/lit/ - Literature

>>7213628
Does Zizek actually understand Lacan?

>>7213628
How do you feel now that you have wasted your life?

>studied Lacan extensively

my condolences

>>7213633
Yes, to a very high degree. His point of divergence with Fink and other prominent Lacanians has mostly to do with his interpretation of the late Lacan. As everyone knows he's best at illustrating the classic Lacanian concepts like the objet a and jouissance in terms of pop culture references, but is less convincing when trying to fuse Lacan with Hegel -- something that really can't be done, in my opinion.

>>7213639
Pretty good.

To lazy to look it up on Wikipedia : what are Lancan's main opinions?

>>7213644
What should a "prior to reading Lacan" reading list look like?
Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure, Kojève?
>something that really can't be done, in my opinion
What makes you say this?

>>7213628
What is your opinion on Lacan's use of mathematical concepts that are mathematically meaningless (e.g topological limit)?

>>7213628
Can you give me an example of a time when Lacan actually penned a coherent thought?

>>7213655
One should start with the "greatest hits" of Freud. Lacan seems to make the most use out of the Traumdeutung and Der Witz, and also the case histories of the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Dora.

A skim-through of Saussure's course in general linguistics is a must, though Lacan ends up veering away from that text an awful lot.

Kojève was extremely influential on the young Lacan, and one should definitely read Hegel in light of his reading of the Phenomenology.

Answer to the Hegel question to follow in a separate post.

>>7213628
what is your personal object petit a?

why is he important

Honestly why?

>>7213652
Lacan was at heart an orthodox Freudian who integrated psychoanalysis with (continental) linguistics and phenomenology. This led him to conclude that the Freudian unconscious was a sort of sediment created by an individual's learning language, thereby "structured like" a language and subject to some of the same laws. Neuroses, psychosis, etc., are the results of a maligned unconscious.

>>7213679
Good question. Probably a deep-seated sexual masochism.

Do you think people who are condemning you in this thread for reading Lacan are bothered by your enjoyment?

>>7213698
thats very precise.

what was lacan's object petit a?

what about zizek?

tfw cant identify mine.

>>7213665
The Borromean knot phase of Lacan is unfortunate. It's explainable given that the role of the French intellectual was becoming more and more defined by extravagant posturing -- which was obviously something intentional in Lacan's persona from the beginning -- but which became easier and easier to fall into once he began losing his voice to a severe lung cancer. The early experiments in topography came about when he was simply too tired to speak, and became easier and easier as things grew more painful for him. I'm not particularly interested in a lot of his work post-1970 for that reason.

>>7213704
Yes.

WHY IS HE IMPORTANT

On feminine jouissance Lacan said that besides what the phallic function designates of jouissance, there is also a supplementary jouissance -- a jouissance of the body -- which is beyond the phallus.

What is it, and does it "ex-sist"?

>>7213672
I think that the two are incompatible because of their fundamentally different views on human subjectivity. The Hegelian subject that comes across in the Logic and the Phenomenology is one who is initially "ruptured," in a similar way to the barred (castrated) $ubject of Lacan, but is later able to come to self-consciousness and coherence after learning more and more about itself, as we see in the Phenomenology. Of course Zizek says that Hegel didn't really intend this, that the Hegelian subject is much weaker and inferior than originally believed -- but I don't buy this.

The Lacanian subject can never have real happiness, self-knowledge, or coincidence with itself, even after the most successful analytic treatment. From the moment language enters the life of the individual, they are split apart from themselves, and will never again reach a state resembling wholeness.

Seminar 17 can in many ways be seen as Lacan's assessment of his work viz. Hegel's philosophy, and is very good reading for this.

>>7213729
Bodily feminine jouissance is unknowable. It is an abyss. Recall Lacan's comments on the painting L'origin du monde (which he owned): "The phallus is inside the painting."

I dont get it, the big Other doesn't exist yet we are supposed to pretend it does anyway?

Is man's love narcissistic?

>>7213670
I asked you a question motherfucker

>>7213698
how do you sublimate it?

>>7213751
The big Other does not exist, yet all of human social life is structured in such a way as to convince us that it does. I don't think the answer is to pretend that it exists after learning that it doesn't, but rather recognize common ways in which we give too much ground to it in our decisionmaking and social life.

>>7213754
Yes. To quote, "Inasmuch as I love you, I love another." All sex is masturbation with a human partner.

>>7213765
What's more masochistic than reading Lacan?

