For Lacan, the idea of “gaze”, or perception, was seen in the skewed image of the skull in Holbein’s painting, entitled The Ambassadors. Like the skull, “truth” is seemingly skewed based on the way we come to perceive images and ideas through our cultural experiences. Just as the skull (“truth”) goes unseen, only subjective images (i.e., the ambassadors) can come into our sight. Only when this subjectivity is skewed can the truth (i.e., the skull) be seen clearly.
Lacan’s triptych of psychoanalysis consists of (1) the symbolic order (which consists of unconscious linguistic signs and cultural symbols), (2) the imaginary order (i.e., the process of identification or cultural interpretation of signs and symbols) and (3) the real. For Lacan, in using subconscious symbolic signs, we identify and live within an imaginary realm, losing sight of reality. In other words, we subconsciously use cultural signs to falsely interpret what we think to be true.
@TheEponymus yes there are. more so for freud. on the one hand most of his primary texts have been available in english for some time. Of 21 or more of Lacan's seminars only a handful are available in english, and it was only in the last few years that a complete edition was translated. lacan has been more influential in the u.s. in fields like film theory than psychoanalysis here, unfortunately. also, lacan presupposes familiarity with hegel, heidegger, and existing psychoanaltic theory, etc.
Well the study of human tough, mind and perception is made by several other people that have nothing to do with psychoanalises. The theoretical failure that psychoanalises have become, due the choice of staing in the sphere of the metaphysical only, do not imples that the study of human behavior or "mind" have failed. Maybe if the pyschoanalises had evolved taking an aproach less based on a system of dogmatic concepts becoming so static that sounds like giberrish.
All of Lacan's thought can be summarized by :"Man does not think with his soul...man thinks because he is split by a structure which has nothing to do with anatomy." The existence of the unconscious: the fact that as Freud once quipped "The ego is not master of his own house", and the fact that the notion of humanism as been challenged time and time again from our paradigm shifts in science though the "psychopathology of everyday life" that we see in the vices/virtues of others proves this.
What a way of meeting people and get to see their talent. At first was reluctant being on youtube, but getting to do this has brought me into the houses of some very special people. You are one of them. Life; isn't it wonderful!!! Keep up the good work. Have A Splendid Day!!!!
"[A]lthough Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish."
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea Instead of parroting critics why don't you do some research on Lacan yourself ? Although lacan makes use of mathematical terms he does not ground them on mathematical ontology , he just draws a sketch to clarify his ideas. RD ,as far as general linguistics is concerned, is illiterate .Lacan utilizes saussurian symbols , which are not at all arbitrary.
Perhaps you , sokal , RD and others should do some background research on the things you're criticizing.
@SonytoBratsoni I make no apology for quoting hilarity. As for research, I shall quote again: "I don't think it merits the time to do so" - cscs.umich. edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
If I want to study linguistics, I stick with science, as I have done. You can download Chomsky's PhD thesis via his Wikipedia entry, so you could make a start there. Admittedly, his thesis is comprehensible, unlike the farcical gibberish you seem to prefer, but try not to let that put you off.
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea There's no doubt in my mind that Chomsky's work on linguistics isn't only solid but revolutionary . What I'm personally interested in however , is taking the best of both worlds , critically examining what is offered by both sides.
Lacan utilizes (as I've explicated previously) linguistic symbols which Chomsky considers inadequate only as far as syntax goes ,but that is of no concern to someone who studies semiotics.
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea Why do you ,so insistently, keep claiming that it is crap ? Have you viewed the lectures on Lacan from Yale university , have you read the several articles from the scholarly Cambridge companion to Lacan ?
If you are in possession of some arguments I would love to hear them.
@SonytoBratsoni Lectures in Yale or any other univsersity do not comprove nothing about them. It's Just a construct of the postmodern Zeitgheist. And by the way everything he said is giberrish. Frist the introducion of the human instinct as he describes are nothing more than a swallow metaphysical perception over the primitive brain studied by biology and antropology. And everything he said in his life time is nothing more than a mixed interpretation of hegell, freud with math.
@rtlz1985 1) I envisage that you're correctly assessing psychoanalysis's failure to evolve . Personally , l do deem it has a flavor of fictionalist utility . 2) We disagree concerning lacan's comments , not to mention you're contradicting yourself by claiming it is gibberish ( meaning non-sense) and later claiming it's shallow and metaphysical . 3) Some of the things being said by him ,can and are used effectively in film theory , sociology and literary theory.He has yet to run out of insight.
@SonytoBratsoni 2) I will try to correct myself about my contradiction. I called it giberish due the fact most things said by Lacan makes only sense inside his own theory and not in the reality. But this is a problem with the psychoanalisis itself with so many metaphysical concepts wich mostly functions in the ocidental societies ( such as edipus ) and the creation of the phantasm that is the inconscient.
2) When i used swallow *my mistake sorry" i meant Shallow as you corrected me, and thank you for that. But it's because it does ignore the previous knowledge on anthropology, biology and any other science that focus in the human existence, like the evolution of behavior. And because it's metaphysical line of thinking that tries to fit the human in a theory even if need to distort the reality.
3) Yes, but when his theories are used we have to look to how and why they are being used in other fields. And what those people are trying to say. Because when you have someone with a similar mindset, like positivism or "metaphisicism", you can use that to theorize about a subject , like the use Jungian theory of Synchronicity , Collective unconscious and Archetypes to study social phenomena. So it may be useful but to people that are also into a metaphysical interpretation of reality.
It might have helped tremendously if at least some of the context of this little speech had been indicated in the video description. When was this recorded? Personally I feel in the later stages of his work he seemed to start losing his grip on things, this seems sort of symptomatic of that. Sadly, there is a certain personal cult of Lacan that insists to propagate his later work as some kind of inevitable conclusion of his prophesy, much to the detriment of understanding of his work, ironically
Postmodernism is nothing more than cocktail chatter. Reading some of the comments on this board makes me weep for what these terds have done to higher education for the past forty years. When the revolution eventually comes, I sincerely hope they all get lined-up against a fucking wall.
Excellent video. The soul (being-at-work, or essential "person") does not think, thought comes in via language - "reality" is that which persists language, an inter-subjective agreement to sustain the lingual system. The soul is alienated from the body vis language, an alienation expressing itself through the obsessive or hysteric symptom. The unconscious is "the grimace of the real", that is, it is where agreed-upon-"reality" breaks down and the alienation kicks in, where the seems don't fit.
What many of these posts here don't get is that Lacan was not a philosopher: he was an anti-philosopher. For instance, read Fink on the Four Discourses: "Philosophy, Lacan says, has always served the master, has always placed itself in the service of rationalizing and propping up the master's discourse, as has the worst kind of science." (The Lacanian Subj. p.132)
@josepha1008 qu'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuels, ça, mon joseph, je te suis pas. Car j'ai niqué ta mère pas plus tard qu'hier. A bon entendeur, salop.
All you science people: you cant stand the fact, that your ego is not the master in its home..
and earth is a planet and not a saucer
also humankind developed from the apes.
Science did not believed those facts. Old greek philosphist described earth as a
globus without technical equickment.Just thoughts. You will never find the Ich and Über-ich with x-rays-but they exist and they are just a construct from anno 1900...
Lacan is difficult for people to grasp, because of its difficulty, it's easy to criticize it or decide it takes to long to learn, explain and practice, however i think psychoanalysis is still relevant and can provide some more thoughtful answers than modern psychiatry's prescriptions can...
@gutchinson That is not necessarily true. It may be that we who do not understand are stupid (I can live with that). Or, it may be that the emperor has no clothes. Look at the history of these theories (and much else in continental philosophy). Often their very grounds are shaky, as in the case of Mr Lacan. Freud isn't exactly airtight, far from it in fact, neither is Hegel. In fact both has been described as profoundly disingenuous. Hegel might have been mad altogether if you are to believe
@dhyanamooch This just does away with history entirely. FFS look at the scientific theories at the times of Hegel. I agree with you on Hegel and understand what you're saying but you cannot compare a 18th century philosopher with contemporary science. Instead compare Zizek to it. Philosophy, like science (which was originally natural philosophy), has evolved.
