Prismatic Heresy was first exhibited in the Fringe for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis’s 2017 conference on Gender, Transgender, and Psychoanalysis. The exhibition, which was curated by two Site trainees and which was very well attended, was held in a different part of London from the conference. The geographical separation represented, for me, the ways that the participants and audience for the fringe and the conference only partially coincided. I’ve been interested in set theory and the ways it can be used to figure the logics of relations between self and other for decades; my PhD, published in 2005 as a book, began with a discussion of Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon series, and a discussion of the critique of colonialism elaborated by means of the character called ‘Venn’. This is what Bion (1965) calls ‘transformation’, the displacement of an abstract, formalised ‘scientific’ way of thinking, G and H on the grid, into the more communicable and evocative literary or mythic level, C on the grid.
Figure 1 is a Venn diagram for two, three, and four sets that intersect.
