/lit/ - Literature

>>11120820
Because he is invaluable but people too stupid or over-invested in inferior accounts of the mind can't admit it

>>11120825
What about him and his ideas do you personally like, anon?

>>11120827
He was an extremely intelligent reader of Heidegger and was the first thinker to be able to take the rather abstract and obscure existential tradition and use it to render the clumsy Freudian account of the mind into a philosophically secure and coherent account of its difficult relationship to both the inacessibility of reality and the contrivencies of social existence towards what is the meaning and genesis of our own desires.

Its not so much as he gave us ideas as he gave us the universe itself. Extremely important thinker

One of the finest pleb filters around, in both ways. His thinking is very paradoxical and depends in large part in an intuition on your own personal mechanics of desire. His conception of drive is tantalizingly ouroboric

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74oPxu7Czaw

>>11120872
Holyshit, newfound respect for Sadler, had no idea

>>11120903
sadler is an OG and you should never forget it

>>11120903
This. I always felt Sadler must be a Christfag stuck in a Plato and Aristotle loop but looking at more of his videos he's very well-read and clearly has far more interests than we know. I wouldn't be surprised if he's a fucking hentai artist in his second life, at this point.

>>11120920
did you seriously think that a guy with a PhD in Philosophy was never interested in anything after Aristotle or Jesus?

>>11120939
I went to a highly rated philosophy department and half my professors were general idiots with an interest in only one specific meme subject. Thats all you have to know to get a PhD

>>11120939
Is that a serious question? There are literally endless people with PhDs that study analytical philosophy and haven't cracked open a continental book in their life, unless it was so that they could advance in their post. Same goes for Christfags. I mean, if they had actually read all this stuff, why would they make the same old tired arguments again and again in debates? Just look at a guy like William Lane Craig, that's not only a PhD but a supposedly famous Christian apologist. He argues like a fucking child and is made to look retarded by all sorts of mental midgets like Sam Harris. So, yeah, I doubt they leave their comfort one.

>>11120820
People dislike him because he appropriated mathematical or scientific language and repurposed it in order to explicate concepts which have nothing to do with either. Some good examples are his formulae of sexation, his description of desire as being asymptomatic (IE. infinitely approaching but never reaching its fulfillment), or his controversial claim that the phallus is equal to the route of negative 1. While these different uses of specialised language might encourage scientists to dismiss him as a hack fraud, they're missing the whole point of "mathemes" as representational allegories for helping us understand the unconscious in clearer, functional terms that can then be used to explain the relationship between different elements of the psyche

>>11121011
spot on

>>11120986
>There are literally endless people with PhDs that study analytical philosophy and haven't cracked open a continental book in their life
Dude no.

You need to spend some time in a higher education institution. The shit you hear online is mostly...shit

>>11121011
Quasi-hermeneutics. Noble. Controversial. Is it satisfying, would you recommend reading his work?

>>11120854
Western philosophy, with the exclusion of the New Testament, is unbelievably stupid. It's like a dog trying to chase it's own tail.

>>11121050
ok

>>11121047
Not him but I have a degree in philosophy and this is 100% the case. I have to question your own credentials

>>11121047
What the fuck are you talking about? I spend nearly all of my time around these sorts of people, and all you need to do is look at the "intellectuals" of our society to know that they live in a fucking bubble.

>>11121050
Is this just bait? If not, I'd like to hear your arguments. As to why exactly it's so bad and what you think is superior and why. I don't know much about eastern philosophy apart from the basics so I'd like to hear such a radical take.

>>11120820

Lacan and many of his close colleagues were notorious for abusing mathematical language and distorting the meanings from the original source into whatever they wanted terms and expressions to mean. Of course this has gotten a lot of the super cereal scientists absolutely mad, to the point Sokal (a mathematician) and Bricmont have written a whole book solely to shit on his and other names as being "unscientific", "pseudos" and "charlatans".

The thing about Zizek and some of the other writers who praise Lacan, is that they never quite had this contact with the anti-Lacan sentiment sprouted by the angry scientific community.

