-d torus, thanks to its production of a cut shaped like two Euler circle in the relation of symmetrical difference." Take this to other topological figures, beginning with the Möibius band, and re-think other critical ideas, such as the après coup and L-Schema. Oops! Don't forget lalangue! Create your own "zairja" (personal thinking machine).
Mapping the Topology of Inversion to a Sphere Donald Kunze 2025-01-28 | This silent video is a place-holder for review and comments before the narrated version is produced. It proposes to use a sphere to map relations of the viewer to the viewed, showing how the horizon creates an invisibility that is transferred to objects in the visible field. Suppression of this creates the double frame as a buffer to the inversive transfer of invisibility to ordinary objects, localizing the gaze and its inversive infinity.
Lacans Inversion Circle and the Cardano Cycloid Donald Kunze 2024-12-21 | This is a silent video that suggests a way of using Lacan's four discourses' sequential order and internal "lacework" to find a new "cycloid" feature. This relates to Lacan's project of reconciling the discourses to Aristotle's square, leading to the "extraction" of a quarter turn. Thanks to graphic designer and Lacan enthusiast Ross Sokolovsky for the graphic of the discourse wheel, which suggests a different order from the standard Master, Hysteric, University, Analysis (Analysis and University switch places). The argument is that the 4-to-3 theme that pervades Freud's work extends to Lacan's deployment of inversive geometry. See Jean-Michel Vappereau, "La théorie de l'identification selon Freud," pages 63 à 83 in his Topologie en extension, 1998, Paris.
Lacans inversive Geometry: Expanded and Improved Edition Donald Kunze 2024-12-07 | This is an enlarged and corrected edition of a silent video prepared for a zoom seminar to be held December 15, 2024. New in this edition: a way to connect Lacan’s critique of Aristotle’s logical square to the inversion circle, interior-8, and torus! Not exactly for beginners; challenging for veterans. For more information go to https://sites.psu.edu/boundarylanguage/lacan-toronto-seminar/. Please note that the new special term listed at point 1:14, "ausculatory," should be "osculatory."
Inversive Geometry for Lacans (Ethno-)Topology Donald Kunze 2024-12-04 | This silent video collects examples of "inversive geometry," the logic behind Lacan's famous idea of "extimité" — the inside-out conversions that constitute the Real of the subject. Participants in the upcoming TorontoLacan lecture (December 15, 2024) will study selected images to talk about the use of the inversion circle idea to connect Lacan's topology to ethnology. Supplementary materials can be found at https://sites.psu.edu/boundarylanguage/lacan-toronto-seminar/.
The Orthographic Cut: An Ethno-topological Approach to Psychoanalysis Donald Kunze 2024-10-22 | Inversive geometry has the ability to transform our view of Jaques Lacan's topology, making it less a matter of pure mathematics and more a central feature of the psychoanalytic value of ethnology. In this presentation prepared for a zoom with Iranian psychoanalysts, we use the L-Schema, Dracula, Antonello da Messina's painting of St. Jerome in his study, and Charlie Chaplin's film "The Circus" to develop the idea of the inversion circle, which shows how Lacan's "toroidal logic" applies to instances of non-orientation critical to cultural formations. There is a Farsi translation of the narrative for this video, thanks to Dr. Iraj Ghoochani: youtu.be/A34t2326Grc.
Tiny House, Big Ideas Donald Kunze 2024-09-23 | This silent video will be narrated at the VANDA conference, Vienna, September 25, 2024. A Farsi translation will be created by Iraj Ghoochani and posted soon. The silent version of this video was narrated at the VANDA conference, Vienna, September 25, 2024 by Don. Kunze. There is a Farsi translation of it created by Iraj Ghoochani (youtu.be/Hym5id2MGaA). Check: https://sites.psu.edu/ipsa/tehran-proFor origina video please cjeck: • Tiny House, Big Ideas نسخه بیصدا این ویدئو در کنفرانس VANDA، وین، 25 سپتامبر 2024 توسط دان کنزه روایت شد. این ترجمه فارسی آن توسط ایرج قوچانی ایجاد شده است. بررسی کنید: https://sites.psu.edu/ipsa/tehran-pro برای ویدیوی اصلی لطفاً مراجعه کنید: • Tiny House, Big Ideas.
Lacan: session 7 (featuring Dantes INFERNO) Donald Kunze 2024-08-22 | This silent study video addresses the dream-like structure of the session's examples.
