PREVIEW-Episode 74: Jacques Lacan’s Psychology

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 74 is, what is the self or subject? And we read Bruce Fink's the Lacanian subject from 1996 and Jacques Lacan's paper the Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience from 1949. You can join the discussion and read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:48 Mark: At last we are here. This is supposed to be the thing. It is the Rosetta Stone. This is the guy. Actually, we said the same thing with Saussure, that if you understand Lacan, then you will understand the whole mass of weird contemporary French philosophy. Is that just a bullshit myth? He's not the key to unlocking anything.

1:09 Seth: If he's the key to unlocking something, it's a very complicated lock.

1:16 Dylan: It's also an obscure lock.

1:18 Wes: Yeah. I think even Fink and other explicators of Lacan, who are not themselves obscurantists, will admit that Lacan is needlessly obscurantist or not necessarily needlessly. Sometimes they'll justify it as a way to stimulate one and two being more thoughtful.

1:34 Dylan: I suppose part of the problem is because he has an idiosyncratic way of writing and set of terms, you run into the same problem that I would run into with reading Kant for the first time, where he has all kinds of technical terms, and so you end up just sort of kludging them all together. And you have the same thing with Hegel. The experience, though, in reading through. In the pieces of Lacan that I read, where other stuff I've read, I felt like it was really hard and they weren't very good writers necessarily, but that the more time I spent with it, the more I sussed it out. And I confess that I had some paragraphs in Lacan that I felt like I got it better the more I spent with it. And other times I felt like it was purposefully obscure. And then talking to Mark, he said, well, yeah, actually, he does that on purpose.

2:25 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

2:26 Mark: So all this has been a reason why the main thing we read for an episode on Lacan was not by Lacan, was by this American psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, called the Lacanian Subject which Wes recommended. And it's because, at least according to Fink, you have to know basically what Lacan is talking about before you try to read Lacan, if you're going to understand any of it.

2:47 Wes: A lot of it depends on, you know, having a background in Freud. So barring acquiring a background in Freud and becoming scholars of Lacan, where we do the work of piecing together all the different things that he's done and going through it very carefully and constructing what it is he's trying to say, a very laborious task. We're left with relying on someone who's done that to some extent.

3:07 Dylan: What's our way in on this?

3:08 Mark: Well, let's say how what we're going to talk about today supposedly answers the question. So the question I was originally going to put in the way that we put several other episodes that we've had, what is the self? Because what Lacan is talking about here relates very well to the way that Hegel, in our Hegel's Phenomenology episode, talked about that, that the self is not something that's inborn, it's something that is acquired, and it's acquired through our interactions with people. Lacan is all over that and addresses Hegel specifically. And then we did the Buber episode more recently, which sort of added to that the idea of it's not this struggle to the death like Hegel thought.

It's love. It's the mother's love. It's these real connections that we form with people, and that's how we get a sense of self in the first place, or at least unauthentic sense of self, as opposed to a very surface level, unreflective sense of self. Buber and Hegel, you might just think, are sort of dabblers in this area. Lacan takes this as his main quest through his career, seemingly. However, when I threw out the question, what is the self? To Wes, right before we started, he said, no, no, no. We got to say, what is the subject? Because that's the title here, the Lacanian subject.

Anybody who knows Lacan will say self. That doesn't capture subject.

4:16 Wes: So, yeah, and then there's a movement in psychoanalysis called self psychology, which is its own thing. And so this gives us a good entry point into talking about Lacan. One of the things he's pivoting off of is that Freud's notion of ego, the way Freud actually wrote that was. So Freud wrote about this sort of tripartite division of the psyche, ego, SuperEGO, and the ID. And originally in the German, he uses the Ich, the I for ego. It ended up being translated as ego, but some would argue unhelpfully, because there's a more down to earth quality just to saying the I.

And then the superego was the Über-Ich and then the ID was the Es, the it, this undefinable part. Yep. Psychoanalysts after Freud were focused on their conception of the psyche really centered on the ego. You started out with the id, which was associated with all these, this chaotic set of impulses, the id. And then the way Freud describes it, the ego actually is sort of a skin that develops out of the ID in the way the ID brushes up against the world. Especially because of the fact that you can't have what you want all the time. The reality principle.

And then the superego is associated with societal prohibitions on top of that. So the ego helps you navigate the world. Basically. It's associated with things as simple as perception and motility, but also rationality and decision making processes. One of the main points we're going to get with Lacan here is that the ego in a way, is imaginary. It's a. I don't know if false self would be the right way to describe it, but it's imaginary in the sense that it's constructed by the individual. So I'm reminded of Sartre in this. In the sense in which the ego.

When we read the transcendental ego, Sartre is arguing for this sort of empirically defined ego as opposed to sort of a transcendental Cartesian substance ego. And Lacan is concerned with the same sort of thing. So when we get to this idea of the mirror stage, that's really where we get the development of the ego. With Lacan, So that's early on and say between six months and 18 months. Right. One way to think about it is when at the point where a child recognizes itself in the mirror in a way that many animals will never be able to do, right? They'll never be able to look into a mirror and see an image of themselves and say, that's me.

Of course, we don't have to take that literally. It's not like that. For the mirror stage to happen developmentally, we need a mirror. Or that if you're blind, you're screwed, or something like that. The mirroring happens through another human being in the way that we partly talked about with Hegel. But what's critical is that through some way or another we basically come to have a conception of ourselves and it's false in the sense that it's constructed to attribute to ourselves a wholeness that we don't really have. So in the case of the mirror image, say a child who is not yet fully mobile is sort of stumbling around and in some ways coming out of a feeling of fragmentation from earlier on, like an infant who sort of takes their fist and gnaws on it or is sort of impressed by their own arm.

It's unclear how integrated that their conceptions of themselves is. But when you see yourself in a mirror, you see a hole. You have this integrated conception. The Lacanian idea is that this idea of a substantial integrated ego self is based upon that. It's constructed out of that mirroring moment, but it's not the subject. The subject will turn out to be something else.

7:54 Dylan: So is it easy to say in what way that is different from Freud's ego?

8:00 Wes: Freud says a little bit about the development of the ego, but not a lot. He has some very nice metaphors for talking about that development, but in kind of abstract, abstract terms. Freud will think very abstractly about what it means, for instance, to go from a symbiotic relationship with a mother or an early caretaker, which is almost to the point where you don't make a distinction between yourself and the other. You're almost merged. And then this sort of gradual sense of developing an idea that the mother is separate, for instance, and that idea is developed critically out of frustration and her absence, which will become important to Lacan into symbolization.

Because the development of symbols is first and foremost a development of a fantasy, which serves as a substitute gratification for what's really there. Right. A symbol is a substitute for what's real. And early on, the theory is that that substitution is like a thumb sucking. It's like something that gives you some sort of indirect gratification when you can't have the real thing. So the mother's absence, the first thing you learn how to symbolize or to signify in Lacan's terms, is the mother. You learn to signify her because of her absence. She's gone.

And so the signifier stands place.

9:13 Seth: Wes, were you talking about Freud or Lacan there?

9:15 Wes: Well, I'm trying to get at how the Freudian concept of the ego differs. As far as I can tell, Lacan is a sort of elaboration of Freud. Freud isn't telling us where the subject, in this sense resides, although I think Lacan is reacting to a tradition that came out of Freud in America and England of what's called ego psychology. Where the therapeutic goal is to strengthen the ego, the analyst becomes a powerful parental figure to the analysand. They become someone with whom the analysand can identify and therefore strengthen their ego to function better according to societal expectations.

That's not necessarily Freudian, I don't think. Lacan would never say, oh, yes, that's Freud, but that is a tradition. That's one of the traditions that came out of Freud, and that's what Lacan is reacting against. So I don't think he's reacting against specifically the Freudian concept of ego, which is abstract enough to be put to a number of different purposes. He's reacting against this specific Anglo American tradition of thinking of the ego as the locus of the psychoanalytic cure. Whereas for Lacan, it'll be much different.

10:25 Mark: Before we go on, I think we need to tell our audience why it is that you, in particular among us, are running off at such great length about this that you've been forced to spend quite a bit of time with lacan and Freud, etc.

10:37 Wes: I've been taking classes on and off at a psychoanalytic institute for years, so I have quite a bit of background in Freud. I've read a lot of Freud and read it carefully. Lacan, not so much. I mean, I've read some and I've spent more time with Lacan than will be evident from what I have to say in this podcast, but frankly baffled by a lot of it. I have a real antipathy to the way Lacan writes and to that kind of obscurantism. And it's mainly through readings that have. There's some really wonderful writers out there who really do great justice to these ideas, I mean, and make clear how fascinating and interesting they are, regardless of how one feels about actually reading Lacan.

Now, one could say this is a cop out and this is an unwillingness to do the hard work involved, you know, with, say, Hegel and Kant. Maybe it's because I was younger, I was willing to do that. But on the other hand, I never got the feeling from Hegel and Kant of this sort of pretension factor which I get from Lacan, this idea of someone trying to seem profound. And that's really a turn off to me. Now I become an agnostic about that for the purpose of trying to get at some of Lacan's more interesting ideas.

11:42 Mark: One of the sources that you referred us to we can point listeners to is the introduction to how to Read Lacan by Zizek, a very popular author in his own right who Writes that most of Lacan's writings are broken down into. He gave these seminars which were open to the public. He gave them every week.

12:00 Wes: Yeah, the seminars were open to the

12:01 Mark: public, so those are actually a little more accessible. The one we read this time, the Mirror Stage, was a speech. It wasn't one of those seminars. But then he would go back and take the material from the seminar and write a paper on it, which are mostly in this giant volume, Écrits, writings. And those are really terse and hard to make any sense of. But according to Zizek, you kind of have to read both on any given subject to really get it, that you have to read the seminar. And he kind of wanders all over the place in the seminar and is very.

Making little jokes and things. But if you just get that by itself you're not going to get the overall. What was your point? But then go back to the corresponding and you'll see that. But you wouldn't get the Écrits at all. The Écrits is much too terse and dense that unless you'd read the seminar, you wouldn't get that. So there's one way we didn't do that. Instead we read this book by Fink that gives us a pretty coherent picture, even over the various changes. I guess one of the difficulties in reading Lacan is he changes his mind about a lot of these things.

He changes his conception of construction of the self over his 40 odd years of doing this. And so Fink gives us what he admits is an almost artificially coherent single picture of the psyche, that it's not anywhere near as simple as Freud's id ego superego. There you go. And Lacan is nothing. No simple formula like that, but it's at least something that we can sketch out.

13:21 Dylan: I stubbornly tried to start with the subversion of the subject and the Dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious, which is one of these papers from Écrits. It's one of those things that you read through and as you skip along there are sentences or sections of sentences that you can understand and the rest of it. He makes these diversions as well as these flourishes that it's. I think obscure is a good word for it. I can see in reading it why someone who has more patience and maybe why a person might be attracted to it. Mark and Wes both tried to say, look, you're going to have to read something else besides Lacan.

Because I was stubbornly saying, let's just read Lacan, because I've never read him before, and I'm a big advocate of just reading the damn stuff that people write. And I felt like, well, how bad can it really be? Turns out it can be pretty fucking bad. So I acquiesced. In the end, I started reading this thing, and I.

14:22 Seth: You were beaten into submission.

14:24 Dylan: I say, by all means, take a shot at it. There are a couple things that I'm sure we'll put as links on the website that give you a taste of it. Like there's this interview that we got linked to from 57 that was. You could imagine, actually, that he could speak to a human being, which you don't get the sense when you read his papers.

14:41 Seth: That being said, the Fink book is actually extremely well written and readable, and that if he's really presenting a structure of Lacan's thought, it's fascinating and interesting and coherent. And if Fink is recreating an edifice around fragments of coherence, like he's working with Heraclitus or something, then it's a different story. But whichever way it is, it's an impressive work.

15:06 Wes: Yeah.

15:07 Dylan: Yeah, man. I'm willing to give the whole thing the benefit of the doubt in saying that it presents an interesting problem to talk about his style of writing and his style of communication and what effect that has.

15:18 Wes: The argument is that it sort of matches the. Lacan is right, trying to create desire. I guess creating confusion can create desire. That's one of his therapeutic differences with an ego psychologist, or at least the difference that he claims. So when we say the subject, you know, is decentered, which is a famous sort of Lacanian thesis, that's to say that the center goes from being the ego to being the unconscious.

15:44 Seth: I did my usual extensive amount of repetitious note taking, and I feel like I've got some things I could throw out there to give us an entry point.

15:54 Wes: Go ahead.

15:55 Seth: Well, starting with Fink's book on the Lacanian subject, Lacan apparently had a fairly famous and mystifying quote, something he would say over and over again, which is, the unconscious is the language of the other. And Fink spends a little time explaining what that is. And I think it's worth probably delving into that. Fink asks us to think about slips of the tongue, like you accidentally say, I have to go walk the. The God. I mean, the dog. Right. Or something like that. And following Freud, Lacan wants to say that that type of thing is not accidental, or at least not meaningless.

It's not simply an accident. Instead, it has somehow significance. And Freud Interprets it one way. And Lacan thinks that what that really is is sort of like the term that is frequently used is eruption. But it's really sort of a breaking through of the conscious control of the ego in this underlying thing which is called the unconscious. So it's like something speaking through from the unconscious into the conscious. Breaking through into consciousness.

17:04 Wes: Yeah. Often case that can be an outlet for repressed impulse. I think the example that Fink gives is someone who says, I know that in my relationship with my father there was a lot of tension. I think it came from the fact that he was working too hard at a schnob. He couldn't stand and took it out on me. So someone says schnab instead of job. And then most people will say, well, that's just a slip. It's a meaningless slip. But Freudian would say that there's a possible significance there having to do with, say, repressed impulses. So it's an unintentional release of something that's been repressed in language.

And so in that way, it's analogous to what happens in dreams. And it's analogous to a symptom. It's a return of the repressed and an unintentional escaping of it. So the theory here is that it could be that the eldest child in the family, the older brother or sister of the speaker, is a snob. And the speaker thinks that their father doted on that older sibling excessively. And then there's the association to the word schnoz, the father's nose, which the speaker was afraid of as a kid. Basically, the idea is that there is a chain of associations in the unconscious where you can have an impulse that you don't want to admit to yourself.

Say anger at a sibling or anger at a father, and it can be displaced onto something else. And it comes out in that form.

18:23 Seth: Right. Unlike Freud, who sees the unconscious as part of this superstructure of the subject that includes the ego and the superego and all this. Lacan says that when we have these slips of the tongue and the unconscious sort of breaks through, it's like an alien interruption. It's almost like it's not part of the subject. It's not part of what he conceives of subjectivity to be. It's almost like that language itself comes from outside of us, if you will, or comes from the other. So when he says the unconscious is the language of the other, he means in a pretty strong sense that what's happening in the unconscious and that structure of signification and chains of signifiers and symbols that Wes was talking about actually aren't part of us where we're working through something on an unconscious level, and then we need to reappropriate it in some way by confronting it.

Rather, what he's saying is that it's almost like an alien thing that is working from outside of us. And what he's driving at is that when children are born, before they go through this mirror stage, before they have separation from the mother, before they have self realization or self identity, there is no language. Language is like an alien thing that's imposed upon them. The unconscious is kind of the continuing working of this alien language, this language of the other on us.

19:52 Dylan: Is it that it's the alien language, or is it that the unconscious is that pre alienated functioning that we have access to that is not language based?

20:03 Mark: No, that would be the real.

20:04 Seth: It's the real. Yeah.

20:05 Wes: Okay, so the other major statement is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Right. And there he's getting at something which comes right out of Freud, which is that the way the unconscious works is it's something like the slips of the tongue, but it's slippages of what Freud calls cathectic energy, or when we manifest it, we call affect, like a feeling or a mood. But any energy associated with an idea can slip between the ideas through processes which are similar to metaphor and metonymy. So they're language based in a way. They're based on free association.

So if someone has a phobia towards horses, that's really based on a phobia between their father, that's based on a kind of free association, Right. Between some sort of similarity or some sort of contiguity between. Between the concepts of horse and father. Lacan's innovation here is using Saussure to say that the unconscious is full of simply of signifiers. So if we remember from our Saussure podcast, the sign is divided between the signifier and the signified, and the signified is actually a concept or an idea. So the signifier signifies the signified, but it's not signifying or referring to a real object in the world.

It's actually referring to an idea or a concept. So for Lacan, everything that's going on in the unconscious, we don't even get to the level of these signified ideas. The associations happen at a purely syntactic or grammatical level.

21:35 Seth: Yeah.

21:36 Wes: The unconscious is intimately related to the other, and language comes from without. We're born into language. It's given to Us. All of these things that we do with the unconscious and with language, even consciously, are handed to us. All of the signifiers and the relationships between the signifiers come from our socialization. So in a way, when we're thinking and when we're unconsciously thinking, we're not thinking with our own words. Exactly.

22:03 Mark: Even when we're consciously thinking. I think we need to fill in this picture. Because we started describing the unconscious as this alien thing because it's language. But the ego itself, conscious thought, our intentions, they themselves too, because they are linguistic, are. The others are alien. Whereas for Freud, it seemed a little more simple that, you know, we have the ego that is us, or at least the part of us that we built through civilization. And then we have the ID or the unconscious that's pushing. That's still part of us, but it's this uncontrolled part of us.

And it's kind of an agency in itself. So it's kind of like we're of two minds or three minds. If you add the superego as sort of your conscience that's bearing down on you. So there's agency all over the place for Freud, whereas for Lacan, it seems like the agency is very difficult to come by. The major point at the beginning of the Fink book in this picture of the conscious and the unconscious is the conscious and the ego. So all conscious talk or conscious thought would be ego talk. That is an illusion because it is cast on us by language. It is given to us by the labels that are attached to us, the language that we learn to think of ourselves in.

He says there's not even a meaning to the baby's cries before the parents say, oh, I bet he's hungry. And so we start thinking in terms of hunger.

23:21 Unknown speaker: Right.

23:21 Dylan: What part's the illusion and how is that word being used in this particular case? Is it being used in a very loose way, almost a human way, that there isn't a strict correspondence between the real and the language? Or is it being used in the way that it's a explicit obfuscation, It's a social creation.

23:44 Mark: And he insists that it is not the subject. Right. The ego is not the subject.

23:50 Seth: No, definitely not.

23:51 Mark: Something that is illusory. Right. So it is.

23:55 Wes: Well, it's imaginary. I don't think illusory is Exactly.

23:57 Seth: Yeah, I don't think illusory is the right word. Right.

23:59 Wes: I think the. Yeah, the word is imaginary.

24:01 Seth: I'm worried that talking about ego and subject, at this point, we're going to lose sight of this key piece that I just want to kind of get out. Fink characterizes Lacan as talking. Very specifically when talking about babies. The child has a need. It doesn't have a name for that need. It doesn't have an articulation for that need. It simply cries. And then the parents try to have to figure out in their language what the baby needs. Oh, it's hungry. Oh, it's tired. It needs to be warmed up, or whatever. And if the baby stops crying after they do something to address that need, then they say retroactively, ah, the baby was hungry.

But it's not something that actually the baby articulates and it's not apparent in the present time. And what Lacan says is, it's the language of the parents that starts giving a name to the crying and the behaviors and starts articulating the baby's needs. And the baby learns from the parents, I must be hungry. I want this, I want that. And that's the way in which language comes into our lives developmentally and alienates us from this natural state where we simply exist in direct contact with our needs, but with no way of stating what they are.

25:17 Wes: One way to think about this is the. And this is something Lacan actually explicitly rejected, but I think it's still helpful is to think of the real like the Kantian thing in itself. And to think of the world of the imaginary as the world of appearance. And to think of the symbolic realm is associated with understanding our contact with the real. That whatever extent we have that pre linguistically is lost to the extent that we begin to conceptualize it and give words to it. Right. It's much different to have that raw pre linguistic need of the baby than to be an adult who says to himself, I'm hungry. We transform that experience by putting it into language.

26:01 Mark: That's a fine analogy. As long as people keep in mind that it's not that the real is unexperienced, like the thing in itself, it is experienced, it's just not experienced linguistically.

26:12 Wes: And so, right, think of the reals associated with drives. This is where we get another difference from Freud. We get the real is associated with these very basic libidinal drives, whether hunger or sex or see, I don't know,

26:26 Mark: I didn't see the real that way. I thought of the real as when you say drives. That's again, looking at it like it has agency. Agency is something that is built and it is not where we think it is. And that's sort of the whole puzzle of the whole thing, where does the subject end up being? So we think the subject is in the ego, but it's not, because the ego is something that's imposed upon us by language. We might think that the subject then is in the unconscious, that if the ego is an illusion, then maybe the unconscious is the thing, that that's where our true self is.

But that's not where agency comes in either. And that's also not the real. Because what the unconsc conscious is then is more of this same linguistic crap, but that has gotten suppressed in some way. There was some trauma, and there's trauma all over the place for the con, just in the way we would deal with our mother and how much she paid attention to us or didn't pay attention to us. There's trauma right there. And how that gets resolved by, oh, is the mother paying attention to the father? Are there siblings around? There are all these things create traumas which then push certain linguistic strings underground so that the unconscious is just a bunch of sentences or linguistic strings that might not even be sentences that somehow eat at us and screw us up, and we find it difficult to say them aloud.

