Decolonizing the Foundations of Lacanian Schools Through Edward Said's Notion of “Beginnings”

ABSTRACT This essay examines the institutional ethics of Jacques Lacan's 1964 “Founding Act” through the critical lens of Edward Said's framework in Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). I argue that the survival and vitality of psychoanalysis depend on the institution functioning as a beginning, a secular, humanly produced, and continuously reexamined project, rather than a mythical origin rooted in paternal authority and sacred lineage. By analyzing structural innovations such as the Cartel, the Plus One, and the principle of rotation, this essay demonstrates how Lacan utilized adjacency to rupture the dynastic logic and hierarchical descent prevalent in traditional psychoanalytic movements. Furthermore, the text offers a decolonial critique of Lacan's “reconquest” metaphor, proposing a praxis of learned ignorance (PLI). This praxis rejects Eurocentric notions of purity in favor of an Other logic that accounts for singularity and the irreducible difference of the unconscious. Drawing on the philosophy of Giambattista Vico and Hannah Arendt's distinction between work and labor, the essay concludes that the Lacanian School is an institutionalization of the perpetual beginner, where authority is not an inherited property but a dynamic desire authorized anew through the ongoing production of psychoanalytic know‐how.