/lit/ - Literature

Zizek taught me how to apply him to cartoons and viral videos

Never read him. In that video where he is interrupted by the situationist kid, he (lacan) comes off like an arrogant charlatan full of hot air who, when pressed or pushed to perform on the spot, is unable to pursue an object with any originality.

His books are perhaps better, though he is one of the few thinkers whose wikipedia articles leave you with extremely low impression of their subjects.

this >>3289180

if you're interested this is a p good intro, there's a clinical study like 90 pages in http://www.scribd.com/doc/96126745/Bruce-Fink-a-Clinical-Introduction-to-Lacanian-P-BookFi-org

more like lacan't

Mesmer's successor.

he's cool

Fucking brilliant but obvious conclusions that Freud should have thought about so himself. Set the ground for today's clinical work, crushed certain good/bad dichotomies of the past, etc. The talking cure was elevated to a whole new level with his focus on language.

He is hard to get into, though. I think that hurts how people perceive him and thus a lot of prejudice is formed. In other words, the image he created for himself backfired.

But deep down he is an intelligent dude.

What Zizek says here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=U0jxclqEJD8#t=1213s

He's not better than Freud. Fuck anyone who thinks so.

>>3289170
Confuses the hell out of me, but not in a bad way. I'm fascinated by the idea of the Symbolic Order and the suggestion that we're all just struggling to get back to mom, underneath it all. I know I'm way over-simplifying, but my understandings are those of a simple poet, not a philosopher ;)

>>3289234
> a lot of prejudice is formed

He was invited to give a lecture at Yale. He had like five typists set up their typewriters. Took a really long time to get ready and then right when he was about to start, he put his hat on and walked off the stage. The typists packed up and followed suit.

Tell me what's so brilliant about this man. All I get is a charlatan with an oedipal complex and an abusive personality who did a bunch of freudian readings of literature and people think its sexy.

>>3289204
Care to elaborate? Who was Mesmer?

It speaks volumes about the state of academia that this goof is so popular and admired.

>>3289271
He didn't like people typing down what he says, because they always fucked the meaning of his shit up. He only liked Jacques-Alain Miller's editing of his lectures.

He was arrogant indeed, not denying that. But a charlatan fools people into thinking there is something there when there is isn't. I'm telling there is something there in Lacan, but what he shows to people is another thing.

He was a controversial figure and you're never sure with Lacan. Completely unorthodox. But the more one reads about and from him, the more enchanted one will be with his ideas.

Anyone who attempts to dissect our primitive brains is not intelligent. Any intelligent person will realize all our thoughts, feelings and motivations are complete bullshit. Read some Schopenhauer.

>>3289333
What's there in Lacan is called Freud.

What did Lacan offer that wasn't Freud, or was a worthwhile revision of Freud?

>>3289333
> But the more one reads about and from him, the more enchanted one will be with his ideas.

So the more you read, the more seduced you are.

>>3289365
He doesn't try to do that. It's pretty obvious that you haven't read anything written by him.

He taught me that the penis is equal to the square root of -1

Brilliant!

>>3289365
Thanks for the reminder.
I'll no longer have to carry this shame of not having read any of his works.

>>3289387
He's what's so "clever" about Lacan. He says that the phallus, the male is essentially a fraud. Always postering more than it is. The woman is an undefinable, uncontainable butterfly.

What does this mean for Lacan? He's aware that he's a posturing intellectual, seeming to offer more than he does.

When it comes to french philosophers worth spending your time on, I prefer Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.

>>3289386
Skimmed over some of his stuff. It's similar to Freud in its dissecting of the "self" and our "true motivations" - he does exactly what I said. There's nothing deep or meaningful in anything he writes.

>>3289387
no, the phallus. the phallus isn't "the penis".

>>3289372
well, freud was pretty cartesian in his view of the self. at least lacan is a phenomenologist (building on heidegger and merleau-ponty).

Luce Irigaray criticized him after being a follower of his. What did Lacan do? He used his influence to ban her from every having a teaching position in Europe.

There's nothing worthwhile in Lacan beyond examining this neurotic's oedipal complex.

>>3289430
He barely builds on Heidegger.

>>3289442
>Luce Irigaray
>implying she deserved to be teaching shit

>>3289450
So then why did she provoke so much anxiety in Lacan?

It's entirely fair that people completely dismiss Lacan, much in the same way that he dismissed Irigaray.

