ABSTRACT
Neuro-elaborating a Lacanian heritage, the work of Bazan is presented, beginning with the phantom signifiers that can haunt our psyche. Lacanian signifiers are phonological and not semantic. Idiosyncrasies of the signifier are discussed. Most importantly: the signifier’s significance entirely depends on itscontext. In a return to the symbolic register, the created gap causes a never-ending and ever-shifting desire for some Thing that is real. The gap is inside, and it has its bodily and cerebral counterparts. Bazan examines how historicity works. It depends on salience and enjoyment that gets ‘installed’ according to events/life experiences that leave their mark regardless of their affective valence. Bazan explicitly distinguishes the dichotomies between drive and affect and between Freudian pleasure and Lacanian enjoyment. What is their relation to the essence of sex? A comprehensive discussion of various forms of repetition that Freud explained follows. Next, Bazan’s focus on the specifics of repetition compulsion is examined. There is an extensive analysis of the fort-da game of Ernst Wolfgang and the workings of the first signifiers that inaugurate the symbolic order.