>>7213715
You have to answer this question yourself.

>>7213751
Not the OP, but the big Other -- i.e. as that which guarantees meaning -- is a (necessary) fiction.

>>7213769
reading Dickens. or maybe kafka

>>7213769
Is woman's love narcissistic too, if part of it is related to the abyssal Other-jouissance?

Are you an obsessional neurotic?

>>7213798
I would call it narcissistic up to a point, or it is at least narcissistic in the sexual act. The bulk of a woman's pleasure however -- and female jouissance entirely -- is not sexual. It's a sort of mysterious tryst with the Other.

Yes.

What was his analysis of Las Meninas supposed to convey?

I remember being fucking puzzled reading that

>>7213816
It's been a while since I've read seminar 3, but put briefly, it was meant to describe certain traits of the objet a, particularly its insistence and elusivity.

C'mon, does any of this shit even mean anything in the real world? Joussance? All love is narcissistic? $ubjects? gimme a break. what a hack

How does anyone take psychoanalysis seriously in 2015?

>>7213831
>>7213835
Why do you feel a pathological compulsion to denounce all of this? You don't actually have to participate in the thread.

>>7213844
I was asking a serious question. It seems to me, that the only thing Freud got right, was on religion.

Everything else seems like his own personal, cocaine-induced projections on to the world.

>>7213844
>pathological compulsion

lol. it was a post that took like 7 seconds to write. this shit is gay. it's like a bunch of fags sitting around talking about klingonian linguistics - literally woo-woo claptrap

>>7213854
Now you've made your opinion known. Now let's move on.

>>7213853
Freud stopped using cocaine very early in his career, after witnessing a colleague from university die penniless because of it.

>>7213854

>tfw the unconscious manifests itself so visibly in the ideology around the use of language in discourse

How does Lacan's theory of Oedipus differ from Freud's?

>>7213644
>but is less convincing when trying to fuse Lacan with Hegel -- something that really can't be done, in my opinion.
I assumed Lacan was Hegelian?

>>7213864

>>7213870
Yao ming as a reaction face is so 2010.

>>7213862
I like how Lacanians can never just sit down and explain what they're so passionate about. I love music. For the sake of argument, let's pretend I like noise or whatever. You say hey anon, this sounds like ass, what possible enjoyment do you derive from it?

since I'm not a buttblasted faggot I'd try to explain what it does for me. Seriously, why study Lacan? Why devote a large portion of your life to intellectual masturbation?

Explain the unary trait: “the most elementary
form, if one can express oneself in that way of subjectivity; there is no object at all here yet,
there is something different: the sign, which represents this something for someone.”

Does that 'occur' after the symbolization and effacement of the Real, from which the lost object is retroactively constituted?

How much do Lacan and pic related's ideas on ideology differ?

Also, how much was pic related influenced by Lacan, would you say?

>>7213867
The importance of the Oedipal drama and the threat of castration is not confined to the child-father-mother situation. It is instead something occurring on the level of meaning, in the earliest stages of language. In short, he takes it much more abstractly.

>>7213868
"I am not a Hegelian." L, seminar 17.

>>7213875
We're still in the 2010s. I'll stop in 2020.

>>7213877
how do you explain to others that the music you like doenst sound like ass?

What is your reaction to Deleuze and Guattari?

>>7213844
Like with academia, you can't contain the hackery in e.g. this thread. It leaks. So just let us take a piss here too, all right?

>>7213868
He denies that explicitly on a number of occassions.

Zizek argues that he is, though. You should read this:

http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan1.htm

I'm not OP btw.

>>7213877
>literally exhibiting your own biases in order to shift the conversation in a vague direction

just say what it is you're trying to say about Lacan

>>7213893
I'd try to level with them because I recognize people listen to music for enjoyment and whatever, and if it was actually just pretentious garbage I'd at least admit it's nothing more than an exercise in novelty and obfuscation.

>>7213900
Yes, that's what I'm specifically referring to. Zizek has claimed Lacan was Hegelian multiple times.

>>7213901
I'm asking YOU, dude. What the fuck does any of this shit have to do with real life?

>>7213879
The unary trait precedes all other symbolization. All symbolization relies upon the unary trait, which is the very first signifier.

>>7213885
They were both intensely structuralist, but seemed to mostly ignore one another in their respective ways of thinking, despite how much respect they paid to the other in public and private. There's a really interesting correspondence between the two published online. Mostly it's just them complimenting each other while betraying that neither has really read the other in any depth.

