Psychoanalysis of an Eye

Community Seminar

June + July 2026

Facilitated by Dr. Prathna Lor

In the 13^th seminar on “Anxiety,” Jacques Lacan will clarify that the “moment of anxiety” in the Oedipus story is not the scene of self-evisceration when he gouges out his own eyes; rather, it is the “impossible sight…of your own eyes lying on the ground.” It is this impossible image—with its dread and disgust, its horror and abjection—an image which can only be conjured in the field of the imagination, that constitutes, for Lacan, the “universal affect” which he names desire. What does this impossible vision have to do with our anxiety/desire? And how is it entangled with the desire of the Other?

While psychoanalysis has long welcomed the estranging and the wounding as an ethos with which one continues to choose living, the escalation of the terrible and the awful—the conversion of terror into spectacle—demands a reconsideration of that which captivates and captures. As part of the Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye Research Cluster, this seminar seeks to animate a “psychoanalysis of an eye” to consider, repudiate, and repel the nightmare visions in lieu of the dark intimacies which may yet sustain and invigorate us as an anticolonial technology of being. Our texts will explore race and psychoanalysis across foundational texts in psychoanalysis, as well as black studies, aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophy.