What is that thing I call “I?” While most of your grade-A philosophers of the past hundred years or so agree that it’s not a Cartesian Cogito, i.e. an immortal soul characterized by continuous consciousness, the alternatives are many and varied. With Hegel, we got the idea that the self is built, and this through our relations with others, but that leaves unclear the question of who it is, if anyone, that’s the perceiving subject, the “point of view,” the center of consciousness, while this “self” as a collection of personality traits and self-identifications is built. Sartre made a sharp distinction between the self as a mostly public object, a thing in the world, and consciousness, which he thought actually does not (as experienced) have a subject at all, but is just nothing but the world itself exposed, with the question “exposed to whom?” labeled as misconstrued.
French psychotherapist Jacques Lacan followed Freud in claiming that the Cartesian picture of self is misleading because it neglects the unconscious. For both Lacan and Freud, the ego (or in German, “Ich,” which is just “I”) is something that we build, largely injecting material dished on us by other people; our “self” is an imaginative creation. They diverge in that whereas Freud saw the unconscious as our deepest desires, and so (maybe) a better candidate for our “true self” than the ego-creation, Lacan saw the unconscious as all syntax, no semantics: just strings of symbols that for one reason or another have sunken below conscious awareness and now sit there, making us unable to think certain thoughts and otherwise screwing us up. The psychotherapist, for Lacan, is a cipher who can read these strings as they reveal themselves through slips of the tongue and such.
The important thing, though, is that the unconscious is no more of a true self than the ego: both are the result of the infection of language, which approaches our raw desires and labels them, traps and channels them within language. What remains, the “unthinkable,” is called by Lacan “the real” (as opposed to “reality,” which is the socially constructed, language-infected world).
If Lacan were an existentialist, then, with a notion (like Heidegger’s) of authenticity, of being true-to-yourself, then the goal of therapy, then, would be to somehow take possession of this “real,” but that’s not actually possible for humans, who live in language, whereas the real is by definition what escapes language. No, Lacan’s use of “real” to describe this unarticulated backdrop is not meant to pick out some ethical goal. The point of therapy, instead, is to achieve a self that is internally coherent, that takes responsibility for unconscious contents instead of letting them needle at you, to work through issues with your parents and such that may have prevented you from becoming appropriately independent of them.
The subject, then, according to Lacan is split between this fiction-imbued ego and this fiction-imbued unconscious, and one goal of therapy is to “subjectify one’s fate,” i.e. to heal the split, to take into one’s consciously built self ownership of and identification with these unconscious contents, among which are the desires of your parents that made you who you are.
To explore these ideas, our chief reading was a book about Lacan by American psychotherapist Bruce Fink called The Lacanian Subject (1996). (Buy it here.)
We also did dip into Lacan himself with the short essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), which you can read online here or purchase in this collection
Let me leave you with a slightly longer quote from this essay just to give you a picture of how irritatingly difficult it is to read Lacan:
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic–and lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt [our inner world] into the Umwelt [the outer world] generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s verification.
So yes, Lacan does like throwing in superfluous mathematical terms like quadrature, and yes, we do spend some time bitching about how an arrogant disregard for his readers infects Lacan’s style in a way qualitatively worse than even that of Heidegger or the other difficult figures we’ve read.
Fink actually has a defense of this difficulty from Lacan himself: if you immediately understood what Lacan was talking about, that would indicate that he wasn’t actually saying anything new. Just as the baby, in seeing his reflection, in essence thinks “hey, that’s me; I now understand myself and just need to fill in some details,” we are all guilty of overweening self-confidence. The traditional model of learning is one of assimilation, where we just add some new facts to memorize to a storehouse of predetermined parameters, and Lacan wants nothing to do with that; to actually learn something really new, you have to stretch your mind, redefine the storehouse or come of with a new metaphor than “storehouse” altogether. Lacan becomes our guru, playing to us the role that the Lacanian therapist is supposed to play to his patients, getting us to upturn the garbage pails in our mind until we’ve worked out a framework for understanding ourselves that is coherent and livable.
there might be a copy or two of Bruce’s book on scribd.com if people want a preview
http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm
Looking forward to this! You can’t properly study self-other relations without Lacan.
hmm which is the rosetta stone?
http://www.berfrois.com/2013/03/lacans-joyce-the-real-imaginary/
‘We are all guilty of overweening self confidence.’