>>7213895
Mostly negative. I was not impressed with A-O or 1000 Plateaus, but do like some of Guattari's French work, like Chaosmosis.

>>7213877
>Why devote a large portion of your life to intellectual masturbation?
If you'd read Lacan then you'd realize that everything we do is basically just masturbation :^)

Is Lacan indirectly to blame for tumblr SJWs or no?

>>7213921
/thread

>>7213911

are you asking a metaphysical question about reality or are you asking what practical use to analysis a psychoanalytic discourse might have

http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/en/Shrink_from_Hell.htm what do you think about this?

>>7213914
>The unary trait precedes all other symbolization. All symbolization relies upon the unary trait, which is the very first signifier.

Is that where Lacan talks about the first drawn line(?) that 'prehistoric man' jotted down when they had slayed an animal?

>>7213924
Perhaps, but I think that's tracing things back a little too far.

>>7213942
Not exactly. It's rather the most basic recognition of difference between I and another, or, in Lacan's theory of development, I and my other, my image in the mirror.

>>7213905
I don't know m8, I like classic salsa, but people just can't get into it, and those that can they just get into it.

you can't give reasons for people to like your music. They have to feel it.

>>7213956
>Perhaps,
In what ways exactly?

>>7213941
>http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/en/Shrink_from_Hell.htm
A lot of that is true. Roudinescou addresses the fundamental "why bother to read Lacan when he was such a pompous shit" question in Lacan in Spite of Everything, which is a good answer to criticisms like these.

>>7213956
>Not exactly
Is the trait which will eventually transform the ”lost” object into an object of desire?

>>7213962
Mostly by inspiration. Though Lacan himself was pretty Victorian in ethics, thinking homosexuality was basically a mental disease and all that, he inspired theorists like Butler who are more directly responsible for the more unfortunate elements of SJW-ism.

>>7213966
Yes.

>>7213956
What the fuck does Lacan have to do with SJWs?

He is despised by feminists for being anti-feminist (a retarded claim btw).
Tumblr morons talk about phalluses (phalli?) because they've had an introductory class on Freud.

>>7213628

Have you ever read Leninology, the blog of the contemporary socialist Richard Seymour? Specifically, have you ever read any of the pieces where he invokes Lacan? If so, what did you think of them?

Was Lacan himself a Marxist? Why, beyond his simple proximity to them now that I skim wiki, is he so popular among Marxists?

>>7213971
Lacan is popular among Marxist because of Althusser, basically.

Also, has Seymour converted to Islam yet?

>op thinks a reading of Lacan justifies him laughing off social justice as 'unfortunate'

read more

>>7213778
I don't know who he is, tell me who he is.

>>7213975
>some of the elements

>>7213971
I have not read that blog. I'll keep it in mind, though.

Lacan was not a Marxist, and was always skeptical if not outright antagonistic toward revolutionaries. His address to revolutionaries at Vincennes is indicative of this. It's called the Analyticon, and is collected in the Autres écrits and a few other volumes, including the English seminar 17.

Marxists like him because the Lacanian discourse is particularly adept at critiquing capitalist ideology, as Zizek, Dolar, and others have found.

Your all think youre so smart, well I got news for ya, your not! Stop reading this psycho philosophical crap (you are literally rotting your brain out). Have you ever wondered the consequences of all this? You will wind up in a mad house due to your solitude and being as Freud puts it "stuck in your own head". Lacan said, and I quote, "To be constantly analyzing your own, in solitude, is commiting oneself to the madhouse".

I'm just here to warn y'all. Love from Paris.

>>7213967
So, how does Butler get all that transgender shit out of Lacan's theories? By way of Irigaray or is Butler just full of it?

>>7214001
By way of Irigaray, yes, who I'm not too familiar with. Virtually every point of contact between Lacan and feminism comes from the later moments of seminar 20, for further reference.

Have you ever smelled a girl's butthole?

>>7214004
Well, Butler's work isn't exactly the best feminism out there. Irigaray makes some good points though.

>>7213967
>thinking homosexuality was basically a mental disease
You're wrong here, Lacan was with Freud in regards to homosexuality.

>>7214042
Sorry for being imprecise. I did mean that he held the orthodox Freudian view of it.

what does the whole 'a signifier presenting itself to another signifier' mean?