@mit181 No! I am almost certain that Lacan's work is of no scientific value whatsoever. Read "The Cult of Lacan" by Richard Webster for some of the arguments.
Most scientists does not purposefully obfuscate, and there is no lack of any clarity in "complex mathematical formula" and Quantum theory is VERY exact. In math every single step logically follows from the previous, and in science we look for experimental evidence/falsification. None of these principles can be found in Lacan.
@dhyanamooch I said Lacan's theories have empirical data. Masses of it. I did not say he was a scientist.
I agree that with everything you said.
Because Lacan is not a scientist as you use the word in your language game (i.e. it has a different meaning according to the rules of the context your 're using it in). The problem is not so much solved as dissolved in this manner.
@mit181 If I were you I'd stop wasting my time with that nonsense. Read the essay I mentioned, it will be a slap in the face, and a wake-up call, but you'll understand that there is nothing of interest in Lacan's pontifications, scientifically or otherwise. It's all just ... shit.
@dhyanamooch Nice of you to be critical and believe only in things that are proven. The next step is to realize that even in empiric studies and mathematical logic there's always an illogical element, and in the end nothing can be taken serious and it's all just about entertainment and not cognition.
@KrushKrackKruck I'm sorry you don't know what you are saying. Ours, is an inanimate world, following rules of logic and math. A cold world maybe, for some, but a world devoid of everything Mr Lacan dreams about. Of that I am sure. Poor demented old fool Lacan.
@gutchinson Shopenhauer. Any theory that builds on these very dubious far from validated theories about the world and grandly speculates needs to be seen as even more spurious.
Furthermore, it is exactly the opaque and turgid language that is the sign that something is amiss. When no one can conclusively say what any of it means one needs to ask if it means anything.
And what is the explanatory power, where is the empirical evidence and can it be falsified?
@dhyanamooch You prefer determinist theorists with the presumption of an 'empirical' or 'airtight' answer, sometimes this is more relevant to a particular situation; that's fine, but i prefer to criticize after i can fully realize someone from their own framework of understanding. I do agree though that this is an awful video of which to illustrate Lacan- no one would see this and think "wow! what a fuckin genius!"
Before you speak about opaque and turgid language you should first make the effort to read it. And not from an empirical point of view - or else you commit paralogisms. Who told you that empiricism is the Truth, the Episteme that rules the world? And who told you that falsifiability put at work as you do is anything more than petitio principii? Now that's turgid and opaque thinking. Or, better said, no thinking at all.
Chomsky had a shocking mirror experience... As an academic who never knew what it was like to live in Vietnam in the late 60's ... looks at Lucan qui aussi lived in the ivory tower. Shock horror damnation.... Chomsky thinks there is something amiss. The word is not the maligned media the rest of the mere rabble-rousers gets to be labelled.. Chomsky continues amid his cloud. Pen poised never having lived.
Also: I find him very very entertaining. And I do think he was a very smart man, but smart enough to know what he was shoveling and how he was shoveling it.
You can't falsify or argue against what he says because it requires you to understand what he says first, and when you interpret to the best of your ability what he says, his followers just say "Well, that is not what he's saying." You say, "tell me then, what is he saying." They say, "You have to read him." And this circular gambit goes on...
The truth is that his followers can not explain what he is saying to themselves.
This interview was also published in English as a book by Joan Copjec (titled Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment), the pdf of which can be found on my blog.
The subtitles provide a poor translation of Lacan. He really knew what he was talking about. I can see people getting offended by his intellect because they can't understand it. The words you are reading here are NOT him. Read the Ecrits. It's tough, but it's a lot better.
Lacan is helpful it that he address the interactive programming structure of thought/language on the human psyche. In the video, he is talking about the "Matrix" of unreality created by language. In the film, Morpheus said, "What is real?" That film is a part of Lacan's legacy. He revised the work of Freud. He has brought clarity to the world in ways unrealized by most. Anybody that can walk into a Nazi headquarters and walk out with his wife unharmed has something valuable to tell us alll.
@carlpope You poor misguided person. It is nonsense. Just like "the interactive programming structure of thought/language on the human psyche" is nonsense. It sounds fancy, but I bet if you try to say that in a simpler way it comes out a very trivial observation. Couched in neologisms and obscure language you can describe taking a shit as the most profound illuminating experience. You are misguided. This is the pinnacle of intellectual dishonesty. It's revolting.
So, in fact, you recognize that you don't understand Lacan because you never studied psychoanalysis and have no bloody idea what is all that about. That's just great. And very easy, just the same. A psychoanalist would tell something about your hysterical frustrations that drive you to such dishonest considerations.
@wandermere14000 I know it's crap. In fact, among real scientists it's a joke. Real thinkers, know all too well what distinguishes them from the likes of you and all other muddleheaded pretentious fools. You are indulging in "higher superstition", and the hard fact is this: at the end of the day you don't know what the hell you're talking about, like Mr Lacan here...I don't care how many of his books you've read. Hehe. You still don't know what any of it really means. That's b/c it means nothing
First of all, you should know what science is. And you obviously don't. If you would be a scientist, you wouldn't betray the experimental paradigm that you would serve and wouln'd make assertions in lack of knowledge and experiment. Go back to highschool, boy.
@wandermere14000 Basically, what you are saying to me is: philosophy doesn't have to make sense. Most of what I consider to be real philosophy is those theories which tries to improve our understanding of the world. This is very broad but the fundamental thing about all understanding is clarity. Clarity and exactness are key elements also within science. Are you deranged? What the fuck are you talking about when you say we shouldn't base our knowledge on empiricism? You feeble-minded idiot!
@dhyanamooch Lacan's account is empirical because he was a practising psychoanalyst. His theories were based on Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure, Jakobson and of course Freud, but the theory arose out of his experience with his patients as much as with abstract philosophical works.
That clarity and exactness are found within science is problematic. What happened to Quantum theory (exactness) and complex mathematical formulae (clarity).
@dhyanamooch Furthermore Lacan is massively misunderstood not only owing to his complexity and esoteric style, but also owing to mistranslation and Miller's monopoly as editor over Lacan's works, keeping them private within a clique.
I find it difficult to move outside Lacan's language game and I think this is the main issue that Lacanians have in explaining it to people, but it can be done so via analogy. Hence Zizek's application to popular culture. So this criticism is unfair too.
@carlpope "Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
@SuperCp12 Oh, I don't think so! Indeed, they're not even my insults, but those of Richard Dawkins, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. You've heard of Alan Sokal, right?
You're just crying because deep down you know you've wasted so much of your life on rubbish like Lacan's, and feel embarrassed and ashamed that you can't get that time back.
I hope you are feeling better now that you are "right" and I am "wrong". So everything Lacan said was "wrong" and you and others are "right"? Ok... Be "right" until your yearning meat realize that you are all wrong about your righteous. If you are lucky, the drama of the realization of the misery your yearning meat creates will not be a shocking scene where you take on the role of a martyr to escape the responsibility of being an ass.
Be careful everybody ! Independently of all the discussion on Lacan's intellectual distinction, the most of the subtitles are not precise and some are completely wrong , so deviating the watcher from the real meaning Lacan intended. Try to focus your atention only on his speech.
But, Lacan was certainly not a representative voice of psychoanalysis and should not be made as if he was or is representative of the field. He ran off into, however thoughtful, tangents of his own making. Anyway, he was never really interested in communicating his ideas so that they could be understand. In fact, we enjoyed not being understand, it seems. It kept him at a comfortable elite distance from his critics who just didn't understand him.
Look, just because a guy is tough to understand does not mean he should not be taken seriously. Take Heidegger - he is hard to understand, but he is an important philosopher. Personally I am not a Heidegger-follower, I am more in the Aristotle/Nietzsche/Rand/Dennett flow of thinkers. Still, I think Heidegger should be approached with the seriousness he deserves. Similarly, Lacan needs to be taken seriously. Especially his dealing with language, that the id is structured as language.
Interesting. I always thought the id was part of the subconscious? Or does Lacan have a different idea of the subconscious versus the id than Freud did?
Some of the greatest missundrstandings with Lacan is that his is initially taken as a philosopher ot theoretician, whereas it is a clinician he primarily is; his ideas are present and persistent in any clinical application of psychoanalysis
Ok, I had to look "Ludwig Von Drake" up. You seem to be stuck in either logical positivism or scientific naturalism, my anal friend. Watch your Penn & Teller and stay out of real philosophy until you care to grow up.