…ach! I’ve been hit!
Okay, I’ll read some Lacan.
Reading Lacan is almost impossible.
My brother-in-law, who is the smartest person I’ve ever come in contact with (until I met you people online), tried and gave up, sending me the book, which I found beyond my mental powers.
Certainly it will be fun to listen to in bed while falling asleep, a johnny carson late show surrogate.
I admire how you guys take on the impossible (but Continentals say that is our lot), but I will ascribe this courage especially to Mark for this post, for presenting the enigma of Lacan in such interesting terms thus far. His abstraction is not new to philosphy (H-H-&H, and Continentals) but the philosophical abstraction is new to psychoanalysis.
The abstraction is easy to criticize (great quote), but what is interestingis that there is baby (deep meaning) in that bathwater (abstraction)–including the depth which is derived from Freud (Lacan is not anti-Freud in some of the most profound ways). I would really hope you could focus on the contribution of Lacan, not so much for the psychoanalytic per se, but for the philosophic as best represented by Zizek.
But I am sure your sensibilities will go in whatever direction is most expedient. My sense is that most of us are totally mystified by Lacan, and anything you do to help provide reality in your usual context of entertainment is welcomed. –Wayne
You could almost make a game-show based on this type of philosophy:
“For five points, can you tell me if this is something Lacan wrote or something I just made up:
The inwardly-realized dichotomies of the post-structuralist divergence of Being indicates that the modes of semantic structure do not falsify the post-deconstructionist existence of consciousness for-itself, in-itself, and against-itself. ”
In all seriousness, I always wonder exactly what people like Lacan are visualizing when they write the way they do. I’d like to think that they have a clear and distinct image of something they really perceived, but I’m skeptical. It’s so easy to string a bunch of multi-syllabic words together while thinking about nothing much at all. I mean, how could Lacan possibly know what’s happening in a baby’s mind when it looks in the mirror? Is he the first psychic philosopher? Has he invited the baby-translator thing from that episode of the Simpsons?
As for Lacan’s defence: I don’t buy it. He says the difficulty of his language indicates he is thinking something “new,” and I take this to mean that he thinks he’s expressing a thought so revolutionary that it would be impossible to use normal words to express it. This is interesting, but it doesn’t explain why so many other intellectuals have indeed said new and revolutionary things using normal or relatively normal language. The Tractatus, not counting the math symbols, is expressed with fairly everyday language. “On the Origin of the Species” is likewise expressed with plain language. I could probably keep going, but I think I’ve made my point.
With all that said, I realize that not every great thinker is a great writer (or is even aware that clarity can be achieved, or should at least be attempted). I look forward to this episode.
how would you suggest we come to terms with (and or represent) those aspects of life/thought that are not “clear and distinct”?
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I like to think that our thoughts are always clear to us, even if the thought is wrong and/or just illogical. If I have trouble expressing it, it’s not because the thought isn’t clear to me, but because I don’t have the verbal powers to articulate it, at least at the moment the thought occurs. So maybe I think that people can only perceive those parts of life that are clear and distinct to them (although what’s clear to a person varies; what was clear to Einstein about reality is not what’s clear to me about a reality, etc.) Another way to say this: if you can perceive it, you can express it.
As for Lacan, I’m sure that he often does have a clear personal sense of what he means (he knows what he thinks), but he decides to express it with ridiculously convoluted language. Sometimes, as with the baby thing, I feel like he doesn’t actually have much going on in his imagination. How could you possibly know what’s happening inside a baby’s head?
But then again, I’m probably digging myself into a hole because I don’t know anything about Lacan. For all I know he performed years of systematic research on babies, informed by cutting-edge child developmental science, to reach his conclusions. It’s just his language that I have trouble with. It will be nice to listen to this episode and hear with plain language what Lacan was thinking.
Hi Noah,
I share your frustration with the “continental style,” particularly with guys like Lacan. But as you’ve brought Wittgenstein into it, I’d like to use him as a springboard to push back a little bit.