Is Lacan's mythical position as the quintessence of pseudo-intellectualism unwarranted? I just look at his body of work and it really almost seems like he is trolling sometimes. For instance a torus diagram of the psyche. He's like a Terrence Mckenna who isn't even high

>>7214051
This is a little tricky. The signifier representing the subject to another signifier is the master signifier, which then stands in the place of the subject for all other secondary signifiers. You can consider a master signifier as a sort of guaranteed, stable meaning for something.

>>7214077
It is not unwarranted, because he cultivated it intentionally with his public persona to avoid criticism. Lacan the speaker was a far cry from Lacan the thinker; he basically assumed the persona of someone speaking nonsense to bolster his points about the difficulties of speaking sense.

>>7214047
And the orthodox Freudian view does't imply homosexuality is a disease at all. At best it's a "perversion" but so much of everything is, there's no negative connotation in a psychoanalytic context.

>>7214090
That is correct.

>>7213924
I am concerned because Foucault seems like a cool guy. do you think Foucault would approve of the sort of indentity politics we have now? Even if he is somehow responsible I think on that front he is largely overshadowed by re-o-tard for bringing about this solipsistic and willfully anti-intellectual brand.

>>7214112
Not OP but I'd say Foucault is more responsible than Lacan ever would be

>>7214112
>do you think Foucault would approve of the sort of indentity politics we have now?
Probably not.

Foucault actually called out other Leftists in his day for being too authoritarian-minded, similar to the people already in power. He was also pro-Israel to some extent. Chances are, he'd tell SJWs to fuck off for resembling their perceived oppressors too much. Later Foucault, in particular, would see them as just another power structure.

Explain aphanisis

OP here. I'm afraid I have to go for now. Thanks for the questions, everyone.

>>7214169
Au revoir !

>>7214169
Thanks OP

>>7214120
>Foucault is more responsible than Lacan ever would be
In what ways?

>>7214232
power structures, epistemes, and the genealogical method.

>>7214247
SJWs think of power as more of a binary whereas Foucault thought of power as more of an action.

>>7214253
I think of Power as what i do to your mom when your father's not around.

What do you think of the charge that his philosophy is an incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish?

>>7213628

Why was Lacan such an insufferable douchbag?

Why did he steal other people's works and try to pass them off as his own?

Why haven't the French been sent to the gas chambers yet?

>>7214911
>Why did he steal other people's works and try to pass them off as his own?
[citation needed]

>>7213628
How do you feel about Deleuze? Do you think that his and G's arguments have been adequately refuted by the psychoanalysis community?

>>7215083

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jacques-lacan-was-sort-of-a-dick-323

>Lacan’s casual relationship with theft is also documented. Namely, towards the books he was lent by his friends. Unlike your friend who “lost” your copy of 50 Shades of Grey, Lacan was far more premeditated. After poring through her archives of Lacan’s letters, Roudinesco discovered that Lacan would often write to friends to either borrow or purchase books that were rare and collectible. When asked to return them, they were often “lost”, and in the case of purchasing them he rarely shelled out the full agreed-to amount.

>Many psychology undergrads know the case of Aimée (a pseudonym for Marguerite Anzieu), Lacan’s patient and the subject of his now famous 1932 doctoral thesis. Aimée was jailed and put under Lacan’s ward after she tried to stab famous French actress Huguette Duflos. Aimée was described as paranoid and delusional, but Lacan was fascinated by the novel she was writing while under his care. Even Aimée couldn’t escape his avarice, as Lacan “borrowed” the novel’s manuscripts for his own scholarly work. To this day, the descendants of Aimée are trying to recover the manuscripts.

>More serious are accusations of plagiarism. Lacan is famously known for positing the “mirror stage”, a psychoanalytic term for the point in life at which infants can recognise themselves in mirrors. However, not unlike his book collection, it was stolen from somebody else. Roudinesco notes that the term comes from a Communist psychologist named Henri Wallon, and that Lacan – ever "quick to erase the original archive” – “always suppressed Wallon’s name”.

>Another great Lacan scam was his “variable-length session”, a fancy way to justify bilking his therapy patients out of money. Throughout his life, Lacan slowly decreased the time he spent with each patient; what began as nearly an hour of psychoanalysis later dwindled to only a few minutes. The whole affair was extremely lucrative, with Lacan charging between 300-500 Francs in the late 1970s. And, if you were an aspiring student of Lacan, you too were required to pay to get on his couch.

>>7213997
Define your terms plz.

>>7213628
who is lakorn?

Do you know of anyone, aside from Zizek, who takes a decidedly Marxist approach to Lacan, in particular to the structure of the unconscious and what that implies for the field of possible intelligibility for a given subject?