And so that's one of the things that therapy is supposed to do. That's what's really strange about the unconscious to me, for Lacan, as somebody who thought he had some understanding of Freud, that it's not the id, it's not this agency, it's not the real that's hiding underneath the mask. It's strings.

28:02 Wes: Right. The unconscious and the real are different. Yeah. What I'm saying is he pushes drives out of the unconscious and into the real.

28:09 Mark: But are they even in the real? Partly. This is because I've reading ahead. We're going to do Deleuze in a couple episodes. And Deleuze takes a lot of his language from Lacan. Like, he's one of the reasons that we're reading Lacan. So he talks about the plane of immanence as this thing that is pretty much is the equivalent of the real, I think. And it is the mass of intuitions, or not even formulated intuition. It is the world as far as we are concerned. And then language, the way Deleuze describes it is very similar to the way Fink describes Lacan describing it.

Language makes cuts in the real. It creates object. Right. Very much in the way on our Saussure episode, we were saying you were just contrasting the signified from real objects that the word tree corresponds to an idea that we think corresponds to something in the world. But really, why are we saying this thing with bark is an object, and we're making that our idea. We could have cut the world in some different way and said, oh, it's a bunch of trees. You know, why don't we pick out just the molecule? I mean, there's obvious practical reasons why we pick a tree as the primary thing that an idea will correspond to.

But in any case, as soon as we're conceptualizing anything, we are cutting up the world in some way. So that's what I thought. The real is this mass of un. And there's always a leftover of the real. Even though all our experience. And he even says, we don't even say something exists unless it is conceptually carved out. The real itself doesn't exist. It has.

29:40 Wes: Right? What it's exist.

29:44 Mark: S I, S T it ex. Cysts.

29:47 Wes: Yeah. It's what's left over, right? One way that Lacan puts this is it's what's left over when the signifier becomes attached to a signified. The real, in a way, is what's left out of that or left over. Another way is to think of it. And all of these ways are inadequate because the real is, by its nature what can't be symbolized. Right. But one way is to think of it as sort of featureless clay from which we fashion or construct reality in the symbolic order through our use of signifiers.

30:16 Mark: So why are you putting drives in there? Because drives sound like, oh, yeah, it's the death drive, it's the sex drive. Like, those are labeled and they're agencies. Whereas the real seemed like it was much more nebulous than that.

30:29 Wes: We don't know the drives per se. And this even Freud thought, there's no awareness of an instinct. We know what Freud called drive derivatives. We know specific impulses. We know that we have a given sexual desire at a given moment. But the sex drive itself is something abstract. And you could say, well, that belongs to the realm of the unconscious. But I think Lacan is reserving the unconscious for, as you said, these syntactic strings, this linguistically structured set of signifiers. What's going on in the unconscious is actually associated with signification. Even though there's no signified, there's a signifier, and the real is outside of that. So the drive itself stands outside of that in the realm of the real.

31:18 Mark: I get what you're saying now, and it fits very well with what we were just saying about the baby, that the baby has just this need, which is kind of like the drives, but it's not identified.

31:28 Wes: Yeah, it's formless in the beginning.

31:30 Mark: It's only when it gets put in language that we call it an actual desire. I think my dispute was just with the word drives that I didn't see in Fink. And I think maybe historically, where Freud was coming from in here, one of the touchstones that kind of makes sense to me if I think in terms of this is Nietzsche or Schopenhauer when they talk about Will. That you could think of the real, even if you're thinking of the real as the whole world as just. It's throbbing with undirected purposefulness. Like that is the way that we experience phenomenologically before language comes in the world.

It's not just a static gray stuff around us. It is things pushing this way and that. And one of the ways, just like we could look at the mass of nature and pick out tree, we could look at the mass of this pushing and pulling and say, that's my sexual desire and that's your desire for me to get good grades. Those are concepts just like any other. In fact, those kind of concepts about people's motivations would matter a lot more to us at a younger age than trees and static concepts.

32:36 Wes: Yeah, a given drive itself is sort of universal and it's undefined the way Freud described it. It's just libidinal energy. And it's there to go towards whatever we put it towards. And Lacan is going to say, well, it's what others desire and want. And the way language is structured, all that stuff that we internalize, it'll determine the way our libido gets distributed, let's say, in the symbolic, imaginary orders. So this is getting back to Seth's concentrating here on the way in which the unconscious is structured by others. And our desire is structured by others. And what others desire, we want what they desire. And we want principally in the beginning, we want the mother to desire us. Our formation of our specific desires and come from the outside.

33:24 Dylan: It makes sense to me that the articulation of what the baby wants is not realized and becomes determined in some important ways when it gets satisfied. So the baby cries. The baby doesn't know why it's crying. It just knows that it wants in some kind of amorphous way. And the parents don't know what that is. And my own experience was, you just went through the list of things that it could possibly be. And eventually there might even be some distinguishing features of their crying that would let you know, oh, they're hungry or oh, Their diapers poopy or whatever.

But certainly at the beginning, you just try different things. You're jamming stuff in their mouths, you're wiping their ass, you're doing whatever until they stop crying. So that makes sense. But it does seem to me that even if it's amorphous for the child or for the parent, it's not going to be the case that crying was not specific. So, for instance, the baby's crying, and when the baby gets satisfied by a bottle, it's not as if changing their diaper is going to satisfy that.

34:37 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right.

34:38 Dylan: So while it was unknown and unarticulated desire by the child and it becomes articulated by its interaction with the other, it's not as if it was utterly defined. Where this, to me would get a little bit more complicated would be the way in which a parent or the other would shape, say, the food appetites of a child. So depending upon what they give them, then eventually that hunger gets satisfied by certain particular foods that would have been defined by previously what they had been satisfied with. So that their hunger gets particularized in a way that it wasn't before. And that particularization happens through their interaction with their environment or their parents or the other in general.

35:27 Wes: Yeah. Hopefully. It would be absurd if Lacan or Fink were saying that there's no felt difference between the need to urinate and hunger. Right. That would be an absurd thing to say.

35:38 Mark: Or that the things that fulfill those are socially determined, that it's just the parents are imposing.

35:44 Wes: Nonsense.

35:45 Mark: You're hungry. No, really. I had existential ennui, but now that you've told me I'm hungry now, food will satisfy me, but I'll keep eating until I'm really gorged because you misidentified my ennui.

35:59 Wes: Yeah. Those have to be distinct in some sense. But to get to the point where you're a conscious being who can name those things transforms those experiences. And then when we get to specific desires later on in life and you say, why is it I wanted to become a doctor versus a physicist, or why I chose this path or that path, you could give a why and wherefore as to the specific desires that someone has and their relationship to the other, their relationship to, say, your mother's desires for you, or to societal expectations and so on and so forth.