1. According to early Wittgenstein, at least, a thought is nothing more than a proposition with sense. Therefore, the very act of thought requires an articulable proposition. See TLP 4. Thus, if you can’t say it clearly, then no, you’re not thinking it clearly, either. (Think of the famous John Searle quote, “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.”) I point this out not to criticize Lacan, but to argue that one can have “proto-thoughts” that are not (yet) fully clear to us, but not worthless either. These “proto-thoughts” may ultimately prove to be sheer nonsense, and can’t/won’t ever become clear to us. (Or, they could eventually become understood, only to be proven demonstrably wrong.) But it’s also true that these “proto-thoughts” may simply require a more sophisticated language to properly express (and understand). Think of the classical Greeks, who had an intuitive notion and term for “atoms,” long before they could properly describe them or even demonstrate their existence.
2. You mention that Wittgenstein was able to express new and revolutionary concepts with fairly everyday language, but I’m not sure that’s quite true. Among the most revolutionary concepts in the TLP were neologisms like “truth-tables” and “truth-conditions”. We take these concepts for granted now, but only because they’ve become incorporated into logical method. But those terms were new and unintuitive at the time. Also, I don’t think it’s fair to exclude Wittgenstein’s use of logical symbols, when stating that he “otherwise” used clear language. W.’s logical arguments make up half of this entire thesis; and his use of “ξ” (xi) to stand for “any set of propositions” is far from clear to the uninitiated. In other words, Wittgenstein also had to invent or deploy new terms and symbols to express his argument. (Ironically, Wittgenstein concludes TLP by saying that his own argument is nonsense!)
3. Lacan’s invention of neologisms to express new ideas shouldn’t necessarily be considered out of bounds. The English language became radically richer as it expanded to include the neologisms that Shakespeare coined. (Think otherwise common words like “cheap,” “bedazzled,” “fashionable,” “sanctimonious,” etc., all credited to Shakespeare.) Lacan is no Shakespeare (IMHO, but then French isn’t my language), but I wonder if the culture won’t ultimately absorb and normalize some of his ideas.
In short, Lacan may well be a fraud, or he may be ahead of his time, or a little of both. The ancient Pythogoreans were perhaps silly to make a religion of mathematics, but that doesn’t detract from their meaningful (and still useful) contributions to knowledge.
But yes, I hate Lacan’s style, too.
Well put; especially: “In short, Lacan may well be a fraud, or he may be ahead of his time, or a little of both.”
Noah, I feel your frustration.
The inwardly-realized dichotomies of the post-structuralist divergence of Being indicates that the modes of semantic structure do not falsify the post-deconstructionist existence of consciousness for-itself, in-itself, and against-itself. ”
P.S. You made this up.
Wittgenstein has come up and it would be interesting, and perhaps even helpful, to consider if there might be a therapeutic aspect to the existential reading experience offered by Lacan, if he isn’t ask much showing us as telling us.
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin5.html
The “proto-thought” thing is interesting. So do you think that Lacan’s theories (or parts of them) could be examples of proto-thoughts? That might explain the lack of clarity. If this is true, it seems to suggest that a lot of continental thought could be considered “proto,” from Sarte to Derrida.
I probably should stop this speculation now before I end up committing the crime I’ve accused Lacan of.
As for Wittgenstein:
Yeah, and I probably should have thought of another example to prove my point because I’ve only ever skimmed through bits and pieces of the TLP.
With this said, I do think that there are sections of the TLP that express new ideas (for their time) expressed with clear language. As someone with no understanding of symbolic logic I’ve managed to work my way through parts of it, particularly the opening and closing pages. Of course these passages are difficult and require mental sweat, but compared to Lacan, they’re like nursery rhymes. But as a whole, the TLP is probably only a little bit easier to understand than Lacan.
There must be more examples of new ideas that were easily understood during their time due to the language used to express them being clear. Darwin’s ideas spring to mind. Camus’ as well (I don’t know: were ideas about the Absurd considered “new?”)
Hi Noah,
I don’t know if Lacan is pushing forward new boundaries of thought with his terms, or if he’s just obscuring mundane or nonsensical insights in impenetrable language. But given Lacan’s own popularity with so many un-stupid people, I’m inclined to postpone judgment until I’ve absorbed his work through interpreters.
That’s the best way I’ve found to deal with any impenetrable philosopher: review some of the introductory secondary literature, like Fink’s introduction: http://amzn.com/B005H08LM2. I would frankly have no way to comprehend most of the authors covered on PEL — including Wittgenstein — without having first started with their interpreters.