Malcolm Bowie has suggested that Lacan "had the fatal weakness of all those who are fanatically against all forms of totalization (the complete picture) in the so-called human sciences: a love of system". Similarly, Jacqueline Rose has argued that "Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described, just as his utterance constantly rejoins the mastery which he sought to undermine".Feminists would then raise the question: "is Lacan, in claiming the law of the father, merely himself in the grip of the Oedipus complex?"

To intimates like Dolto, "Lacan was like a narcissistic and wayward child... All he thought about was himself and his work". Yet if Lacan was a narcissist, if his writings are essentially "the confessions of a self-justifying megalomaniac", fuelled by "Lacan's craving for recognition—his almost demonic hunger"—if they reveal "a narcissistic enjoyment of mystification as a form of omnipotent power... phantasies of narcissistic omnipotence"

Didn't he abuse his kids?

>>3289387
Dawkins pls gb2 /sci/
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~plotnits/PDFs/ap%20lacan%20and%20math%20Plotnitsky%5B1%5D.pdf

like most, I have very strong feelings about Lacan without having read any of his work

>>3289496
> he doesn't mean the actual penis but the phallus!

Oh, okay. Gonna read my Ecrits like a good boy. Thanks.

Maybe when I'm done I can abuse my patients and do a critical analysis of toilets and films like Hitman 2.

He's not taken seriously in phil departments, only in north american English departments. Literary critics don't have philosophical training and they don't have the intellectual strength to stand up to the arguments of Lacan, so they just absorb it.

>>3289515

>he thinks the penis is the same thing as the phallus

I bet you think all spheroids are watermelons

>>3289515
So you chose to absolutely misread the link? Did you even read it at all?

This is good, but I can't find English subs or anything.

If you understand French, watch it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBWqrRR9TBc

>>3289580
This looks bretty gud, thanks niggy.

Love the way Lacan reads. I really wish he had done an audiobook of all of Proust's A la recherche

Is this biographical? Critical? What's the angle? I'm gonna save the file and watch it later.

Shit tier French theory. Foucault, Serres, and Virilio are 10x better.

>>3289580
> glorifying his office space

I think I'm gonna hate this doc.

>>3289696
It focuses on his work in the clinic with interviews with a lot of his patients.

One of them describes Lacan as "holding him with one hand and never letting go and with the other shaking him". They talk about the importance of language to the therapy, relationship between public and private and so on.

They talk about his eccentric ways, his relationship to money, how his lectures attracted more and more people, etc.

>>3289730
tl;dr Lacan is worthwhile

???

I'm not sure what I think of him, it's just so difficult to unravel this Borromean knot without the whole thing coming apart.

Only interesting use of Lacan I've seen is by Kittler

and Kittler is/was in no way in hell a Lacanian

>>3289234
This.

Read most of his seminaries and his ecrits and I have written some papers on him. Brilliant dude. But before you understand what he is doing you have to know freud and know what psychiatry was like in the 50s and the 70s.

>>3289271

He is an amazing thinker and pushes to the limits a lot of the ideas of modernity.

He manages to revitalize the notion of truth, ethics and subjectivity after structuralism.
He is probably the deepest thinker of the past century together with Adorno

> He is probably the deepest thinker of the past century together with Adorno

lel u cant tricked me that easy!

>>3289530
He is not taken seriously in american philosophy departments which tend to be pretty laughable.

"Off to the dustbin with French Freud" - Harold Bloom

>>3289778
He is angry because his whole conception of american literature is that it's about the individual making it on its own.

>>3289730
lol I'm loving this interviews with his patients. Pretty much they were all pretty attractive women and he was just a seductive womanizer.

This one Fraulein right now is describing how Lacan gave her a sultry kiss on the cheek to reshape her memory of the Gestapo.

What a player.

>>3289782
Or he rightly prefers Freud to Lacan.

>>3289784
con't

This one chick wanted to suck his dick so badly. She even confessed to being in love with him.

I'm getting a lot of french fanboyism in the documentary. Might have to give it a thumbs down on youtube.

Not seeing what's so revolutionary about this slutty psychoanalyst. I once picked a Bruce Fink book on Lacan and the back said that Lacan was as important and revolutionary for the 20th century as Einstein. I chuckled.

>>3289787

I bet you cannot tell me what are the differences between Lacan and the"Freud" Harold Bloom prefers.

That's because Lacan's reading of Freud tend to be very accurate, so much that even orthodox freudians today they recognize their importance. The difference between freudians and lacanians is first and foremost in how therapy is practice, not so much theoretical.

Again Harold Bloom dislikes Lacan because he points out what Freud has been saying all along: there is no I.

