/lit/ - Literature

>>17151884
>I found this incredibly interesting. Is there any philosophical work that deals with the same subject in depth? Doesn't have to be philosophy either, could also be a non-fiction book.
Lacan's writings around the object of desire/l'objet petit a are most obviously relevant to me.

I guess it's also the central idea of High Fidelity.

>>17152006
>>17152025
Thanks

Lacan and Zizek are bullshit. The OP's quote is as deep as they get and you have to dig through mountains of blubber to get there, literally in the case of Zizek.

No, Proust is what you want.

Pic related.

>>17151884
>>17151884
An old Jewish dirty joke

>>17152085
Can you expand on that? Why are they bullshit

"How to destroy a man? Give him exactly what his heart desires."
I'd turn to the neuroscience of dopamine rather than philosophy, OP.

>>17152120
Science is on the cusp of rendering the majority of philosophy embarrassingly obsolete. Philosophy only really accomplished anything when it was doing science and offering self-help advice in the hellenistic period

>>17152120
>>17152204
dummies

>>17151884
I just want to be married to someone.

>>17152120
The only thing I desire is a comfy simple life with a wife and kids. Am i immune? I suppose I do also desire cock

>>17151884
Luis Bunuels films

>>17152099
>>17152099

1/2

My friend is very interested in Lacan and Zizek so I decided that I would try to interact with them a bit so I knew where my friend was coming from.

I worked my way painstakingly through the Sublime Object of Ideology and thought some of the points, particularly the analysis of certain Hitchcock movies, was brilliant. Later I returned to this book and realized, having digested as much of the book as could be digested by me, that it was really the syntax and structure of the book that made the book so torturous. Just as an experiment I compounded as many pages of Zizek into one summary sentence as I could. I found I could easily compound 8 pages of Zizek into one sentence without losing any nuance. Honestly.

But still I bought Lacan's Ecrits in translation. I worked through about a hundred pages. Garnered absolutely nothing from it, and I am interested in exactly the same issues and questions as the OP put forward. The tone of the lectures was so celebratory, vapid, and deliberately obfuscatory - it is offputting on a personal level. If you follow the flow of logic from one paragraph to the next it is obvious what he is doing even if on a sentence by sentence level it is indistinguishable from the Dada work of Tristan Tzara.

Get on YouTube and watch Lacan lecture - both the one where he is speaking to students with the cigar that looks like a limp dick hanging out of his mouth and the one produced for French television. It's obvious to see today how put on the act was. The film produced for French television really resembles Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

Lacan invented the variable length psychoanalytic session, with therapy sessions lasting an average of 15 minutes during which he would have his hair cut, have his clothes tailored, and so on. Once a client gave him a statuette as a present. He accepted the present, declared the session ended and demanded payment. He believed the point of Psychoanalysis was for the client to overcome the act of the analyst as 'the-person-presumed-to-know' and thus take the wheel of the own life ...

Put all of this together, especially his vaudeville type acting with the obfuscatory style: it is obvious that he was concerned with forming a cult of personality through his work and especially his seminars. Choamsky described him as a 'perfectly self-aware charlatan'. He was entwined in the Dada and Surrealist circles in Paris in the 30s.

What cemented it for me was reading Life with Lacan - he had a lifelong obsession with the Catholic Church ... and drove a very expensive car very fast and never stopped for red lights.

I can easily imagine Lacan as a high ranking Bishop ... — shit — ... even the Pope ... he certainly imagined himself a Pope of Psychoanalysis.

But he certainly embraced the role of the 'person-presumed-to-know' and he is no doubt an incredibly intelligent man and a highly interesting personality - it's not so simple as to just dismiss him as a fraud.

>>17152099
With Zizek I am not so sure. He was certainly part of, is still a part of, the Lacanian quote. He himself was analyzed by Lacan's 'appointed heir'. But seemingly in the line of Lacan as far as practicing analysis in a clinical setting himself on others ... he had other concerns. He describes the prospect of being a clinical analyst himself as being hell, unimaginably boring, and so on ...