I’m not sure it’s so different with the sciences. I grasped Darwin far more clearly after reading Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker than after reading The Origin of Species.
Lacan’s problem is not neologisms or new ideas. It is simply his writing. The only possible excuse that has merit would be if his syntactical and compositional confusions somehow, themselves, rose to the level neologisms, in which case we’d need to start quoting whole paragraphs of Lacan as one hyphenated word.
I think this problem with Lacan is distinctly different than the challenge of reading original sources. The challenge of reading Darwin or Newton or Descartes, or even (gasp) Hegel or Kant, lies in such neologisms and, at times, just poor writing. (I’d never accuse Kant of being a good writer unless he were standing next to Lacan.) Yes, original sources often require more work to understand than reading interpretations or summaries. In the end, interpretations can be read more efficiently because they inevitably cover more ground, both regarding the thought of a particular person, and the context of that thought. You really end up effectively reading several books by the original author plus scores of supplementary material, especially with a good secondary book. There is a danger though — you end up reading an interpretation rather than interpreting yourself. Typically, the official interpretation is a thinner, lest articulated version of the original thought. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for the original. The question, often, will be whether you think it’s worth it. For me, Lacan has consistently driven me back to supplemental material.
Darwin’s sentences aren’t hard to understand, but the ideas might be at first.
Darwin’s writing was and is accessible in terms of the grammar/vocabulary but obviously his ideas have not been readily available to many literate people whose psychology is such that they cannot accept such a view as true and at least part of what is at stake for writers like Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and yes Lacan, is not just clarity/logic but realization/conversion, as to whether they succeed or not obviously there has been much ink spilled on either side. I think to understand some of the method/madness of Lacan’s writing style you have to keep in mind his avant-garde clinical analytic/therapeutic practices, that said I think much of what he tried to do was just wrong but I’ll save that for after the podcast. It might be worth some day taking a look at Derrida’s Archive Fever on the readings/institutionalization of Freud.
http://beforebefore.net/149a/w11/media/Derrida-Archive_Fever_A_Freudian_Impression.pdf
Hi Dylan,
Points well taken. When I referenced “neologisms,” perhaps I should have said “terms of art.” True, Lacan didn’t invent the words “imago” or “real” (or “quadrature”!), but one can’t really understand what Lacan meant by “imago” by simply looking it up in the dictionary. Understanding what Lacan means by these terms requires a certain immersion into his context.
But I didn’t mean to get into a discussion of what is or isn’t a neologism. I simply wanted to assert that Lacan’s frustrating writing style doesn’t necessarily mean he’s got no intellectual heft. (Of course, it may happen to be true!) So, I’m not sure writers like Lacan or Levinas differ from writers like, say, Wittgenstein in style or kind. They may simply occupy different points on a scrutability spectrum.
Clearly, Wittgenstein is an easier “read” in one sense, but it’s equally easy (for me) to misunderstand W. without context. For example, W. begins the TLP with the proclamation, “The world is all that is the case.” In one sense, that’s a simple sentence. But it’s still easy to misunderstand what W. meant by that sentence unless one has enough grounding in the vocabulary of logic to understand what logicians mean by something being “the case.”
Perhaps this says more about the limits of my own intellect, but I think I’m far more likely as a lay reader to misinterpret these philosophy texts by reading them alone, than I am likely to be led astray by a secondary source. And that would be true no matter how much time or work I put into trying to grasp Kierkegaard’s argument in a vacuum. It’s not simply “harder” to do it by myself, it’s impossible. I might even think I understood Kierkegaard because I understood the “dictionary definition” of his terms (say, “authentic”). But I’d misunderstand the gist of his argument trying to read it without context, which the text itself usually can’t provide.
Of course secondary “interpreters” can make interpretive mistakes as well. That’s where the troublesome issue of “authority” comes in. (I’ve already identified an error made by Simon Critchley in an earlier post, but who’s going to take my side over Critchley’s?)
All the same, I still recommend that confused PEL listeners look to the secondary literature for some of these hard-to-read writers, given our limited time and attention spans.