>>3289811
There's that but it's also an aesthetic preference.

Freud is a better writer than Lacan. And why not just read Proust?

>>3289801
Have you ever went through therapy?

>>3289811
> what Freud has been saying all along: there is no I.

That's just not true. There's a subject in Freud. Lacan pushes it further to say there's no subject, but that's a revision.

>>3289828
No. Is that a natural outcome of psychoanalysis? To want to suck your analyst's dick?

>>3289834
Sort of. Look up transference. It's not uncommon for the patient to become infatuated or fall in love with the therapist or vice versa.

> Again Harold Bloom dislikes Lacan because he points out what Freud has been saying all along: there is no I.

Only 2000 years behind buddhism.

You guys still worshipping this Freudian shit?

Jung is infinitely better.

>>3289861

Like I said, he's shit tier French theory. The French "moment" in philosophy had some really sharp minds. Lacan wasn't one of them, dogmatically relying as he did on a model of the psyche that was already losing its credibility.

I can't handle this documentary. So much dick suck.

Not a single critical remark.

>>3289870
Hmm...not to mention Saussure's linguistics. Where is that now? Not relevant.

>Read Jung
>Acquire women and money

>Read Freud
>Become pedophile communist

>>3289829
Lacan believes there is a subject, and that is the unconscious.

Freud believes the same thing.
The ego for freud is basically a membrane coordinating reality and the unconscious it has no agency.

>>3289845

Not relevant, eastern thought does not emerge from the categories of modernity and thus it's not a proper critique to it.

>>3289956
> buddhism is old therefore any critique of subjectivity is radically new

wow its like you actually have trisomy

>>3289822

Because Proust and Lacan don't say the same things?

What they say on love it's eerily similar, but it's not the same thing.

Also I think that Lacan is much more interesting to be read than Freud. Lacan has a much sharper wit and a better sense for one-liners than freud. Also Lacan has a much more extended culture than Freud.

>>3289960

I don't think you actually understood what I said.

What I meant is that freudism, structuralism and post-structuralism are, when addressing the problem of subjectivity, basically a reply to the Kantian theory of the subject and that's why they are important to us.

Buddhism in itself does not address, for obvious reasons, the Kantian subject.
Saying that "there is no I" as such is of no interest.

The interesting part is when "there is no I" is a consequence of the Kantian construction.

So saying "buddhism said that already" is of no interest, because I don't share the categories of buddhism, the form of life in which buddhism originated, nor the modes of thought of buddhism.

>>3289983
Cont.

In one sentce: the "Ego" I talk about, is not the same Buddhism talks about.

Charlatan. Worthless interpreter of a worthless theory; only English departments are credulous enough to take him seriously

>>3290013
Have you ever read it?

>>3290013
Yeah, have you ever read it?

I bet if you dedicate 10 years of your life to reading him you'll see that he's more than worthwhile.

Sheesh. The nerve of some people!

>>3289893
The irrelevance of saussure's linguistics is over stated.

It's just that his approach is so integral now that it's kinda moot to discuss it.

You should read: http://www.amazon.com/Re-reading-Saussure-Dynamics-Signs-Social/dp/0415104114

>>3289961
> What they say on love it's eerily similar, but it's not the same thing.

It's called plagiarism.

Bloom is right to dismiss Lacan. He is not original. Freud was and so was Proust.

Performing a career long Freudian reading of Proust with venn diagrams and math equations and passing it off as your own insights is plagiarism.
Lacan doesn't even have the balls to admit when he was quoting Freud a la lettre and when he was revising him. It's all appropriated into one big framework that's his and that people will worship him for.

> durr I'm freudian you gotta be Lacanian now

Really a kooky gang of dogmatic followers he's amassed.

>>3290065
>>3290065

Who gives a fuck where the idea comes from if it's interesting?

You guys seriously need to stop considering author gods. It's painful to watch.

>>3290078
> author gods are bad

Then why do you worship Lacan? Why does every Lacanian hold his works like Holy writ?

Just admit it. Lacan is your god.

>>3290065

No it's not plagiarism.

>Performing a career long Freudian reading of Proust with venn diagrams and math equations and passing it off as your own insights is plagiarism.

This shows that you have just a passing knowledge of Lacan.
Lacan and Proust have similar outlook on romantic love which is a topic that Lacna tackles only rarely.
Even the seminar dedicated to love (seminar VIII) is in the first part a commentary on Courtly Love and the second part a commentary on Plato's Symposium.So thinking that he is just copying Proust is just absurd.

