1. The Quilting Point: post-structuralist ethics
Grant Gillett

2. Structuralism The divisions are arbitrary.
The signifiers slide over one another.
The link to reference – the actual world is tenuous and undefined except in discourse.

3. The ambiguity of discourse
Lacan: the sliding of the
signifier over the signified.
Abner and Jehoiada
A plot, a soldier, a queen,
and a priest.
“the fear of God” “connects or hooks the discourse into a clear line of thought that disambiguates what is being said and produces a moment of insight in the participants whereby they see what the other is thinking” … “This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate I shall call a quilting point”(The psychoses, 267)

4. Meaning and the human life-world
The human life - world a place of memory and adaptation “read through” or “seen in” the mirror of language.
Language - an artefact for the communication and construction of the imaginary collectively and individually
The imaginary - a shifting relationship to the actual or situated experience of a human being therefore room for slippage.
Crossing cultures - potential & actual slippage
we cannot always adjust our thinking to the ways of meaning we encounter
we lose sight of how they are making sense of the engagement.

5. Planes of signification and the actual
Planes of universal signification,
? the natural sciences.
aim to track objects that are independent
of our thoughts about them.
Tracking, articulating, making meaning
is always “interested”
“Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest.” (Wittgenstein, PI, #569).
We convey and refine thoughts through argument,
The phenomena of culture - not universal in the way that natural science aspires to be.

6. Methodology and the quilting point
Triangulation
co-cultural thinkers and a situation
subjectivities from diverse cultures & a third thing. (Kant).
Immersion in “meaning as use”(Wittgenstein)
“The common behaviour of mankind” (PI, #206).
A critical clarification and engagement with culturally specific representations to seek an (?uneasy) reflective equilibrium.
Intuitions, conjectures, interpretations, and instinctive responses examined with alertness for covert assumptions and modes of thinking that will hamper

7. Methodologising AHA!
Quilting point - an “Aha!” moment that unambiguously and strikingly connects us with another in a context.
Connection in human
meaning that disambiguates
but not just information.
Vertical connections –
tentative alignments of cultural
connections between ways of
understanding and structures of knowledge.

8. The importance of quilting points
The schema of the quilting point is essential
in human experience.”(Lacan, 268) It radiates into the discourses which it fixes, as lines arise around an upholstery button,
It is irreducibly human … recognising the other
as “like me but over there” in a very deep sense.
Shared being - not just biological
Agamben: voices.
Heidegger: Dasein-mitsein.
Out of the world we cannot fall (Freud)
[even for the objectifying purposes of the academy.]
Levinas – the “face” time that glimpses the enigma

9. Clinical Applications
Psychiatry as in Lacan’s initial insight.
Psychotic speech.
Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms.
Cross cultural clinical communication.
End of life care and “telling the truth” e.g. !brain haemorrhage!
Abandon Hope all ye who enter here!
Cancer treatment.
“We want you to do the treatment; just don’t tell him it is cancer.”