36:36 Mark: Right. The example of hunger is not really a good example. I mean, there really is. The parents discover that you were in fact hungry, and they fulfill that in a certain way. But you could say Even after those basic needs are met, you still have this need, this just raw need, which ultimately Lacan says it's the need to be loved and recognized. But there are different ways in which then the parents can fulfill that. So, you know, you're, you're, you're acting up as a 2 year old or something. And they channel this in certain ways, like, oh, he's bored, let's have him run around.

What you really want to do is run around. What you really want to do is go to the zoo. What you really, you know. So we pick all these activities that these are appropriate activities. And right there we're sublimating in a way. Because really there is no really what the kid wants to do. I mean, there are many things that could satisfy the kid. And if you are taking a very Freudian view, maybe what the kid wants to do is exhibit some sexual energy in some immediate way, but that's not going to be appropriate or even physiologically possible at the time.

So going to the zoo will be a good. Or playing soccer will be a good way to channel that and thereby sort of make you into a civilized being that has civilized sets of desires. But there will always be something left over. The real.

37:53 Dylan: I feel the weight of Seth thinking that we're at step number seven and we should have gotten to step number two first.

38:01 Seth: You are extremely perceptive.

38:04 Dylan: I am in tune to the unconscious.

38:07 Seth: Yes.

38:07 Wes: Your silence signifies volumes.

38:11 Seth: The lack, you mean the lack.

38:15 Mark: The problem is I gotta stop editing out when somebody says something absurd because it's obviously giving away their true opinion.

38:24 Dylan: It's the philosophical slip.

38:25 Mark: When Wes calls Sartre's book the transcendental ego, as opposed to a transcendence of the ego. That's because he has a finish the joke.

38:34 Wes: Did I say that?

38:35 Mark: Yes.

38:35 Seth: He has a Husserlian axe to grind.

38:38 Wes: No, because I have a Kantian axe to grind.

38:41 Seth: Well, we take that for granted. Well, wow. I don't know. I guess I was just thinking about how I like to build an understanding. But I think that, Mark, you brought the conversation back to that. If we can buy into the idea that essentially children have some kind of pre linguistic experience which because it cannot be articulated because it's not already structured by language, we can only guess at what it is that they need and want and then we start giving them language or we start taking it on. If you're in the role of the child and eventually you begin to get a shape of your quote unquote world.

And this is what Lacan and just. I'M going to assume for the sake. Now, if I say Lacan going forward, I mean, Fink on Lacan, just so that everybody can make that assumption, that language is a symbolic order. And what he wants to say is that when you get language and you start to get a symbolic order to your experience, what he says is it cancels the real and it creates reality. So this goes back to Wes's comment about, you can think of the real as maybe like the thing in itself. The real is just anything that we. And even when I say experience, I'm already assuming an ego or a subject, and I don't want to, but I don't really know how else to put it.

The real is what the world is to an individual prior to it being structured or ordered by language or some sort of symbolic order. And what Lacan wants to say is, even after you acquire language and you start saying, okay, well, this is a chair, and this is my mom, and that's outside, and this is inside, and you start putting a structure to the world and to your relationships, and even, oh, this is me, like, you look in the mirror and you say, this is me, there's still a tremendous amount of stuff that isn't part of your symbolic structure. And so what you can name and talk about is reality.

And reality is a construct that requires language. But there's still this real, which isn't structured symbolically and doesn't have meaning. And that doesn't mean that you can't give it some. In fact, life is this constant progression of turning the real into reality. But that. That always floats out there.

41:03 Dylan: Can you say, Seth, how the soup of reality that isn't articulated is different than just secrets that you don't know that would normally be articulable? So, for instance, the woman that you believed was your mother your whole life, you find out later, was not your biological mother. Or pick something even more mundane, things that were simply unknown or secreted from you. Or even something like, I didn't realize that germs cause disease and that actually I have these.

41:34 Wes: This sounds like the pragmatist line of argument against the Kantian thing in itself, right?

41:39 Dylan: Maybe it is. I guess what I'm trying to find out is, is there a distinction between the things that go unnamed because I haven't named them yet, but normally would have named them versus things that are?

41:53 Wes: The idea is that there are things which just cannot be symbolized that escape symbolization.

41:58 Dylan: Okay? It's not even just the case that they have not yet been symbolized. It's that they are unsymbolizable.

42:05 Seth: I think at one point he uses the language. The inability to determine the validity of all elements in an axiomatic system points to the presence or influence of the real on the symbolic. He actually does a version of the Barber paradox, talking about art catalogs to address Dylan's point. Yes, I believe it's the strong version of that. Not it hasn't been yet, but that there will always be elements that can't be. And that's what his use of that particular analogy is.

42:33 Dylan: And let me just articulate that strong sense. It's also the case that the characteristic of these things is fundamental in articulability. It's not the weaker version that there's just an infinite number, an infinite progression of them, such that the problem is one of just the ocean being just too big to articulate all the pieces.

42:54 Mark: I think you guys are drawing a distinction where there is not one in the reading that the real is both of these things. It's what has not been articulated yet. Because when we are pre linguistic, everything is the real. But it's also when we are mature, the residuum. And as you said, any particular thing you say there's something that that sentence excludes. Something that, given that you've said, that sentence cannot be said. There's a residuum, he says, of any given articulation act and that will remain in the real. So there are parts of the real that are unarticulatable. But then plenty of the real is just doesn't happen to have been articulated yet.

43:33 Seth: Mark, I don't think that's exactly correct either. And I don't know, maybe this is not a distinction that's worth making. But remember that language and symbolic systems are formed by chains of associations and context. There is no foundational, unknowable, unspeakable thing or real that can never be articulated in that sense. What he says is as you acquire language and as the symbolic order that is language structures the world and all that stuff, the real certain way kind of disappears to be replaced by reality. But there's always a residual and.

And what he says is that becomes the second real. And what I think he means is anytime you have a structured system of this sort, there will always be things that will elude the grasp of that structured system. And they're not necessarily some fixed, immutable thing that we don't have privileged access to. What it means is as you find a way to name something that had not previously been named and bring it into the symbolic order. There will be things that then fall outside. New concepts, new ways of articulating things, new structures that will become unarticulated until we in turn articulate them.

And that's that residual. That exists, and it will always exist. Because you can't capture everything in your symbolic order.

44:48 Wes: Yeah. On page 25, the real is perhaps best understood as that which has not yet been symbolized. Remains to be symbolized or even resists symbolization. And it may perfectly well exist alongside and in spite of a speaker's considerable linguistic capabilities. I thought the way Mark put it was pretty good. Because it gets at the sense of, principally, anytime we are doing something in the symbolic order. And anytime we're signifying, we're leaving something out. We're leaving out what can't be represented.

45:19 Seth: One thing we're not talking about when we talk about the real here. It's not truly the Kantian thing in itself. Where we're just in a process of trying to name what hasn't been named. Because if you remember the stuff about the coin tossing and the structure, the ciphering that he talks about. That you can put on top of the random coin tosses, he says that even that every level or every cipher that you add. In essence opens the door to the real at the ciphering level. And not just at the kind of. Let's call it, original world level.

