The Lacan Circle of Australia presents
a Public Lecture by Domenico Cosenza
(SLP, WAP)
“An Appetite for the No-thing”
(Dis)ordered Eating and the Lacanian Orientation
Saturday, July 11th, 2026.
2:00pm – 3:00pm incl. Q&A
The Lacan Circle Rooms, Brunswick.
In person, online, and recorded.
Open to all. Tickets $30.
LCA Members No Charge.
Public Lecture: Register below
Domenico Cosenza will present via Zoom.
Lacan, in his last reference to anorexia in 1974 (Lacan, 1974, unpublished) curiously defined it as an action characterised by the fact of eating nothing. He underlined that this eating nothing was not a negative but an affirmative value. Eating nothing is the experience of enjoyment of anorexia, which is obtained through the refusal to feed. The anorectic obtains pleasure from this refusal and it makes her hyperactive and euphoric. To say that this practice is an action is also to say that anorexia is the solution constructed to last through time. Like every action, it aims at a continuity, in contrast to the act that introduces a discontinuity, a break between now and later. What is valid for anorexia seems to me to be valid also, although in different ways, for the other pathologies of excess: they are solutions that give the subject an anchor to hold onto, and that aim to become stable in a system of practices and rituals that are centred on the experience of jouissance.
Domenico Cosenza is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Milan, Italy. He is an Analyst Member and past President of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (SLP) and a member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP).
In-person in Melbourne: The Lacan Circle Rooms
Unit 4 / Nine Wilson Avenue, Brunswick.
(Entry via rear alley, off Black St)
3 hour free parking @ Barkly Square Carpark
Online via Zoom: Streaming details will be sent out after registration.
Contact us here with any queries.
Art by Edouard Vuillard, Detail from Woman in a Striped Dress (1895).
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