Albrecht Dürers Magic Square Donald Kunze 2024-07-31 | This silent video reviews the methodology behind Albrecht Dürer's magic square, a 4x4 "Square of Jove," possibly intended to balance the bad effects of Saturn's magic 3x3 square. Magic square are ancient. Chinese and Indian examples have been recovered. Thanks to Vedic mathematics, however, Dürer's square seems to have been strategically manipulated to effect a unique result. This video presumes the viewer already knows the basics about magic squares, i. e. that the rows, columns, and diagonals all add up to the same number. For Dürer's square, this sum is 34.
Lacans Janusian Observer: A New Approach to Psychoanalytical (and Ethnological) Topology Donald Kunze 2024-06-24 | This is the first part of a two-part instructional video based on the idea of the inside or Janusian Observer who is able to insert himself inside the two dimensions of topological space, where an observer is not technically allowed. This “space invader,” like the real Janus (from Roman mythology), lands in the middle of things but, because of this central point of view, must rotate to get a full view. The parallax of this interior spectator is 2x of the ordinary Euclidean observer who always looks in the same direction from a generally fixed position. The Janusian Observer, however, can see what the Euclidean observer can see only as a gap, a blank spot, or a contradiction. This is the turn converted into a cut that separates the viewer from the viewed, either on the inside of the social world of the neurotic, in the form of alienation, or from outside, as someone who, permanently or temporarily psychotic, such as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” whose magical journey amounts to a coma induced to facilitate healing. The psychotic mirroring of friends from the inside farm life of Kansas to the radical exterior of Oz, is the mystery of the mirror itself, which in Lacanian psychoanalysis is primal and primary. Part 2 will study key paintings, where non-orientation and self-intersection directly involve an embodied Janusian Observer.
Instrumental Convergence: The Fundament of Time in Psychoanalysis Donald Kunze 2024-06-13 | This presentation for the 2024 meetings of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society focuses on instrumental convergence as the essential topology of "the extimate," Lacan's idea of the inside-out.
Tiny House and Lalangue:: Video for a Zoom Discussion, June 9, 2024 Donald Kunze 2024-06-09 | This silent video highlights the importance of a diagram Lacan presents on page 53 of his essay on "lalangue" — a Brunnian variation of the Borromeo knot. Iraj Goochani has discovered that this figure is the result of a transformation of an "inverter circle" circumscribing the three rings and "extimating" the Brunnian variation according to the rules of transformation by which tangent points remain tangent, and interior circles passing through the center become straight lines.
The Timing Belt of Subjectivity Donald Kunze 2024-05-16 | This is a fairly technical (Lacanian; topological) thesis about how we may combine three of Lacan's "squares": the R-Schema, the L-Schema, and the Fundamental Polygon of the Torus. Bone up on these diagrams using Lacan's Seminars II (the L-schema), "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (1959, included in the Écrits), or XIV for the fundamental polygon of the torus. You won't get much help in the video. What justifies these overlays is the idea of a space of rotation, where a vector, to return to its origins, must complete a 4π circuit that reinters the sphere at the precise moment it seems to leave it. Next trip? On the the formula for metaphor to see what can be done there! Narrated by AI Revoicer, James. Farsi version translated and narrated by Iraj Ghoochani at youtube.com/watch?v=8nqdevwJUPQ
Understanding Lacans Objet-a as Non-Orientation Donald Kunze 2024-05-06 | This is a sketch of a non-mathematical approach to instrumental convergence, presupposing that it is possible to map what is otherwise unobservable. The 1951 Hitchcock film, "Strangers on a Train," shows out the 2π realm of the tennis pro Guy Haines can be set into non-orientation by the objet-a, the monogrammed cigarette lighter stolen by the blackmailer Bruno, to force Guy into a symmetrical exchange to remove the element of motive (cf. intentionality) from the murder equation. The viewer is expected to do some homework on this!
Quantum Ethnology: from Diracs 1/2-spin Electron to the Pivot of the Four Quarters Donald Kunze 2024-05-05 | This study video requires a bit of background that the viewer will have to Google elsewhere: (1) Paul Dirac's "belt-twist trick" to demonstrate the 1/2 spin of the electron, (2) Giambattista Vico's thesis about the localization of the first humans, (3) some working definition of the "real projective plane" in relation to projective topology. Good luck in any event … the thesis is that ethnology can be an alternative to a full mathematical understanding of such things as the space of rotation, projective geometry, and quantum mechanics, IF YOU KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR.
