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Lauren Elkin on Lacan at Centre Pompidou-Metz in Gagosian Quaterly.

The show, which is immense, calls for a great deal of mental agility; I am grappling with Lacan’s complicated ideas while also trying to remain open to the many pieces included, meeting them on their own terms. But from the Infanta onward, I am tangling with one of Lacan’s central concepts, the objet a, which despite my past struggles has always eluded me.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what the objet a does.

The objet petit a is lack: what we are forever chasing and can never find. Lacan says that the Infanta, with her invisible/visible slit, is the objet a par excellence. A variety of gazes converge on her: her own parents’, reflected in the mirror in the background; Velázquez’s, who is both the author of the painting and a figure within it, supposedly painting the Infanta and the others as reflected in a mirror situated where we are standing; and, of course, our own gaze, the viewer’s gaze.

When you live underground, among the things you discover is that you are not alone. You’re in a world richly peopled. Occupied by legions.

Homo erectus, who stood up and cooked, Bruno said, he is here.

Homo neanderthalensis, who huddled modestly and dreamed expansively: here.

Homo sapiens, gone into caves to paint, to render his capture with extra legs, extra horns, so that these beasts canted and ran over cave walls, or butted heads, clashed and fought, all in the light of a torch, H. sapiens’s underground cinema house: that resourceful and ruinous forebear of ours, he is here.

Cathars and other heretics, the few not slaughtered, gone deep, living in darkness: yes, present.

Cagots, after the war of 1594, hiding to survive. Surviving in secret.

Here.

An extract from Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Jo Livingstone, interviewed by Merve Emre. From Episode Six of “The Critic and Her Publics”,

Love poetry has a very close relationship with the seasons and the weather in the Middle Ages. In a poem about “spronge blostme,” things springing, you might talk about the fish and the flood and the flowers growing. In springtime, flowers grow and people fall in love. That’s where all of these rhythms come from. It’s exactly right that it’s all mixed up with the idea of coming across an actual hottie at the harvest.

You mean a “swete levedi.”

Yes, coming across a “swete levedi” at the fair. Her beauty isn’t really her, it’s the integumentum—the veil that God has drawn over reality, the world that we perceive. Her beauty is a metaphor that helps you to understand the theology of the Virgin Mary, and hence the great mysteries of everything. Also, it is a miracle that she lives and breathes in front of you, in your lifetime. She’s part of an eternal presence, connected to the way that the universe is bolted together.

It’s easy to think of these as separate traditions—the Virgin Mary and love poems, courtly love, balladry, troubadours. There were lots of secular traveling musicians in the Middle Ages. But these traditions are never really separate to begin with. There’s no disembodied theology of the Virgin Mary. It’s in medieval music, especially in the medieval English music that survives.