May 2009, NYC. We travel across a flu epidemic. Clearly epizootic, the actual flu has its origin in the Mexican swine. Besides there is the bird that gave it to the swine, likewise the inoculated laboratory egg from where the bird could have originated… However the problem is not between swine, the bird and the egg, but between people, giving it to each other. Measured up to a 5-degree level, what we know is that it better not reach the top 6-degree because at that point it prevails as a flu pandemic – or a global widespread outbreak that may affect entire continents or even the world.

Jacques Lacan will call on the pandemic while entering Pausanias discourse at the Symposia, or what is introduced on account of a distinction in two orders of love. For Pausanias love is not unique. Regardless of how there isn't Aphrodite without love, there are two Aphrodites. The difference between the two is that one is in no way part of the woman that has no mother: Born of the rain projection over the earth, she was bred of Uranus primordial castration by Kronos - the Uranian Venus owes nothing to the sexes duplicity.

The other Aphrodite was born after the union of Zeus and Dionea — a Titaness woman; this Aphrodite is not called Uranian, but Pandemic. In Pausanias speech a disparaging and disrespectful emphasis is explicitly formulated. She is the popular Venus. She belongs to the people; she belongs with those that mix the different loves, that do not make of love an elevated element of domination, like the one the Uranian Venus brings along — the Uranian Aphrodite.

Everything based on the diversity of positions in the Greek world, the place of this superior love occurring between those who are both the strongest and lofty spirited, that know how to think, is between people of similar standing — on account of their equal capacity.

For the gods cannot understand anything of love, says Lacan.

Eryximachus, a young medical doctor at the Symposia, offers a more scientific vision of love that together with hate surrounds nature and man. Each guest would make an after-dinner speech in honor of Eros.

So much for the medical physical management of love the opposition of the subject of love and pandemic love he doesn't see with good eyes. The thing made clear in the speech of Eryximachus himself if, relevant to the effects of love, evokes astronomy, "…the harmony which you are trying to reach, to concert with, is one and the same thing ruling with that which governs the order of the seasons… and when on the contrary, he says of the love in which there is rapture, hubris, something in excess, that gets to prevail in terms of seasons, then it is there that disaster starts up; disorder, prejudices, damage… range in which they are also, of course, epidemics. But where frost, hail, the pest of wheat and a host of other things, are located."

To sum up the theory, Lacan tells of a lifetime experience,

"We are dealing here with someone that I found in life – not in analysis – but in daily life, and I knew him well since he opened his heart to me. This was a well-known person, and precisely known for the strong limits he enforced upon himself, more precisely in the question of love, that is what makes the attitude of the rich man. He was a man excessively wealthy, he possessed, and I state this straightforward, plenty of safety boxes full of diamonds – because we never know what could happen. This was after the war…

He is a rich Calvinist. I apologize to those who belong to that creed. I do not think that Calvinism holds the privilege of manufacturing rich people, but this is an important fact in what follows since Calvinist theology effected as the main element of its moral orientation the truth that God fills up with goods those whom He loves; maybe in the hereafter as well, but in any case in this world. The compliance with the divine commandments bears fruit in this world, it helped in many enterprises. The above-mentioned Calvinist regarded the meritorious order he acquired in this world as a pledge for the hereafter, exactly as an accountant would have done, recording each daily transaction. And all his actions were intended for the hereafter, in the sense of acquiring a strong vault full of goods.

Despite he being very cautious while driving, one day he hit with his car, his big car, someone in the street. The victim survived, she was pretty; she was the daughter of a doorman, something that does not preclude the likelihood of her being pretty. She coldly received his apologies, more coldly still his offers of money, almost ice-cold his invitation to have dinner together. In short, more it was difficult for him the access to this object miraculously found, more this object appeared dear to him. He reasoned that this object was really precious. Finally he proposes to the girl - marries her."

May 2009, NYC. We journey through Khyber Pass — Disguised in Afghan Army uniforms and a burqa, Taliban fighters carried out coordinated attacks in eastern Afghanistan, leaving at least nine people dead…

—waves of attackers using suicide vests, car bombs and other weapons, fight until they blow themselves up or are killed.

—Mr. Padshah said 11 attackers had been involved in the assaults in all, each armed with a suicide vest and an AK-47 assault rifle…

—Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen killed 20 people after storming government buildings at three sites,

—They killed two suicide bombers before they could detonate themselves, Chief Naranjo said.

—…the local hospital had received nine bodies, including four policemen, four civilians and one suicide attacker.

What shows up here is the existence of a subject that is articulated not only as a desire of recognition, but also as the recognition of a desire. The signifier is the essential dimension. The more the subject strives to free itself from the signifying chain the more he enters it and blends in, the more he becomes a sign of this chain… Says Lacan, if he abolishes himself; he is more of a sign than ever. It is precisely from the moment that the subject is dead that it becomes for others an eternal sign, and the suicide more than anyone else. In this manner suicide possesses an appalling beauty that causes men to condemn it, as well as a contagious beauty that brings about suicide epidemic outbreaks, which account for the very real in the experience.

However the subject in its relationship to the signifier, insofar as it is summoned to establish itself in the signifier, may, refuse to act accordingly. It may say —No, I won't be an element of the chain. This is really the end and bottom of it. But the bottom, the other side, is precisely here the same as the obverse. So what is the subject up to when he somehow refuses to pay a debt that he has not incurred in? All he does is perpetuate it… Its subsequent refusals to that effect fill out the chain, and he finds himself tied up to the actual chain even further. An everlasting need to repeat the same refusal – this is where Freud shows us the last expedient of everything that, of the unconscious, is displayed under the guise of symptomatic reproduction.

May 2009: Pelosi’s Self-Torture.

Given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's acknowledged skill at torturing the Bush Administration, it no doubt afforded her critics some pleasure yesterday to watch her twist in the wind in front of the press over what she knew and when about the CIA's terrorist interrogations. With mockery even from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Mrs. Pelosi has turned herself into a spectacle about a subject that she and fellow Democrats had themselves reduced to a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame, repeatedly threatening to put Bush officials in the dock for "condoning torture." Nancy Pelosi is "pushing back" against charges that she was aware of — and acquiesced in — the CIA's harsh interrogations of terrorist detainees nearly from the moment the practice began. Maybe she's suffering from amnesia.

As a consequence of a psychological contagion, hysteria was presented as an epidemic and accounts for the real foundation of the history of demonic possession and witchcraft.

Freud did not consider that the desire of the hysteric is located in a position where one can say to her "this is what, whom you desire", since it is always an imposed and inaccurate interpretation. Be it in Freud’s first observations, be it later in Dora’s case, even in the case of the young female homosexual, always Freud errs and reaches the same refusal from the patient to approach the sense of the desire of her symptoms and her acts every time he proceeds likewise. The desire of the hysteric is not the desire for an object, but the desire of a desire - an effort to maintain herself vis-à-vis the instance where she calls on her desire, the instance where there is the desire of the Other.

With Lacan she identifies herself with an object. So Nancy identifies herself with Obama, and she identifies herself with different characters in his family or in her milieu. In order to qualify the instance where she identifies herself with another – in fact, this someone becomes not her ego ideal, not her ego, but her other ego. We are dealing with an object, insofar as she recognizes in another the tokens of her desire. Namely that she faces the same problematic desire than him. It happens through identification – with all the features of contagion, crisis, epidemic, symptomatic manifestations, which characterize hysteria.