I would postulate Lacan is even more important today than at the time he was writing, if any.
Whether an authentic grimace of the real or drama-queen histrionics, this is precisely the type of footage that philosophers of mind would love to harp on in their indictment of psychoanalysis.
IMO (as a semi-believer): accept his circumstance-specific will-to-gesture as historical artifact and move up to the project of reading Lacan in a 2012 context - starting with (and moving beyond) Zizek, Miller, etc.
this is agood video,i think therefore i am being thought of as watching a good video in other words in the word of the other the psychotic crosed the road and the psychic ramblings of an everyday persistence wouldeth become the drive to the other side.
Me resulta increible la imbecilidad de algunos comentarios respecto al pensamiento de Lacan, y del Psicoanalisis en general. Es que alguno de estas personas estudio a Lacan? Desde que lugar emiten la critica? Es cierto: Lacan es complejo, muy complejo, hay que dedicarle muchas horas de estudio para entenderlo...
It's sad to see so much ridiculous poetry was peddled as scientific during the 20th century.
I wonder how much damage Freud, Lacan, and their other dangerous friends caused to the mental health of the babyboomer generation. Not to mention my generation's education.
What I find funny is your appeal to 'mental health' as a totally 'scientific' concept instead. Do you know where these concepts stem from? The modern philosophical tradition ever caught your eye? Descartes, Kant, Aristotle, Hegel, Freud? Ever read those? How can you dismiss as non-scientific a corpus of theory with such lax reasoning? If you are prepared to attack Lacan in such a vulgar manner, at least be specify what your objections are. Saying it's 'poetry' like that is the real obscurantism.
What do you expect from a 500 letters comment? Anyway, if you were as well-educated as you imply, I suppose it would be second nature to you to have doubts that writings such as Lacan's deserve the label "scientific". I myself would agree that this brand of theory is closer to the rhetoric typical of literary criticism or even poetry itself, than it is to psychology. And the disciplinary pattern of its reception in academic life might indicate that this is not so far from the truth.
I expect modesty; not uninformed dismissal. You cannot evaluate whether Lacan is scientific or not, simply because you don't understand what he is saying. You hear words, but you don't know what they mean. It's quite simple really. What you agree with is based on prejudice and slothfulness; want to criticize Lacan? Address his views. Not this general hogwash. And don't make fallacies by appealing to 'academia' at large. Go read. If you still find something to object, come back. Be specific.
I know you weren't addressing me, but I'll bite... It's a shame the subtitles seem to cut out at various points of this video, but what I will say is that Lacan seems to ramble without making his points clear. As far as I could discern one point he made was that language doesn't belong in the subconscious, because only the conscious lives in reality where we find our language.
If this is what he is saying I do not agree wholeheartedly, simply because I'd class the subconscious as any part of the mind which is unexamined by thought, yet this does not exclude this part of the mind from future thought, including thought we can hope to describe. For instance, the landscape of our emotions are not really captured through language, yet we can use language to hint a what we are going through. Do undescribable/new emotions live in the unconscious?
Not only they cut out, but they are innacurate. His thesis here is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Only the speaking being (man) is driven/tortured by a language which he is not aware of; the Freudian notion of symptom. Thus his reference to obsessional impulses in which a subject's soul is tortured. I think, like Zizek, that Lacan's style is often obscure and unclear; that much is true. But there is quite a lot behind the obscurity. Read Zizek first.
I will read some of the thoughts of Slavoj Žižek, thanks for the tip. As for Lacan's thoughts here you explained to me, where is the basis behind this idea of subconscious language? The information I've read about how the brain works is that you have many thoughts all at once but only a few rise to the surface, the brain acts as a filter. Just because there is background noise which could be classed as 'torture' doesn't mean that the unconscious cannot be explored.
By exploring your own thoughts you can begin to make sense of the 'symptoms' you experience as a human being. It is this fuzzy distinction between the conscious and unconscious (and use of the word 'soul', that isn't a part of our psyche but rather a summary of it) that I object to in Lacan's ideas here. Really the two are intertwined, as I said before the only difference between the two is the unexplored nature of the unconscious.
I wouldn't worry about this video being obscure; Lacan made a point (especially in his collection 'Ecrit') about obscurity, the reason being it simulates the unconscious and forces us to unravel his content much like the analyst. The thought of the unconscious being structured as a language comes from a line of structuralism from Ferdinand de Saussure to Levi-Strauss. The best intro to Lacan is 'Introducing Lacan' (it has pictures!) or even better Zizek's 'How to Read Lacan'.
The posturing relates to transference. It's a tricky road, but in a sense - and to put it bluntly- hysteria should be induced in the neurotic subject. Taking up the discursive position of the subject-supposed-to-know (the posturing, arrogance, veiled messages and vagueries) are all a part of that. It's good that the poster mentioned that this 'straw man' Lacan only exists in the imaginary.
Not only this but in terms of lectures it has its didactic purposes that are wholly relevant to his teachings. In that sense, he is practicing what he is preaching in a pretty exemplary sense.
For someone who views language as fundamental to human reality, as Lacan does, this would be a pretty hard row to hoe, wouldn't it? I find Lacan's language-centric view of the human psyche to be rationalist and reductionist. It's in the great tradition of French rationalist philosophical befuddlement that starts with Descartes and runs right through Sartre.
Oh, the unconscious is far from being an innacessible region of thought for Lacan, as it is for Freud; the analyst can well explore it and its relation to thought. Maybe the best book to begin this exploration is Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, maybe you should start with Freud himself. In any case, watch the Zizek lectures, since he often makes reference to Lacanian theory in a didactic, stimulating way.
If we are dealing with health then it is a scientific concept. Since when did the gobbledygook of Aristotle and Hegel become 'modern philosophical tradition'? Have you read Damassio or Pinker or Kahneman or Ramachandran? Damassio btw directly refutes Descartes.
HA, you read Damassio and Ramachandran those people are hacks, they were directly refuted by the psycho-scientific discoveries of Pochvennichestvo, Annensky, Blavatsky, Prabhavananda, Balasubramanian. If you haven't read all the books written by all these people than i have a higher IQ than you.
Good for Dylan Evans. Lacan arouses antipathy because he sucks. He speaks the way he does because he knows that his bullshit ideas can't withstand the light of rational scrutiny. Psychoanalysis is an intellectual backwater, and I'll be glad on the day that the last of its tenured adherents retires or dies.
dude, go study more. The fact that lacan´s texts and seminars are very dificult to understand doesn´nt take its merits. Lacan´s contribution to phsyco analysis is too great to be forgotten or mi-read
Imagine a person totally ignorant about physics grabs a book on quantum physics. He finds most of it nonsense. He doesn't have the background knowledge to understand. You say Lacan can't stand 'the light of rational scrutiny' How so? Because the terms and words he uses make no sense to you? Have you studied the tradition he departs from? If its your kind of pathetic dimissal which passes the 'light of rational scrutiny' then I think we're better off in the darkness with Lacan.
You can verify quantum mechanics through experimental observation. Try doing that with Lacan or indeed almost all of psychoanalysis. Neuroscience has moved on. This stuff was considered acceptable at the turn of the last century
Charles Sanders Perice said something very similar about instinct and reason long before Lacan, though he obviously was not using the Freudian idea of the "unconscious" nor was he sensitive to the issue of "outer language".
you can. but its not needed, as mirror does reflect a partial reality(the revolutionaries in france were indeed breaking an image of themselves as conformist class peasants). but kill the narrator , the other who interprets the mirror image giving it meaning and colors .
That man is, without a doubt, the most interesting and subversive thinker of the 20th century. And (I hope that the americans out there will pardon me) whatever the yankee-pragmatists - devoid of excitement and humor as they are - might think: They don't have shit on Lacan!
What's with this worship of subversion that's making the rounds these days? Haven't you guys realized yet that there's no way to subvert anything? And why would you want to do such a thing anyway?
i am new to lacan and im very unclear about how he relies on the notion of the soul. it seems very idealistic and self serving. so what is the insight that puts such an old fashioned idea back into the equation of identity?