45:51 Wes: Let's look at his example on page 24. The real is, for example, an infant's body before it comes under the sway of the symbolic order, before it is subjected to toilet training and instructed in the ways of the world. So in this case, he's giving an infant's body as an instance of the real. In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers. Pleasure is localized in certain zones, While other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social behavioral norms. So the infant's body is but one unbroken erogenous zone, There being no privilege zones, no areas in which pleasure is circumscribed at the outset.

So you get this idea of a sort of. I don't know if amorphous is the right word, but the cuts haven't been made yet. So in the symbolic order, we take this undifferentiated stuff and we start naming and distinguishing and making conceptual differences and doing all of that work. But the idea is that once you've done that, say, with the infant's body, it's not like you're conquering the real once and for all. There's always some of that left over. And what's left over absolutely resists symbolization.

46:56 Seth: But then on page 27, he also says that there's a second order real. The symbolic order gives rise to a second order real that links into that thing about the purloined letter. I don't think we need to continue to argue about this, say more about

47:09 Mark: the second order real, because I think that's a good additional point.

47:12 Seth: Well, I'll just read a quote here. We can, however, also show that he talks about how you have the sort of original real that you experience at birth and how it gets progressively symbolized, gets turned into reality.

47:23 Mark: You just want to punch him that he used real and reality to mean different things. That is the most obnoxious as a rhetorical device. Reality isn't real, according to this, because the real is the unarticulated reality, is the social articulated reality.

47:42 Seth: So he says there is thus always a remainder which persists alongside the symbolic. So that's the real that can't be symbolized or resist symbolization, it says. We can, however, also show that the symbolic order itself gives rise to a second order real. One way of describing this process is found in a part of Lacan's postface to the seminar on purloined letter for the symbolic order, as modeled by Lacan's numeric and alphabetic matrices produces something in the course of its autonomous operation that goes beyond the symbolic order itself. That's the incompleteness of the axiomatic system piece, where even if we build a symbolic order that we think is complete, there will always be something left outside of it, which can of course be symbolized. But then we'll just go through that iterative process on and on and on.

48:26 Mark: Right? So there's an analogy, if you're familiar that you're with Godel in the incompleteness proof, and you can look it up on the Internet if you're not, that there's always things about the system that you can't say in the system. So he uses that as an analogy. But it's not like this is exactly what's going on. In fact, Fink reproduces part of this appendix to the purloined letter, which we're not even going to talk about when we talk about the purloined letter next time. That gives the most graphic example of how he sees this kind of code. He writes out this string of mathematical symbols.

That's if you have coin tosses and you encode them in a certain way and you double the code and you slide it over one. Then you can see you can't have a triple after a single. And it doesn't matter the details at all. He's just saying that there are syntactic facts. Saying the unconscious is a language is to say there's things that syntactically work in it, and there are things that don't. And the things that don't syntactically work in it by definition can't be said. So that's the second order reel. First order just hasn't been said yet. There's no language at all involved.

49:23 Wes: And it's the residuum as well, though.

49:25 Mark: The first order, yes, residuum. In other words, what is left over in a chemical reaction.

49:30 Wes: So page 28, the final paragraph of that section, he gives this relationship between the first order and second order reals. So the first real, that of trauma and fixation, the real is also associated with Freud's death drive and with trauma, which leads to death drive, people behaving essentially self destructively. Trauma and fixation returns in a sense, in the form of a center of gravity around which the symbolic order is condemned to circle without ever being able to hit it. It gives rise to impossibilities within the chain itself. So the idea here is that if there's some traumatic moment in your life that you haven't been able to symbolize and it drives you to do things that you don't understand why you do them.

You're an alcoholic, for instance, or you have dreams every night of the war that you were in. It's inexplicable why your psyche would want to return to these horrible experiences in analysis or in dream work. And the process of dreaming, where you would expect that a free association between ideas might lead you back to that point of trauma, well, the signifying chain will actually circumvent that with that second order real thing. He's trying to give you an idea of. You know, we can think of it circumventing it purely syntactically in the way that we can think that some sentences simply can't be formulated because they're not grammatically correct.

And the sentence that you would need to get back to that traumatic moment is not grammatical, let's say. So you get this relationship between the first order real and then second order real, the inability to symbolize it, no matter how hard you try.

51:01 Mark: The unconscious is related to the real in a way that we haven't fully sketched out.

51:05 Wes: Well, the unconscious Right is in the symbolic order, largely. But we get, as Fink is pointing out here, it has an important relationship to the real. If the association with drives, death drive, and libidinal drives is right, then what's going on in the unconscious? This slippage between signifiers has to be driven by something. It's libidinal, so you have something energetic going on. There's some sort of libidinal energy. Freud uses this word, cathexis, that occupies a given idea, let's say. Or for Lacan, a signifier in the unconscious. It can just freely slip around based on free associations, like we saw with the Schnab example.

Or a dream in which one event actually represents something else. Or horse representing father. Fear is what represents this energy that I'm talking about, and that's been displaced from father to horse. So that energetic component has to come from somewhere. And that's, I would say, is the real. So I would say nothing would really happen. You wouldn't be able to go from one signifier to the next without the real. There is that important relationship.

52:04 Mark: So even though he doesn't want to say there's agency in the real, because there's no self yet there's no subject, but yet he still talks about when you're saying something, there's two levels of discourse going on at the same time. There's what you intend to be saying, and then there's what you're dwelling on unconsciously. So there is still thinking going on unconsciously, even though apparently it is not the unconscious that is doing the thinking, because the unconscious itself is just a bunch of dead strings. So it has to be the real that is thinking.

52:34 Wes: Yeah. For Freud, what was in the unconscious were thoughts. There was philosophical controversy at that time. When Freud came out with this idea, well, how does it make sense for a thought to be unconscious? It has to be conscious by its very nature. And Freud, I think, successfully argued against that. And he says, look, it functions like a thought in the same way that I have a certain belief. Obama is not a Muslim. I don't have to have been paying attention to that in my head to have actually held that belief. That belief could easily function just in the same way that a conscious belief would.

I would behave as if that were true. And I have all sorts of beliefs that I'm not conscious of at a given time that functionally affect my behavior. So for Freud, it's just thoughts that are in the unconscious. For Lacan, again, he's stripping out the signified half of that and leaving Us just with signifier, stripping out the semantics and leaving us with syntax. So where, for Freud, there were slippages between meanings, let's say, I think for Lacan, the unconscious is a meaningless place. Now, I don't know that you would want to say that. That doesn't mean that there's thinking going on, right?

Because if you look at some of the philosophy of mind stuff that we've done, right. Some philosophers want to reduce thinking to simply syntax. When you want to say that thinking is just brain states, well, brain states are essentially just physically instantiated syntax, it's a functionalist project, is to reduce semantics, to say that semantics is in some way reducible to syntax and to accomplish that reduction. So I think you could say some type of thinking is still going on in the unconscious for Lacan, but we have to keep in mind that it's all at the level of the signifier and syntax.

54:12 Mark: Fink says that Lacan characterizes the unconscious as just syntax and no semantics. But the examples that are given there don't seem to hold up to that. So one of the examples is you may have heard when you were a baby, maybe not even talking yet, but still understanding. And you heard your dad say, hell, never amount to anything. And in fact, he was referring to the neighbor's kid, but somehow that sentence stuck with you and then makes you feel inferior all through your life because it's sitting down there. Well, clearly there is semantics there. You think that Hill refers to you. That's semantics.