A recent reading of Lukacs has made me interested in class unconsciousness and his remarks regarding the unconscious and class position piqued my interest (the nature of the bourgeoisie and its position within the social whole structure its conscious and unconscious so as to prevent it from reaching a true understanding of the totality).

>>7215106
>frogs were stupid enough to pay lacan for 2 minutes of his time
>this is his fault

>>7213628
my mother is hysterics since always.

tell me about hysteria in women.

Why can't women know/express what turns them on?

>>7213628
why do men seek validation of their existence/skills from women, in trying to please them sexually, to amuse them, to support them materially and to emotionally ?

>>7215465
Bumping for this

>>7215564
The Vice's article quoted by >>7215106 presents these things as if they were an objection to his psychoanalysis practice. Of course, Lacan loved money and the variable length session have been used lightly, even by him. Though, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, it could be quite useful.

By example when an obsessional person try to barricade him/herself by intellectualizing his/her speech every sessions. Closing the session before the 30min time may be a way to make the person realize he/she's wasting time (and money too) doing this. When you let people know the session is variable in length, they know it's not an obligation to "fill" the 30".
I'm not saying that one practitioner should do this with every obsessional people : that's his/her skill that will determinate the use of this practice. By example, one should not close a session because he is bored or scared, uneasy with a patient' silences. But that happens, practitioner are also humans. And a good practitioner will be the one who question this negative transference, this boredom or this uneasiness.

It's like anything in psychoanalysis, there is never a notebook to do things correctly, and there always will be mistakes, that's life. A very good and correct interpretation of a patient discourse, if given at the wrong time, could be of no use or even dangerous for the patient's mind. That's really depending of the skill of the practitioner, and of the transference quality. A practitioner may be usually very good but not be the suitable one for one patient, if the transference is always negative.

>>7215465
Althusser is basically Zizek but Spinoza instead of Hegel

>>7215106
The only accusation of plagiarism is this and it wasn't plagiarism

>More serious are accusations of plagiarism. Lacan is famously known for positing the “mirror stage”, a psychoanalytic term for the point in life at which infants can recognise themselves in mirrors. However, not unlike his book collection, it was stolen from somebody else. Roudinesco notes that the term comes from a Communist psychologist named Henri Wallon, and that Lacan – ever "quick to erase the original archive” – “always suppressed Wallon’s name”.

Lacan admitedly was influenced by Wallon early on but his later writings on the mirror stage are completely different than anything Wallon wrote

The author of this article is distorting what Roudinesco said in her book, she herself is an Lacanian

>>7218080
My god, Althusser references Lacan so fucking much in his autobiography.

>>7216268
Is this girl that youtuber someone from 4chan traumatized out of the internet? I don't even want to know why do you have all these personal photos of her.

Faut il avoir un savoir aigu en psychologie pour pouvoir l'aborder ? j'ai peur qu'il me baise le cerveau .
Si c'est le cas , quels auteurs me conseilles tu pour avoir une bonne bonne base dans le domaine .

>>7218188
Je ne suis pas >>7213628 et je n'ai pas lu "tout Lacan", mais ce qui est certain c'est qu'il faut avoir lu Freud ! Et je dirais que c'est une bonne idée d'avoir une petite expérience de la psychanalyse, afin que ça ne reste pas qu'un simple plaisir intellectuel ou philosophique (certains l'abordent comme ça... pourquoi pas ! mais c'est se priver de quelque chose, d'un certain ressenti de ce que ça peut "vouloir dire")

Bump for the >>7213628 's comeback

>>7218153
I use her for masturbation

>>7213908
Only in the 50s.

>>7213924
Structuralism is actually reactionary as fuck.

>>7213628
Why did you take malleable sophistry as dogma?

>>7217101
>actually defending three minute sessions of your favourite guru

frenchies have found the absolute bottom of philosophy merging marxism, word games and psychoanalysis.

is it like sunk cost fallacy? all those years spent reading piles of books these people shat out?

what does lacan says about dildos for babies ?

>>7221435
I don't particularly defend three minutes session, it's all given the context. But to know that you should have read me. The problem is you don't read much, and you're even proud about that.

>>7213914
>Mostly negative. I was not impressed with A-O or 1000 Plateaus

Could you elaborate on this? A-O was admitted insufficient by the authors themselves as far as I know, but their criticisms of psychoanalysis still seem valid even if their alternatives aren't sufficient.