Hi, if you are new to lacan, you should know that his idea of soul is diferent from religion or filosophy. He have his own idea, that comes from Hegel, Heidegger, etc. but is not the same.
But, quite right, Lacan wrote and talked a load of bollocks (see above), and seemed to be desperate not to be understood.
If you're interested, though, I think Sean Homer's 'Jacques Lacan' is a good short introduction thing that actually almost makes sense. Zizek's fun too, of course.
The Mirror Stage is when a baby, which feels clumsy and incoherent, sees something like him (his reflection, how other people react to him, a role model, etc.) which seems to be co-ordinated and coherent.
It identifies with this mirror-image, so its ego/self-esteem/whatever is sort of constructed externally: i.e. what you think of yourself depends on what you think other people think of you.
We're thus 'beings that are looked at', always having this vague feeling of being watched and judged.
and how do you know how a baby feels? and what about the times where there were no mirrors? in roman times for example the mirrors were made of polished silver, so the working-class had no mirrors at all. how could they have been human?
i think you better look at the mirror stage as a metaphoric entity, it basically signifies a self-image which is conducted by the "other" , ultimately the big other i.e. master signifier or freud's superego . hence self image is basically the other's image "I" attempts to become. But there are lots of problems with psychoanalysis in general and lacanian format in particular. i suggest you read some deluze (e.g. Anti-oedipus) it does help
The mirror stage can probably only ever be taken loosely. Though it seems Lacan took it to be hard science when he conceived it, judging from the rhetoric in Ecrits. Do you think Anti-Oedipus solves this, the problem of the scientificity of psychoanalysis? Is that what you mean? Or do you mean other problems with psychoanalysis? From what I know of Anti-Oedipus, these problems are not addressed, but perhaps I must revisit it.
well , deluze is hardly lacanian, Anti-oedipus is some how against psychoanalytical culture, where there exist a cohesive , original , prinicipal source for desire which its repression results in neurosis. its certainly a postmodern text, but different from the postmodernism we face in recent capitalist culture. its a hard read, but i cant say it has a positivist or (scientific approach) regarding Psychoanalysis.
yes jacobins, it takes some thinking to penetrate his understanding but once you arrive, there is no looking back. get your thiking cap on and take a basic course to help you understand him? a conclusion is a place where you get tired of thinking...
Well, I consider myself a patient person. For example i've tried to read some Kant and Nietzsche. Of course I don't claim to understand nearly everything they say, but they can at least form coherent sentences which actually mean something. Unless you are claiming that the works of Lacan are immeasurably more profound than Nietzsche, Kant and Aristotle, then explain to me why he couldn't express himself just as clearly. Please, try to explain to me one of Lacan's ideas in a way I can understand.
For Lacan, the idea of “gaze”, or perception, was seen in the skewed image of the skull in Holbein’s painting, entitled The Ambassadors. Like the skull, “truth” is seemingly skewed based on the way we come to perceive images and ideas through our cultural experiences. Just as the skull (“truth”) goes unseen, only subjective images (i.e., the ambassadors) can come into our sight. Only when this subjectivity is skewed can the truth (i.e., the skull) be seen clearly.
originalsessions 2 months ago
Lacan’s triptych of psychoanalysis consists of (1) the symbolic order (which consists of unconscious linguistic signs and cultural symbols), (2) the imaginary order (i.e., the process of identification or cultural interpretation of signs and symbols) and (3) the real. For Lacan, in using subconscious symbolic signs, we identify and live within an imaginary realm, losing sight of reality. In other words, we subconsciously use cultural signs to falsely interpret what we think to be true.
originalsessions 2 months ago
just want to know one thing : is there american people that can understand Lacan/Freud theory ?
Ok no prb with Europe and South America.But it seems that there is a problem in US. Can you confirm it?
TheEponymus 4 months ago
@TheEponymus yes there are. more so for freud. on the one hand most of his primary texts have been available in english for some time. Of 21 or more of Lacan's seminars only a handful are available in english, and it was only in the last few years that a complete edition was translated. lacan has been more influential in the u.s. in fields like film theory than psychoanalysis here, unfortunately. also, lacan presupposes familiarity with hegel, heidegger, and existing psychoanaltic theory, etc.
picofarad2 3 months ago
Well the study of human tough, mind and perception is made by several other people that have nothing to do with psychoanalises. The theoretical failure that psychoanalises have become, due the choice of staing in the sphere of the metaphysical only, do not imples that the study of human behavior or "mind" have failed. Maybe if the pyschoanalises had evolved taking an aproach less based on a system of dogmatic concepts becoming so static that sounds like giberrish.
rtlz1985 5 months ago
All of Lacan's thought can be summarized by :"Man does not think with his soul...man thinks because he is split by a structure which has nothing to do with anatomy." The existence of the unconscious: the fact that as Freud once quipped "The ego is not master of his own house", and the fact that the notion of humanism as been challenged time and time again from our paradigm shifts in science though the "psychopathology of everyday life" that we see in the vices/virtues of others proves this.
goldenarms12 5 months ago
he's much less seductive "in person" than he is on paper.
notleonard 7 months ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Thank you very much for Sharing!!!!!
What a way of meeting people and get to see their talent. At first was reluctant being on youtube, but getting to do this has brought me into the houses of some very special people. You are one of them. Life; isn't it wonderful!!! Keep up the good work. Have A Splendid Day!!!!
A New Friend
Erick
erickdircks 7 months ago
"[A]lthough Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish."
How can anyone take this man seriously?
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 7 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea Instead of parroting critics why don't you do some research on Lacan yourself ? Although lacan makes use of mathematical terms he does not ground them on mathematical ontology , he just draws a sketch to clarify his ideas. RD ,as far as general linguistics is concerned, is illiterate .Lacan utilizes saussurian symbols , which are not at all arbitrary.
Perhaps you , sokal , RD and others should do some background research on the things you're criticizing.
SonytoBratsoni 7 months ago
@SonytoBratsoni I make no apology for quoting hilarity. As for research, I shall quote again: "I don't think it merits the time to do so" - cscs.umich. edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
If I want to study linguistics, I stick with science, as I have done. You can download Chomsky's PhD thesis via his Wikipedia entry, so you could make a start there. Admittedly, his thesis is comprehensible, unlike the farcical gibberish you seem to prefer, but try not to let that put you off.
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 7 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea There's no doubt in my mind that Chomsky's work on linguistics isn't only solid but revolutionary . What I'm personally interested in however , is taking the best of both worlds , critically examining what is offered by both sides.
Lacan utilizes (as I've explicated previously) linguistic symbols which Chomsky considers inadequate only as far as syntax goes ,but that is of no concern to someone who studies semiotics.
SonytoBratsoni 7 months ago
@SonytoBratsoni Semiotics?! Oh mate, please stop wasting your life on such worthless crap...
watch?v=CuQHSKLXu2c#at=991
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 6 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea Why do you ,so insistently, keep claiming that it is crap ? Have you viewed the lectures on Lacan from Yale university , have you read the several articles from the scholarly Cambridge companion to Lacan ?
If you are in possession of some arguments I would love to hear them.
SonytoBratsoni 6 months ago
@SonytoBratsoni Lectures in Yale or any other univsersity do not comprove nothing about them. It's Just a construct of the postmodern Zeitgheist. And by the way everything he said is giberrish. Frist the introducion of the human instinct as he describes are nothing more than a swallow metaphysical perception over the primitive brain studied by biology and antropology. And everything he said in his life time is nothing more than a mixed interpretation of hegell, freud with math.
rtlz1985 5 months ago
@rtlz1985 1) I envisage that you're correctly assessing psychoanalysis's failure to evolve . Personally , l do deem it has a flavor of fictionalist utility . 2) We disagree concerning lacan's comments , not to mention you're contradicting yourself by claiming it is gibberish ( meaning non-sense) and later claiming it's shallow and metaphysical . 3) Some of the things being said by him ,can and are used effectively in film theory , sociology and literary theory.He has yet to run out of insight.