54:47 Wes: So you're exactly right. This is one really important criticism of the structuralist and Saussurean and Lacanian project is it's really not just signifiers. And this is where I think Freud's approach is actually superior. I like the fact that there are still meanings in Freud. I think their idea is that in theory, we're going to say that it's all reducible to signifiers, it's all reducible to syntax. But the examples we give, of course, we can't do that because no one has ever been able to reduce semantics to syntax.

55:15 Dylan: So doesn't part of it come down to if you're going to have a relation, you have to have it between two relata. If you're going to have a syntax, it has to be between elements of something. And so they would seem to have to come with each other. They may interfere with one another. They may have a kind of joined togetherness. You're going to have elements that are going to be related to one another. You're going to have syntax that's going to be about things, entities, you're going to have to have something that you're going to claim that's going to be those entities.

55:42 Wes: The signifiers refer to ideas or concepts. From our Sasure episode. The idea was that the sign is divided between signifier and signified. And it's the relation of a given signifier in the. The entire system of signifiers that somehow establishes its signified. The concept emerges out of its syntactical relationship. You know, I'm reminded of the carnap where he tries to build up the world from what almost seems syntactical.

56:13 Mark: So chicken is not because it refers to those clucking animals, is because the word chicken is different than turkey and is used in such and such circumstances. It's to do with the relationship of sentences about chickens to other sentences is what ultimately determines the meaning of chicken. Not some ostensive pointing to a chicken and saying chicken.

56:31 Wes: And I don't think we have to settle whether or not we think that's true. I don't think it's true. I don't think that works. And I think we can reformulate a lot of Lacanian concepts. Even if we don't like the idea of signifiers stripped of their signifieds, doing their thing in the unconscious. I don't think that's fatal to the rest of the project.

56:49 Seth: I didn't even read that into what we read from Fink. But either way, you have to take him that way at both the level of the real and the level of reality. Both at the conscious level of symbolization in our natural language as well as the symbolization of the unconscious. Because he does say that's how we started off this discussion, that the unconscious is the language of the other. And then we have the language that we adopt and take on to ourselves. But in both cases, they're symbolic structures that have signifiers that require a chain and a context or follow rules.

And what he says is that at least one of the differences between the two is that the unconscious. It has a different set of rules that it follows where natural language, we have, grammar we have. There's all different sorts of things. The unconscious can use alliteration and imagery. It can draw upon memories that our conscious mind may not even recognize or may not acknowledge. In essence, like you say, we haven't spoken them out. So they're still part of the real. They're not, not reality for us. So the unconscious works the same way at the high level as the conscious use of Language does.

It just follows a different set of rules.

58:00 Wes: Yeah, it has a freer grammar.

58:02 Seth: It has a freer grammar, exactly. So whichever way we take Lacan, we're taking him that way at both levels of this discussion that he's not distinguishing and saying, one has syntax and one doesn't.

58:12 Dylan: Or.

58:12 Seth: Sorry, whatever. One has semantics and one doesn't. Yes.

58:16 Wes: The semantics is at the realm of the imaginary. So in Saussure, when we had signifier and signified. The signified is in the realm of the imaginary. It's the conceptual, it's the imagistic. So the unconscious, by its very nature, is stripped of the imaginary. We don't have the signified at the level of the unconscious.

58:33 Seth: I don't know what that means.

58:35 Mark: I thought that anything that is conscious could potentially sink to the level of the unconscious. So if we're saying imaginary includes, say, the whole formation of the ego. So, you know, I think I'm a great football player or whatever. And then there's a trauma and I can't even say the word football anymore. Well, the idea that I was a good football player has now been pushed down to the unconscious. So it was imaginary.

58:59 Wes: What's in the unconscious is just the words. That's just the words, though, not the meanings.

59:03 Mark: It's just the words. Football player. It's not.

59:05 Wes: It's the signifiers.

59:06 Mark: I don't actually think on any level, on an unconscious level, that I'm a great football player. It's just the word that I can't say anymore. Football.

59:14 Wes: Well, really, we should say signifier. But, yeah, it's something like. That's the radical idea. What's pushed down is these strings. It's these signifiers. As opposed to the way we would think about with Freud, Mark, which is what you were pointing to, where the idea that's pushed down for Lacan, I think we lose half of it. We lose the imaginary part. We lose the signified. And what ends up in the unconscious is just the signifier.

59:37 Mark: I gotta say that this, like the example that I gave of the. He'll never amount to anything. It really reminded me, made me laugh of something I'd read in high school, which was Dianetics, which has this very same kind of idea that there are sentences that get in our unconscious. For L. Ron Hubbard, the only time they get there is when you are actually unconscious. You're in a moment of pain and somebody says something next to you, and that'll stick right in there. Those are the engrams. In fact, whenever you're unconscious, it really needs to be very quiet around you or these things will get stuck in there.

And the example that it still makes me laugh today from Dianetics was, so while you're in the womb is the big time. You would get these sentences that then would lodge in you as these engrams that you then have to pay the Scientologists money to remove. So if the mother is in pain, in labor pains, and she says, ugh, this is too terrible to be born, like B O R N E, then you will interpret that as I am too terrible to be born. And you'll have that as a thing that you'll carry around with you. And just the fact that that's so obviously absurd makes me feel like Lacan's statement about these sentences getting stuck in your unconscious is just as absurd.

1:00:44 Wes: Sorry. Yeah, but obviously the idea of repression is not itself absurd, but the idea

1:00:49 Mark: that a sentence that it's not a meaning, that it's a sentence that is oppressed. Therefore, a pun, the two notions of born or. Well, it' not even exactly the example of, you know, he'll never amount to anything. It's the fact that it's not the word he is a pun. It's that he is a. Could refer to me or could refer to somebody else.

1:01:06 Dylan: Pronoun trouble.

1:01:07 Mark: Yes, it's a pronoun trouble. But as we were saying before about the two words having the same letter, and that could cause a connection in a dream or in an unconscious state, that those are exactly the kind of things, those stupid puns like born and born. My parents were watching the Bourne Identity, and I. And then I wake up as a super spy because of. It's ridiculous.

1:01:30 Wes: I'm not sure it's as obviously ridiculous, even though I think it's problematic. Because if you think about what is a latent memory, what is a memory that we're not thinking of at the current moment, we might want to say, well, it's just a brain state. And the brain state is purely itself syntactical. Once it gets evoked, you could say there's this subjective imaginary, then it gets re. Saturated with the imaginary. Let's say it can be reanimated at any time. And you could think of. Of Lacan's signifiers in just the same way. I don't know if that helps, but it's.

1:02:01 Mark: No, it does.

1:02:02 Wes: It gets us into deep problems that we can't really resolve. But I think it's not critical to whether or not this project succeeds that his theory of language and the Unconscious being structured like language in the way he thinks that language works, that it all rests or fails on that. Because I think the Freudian idea of repression that he's pivoting off of is coherent and important.