I have never heard Lacan speak in lecture or conversation, but when I read him, I have the feeling he has the horrible habit of writing like he speaks, instead of writing to order structure unorganized thoughts. He seems to use the underlying chaotic nature of the unabated flow of his thoughts to shake the readers sensibilities so that they are forced to read the words in a fundamentally different way. Instead of writing in a linear way, Lacan requires you engage his writing with a paper and pen as well as your eyes, because you will have to plot a course through the writing to find your way out, its not just a linear path of ideas leading to a conclusion. It’s more of forest of ideas waiting for you to choose a path through it. I could just be justifying his inability to adjust his writing to a general audience, but I do enjoy reading his writing when I have the time to engage it completely.
Lacan was a top-down theorist.
“Most cognitive scientist . . . hold to the position that intelligence is fundamentally the work of symbolic processing, carried out in rule-based computational architectures” (Olaf Sporns, Networks of the Brain,p. 179)
“ In the 1960s, Lacan takes formalization/mathematization to be one of the main characteristics of science, that being a key to 100 percent transmissibility, the ability to integrally transmit something from one person to another. . . Early on, Lacan’s concern with the transmissibility of psychoanalysis is clearly based on English and American misinterpretation of Freud’s work in particular, his hope being that such misinterpretation can be avoided by formulations and formalization akin to those of “hard sciences. ” (Fink Lacanian Subject, p. 144) When his concepts were not accepted as scientific, he responded that science is not yet well developed enough to incorporate psychoanalysis.
So, Lacan is clearly a theoretical, cognitive, symbolic, mathematically oriented system builder of psychoanalysis, who is serious about being scientific and precise about the very abstract subject of psychoanalysis, as practiced by Freud and as he believed theory and practice should occur. You can never tell what goes on behind closed doors in a psychotherapy session. Though psychoanalytic schools try to train therapists, eventually they are on their own practicing what they think works, unobserved by anyone else (unless in supervision).
Additionally, the public who has no training or theory really does not know what is going on in those therapy sessions, unless they attend, and then it is only their own experience. So psychotherapy is a process that is unknown to most, unobservable to most and thus fairly inaccessible by merely reading a book. A book on sky diving does not convey the experience, which is the main desire in reading a book about psychoanalysis by Lacan (or even by Fink).
So if we combine the abstract nature of psychoanalysis with the abstract nature of Lacan, we easily get lost in the stratosphere of his language. His abstraction actually makes him more valuable to the philosophical world. I would add that his abstraction negatively affects his ability to get at the greatest positive effect of all therapy outcome studies—the relationship between the analyst and analysand–which of course he believes needs sacrificing for Truth–and this is where things get interesting.
Thank you Wayne, I find that to be a very enlightening and satisfying analysis of Lacan’s style. Far better than, “he’s hard to read’ or “I think he is purposely misleading me”, as some people resort to saying. And also better than saying try harder, it’s not meant to be easy (I am pretty sure i end up in the latter camp typically).
the attempt to provide clear transmissions via mathemes and all only makes sense against the background of slips, polysemy and such, one of the problems of these french thinkers is that they come with , and work thru/against, a whole assumed body of knowledge and without understanding the previous eras of existentialism, structuralism, phenomenology, Hyppolite, and others one can easily end up with crude reductions to what is generally accessible. The fellows will be walking a bit of tightrope with domesticating this crazy cat…
Here is a nice text on Lacan for beginners, recognizing the problem of intermediary interpretation:
Shoshan Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight
http://www.amazon.com/Jacques-Lacan-Adventure-Insight-Psychoanalysis/dp/0674471210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363971311&sr=8-1&keywords=lacan+and+the+adventure+of+insight
Short and readable, it renders Lacan intelligible and useful, especially as it informs pedagogy.
Thanks for this link, Brent. I’m starting with Bruce Fink’s interpretations because they’re available at my library. If I’m intrigued and curious enough by his stuff I’ll spring for Felman.
For people just starting out in philosophy – if they’re serious about the life and practice – it would be a great thing to learn the languages that predominate in the field. If I were young again I’d start with German and French.
My summary of:
“The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.”
“The I we experience in psychoanalysis.” (p. 502) is similar to: “The startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror . . .Fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. . .For me, this meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge.” (p. 503)– “A preliminary to paranoic alienation, which dates from the deflection the specular I into the social I” (p. 507)and results in the “Narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I” (p. 507) and the function of “meconnaissances that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself” (p. 507) so that “we place no trust in altruistic feeling.” (p. 509).