SonytoBratsoni 5 months ago
@SonytoBratsoni 2) I will try to correct myself about my contradiction. I called it giberish due the fact most things said by Lacan makes only sense inside his own theory and not in the reality. But this is a problem with the psychoanalisis itself with so many metaphysical concepts wich mostly functions in the ocidental societies ( such as edipus ) and the creation of the phantasm that is the inconscient.
rtlz1985 4 months ago
2) When i used swallow *my mistake sorry" i meant Shallow as you corrected me, and thank you for that. But it's because it does ignore the previous knowledge on anthropology, biology and any other science that focus in the human existence, like the evolution of behavior. And because it's metaphysical line of thinking that tries to fit the human in a theory even if need to distort the reality.
rtlz1985 4 months ago
3) Yes, but when his theories are used we have to look to how and why they are being used in other fields. And what those people are trying to say. Because when you have someone with a similar mindset, like positivism or "metaphisicism", you can use that to theorize about a subject , like the use Jungian theory of Synchronicity , Collective unconscious and Archetypes to study social phenomena. So it may be useful but to people that are also into a metaphysical interpretation of reality.
rtlz1985 4 months ago
PA = 100 % pure BS
seba20sa 8 months ago
i've found the complete 90 min version of this film on google video but have yet to find it with english subtitles. Anyone here know if it exists?
dogbeardbirdbeer 9 months ago
Evolverman's rambling pontifications= philosophical fail. lulz.
aristotlesmartypants 11 months ago
It might have helped tremendously if at least some of the context of this little speech had been indicated in the video description. When was this recorded? Personally I feel in the later stages of his work he seemed to start losing his grip on things, this seems sort of symptomatic of that. Sadly, there is a certain personal cult of Lacan that insists to propagate his later work as some kind of inevitable conclusion of his prophesy, much to the detriment of understanding of his work, ironically
Neurotrash1982 11 months ago
Postmodernism is nothing more than cocktail chatter. Reading some of the comments on this board makes me weep for what these terds have done to higher education for the past forty years. When the revolution eventually comes, I sincerely hope they all get lined-up against a fucking wall.
Zelathago 1 year ago
Comment removed
mmeditatio 10 months ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Bla bla bla.
RAREpicture 1 year ago
Excellent video. The soul (being-at-work, or essential "person") does not think, thought comes in via language - "reality" is that which persists language, an inter-subjective agreement to sustain the lingual system. The soul is alienated from the body vis language, an alienation expressing itself through the obsessive or hysteric symptom. The unconscious is "the grimace of the real", that is, it is where agreed-upon-"reality" breaks down and the alienation kicks in, where the seems don't fit.
Allocator2008 1 year ago
You are ignorant, Lacan.
Want to know unconscious? Observe.
THIS is a baseball bat. And THAT is your skull.
Now...
chiranjit100 1 year ago
What many of these posts here don't get is that Lacan was not a philosopher: he was an anti-philosopher. For instance, read Fink on the Four Discourses: "Philosophy, Lacan says, has always served the master, has always placed itself in the service of rationalizing and propping up the master's discourse, as has the worst kind of science." (The Lacanian Subj. p.132)
notonewhit 1 year ago
邦訳『テレヴィジオン』２２頁（第２章）から２５頁
語る存在（エートル・パルラン）にしか無意識はありません。その他の存在には〜〜それらは、現実界（ル・シエル）によって自らを認めさせているにもかかわらず、名づけられる（ノメ）ことによってのみ存在たり得ているのですが〜〜本能（アンスタン）、すなわち、それらの生存（スユルヴィ）に含まれる知（サヴォワール）があります。といってもまだ、それはわたしたちの思惟（パンセ）にとってそうであるに過ぎません。わたしたちの思惟は、ここでは不適当（イナデクワット）なものなのです。
人間という病 mal d'homme にかかった動物たちが残っています。それゆえ、それらは「人畜 d'hommestiques 」と呼ばれ、このために、きわめて短いものですが、無意識の地震（セイスム）に貫かれるのです。
（以下略）
67slowslow 1 year ago
@67slowslow ur a moron
mrfatd 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch, you illustrate Lacan's Imaginary self-certification perfectly well.
redmannbrady 1 year ago
Les animaux n'ont d'être que de ce qu'ils soient nommés...ça, mon Jacques, je te suis pas.
Sur ce qu'on dit de l'instinct est peut etre faux, alors là, oui!.
Sur le reste, c'est vrai que l'on croit beaucoup de fadaises sur eux. C'est ce que signifie que "la realité est une grimace du réel".
Jo
josepha1008 1 year ago
@josepha1008 qu'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuels, ça, mon joseph, je te suis pas. Car j'ai niqué ta mère pas plus tard qu'hier. A bon entendeur, salop.
rabbi666jacob 1 year ago
was jacques lacan the leader of a messianic cult?
Nmbrz 1 year ago
Donc si je comprends bien, sa chemise est verte et Sartre est un noir de Harlem. C'est bien ça ?
TheAlonetogether 1 year ago
kartal fenere nasıl koydu hareketi yapıyor başlarda
baristhealienated 1 year ago
All you science people: you cant stand the fact, that your ego is not the master in its home..
and earth is a planet and not a saucer
also humankind developed from the apes.
Science did not believed those facts. Old greek philosphist described earth as a
globus without technical equickment.Just thoughts. You will never find the Ich and Über-ich with x-rays-but they exist and they are just a construct from anno 1900...
uncleurthur 1 year ago
Anyone know when this first aired and on what channel? Thanks.
chaodyssey 1 year ago
down with the positivists
alphanokoko 1 year ago
Lacan is difficult for people to grasp, because of its difficulty, it's easy to criticize it or decide it takes to long to learn, explain and practice, however i think psychoanalysis is still relevant and can provide some more thoughtful answers than modern psychiatry's prescriptions can...
gutchinson 1 year ago
@gutchinson That is not necessarily true. It may be that we who do not understand are stupid (I can live with that). Or, it may be that the emperor has no clothes. Look at the history of these theories (and much else in continental philosophy). Often their very grounds are shaky, as in the case of Mr Lacan. Freud isn't exactly airtight, far from it in fact, neither is Hegel. In fact both has been described as profoundly disingenuous. Hegel might have been mad altogether if you are to believe
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
Did you read Hegel to say that about him or you say that from same pseudo-philosopher as Popper?
codadilupo83 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch This just does away with history entirely. FFS look at the scientific theories at the times of Hegel. I agree with you on Hegel and understand what you're saying but you cannot compare a 18th century philosopher with contemporary science. Instead compare Zizek to it. Philosophy, like science (which was originally natural philosophy), has evolved.
mit181 1 year ago
@mit181 No! I am almost certain that Lacan's work is of no scientific value whatsoever. Read "The Cult of Lacan" by Richard Webster for some of the arguments.
Most scientists does not purposefully obfuscate, and there is no lack of any clarity in "complex mathematical formula" and Quantum theory is VERY exact. In math every single step logically follows from the previous, and in science we look for experimental evidence/falsification. None of these principles can be found in Lacan.
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch I said Lacan's theories have empirical data. Masses of it. I did not say he was a scientist.
I agree that with everything you said.
Because Lacan is not a scientist as you use the word in your language game (i.e. it has a different meaning according to the rules of the context your 're using it in). The problem is not so much solved as dissolved in this manner.
mit181 1 year ago
@mit181 If I were you I'd stop wasting my time with that nonsense. Read the essay I mentioned, it will be a slap in the face, and a wake-up call, but you'll understand that there is nothing of interest in Lacan's pontifications, scientifically or otherwise. It's all just ... shit.
Then study some real science. GL. and bye
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch typical arrogance from reading too much science
Feuerader 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch Nice of you to be critical and believe only in things that are proven. The next step is to realize that even in empiric studies and mathematical logic there's always an illogical element, and in the end nothing can be taken serious and it's all just about entertainment and not cognition.
KrushKrackKruck 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@KrushKrackKruck I'm sorry but you don't know what you are saying.
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@KrushKrackKruck I'm sorry you don't know what you are saying. Ours, is an inanimate world, following rules of logic and math. A cold world maybe, for some, but a world devoid of everything Mr Lacan dreams about. Of that I am sure. Poor demented old fool Lacan.
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@gutchinson Shopenhauer. Any theory that builds on these very dubious far from validated theories about the world and grandly speculates needs to be seen as even more spurious.