Zairja: An Operators Manual Donald Kunze 2024-04-21 | What is a zairja and how do you use it? This video serves as an “operator’s manual” for a 7000-year-old computer that, unlike the modern computer, combines chance and necessity into a composite AI model that employs the user’s own neural network to invent and explore new meanings. The Lalangue/Tiny-House Project requires participants to have at least one encounter with the zairja before joining any of the zoom seminars to develop original written essays on the connection of the (psychoanalytical) concept of LALANGUE (Jacques Lacan's coined term to talk about language after you subtract the words) to the architectural phenomenon of the Tiny House.
LACAN: Seminar XIII, Session 4 Donald Kunze 2024-02-08 | In this important session in Seminar XIII, André Green compares the R-Schema with the L-Schema, highlighting the relationship to projective geometry, the circuitry of the death drive, and to the conservation of energy flows that the neurotic subject strives to maintain in the effort to recover the lost pleasures of the pre-subject.
Meninas Magic: understanding Lacan’s Seminar XIII,through Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas Donald Kunze 2023-12-19 | [SILENT VIDEO] Lacan’s session 16, Seminar XIII (The Object of Psychoanalysis) is crammed with images taken from the perspective technical drawing of Girard Desargues (left), which Lacan interprets through the projectivity of conics (right). There is much to learn here, but the diagrams are richly labeled and the commentary is complex and complicated.This video attempts to condense the logic of projective geometry into the single example of Diego Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas, to show the fundamental logic of projectivity and the importance of distinguishing the “laminar flow” of optical and ocular lines, linked by a “strut of vision” — as “a material ligature between subject and object that supports the act of spectatorship as such” (Anthony Ballas, “Film Theory after Copjec,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 2021).
Lacans Seminar XIII (Object of Psychoanalysis), sessions 2–3 Donald Kunze 2023-12-14 | These silent images set up a study of Seminar XIII in terms of circuit flows and the function of viscosity by following Lacan's contrast of optical lines with ocular ones. This video will be developed, hopefully, into a narrated video extended this idea to the remainder of this topology-intense seminar. See also: bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/9/19778/files/2023/03/XIII-session-18-may18.pdf for the presentation of Xavier Audouard.
Seminar IX, Session 2 Donald Kunze 2023-11-02 | In this pithy session, the first live session following Lacan's reprise of "Science and Truth," we have a symmetrical arrangement of topics surrounding a concealed central statement: the unary trait is a HOLE. Follow these extension (silently) to think about the relation of the Being/Speaking binary to laminar flow. Advice to my subscriber friends: this video presumes some prior familiarity with Seminar XIV, The Logic of Phantasy (specifically, the "slide-rule analogy"). Also, you need to be familiar with Lacan's formula for metaphor. Sorry about all this baggage. The video is mainly for a reading group going through Seminar XIII. Another reference is to Feynman's "Lectures on Physics," Chapter 4, where Feynman talks about the origin of the constant. I take this to Tom Crawford's entertaining and illuminating video on the Reynolds Number, which does the same thing: youtube.com/watch?v=wtIhVwPruwY
From Victims to Fictims: Topology as a Cure for Narcissisms Allegiance to the Big Other Donald Kunze 2023-10-25 | In this video, I am keen to address the theme of the victim, but I am also keen to point out what is Lacan’s unique contribution to this subject, which I believe is topological. The key is narcissism, and the way allegiance to the Big Other lies at the bottom of our problems. Aggression and humiliation are two sides of the same coin, as everyone in academia knows. Administrators used to be the passive ones, faculty were assertive. Now the tables are turned. Edmund Bergler, who coined the phrase “writer’s block,” came up with the idea that aggression and humiliation were linked in a cycle connected to parentage, and Lacan admired his book and cited it in Seminar XIV. I’m going to use it to show how narcissism allows us to overlook the defects in the Big Other, and how our failure to signify these defects interrupts Bergler’s cycle. [Video presented at the October 2023 meetings of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. Thanks to the translation/editing efforts of Iraj Ghoochani, this video is AVALABLE IN FARSI, at youtube.com/watch?v=0twB7rh5BxE
Instrumental Convergence, Lacanian Topology, and the Automation of the Real Donald Kunze 2023-08-27 | This video was presented at the 4th Congress of Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in Tehran, August 30, 2023. The work is in collaboration with Iraj Ghoochani.
Sorites to the L-Schema: A Short Excursus Donald Kunze 2023-08-23 | Those who would wish to see a step-by-step expansion of Lewis Carroll's Amos Judd sorites into the fundamental polygon of the torus and then Lacan's L-Schema may find this silent video useful, although it is bereft of explanatory captions.