As opposed to this, we must learn the “cipher of [our] moral destiny, where the real journey begins.” (p. 509), according to Lacan.
I interpret the above quotes to mean: when the child gazes at his mirror image (Imago) the child acquires a preliminary, libidinal ontological experience of paranoid proportions, of staring into the abyss, the alienation (lack) of his ego. This frightening specular-I imaged in the mirror becomes projected onto the social-I, the I of the other(s).
The child’s I (ego) becomes alienated (terrorized) and narcissistic (seeking perfect fulfillment, desiring the Ideal-I). The mirror stage sets the battle of “meconaissance,” shocks to the child’s system of the Ideal (image) versus the Real vulnerable, fragmented ego. The child continuously is confronted with this false image of wholeness versus the real experience of brokenness and vulnerability.
Reading a biography of Lacan (by Elisabeth Roudinesco, I suggest) before listening to the show (I mean, podcast) would be very enlightening about what Lacan i$ about.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
No mention was made of Lacan’s so-called ‘return to Freud’ which had an impact on 60s Structural Marxism, Barthes, Althusser et al. I’ve always taken Lacan to be a spokesperson for a view of radical decentring of self, and an understanding of what Althusser calls the ‘interpellation’ of the subject, the constitution of the subject by society. This would then indicate that there is no self constituted as an atomic individual with only personal drives, desires etc, but all these elements of conscious/ subconscious life are directly the result of various social factors. The return to Freud is the understanding of the Ego as a liminal space between language and society mediated by the body and others’ bodies. Desire is the desire of the other’s desire, expression is the expression of superego demands introjected as my desire and will, language can only signify in a chain of infinite, self- referential links, so one can only identify a thing through all the objects or states that that thing negates. Lacan emphasises the empty signifier, the lack, the missing Phallus, that which desire lacks and is forever seeking, and must always seek on pain of unmeaning. The cure is the realisation that there is no cure, we are the symptom, there is no reaching of the other shore, just a realisation of the endless circle of social desiring, inculcation and mimesis. Ideologiekritik enters where the Superego demand to enjoy reverses Freud understanding of repression as necessary in the name of civilisation. Marcuse calls the same thing ‘repressive desublimation’, those interrelated demands to have more pleasure, to consume, lest one become critical of one’s state unfreedom. The symbolic is language, ideology, those semiotic systems of social signification which maintain the continuity of communication, social intercourse etc. The imaginary is the self-identity through the continual projection of false totality and the illusion of being, essence, eternity. The real is whatever cannot be contained by the symbolic or the imaginary, what is left over, the surplus meaning which signifies that which transcends all signification but also that which grounds all signification. It is close I think to Hegel’s understanding of the totality as Absolute Spirit, a retroactively signified whole which expressive the subject of a process but founds and grounds it beyond any temporal succession, in a circular selfreferential, almost hermeneutical Ouroboros like fashion, mediate by concrete and abstract moments in dialectical tension, but always exceeding positive definition through continual negation, reaching beyond even the identity of identity and nonidentity. I think Zizeks new book looks at Hegel through this Lacanian opsis. Of course Derrida’s differance is close to this conception also, as is Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics. In fact, no one really makes the link with Adorno. He too writes in an incredibly pithy, obscure and pedantic style. See Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. He aims also for that surplus meaning which transcends merely propositional discourse based on identity and the tradition of western logic, but without negating the Enlightenment project of rationality tout court. The petite objet a, the phallus continually sought for to replace the lack of one (for the women) with which to regain lost attention from the mother, as sole object of adoration. This has something to do also with Freud’s fort da game, baby throws thing out of cot, it returns, then once it throws and it loses. I yet to read a book by Lacan. Will get to it some time. He always seems to be last in the list of priorities, too much bombast and cant. Really the beginning of postmodern subjectivism — better to go straight to Freud and critical theory, Hegel and Nietzsche.
Say again?
Lacan, advocate of PEL:
For Lacan, the unexamined life is the Real,
–the completely examined life is the Imaginary and
–the Partially Examined Life is the Symbolic in search of Jouissance.