You are right anyway when you say that he did not admit when quoting freud and when appropriating him.
But this is a common practice, you cannot write a commentary without distortions.

So did Anna Freud. So did Gadamer with Heidegger. Rorty with Davidson and Quine. So does Pippin with Hegel and so did Kojeve with Hegel. Even St.Thomas with Aristotle and the Bible does the same.

So what?

Never met a Lacanian who wasn't a dogmatic Lacanian.

And anyone who critiques Lacan either has an oedipal complex or "has obviously never read him!!!11"

>>3290093

I've never even read Lacan and that was my first post in the thread.

The text is what your thoughts should be focused on. Not its author. If you have a problem with the ideas, go ahead and argue. Stop stalling.

>>3290101
> Lacan and Proust have similar outlook on romantic love which is a topic that Lacna tackles only rarely.
> tackles only rarely

Yeah, would be a shame if he, you know, admitted that he was a plagiarizer.

> So did Anna Freud. So did Gadamer with Heidegger. Rorty with Davidson and Quine. So does Pippin with Hegel and so did Kojeve with Hegel. Even St.Thomas with Aristotle and the Bible does the same.

lol you really think all those niggas are in the same league as Lacan's plagiarism? The fact that you cite Gadamer of all people as a plagiarizer...You're desperately clinging to your god mister Jackie Lacan and quite frankly it's embarrassing.

If you're french I could tolerate this. It's one of their cultural quirks, you know, much like their aversion to bathing.

>>3290102

There is a difference between criticizing an author and claiming he is a charlatan.

Usually people go with the second and then wonder why other lift their shields around him.

>>3290118
Find me a single Lacanian who lifted a finger against Lacan.

Do you have anything critical, at all, to say about Lacan?

>>3290110
The fact is simple: I read freud, I read proust and I read lacan. They are different author and what is in each is radically different. You can't reduce Lacan to any of them.

As for Gadamer he is mentioned not as a plagiarist but as someone who has distorted Heidegger while trying to explain him.
Which is what Lacan did with Freud.

>>3290093
>Then why do you worship Lacan?
Who the fuck is even doing this here, bro? Calm down. Geez.

>>3290126
Recalcati, Badiou, Zizek, Lacoue-Labarthes.

And yeah myself. I find the mathemes pretty dumb for example and a misguided attempt, even if I understand what he was trying to do.

Also I believe that his middle period concept of the real was better than his later one.

And I believe that seminar xvii is completely misguided by trying to hard to get on 1968 and court people like deleuze.

Ha! Get a load of this fucking Lacanian ITT

I bet you think Hamlet has an Oedipal complex, don't you?

>>3290149
Zizek does not critique Lacan in any way. He never rises above Lacanian explicator.

Dunno about Badiou. He seems like a reasonable guy.

>>3290153
Which is not the case in the Lacanian interpretation of Hamlet, where Hamlet is the result of the failed Oedipus?

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/468811?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid
=21101597258077

Zizek on dogmatic Lacan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36NeCAucRI

>>3290180
Zizek does not critique Lacan head on but he clearly implies that Lacan in itself it's limited and that's because he is a psychoanalyst and not a philosopher.

For zizek Lacan is only a gateway to get past derrida, deleuze and foucault to get back at hegel, who is The Philosopher. And he strongly disagrees with Lacan's criticism of philosophy especially after he got kicked out from the ENS.

In fact read here:

"The only thing one cannot fully agree with in this quoted passage concerns Miller’s (and Lacan’s) all too quick and slick condemnation of philosophy"

http://www.lacan.com/symptom11/?p=346

>>3290153
You know, I never read a Lacanian interpretation of Hamlet, but I admit that as I was reading Lacan I got the feeling that Hamlet would be a perfect subject of a Lacanian interpretation.

The character just fits the whole scenario that Lacan tackles in his ideas.

That said, I'm a sucker for Hamlet and I always have the play in mind at all times.

>>3290190
Thanks for the link.

>>3290153
Oh boy, there wasn't even an Oedipal complex in Sophocles.

A pity we can't shake off these readings.

Didn't Derrida own all of you Freudians and Marxists?

>>3290237
But derrida liked freud and marx...

>>3290263
And he liked Rousseau too.

What's your point? He owned them.

>>3290275
I dunno man, I don't think so.

>>3290275

When did he own them? I'm studying Derrida right now, and I'm curious as to which texts I could find this ownage in.

didn't he beat his kids and a couple of his mistresses?

or is that just some revolutionary therapeutic shit and 2deep4me?

'