What cemented it for me with Zizek was this: in the same documentary, or perhaps it was another one he makes an astonishing confession. Zizek has published something like 50 books of philosophy in 50 years of maybe even more I'm not sure, and he says in this documentary that he has a pathological fear of writing: that he only succeeds in writing by tricking himself into believing that he is not writing, by first making page long 'notes' and then by arranging those notes in order to form books - and he says he can't work except without very very loud music ...

But unlike Lacan I am not so sure how conscious he is a charlatan. This is getting into the realm of speculation, but I have a feeling that Zizek is very much a product of his past - that of an academic and an intellectual behind the iron curtain. This is based of my readings of Milosz, Solzhenitsyn, Alexandra Alexievich and others ... but in the documentary I discussed above he mentioned that there were three levels of academic freedom allowed to intellectuals when he was younger according to your concordance with the Communist Party. The first was you could teach, the second was you could teach but you could not publish, the third was you go to jail. Zizek said he was somewhere between the first and the second. He is someone very familiar with 'toeing the line' politically so to speak.

I think he is so 'familiar' with this mode of half-concealment half-revealment cognition that was necessary behind the Iron Curtain, in addition to the cognitive operations that Lacan employed doing much the same, toeing the line between revelation and Dada, 'dangling the carrot before the reader', has resulted in the Zizek that we know.

There are nuggets of good stuff in there, especially his jokes and small anecdotes like the one quoted in the OP. But the vast majority of it is a heap of circumambulations designed to keep the listeners and the readers on tenterhooks, waiting for the huge revelation that justifies the vast array of far flung references he has exhausted - of at the very least some kind of coherent philosophical ATTITUDE if not conclusion ... - as conclusions are too trite nowadays ...

Because what I really think is behind Zizek, if I am correct, is really a huge intellect at work working by a vast set of techniques and machinations acquired through Lacan and Soviet life, to hide from the public and from the man himself, a contemptuous and murderous Stalinist fantasy. Which he even alludes to — through jokes — in more than one place ...

>>17152282
Based

When it rains it pours

>>17151884
Literally read Capitalism and Schizophrenia Pt. 1 for a lot of good stuff on desire. Not all of Pt. 1, but definitely a ton of it, including the very beginning.

>>17152428
>>17152437
so filtered by lacan he pop-psychoanalyses him lmao

>>17152437
>I discussed above he mentioned that there were three levels of academic freedom allowed to intellectuals when he was younger according to your concordance with the Communist Party. The first was you could teach, the second was you could teach but you could not publish, the third was you go to jail. Zizek said he was somewhere between the first and the second. He is someone very familiar with 'toeing the line' politically so to speak.

In Hungary there was a system for artists which was known as the three T's - "tiltott, tűrt, támogatott", or "banned, tolerated, supported". I never looked into it that deeply but I figure academic life had a similar system. Most people who tried to keep things real toed the line between tolerated and banned, only people who willingly supported the system became the ones who the government supported.

>>17152204
Has to be bait

>>17151884
What do you find interesting about it, some people cheat on their wives because of the dopamine they get from doing something wrong and forbidden. Sounds like Zizek wants to take a perfectly ordinary psychological phenomenon and make a big deal about how this points to some deep truth about existence.

>>17152826
>We don't really want what we think we desire.
This is what he's trying to say, that's just an example

>>17152875
Well his example is not really a case of someone not knowing what they want. If a man cheats because he is genuinely unsatisfied by his relationship, he knows perfectly well what he wants. And if he just cheats for the thrill of it he probably knows it's just a fetish.

Zizek reads a bit bullshit to me, but I will never stop finding the fact that he beat Peterson so hard that he relapsed into multiple addictions and into a coma hilarious.

I can't even get a girlfriend, how do people get a mistress?

This is a tale as old as time.