Furthermore, it is exactly the opaque and turgid language that is the sign that something is amiss. When no one can conclusively say what any of it means one needs to ask if it means anything.
And what is the explanatory power, where is the empirical evidence and can it be falsified?
This shit reeks.
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch You prefer determinist theorists with the presumption of an 'empirical' or 'airtight' answer, sometimes this is more relevant to a particular situation; that's fine, but i prefer to criticize after i can fully realize someone from their own framework of understanding. I do agree though that this is an awful video of which to illustrate Lacan- no one would see this and think "wow! what a fuckin genius!"
gutchinson 1 year ago
Before you speak about opaque and turgid language you should first make the effort to read it. And not from an empirical point of view - or else you commit paralogisms. Who told you that empiricism is the Truth, the Episteme that rules the world? And who told you that falsifiability put at work as you do is anything more than petitio principii? Now that's turgid and opaque thinking. Or, better said, no thinking at all.
wandermere14000 1 year ago
Comment removed
Nmbrz 1 year ago
why is he so angry? because he cannot articulate a single intelligent thought??
LOL this man is a huge FRAUD
sirdelrio 1 year ago
Wow, what a strange performance. But it's totally hypnotic. It's funny how much mannerism Lacan and Zizek seem to share.
renumeratedfrog 2 years ago
Zizek said he had a friend who knew Lacan. He said he was the same cold-boring-monotonous prick in private life too. That it was not "an act".
akais5 2 years ago
haha this is fucken hilarious
criticaljimmk 2 years ago
what was the reason for chomsky to call lacan a self-amusing charlatan?
mrfatd 2 years ago
because he was VERY french.. look at him and listen to him.. it should be obvious
baroh2413 2 years ago
Chomsky had a shocking mirror experience... As an academic who never knew what it was like to live in Vietnam in the late 60's ... looks at Lucan qui aussi lived in the ivory tower. Shock horror damnation.... Chomsky thinks there is something amiss. The word is not the maligned media the rest of the mere rabble-rousers gets to be labelled.. Chomsky continues amid his cloud. Pen poised never having lived.
declan3906 2 years ago
Also: I find him very very entertaining. And I do think he was a very smart man, but smart enough to know what he was shoveling and how he was shoveling it.
anonymous23571113 2 years ago
You can't falsify or argue against what he says because it requires you to understand what he says first, and when you interpret to the best of your ability what he says, his followers just say "Well, that is not what he's saying." You say, "tell me then, what is he saying." They say, "You have to read him." And this circular gambit goes on...
The truth is that his followers can not explain what he is saying to themselves.
One needs to have faith in Lacan...
anonymous23571113 2 years ago
This interview was also published in English as a book by Joan Copjec (titled Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment), the pdf of which can be found on my blog.
TheMariborchan 2 years ago
The subtitles provide a poor translation of Lacan. He really knew what he was talking about. I can see people getting offended by his intellect because they can't understand it. The words you are reading here are NOT him. Read the Ecrits. It's tough, but it's a lot better.
careeringarm 2 years ago
Good lord, what idiocy! Can anyone please define anyway this pretentious nonsense affects the real world? Who's helped by this?
CrocodilusPontifex 2 years ago
Lacan is helpful it that he address the interactive programming structure of thought/language on the human psyche. In the video, he is talking about the "Matrix" of unreality created by language. In the film, Morpheus said, "What is real?" That film is a part of Lacan's legacy. He revised the work of Freud. He has brought clarity to the world in ways unrealized by most. Anybody that can walk into a Nazi headquarters and walk out with his wife unharmed has something valuable to tell us alll.
carlpope 2 years ago 9
@carlpope You poor misguided person. It is nonsense. Just like "the interactive programming structure of thought/language on the human psyche" is nonsense. It sounds fancy, but I bet if you try to say that in a simpler way it comes out a very trivial observation. Couched in neologisms and obscure language you can describe taking a shit as the most profound illuminating experience. You are misguided. This is the pinnacle of intellectual dishonesty. It's revolting.
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
I find you to be a ridiculous person...
carlpope 1 year ago
@carlpope ditto
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
So, in fact, you recognize that you don't understand Lacan because you never studied psychoanalysis and have no bloody idea what is all that about. That's just great. And very easy, just the same. A psychoanalist would tell something about your hysterical frustrations that drive you to such dishonest considerations.
wandermere14000 1 year ago
@wandermere14000 I know it's crap. In fact, among real scientists it's a joke. Real thinkers, know all too well what distinguishes them from the likes of you and all other muddleheaded pretentious fools. You are indulging in "higher superstition", and the hard fact is this: at the end of the day you don't know what the hell you're talking about, like Mr Lacan here...I don't care how many of his books you've read. Hehe. You still don't know what any of it really means. That's b/c it means nothing
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
First of all, you should know what science is. And you obviously don't. If you would be a scientist, you wouldn't betray the experimental paradigm that you would serve and wouln'd make assertions in lack of knowledge and experiment. Go back to highschool, boy.
wandermere14000 1 year ago
@wandermere14000 Basically, what you are saying to me is: philosophy doesn't have to make sense. Most of what I consider to be real philosophy is those theories which tries to improve our understanding of the world. This is very broad but the fundamental thing about all understanding is clarity. Clarity and exactness are key elements also within science. Are you deranged? What the fuck are you talking about when you say we shouldn't base our knowledge on empiricism? You feeble-minded idiot!
dhyanamooch 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch Lacan's account is empirical because he was a practising psychoanalyst. His theories were based on Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure, Jakobson and of course Freud, but the theory arose out of his experience with his patients as much as with abstract philosophical works.
That clarity and exactness are found within science is problematic. What happened to Quantum theory (exactness) and complex mathematical formulae (clarity).
mit181 1 year ago
@dhyanamooch Furthermore Lacan is massively misunderstood not only owing to his complexity and esoteric style, but also owing to mistranslation and Miller's monopoly as editor over Lacan's works, keeping them private within a clique.
I find it difficult to move outside Lacan's language game and I think this is the main issue that Lacanians have in explaining it to people, but it can be done so via analogy. Hence Zizek's application to popular culture. So this criticism is unfair too.
mit181 1 year ago
@carlpope are you saying Lacan walked into a Nazi headquarter and walked out with his wife unharmed?
kppbmin 10 months ago
@carlpope
I bet Hitler could have walked into a Nazi headquarters and have walked out with his wife unharmed.
fielsjd 10 months ago 5
@carlpope "Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 7 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea
Your insults are projections from your ideas and views about yourself.
SuperCp12 7 months ago
@SuperCp12 Oh, I don't think so! Indeed, they're not even my insults, but those of Richard Dawkins, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. You've heard of Alan Sokal, right?
You're just crying because deep down you know you've wasted so much of your life on rubbish like Lacan's, and feel embarrassed and ashamed that you can't get that time back.
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 7 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea
I hope you are feeling better now that you are "right" and I am "wrong". So everything Lacan said was "wrong" and you and others are "right"? Ok... Be "right" until your yearning meat realize that you are all wrong about your righteous. If you are lucky, the drama of the realization of the misery your yearning meat creates will not be a shocking scene where you take on the role of a martyr to escape the responsibility of being an ass.
SuperCp12 7 months ago
@carlpope You are unhelpful in that you seem incapable of speaking English.
MyMeatYearns4Andrea 7 months ago
@MyMeatYearns4Andrea
Your response is a typical response from someone who have given themselves over to a false self. Enjoy the ego while you can.
SuperCp12 7 months ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@carlpope The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically generates postmodern essays. Gramatically correct but meaningless.
Now watch a college language student reviewing a computer generated essay. He has no clue of its true origin.
/watch?v=jxQ7rONF5iE
verwoestijning 5 months ago
Be careful everybody ! Independently of all the discussion on Lacan's intellectual distinction, the most of the subtitles are not precise and some are completely wrong , so deviating the watcher from the real meaning Lacan intended. Try to focus your atention only on his speech.
guilbeltrame 2 years ago 2
This comment has received too many negative votes show
God hates fags.
SavedByGraceAdam 2 years ago
as much as i appreciate and value the work of lacan; i find watching him articulate these ideas absolutely painful
palkom13 2 years ago 3
'There is no unconscious except for the speaking being'
The clarity of this statement utterly belies Chomsky's description of Lacan as a charlatan.
borisjohnson2008 2 years ago
A valuable video, thanks.