Also, in my opinion (as a physicist if this should even matter), is that Sokal went the wrong way about this. We don't want to kill people simply because they said the room is getting cold rather than say that the room is losing heat, and likewise we ought to teach people what we think about things like particles and light interaction and such, rather than shunning them for listening to a "pseudo" explanation, precisely because our own explanation is not available at all. I don't like it when I read Land talking about Negentropy or when psychologists talk about Field theory but I don't disregard absolutely everything else they wrote because of it.

I'd even go as far as saying Lacan has value in the field of psychoanalysis and the field of psychoanalysis itself has value related to how we deal with our sentiment in non-empirical terms (and we will do that, regardless of whether or not you want to impose the joy of neuroscience to everyone and their mothers). Philosophers like Sadler and many other academics who have read far more than I ever did have also not come to the same conclusions as Sokal about Lacan, so you should definitely do your own reading of him rather than disregarding the source because a mathematician said you can't write "topology" outside of a theorem/demonstration structure.

>>11121049
Absolutely. As far as I'm aware almost all of his work are essentially transcripts from his lectures– As I can't recommend that you attend one of his seminars in person (which probably would be the best way to experience his ideas) I'd recommend buying or borrowing a copy of his ecrits– a selection and reading the excerpts on the mirror stage, the agency of the letter in the unconscious and the signification of the phallus. You might get frustrated with just how obscure his writing can be, but bear in mind frustration is for Lacan a desirable reaction to his analysis. What makes him stand out in this regard is the length of his sessions: A traditional interview might last an hour, but once the subject has had a revelation concerning their sense of self, anything that is said after the fact is useless and irrelevant. Lacan liked to end sessions abruptly, even frustrating his clients, because the jarring experience of being kicked out just when you feel like you're onto something actively encourages you to invest a lot more into what little was spoken during the session.

>>11121160
>The thing about Zizek and some of the other writers who praise Lacan, is that they never quite had this contact with the anti-Lacan sentiment sprouted by the angry scientific community.
well there was a fight between him and chomsky about being the same kind of obscurantist as others french philosophers.

>>11120820
Because Zizek, like all commies, is mentally stuck in the time he was at college, when he probably thought liking Lacan was cool because everyone else hated him.
Lacan was a genius though.

>>11121236
Everyone in Slovenia at the time loved Lacan, they produced an entire school of semi-influential psychoanalysts independent of Zizek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_school_of_psychoanalysis

>>11121236
this thread was far too good and well-informed anon, thank god you showed up to fix it with some shit freshly pulled out of your ass

>>11121011
>his description of desire as being asymptomatic (IE. infinitely approaching but never reaching its fulfillment)
I haven't read Lacan, but I gotta say that that makes A LOT of sense, at least from personal experience.

>>11121050
>dude ebin eastern wisdom xD

>>11121306
Yep, the paradoxical nature of Lacan's work is that approach that at first hand seems to be obscure and abstract is actually good at explaining everyday phenomena (same with Heidegger).

>>11121178

That was after Zizek already present himself to Lacan's work and have already drawn his own conclusions on it. What I mean is, like the OP himself has asked, most people already get into knowing psychoanalysis from the point of view that it's not worth the time.

It's also ironic that Chomsky is such an influential name that while he is able to shit on a field for being too obscure and impractical/non-pragmatic, he is also simultaneously responsible for holding back his own linguistics field for decades due to strongly denying the use of heuristics and statistical physics, insisting we should only, and only, focus on finding universals and well defined simple functions to model the acquisition of language by humans.

>>11120820
Is Lacan the Texas of philosophy?

>>11121411
>trying to scientify good old wise memes

His work represents the worst excesses of the continental tradition.

>>11121784
>I ignore all other posts so I can share an uninformed opinion
yep sure sounds like you've read enough of the continentals to know what you're talking about

>>11121821
t. virgin who makes his opinion after reading about the subject

>>11121784

No one has yet superseded the 'continental tradition' (a distinction I don't like and would just refer to as "philosophy") from being present in day to day conversation though (as opposed to, I don't even know, syntax or whatever fringe metamathematics the analytics care about nowadays). It is present in excess and this is allowed to leak into academia very strongly. Ignoring it is just as bad as ignoring the snake oil salesman selling homeopathy to people who know no better, and shunning it without presenting another way for people to think is just as useless.

>>11121821
I read every post on this thread. A couple pretty insights here and there, but nothing of real substance is present unless you're seriously deluded.