The Greeks called it hubris, once you get what you want without considering the consequences or by upsetting the golden mean you get fucked over by fate. This happens to Midas, Cyrus, Herakles,Achilles,Oedipus etc. In the Greek mythical world you don't want to get what you really want, because your raw undiluted desires are not good indications on how to live your life. The solution is to either make your desires more refined, or to stay content.

>>17151884
That's just basic bitch philosophy. I probably read it from at least 3 classic philosophers. Stop reading contemporary philosophers and especially don't read left wing philosophers cause they never came up with anything original or intelligent.

>>17152085
>and you have to dig through mountains of blubber to get there, literally in the case of Zizek.
thanks for that anon

I can't trust Zizek since he loves the Jews.

>>17153102
how do you know there's a direct relation between those two? I'd wager it had more to do with the fact his wife has/had cancer

Kierkegaard
Tarkovsky

>>17151884
That last sentence he says there’s a non-sequitor.
The hypothetical dude in this scenario desires risky sex, not to have another fat wife. He’s getting what he wants, he’s plugging his side piece free from castrating internal psychobabble, and a greasy Slovene looks on and thinks “you hate this right now.”

>>17152204
As though science isn’t going to stagnate and dwindle as radical new innovations one by one prove economically unfeasible or physically impossible.

>>17152085
Okey. Now, this is great.

>>17152826
>big truth about existence
>Zizek
Is it really beyond your mental capacity to read a Wikipedia page or watch 5 YouTube videos before you express your opinion on some topic?

>>17152437
>Because what I really think is behind Zizek, if I am correct, is really a huge intellect at work working by a vast set of techniques and machinations acquired through Lacan and Soviet life, to hide from the public and from the man himself, a contemptuous and murderous Stalinist fantasy. Which he even alludes to — through jokes — in more than one place ...

basically this

>>17153849
it's not. zizek is noting that the pleasure comes from the impossibility of the fantasy. were one to attempt to actualize the situation it destroys both the fantasy and the pleasure it generates. he's pointing out the how important the gap is

>>17152120
Diffuse modulatory neurotransmitter systems do not tell us much about the complexities of higher-order cognition. Neuroscience is still in its infancy as a field.

>>17153803
>The solution is to either make your desires more refined,
So... getting lit/?

>>17151884
Plato, "Gorgias"

We do all things because we think they're good for some reason. So we are always in pursuit of the Good. But what is Good is not always what is immediately desired. Sometimes what we desire makes our life worse, like smoking weed instead of writing the essay you need to pass a class. In that case, we are wrong about what is Good, what we are really in pursuit of, and how to achieve it.

The entire division of soul in the Republic is an attempt to understand these conflicting aspects of human life and experience, heavily foreshadowing Freudian divisions of mind.

>>17156062
Retroactively refuted by Plato

>>17152437
I love it how you try to analyse so much, yet do not know some basic highschool-level facts.
Žižek did not live behind the iron curtain, and he did not experience "Soviet life".

>>17152600
Cope

>I would like a coffee without cream.
>I'm sorry sir, we're all out of cream. Would you like a coffee without milk instead?

>>17151884
The noble truths.

>>17151884
>You think you do, but you don't.

Profound.

>>17158564
Was Budha a nazi?????

OP you literally have dozens of writers and works to choose from.

>>17155640
not that guy, elaborate

>>17151884

When I was in highshool, I had an epiphany while readin The Brave New World I still remember. It was along the lines you suggested.

I wrote about it on my old blog, the writing is nothing much, but the ideas still feel solid.
https://darksamovar.wordpress.com/2019/03/27/to-get-good/
Now I read buddhism.

he into freud?

>>17151884
big z
>>17161912
yes

>>17151884
>I found this incredibly interesting. Is there any philosophical work that deals with the same subject in depth? Doesn't have to be philosophy either, could also be a non-fiction book.
Yes. The book of Genesis. Why did Adam and Eve desire the fruit if they already had Paradise?