But, Lacan was certainly not a representative voice of psychoanalysis and should not be made as if he was or is representative of the field. He ran off into, however thoughtful, tangents of his own making. Anyway, he was never really interested in communicating his ideas so that they could be understand. In fact, we enjoyed not being understand, it seems. It kept him at a comfortable elite distance from his critics who just didn't understand him.
tapolna 2 years ago
A stupid and moron american white people never understand Lacan
valterjose 2 years ago
to change the subject a bit- is it true that he treated antonin artaud in a clinic ?
mikebott 2 years ago
the best conversation with a lampshare i ever seen
mempamaal 2 years ago 51
ahahahaah brilliant
kutthroat84 2 years ago
@mempamaal HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
gigel2006 8 months ago
lacan was a scribbler of insane nonsense
mrfatd 2 years ago 2
that's probably because you don't understand it
chechuskh13 2 years ago
oh please, everyone is a scribbler of insane nonsense. that's how our silly little life is able to continue
discoapocalypse 2 years ago
sure...
gennadiysdengi 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
I love his piss-take of imagination
mit181 2 years ago 2
Thanks Allocator !
Difficulty is a challenge ...
(and I'm French)
Lucindavirtual 2 years ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
i fucking hate french
juanpolar 2 years ago
Sophist! Conman Lacan with his pseudo-Scientific gibberish.
aphex303101 2 years ago
dont show your ignoranceso easyly if you dont understand something...
enterBJ40 2 years ago
Look, just because a guy is tough to understand does not mean he should not be taken seriously. Take Heidegger - he is hard to understand, but he is an important philosopher. Personally I am not a Heidegger-follower, I am more in the Aristotle/Nietzsche/Rand/Dennett flow of thinkers. Still, I think Heidegger should be approached with the seriousness he deserves. Similarly, Lacan needs to be taken seriously. Especially his dealing with language, that the id is structured as language.
Allocator2008 2 years ago 2
Comment removed
mosessauce 2 years ago
Interesting. I always thought the id was part of the subconscious? Or does Lacan have a different idea of the subconscious versus the id than Freud did?
Allocator2008 2 years ago
err you are right
mosessauce 2 years ago
what's with all the crazy and unnecessary gesticulations? he looks ridiculous.
bbravo2 2 years ago
Did you steal your observation from "Zizek!"?
drmurphysjello 2 years ago
yes :]
bbravo2 2 years ago
Some of the greatest missundrstandings with Lacan is that his is initially taken as a philosopher ot theoretician, whereas it is a clinician he primarily is; his ideas are present and persistent in any clinical application of psychoanalysis
ioannisgr 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
Have you been studying Lacan? Lacan was everything but mad.
I encourage you to read Roudinesco's biography to Lacan.
BiffTheUnderstudy 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
Ok, I had to look "Ludwig Von Drake" up. You seem to be stuck in either logical positivism or scientific naturalism, my anal friend. Watch your Penn & Teller and stay out of real philosophy until you care to grow up.
I would postulate Lacan is even more important today than at the time he was writing, if any.
RationalEmotive 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
Comment removed
loxlok 2 years ago
Except from the motive of trolling I cannot make out what you are getting at.
This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
RationalEmotive 2 years ago
As with most psychoanalists Lacan is in need of his depot injection
michaelhypno 2 years ago 2
"WItness the hysteric . . . ."
Whether an authentic grimace of the real or drama-queen histrionics, this is precisely the type of footage that philosophers of mind would love to harp on in their indictment of psychoanalysis.
IMO (as a semi-believer): accept his circumstance-specific will-to-gesture as historical artifact and move up to the project of reading Lacan in a 2012 context - starting with (and moving beyond) Zizek, Miller, etc.
Grinmann 2 years ago
this is agood video,i think therefore i am being thought of as watching a good video in other words in the word of the other the psychotic crosed the road and the psychic ramblings of an everyday persistence wouldeth become the drive to the other side.
scaltan 2 years ago
Me resulta increible la imbecilidad de algunos comentarios respecto al pensamiento de Lacan, y del Psicoanalisis en general. Es que alguno de estas personas estudio a Lacan? Desde que lugar emiten la critica? Es cierto: Lacan es complejo, muy complejo, hay que dedicarle muchas horas de estudio para entenderlo...
juesmar 2 years ago
It's sad to see so much ridiculous poetry was peddled as scientific during the 20th century.
I wonder how much damage Freud, Lacan, and their other dangerous friends caused to the mental health of the babyboomer generation. Not to mention my generation's education.
TobiasVennet 2 years ago
What I find funny is your appeal to 'mental health' as a totally 'scientific' concept instead. Do you know where these concepts stem from? The modern philosophical tradition ever caught your eye? Descartes, Kant, Aristotle, Hegel, Freud? Ever read those? How can you dismiss as non-scientific a corpus of theory with such lax reasoning? If you are prepared to attack Lacan in such a vulgar manner, at least be specify what your objections are. Saying it's 'poetry' like that is the real obscurantism.
Krelianx 2 years ago
What do you expect from a 500 letters comment? Anyway, if you were as well-educated as you imply, I suppose it would be second nature to you to have doubts that writings such as Lacan's deserve the label "scientific". I myself would agree that this brand of theory is closer to the rhetoric typical of literary criticism or even poetry itself, than it is to psychology. And the disciplinary pattern of its reception in academic life might indicate that this is not so far from the truth.
langengro 2 years ago
I expect modesty; not uninformed dismissal. You cannot evaluate whether Lacan is scientific or not, simply because you don't understand what he is saying. You hear words, but you don't know what they mean. It's quite simple really. What you agree with is based on prejudice and slothfulness; want to criticize Lacan? Address his views. Not this general hogwash. And don't make fallacies by appealing to 'academia' at large. Go read. If you still find something to object, come back. Be specific.
Krelianx 2 years ago
@Krelianx
I know you weren't addressing me, but I'll bite... It's a shame the subtitles seem to cut out at various points of this video, but what I will say is that Lacan seems to ramble without making his points clear. As far as I could discern one point he made was that language doesn't belong in the subconscious, because only the conscious lives in reality where we find our language.
blahdelablah 2 years ago
@Krelianx, cont...
If this is what he is saying I do not agree wholeheartedly, simply because I'd class the subconscious as any part of the mind which is unexamined by thought, yet this does not exclude this part of the mind from future thought, including thought we can hope to describe. For instance, the landscape of our emotions are not really captured through language, yet we can use language to hint a what we are going through. Do undescribable/new emotions live in the unconscious?
blahdelablah 2 years ago
Not only they cut out, but they are innacurate. His thesis here is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Only the speaking being (man) is driven/tortured by a language which he is not aware of; the Freudian notion of symptom. Thus his reference to obsessional impulses in which a subject's soul is tortured. I think, like Zizek, that Lacan's style is often obscure and unclear; that much is true. But there is quite a lot behind the obscurity. Read Zizek first.
Krelianx 2 years ago
@Krelianx
I will read some of the thoughts of Slavoj Žižek, thanks for the tip. As for Lacan's thoughts here you explained to me, where is the basis behind this idea of subconscious language? The information I've read about how the brain works is that you have many thoughts all at once but only a few rise to the surface, the brain acts as a filter. Just because there is background noise which could be classed as 'torture' doesn't mean that the unconscious cannot be explored.
blahdelablah 2 years ago
@Krelianx, cont...
By exploring your own thoughts you can begin to make sense of the 'symptoms' you experience as a human being. It is this fuzzy distinction between the conscious and unconscious (and use of the word 'soul', that isn't a part of our psyche but rather a summary of it) that I object to in Lacan's ideas here. Really the two are intertwined, as I said before the only difference between the two is the unexplored nature of the unconscious.
blahdelablah 2 years ago
@Krelianx, cont...
Just to let you know, I just watched "Slavoj Žižek - Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken ..." on Google Video, interesting stuff.
blahdelablah 2 years ago
I wouldn't worry about this video being obscure; Lacan made a point (especially in his collection 'Ecrit') about obscurity, the reason being it simulates the unconscious and forces us to unravel his content much like the analyst. The thought of the unconscious being structured as a language comes from a line of structuralism from Ferdinand de Saussure to Levi-Strauss. The best intro to Lacan is 'Introducing Lacan' (it has pictures!) or even better Zizek's 'How to Read Lacan'.
randylahey123 2 years ago 2
The posturing relates to transference. It's a tricky road, but in a sense - and to put it bluntly- hysteria should be induced in the neurotic subject. Taking up the discursive position of the subject-supposed-to-know (the posturing, arrogance, veiled messages and vagueries) are all a part of that. It's good that the poster mentioned that this 'straw man' Lacan only exists in the imaginary.
shipwrecks09 2 years ago
Not only this but in terms of lectures it has its didactic purposes that are wholly relevant to his teachings. In that sense, he is practicing what he is preaching in a pretty exemplary sense.
shipwrecks09 2 years ago
For someone who views language as fundamental to human reality, as Lacan does, this would be a pretty hard row to hoe, wouldn't it? I find Lacan's language-centric view of the human psyche to be rationalist and reductionist. It's in the great tradition of French rationalist philosophical befuddlement that starts with Descartes and runs right through Sartre.
oakvillebrian 2 years ago
Oh, the unconscious is far from being an innacessible region of thought for Lacan, as it is for Freud; the analyst can well explore it and its relation to thought. Maybe the best book to begin this exploration is Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, maybe you should start with Freud himself. In any case, watch the Zizek lectures, since he often makes reference to Lacanian theory in a didactic, stimulating way.
Krelianx 2 years ago
If we are dealing with health then it is a scientific concept. Since when did the gobbledygook of Aristotle and Hegel become 'modern philosophical tradition'? Have you read Damassio or Pinker or Kahneman or Ramachandran? Damassio btw directly refutes Descartes.
vikramkrishnan 2 years ago
HA, you read Damassio and Ramachandran those people are hacks, they were directly refuted by the psycho-scientific discoveries of Pochvennichestvo, Annensky, Blavatsky, Prabhavananda, Balasubramanian. If you haven't read all the books written by all these people than i have a higher IQ than you.
jacobins3000 2 years ago
IQ has nothing to do with the authors you have read. It is supposed to be an innate property.
vikramkrishnan 2 years ago
Comment removed
langengro 2 years ago
I understand almost no French, but the translation seems a bit incomplete. Lacan is difficult enough to understand when he's properly translated.
JamboCordoba 2 years ago
Good for Dylan Evans. Lacan arouses antipathy because he sucks. He speaks the way he does because he knows that his bullshit ideas can't withstand the light of rational scrutiny. Psychoanalysis is an intellectual backwater, and I'll be glad on the day that the last of its tenured adherents retires or dies.
donkeytron666 2 years ago
dude, go study more. The fact that lacan´s texts and seminars are very dificult to understand doesn´nt take its merits. Lacan´s contribution to phsyco analysis is too great to be forgotten or mi-read
deciothomas 2 years ago
Imagine a person totally ignorant about physics grabs a book on quantum physics. He finds most of it nonsense. He doesn't have the background knowledge to understand. You say Lacan can't stand 'the light of rational scrutiny' How so? Because the terms and words he uses make no sense to you? Have you studied the tradition he departs from? If its your kind of pathetic dimissal which passes the 'light of rational scrutiny' then I think we're better off in the darkness with Lacan.
Krelianx 2 years ago
You can verify quantum mechanics through experimental observation. Try doing that with Lacan or indeed almost all of psychoanalysis. Neuroscience has moved on. This stuff was considered acceptable at the turn of the last century
vikramkrishnan 2 years ago
Charles Sanders Perice said something very similar about instinct and reason long before Lacan, though he obviously was not using the Freudian idea of the "unconscious" nor was he sensitive to the issue of "outer language".
Any other questions, mon ami?
mopsius 3 years ago
play with your insanity, shatter your reality, you are possessed by mirror. dont break the mirror , break the mirror narrator
decodedmonkey 3 years ago
You can't break the mirror!
spinozareagan 3 years ago
you can. but its not needed, as mirror does reflect a partial reality(the revolutionaries in france were indeed breaking an image of themselves as conformist class peasants). but kill the narrator , the other who interprets the mirror image giving it meaning and colors .
decodedmonkey 3 years ago
That man is, without a doubt, the most interesting and subversive thinker of the 20th century. And (I hope that the americans out there will pardon me) whatever the yankee-pragmatists - devoid of excitement and humor as they are - might think: They don't have shit on Lacan!
TheatetustheGreat 3 years ago
What's with this worship of subversion that's making the rounds these days? Haven't you guys realized yet that there's no way to subvert anything? And why would you want to do such a thing anyway?
frozenparrot 2 years ago
This guy is bullshit.
colonelmatterson 3 years ago
Your arguments are great and full of substance.
deussitus 3 years ago
very simple emotional expression. not that i totally agree with you. but i liked the sound of it.
decodedmonkey 3 years ago
Ziek is a second stringer, and he knows it.
mopsius 3 years ago
Zizek
mopsius 3 years ago
si, si
seaoutro 3 years ago
i am new to lacan and im very unclear about how he relies on the notion of the soul. it seems very idealistic and self serving. so what is the insight that puts such an old fashioned idea back into the equation of identity?
willwkrueger 3 years ago
Hi, if you are new to lacan, you should know that his idea of soul is diferent from religion or filosophy. He have his own idea, that comes from Hegel, Heidegger, etc. but is not the same.
omegastrange 3 years ago
But, quite right, Lacan wrote and talked a load of bollocks (see above), and seemed to be desperate not to be understood.
If you're interested, though, I think Sean Homer's 'Jacques Lacan' is a good short introduction thing that actually almost makes sense. Zizek's fun too, of course.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago
The Mirror Stage is when a baby, which feels clumsy and incoherent, sees something like him (his reflection, how other people react to him, a role model, etc.) which seems to be co-ordinated and coherent.
It identifies with this mirror-image, so its ego/self-esteem/whatever is sort of constructed externally: i.e. what you think of yourself depends on what you think other people think of you.
We're thus 'beings that are looked at', always having this vague feeling of being watched and judged.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago
up till just now i had not understood the mirror stage. You put it so precisely that i doubt one could be more clear
thebloads 3 years ago
and how do you know how a baby feels? and what about the times where there were no mirrors? in roman times for example the mirrors were made of polished silver, so the working-class had no mirrors at all. how could they have been human?
LLit11 3 years ago
i think you better look at the mirror stage as a metaphoric entity, it basically signifies a self-image which is conducted by the "other" , ultimately the big other i.e. master signifier or freud's superego . hence self image is basically the other's image "I" attempts to become. But there are lots of problems with psychoanalysis in general and lacanian format in particular. i suggest you read some deluze (e.g. Anti-oedipus) it does help
decodedmonkey 3 years ago
The mirror stage can probably only ever be taken loosely. Though it seems Lacan took it to be hard science when he conceived it, judging from the rhetoric in Ecrits. Do you think Anti-Oedipus solves this, the problem of the scientificity of psychoanalysis? Is that what you mean? Or do you mean other problems with psychoanalysis? From what I know of Anti-Oedipus, these problems are not addressed, but perhaps I must revisit it.
spinozareagan 3 years ago
well , deluze is hardly lacanian, Anti-oedipus is some how against psychoanalytical culture, where there exist a cohesive , original , prinicipal source for desire which its repression results in neurosis. its certainly a postmodern text, but different from the postmodernism we face in recent capitalist culture. its a hard read, but i cant say it has a positivist or (scientific approach) regarding Psychoanalysis.
decodedmonkey 3 years ago
yes jacobins, it takes some thinking to penetrate his understanding but once you arrive, there is no looking back. get your thiking cap on and take a basic course to help you understand him? a conclusion is a place where you get tired of thinking...
choluntpot 3 years ago
Well, I consider myself a patient person. For example i've tried to read some Kant and Nietzsche. Of course I don't claim to understand nearly everything they say, but they can at least form coherent sentences which actually mean something. Unless you are claiming that the works of Lacan are immeasurably more profound than Nietzsche, Kant and Aristotle, then explain to me why he couldn't express himself just as clearly. Please, try to explain to me one of Lacan's ideas in a way I can understand.