1:02:22 Mark: I think we need to get along to the self and saying something if we want to, in more detail, but the mirror stage, and be done with the unconscious for the moment. If that works, what's the next level? So we have a self, a conscious self that is imaginary, that is built over time. We've now said all about the real and the first level of the real. How does the Mirror Stage paper help us understand the formation of the conscious, imaginary, linguistically infected self? You already said in the very beginning, Wes, what the mirror stage is, which is described in the Mirror Stage paper that we read is you actually, at the age of 6 months to 18 months, somewhere in there, before you are speaking, you look and you see yourself in the mirror and you are pleased.

You identify fallaciously as you. And it's fallacious because at this point we don't have unified control even of our own bodies. As you said, portions of our body are unmapped. We're one big erogenous zone. We are in essence, very fragmented. We are not under our own control. And seeing this gestalt, this unified image of me as a whole body in the mirror gives me this new sense of self.

1:03:36 Wes: You say this is me, so it gives me the me, gives me this self. Referential self consciousness.

1:03:42 Mark: Now, what's wrong with that? It's a normal part of development. But he says it's imaginary. I keep wanting to say illusory.

1:03:49 Wes: Well, he does call it a misrecognition. Right? méconnaissance, which some people will argue misrecognition isn't the best translation of that. What makes it a misrecognition is that it's similar to the arguments against an idea of a substance ego, Right? A Cartesian ego. We're not this metaphysically unified ego. It helps to think of ourselves as unified. But based on this image, this looking at ourselves in a mirror or thinking of our bodies as a coherent whole, the reality is that we're quite fragmented.

1:04:22 Dylan: Is that fragmentation of us any different than the fragmentation of any other entity that we would attribute existence to in the world? I took it to be that there's no distinction to be made there at all. If there's something special about us in this respect, as opposed to any other thing that we might attribute existence to, then I'm confused about why you would make that distinction?

1:04:44 Wes: Well, what's special about us is this

1:04:46 Seth: consciousness part in the way that you're talking about it. Dylan, I don't think there's anything special about us versus other things in terms of talking about it being unified or not. But the moment that is expressed in the mirror stage, the moment you get, as Wes said, the me, that in itself is a significant moment. Because that is a lot different than the first time you learn that a tree is a tree or a dog is a dog or a rock is a rock.

1:05:10 Wes: It's not that I don't have an ego or that because in a way, I'm constructing my ego in that moment. The misrecognition is to identify the subject with the ego. And that's the mistake. The subject is not the ego. And we find that out when we start to develop symptoms or through slips of tongue, we find out that the subject is actually what's been buried under the ego, the unconscious.

1:05:34 Seth: Are you saying that the moment of the recognition of gestalt, that there's a unity to us is a misrecognition? Because we believe that that unity implies kind of the Cartesian ego, when in fact, all it implies a unity of symbolic structure.

1:05:51 Wes: Suppose I grow up thinking, yeah, I really want to be a doctor, and I become a doctor. Conceivably, I could find out that that really wasn't my desire. That was my mother's desire for me. And that became part of my ego because I identified with my mother and I identified with her desire. And I could find out in analysis that my desires are quite different. And that's the whole point. Whatever desires you develop at the level of the imaginary and through constituting this ego, they may not necessarily be yours and they may cause you some conflicts.

1:06:23 Seth: Okay, so taking from the Fink book and combining with this, what I took away from this is that when the child has this moment and they're confronted, in a way, their development biologically along with the other as language. Because at this point, the only other in their world is language. And they're forced to make a choice.

1:06:44 Wes: The first other is the mother. Mother is before language.

1:06:49 Seth: Really.

1:06:50 Wes: The first other for the child is the mother. This mirror stage is pre linguistic. You have to be indoctrinated into the symbolic order through castration, which is something hopefully we'll get to. Oh, gosh, that's the big other.

1:07:02 Mark: Metaphorical castration. All right.

1:07:05 Wes: Yes, yes.

1:07:06 Seth: I don't understand what distinctions you're making are really important. And what are just phases. I'm really confused here. I'm just taking what Fink has to say on the subject.

1:07:16 Wes: Yeah, well, he goes through the whole mother and castration thing, right?

1:07:19 Seth: Yeah, eventually, but not at this point. That happens a little bit later on. The child has a self recognition. There is a me. There is a unity that is me, and it is not some other unity. There's a distinction. There are boundaries between me and other things, in particular the mother. And what this in turn means is that the child goes through this state where it then understands, oh, I'm not the same as my mother. I'm something different. But just like I have desires, the mother has desires. The mother's desire must naturally be me because she is all that I desire.

The mother is everything to the child, and the child thinks that it is everything to the mother. And then when the child realizes that the mother has desires for something other than the child, that's where the real drama unfolds. It's in the process of that separation that the child, in essence, he uses the term alienation. That alienation creates subjectivity, where subjectivity is understood as being this unity that has to confront the desire of the mother, AKA the other.

1:08:27 Mark: I think part of what we're running into is the fact, as we said before, that Fink gives this very clear overall picture of Lacan's thought sucked from a bunch of different years, and gives some idea of the progress in his ideas. And so, according to that, as you were saying, Seth, there's no me until I am alienated in language. That's the first step. The first step is that the parents.

1:08:51 Wes: There's no subject, okay?

1:08:53 Mark: There's no subject until we're alien in language.

1:08:55 Wes: We get the ego first and then we get the subject.

1:08:57 Mark: Okay, I'm confused now because that. I thought that that was the same. Sorry. There is no ego until we're alienated in language. That is how I read think. In other words, we are born into a linguistic system. Your parents have a name figured out for you. You're labeled by sex. You're labeled in all these ways and in all the ways that we just talked about how they even label your desires and things. So we are born into this linguistic system, thereby being alienated from our own desires. So we are alienated in language. And that is the first step in getting an ego at all.

1:09:29 Wes: I think what Fink is trying to do in the beginning is he's trying to give you a quick and easy way to understand otherness. So he jumps right into the language. But obviously, developmentally A child doesn't jump right into the language.

1:09:41 Mark: Let's maybe read a couple paragraphs of actual Lacan. We can't talk this much about his style and not read any of it.

1:09:47 Unknown speaker: It.

1:09:48 Mark: Alright, so the mirror stage, second page. So the first two paragraphs here we should understand what they mean already. From what we've said, we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification in the full sense that analysis gives to the term, namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image whose predestination to this phase effect is sufficiently indicated by the use in analytic theory of the ancient term imago. So in other words, image. That's why we're saying it's imaginary, because it has to do with the image imago.

I'm identifying with this image of me in the mirror. This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form before it is objectified and the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it in the universal, its function as subject. I read into that just what we were saying that Fink says, which is that it's not until language that you get the I as subject.

So here it is. Here's the I in primordial form before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other. So language is what makes you think of yourself in terms of. Of the other. But this is you looking at a mirror. This is supposed to be just you figuring something out. All right, so here's where. Where it gets interesting. Then this form would have to be called the ideal I if we wish to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization.

So it's the ideal I in some way, which makes it sound even more fake and more imaginary.

1:11:36 Wes: So this is the ideal I as in what I should be. And at this point, libidinal normalization, I think, refers to restraining your impulses.

1:11:46 Mark: It seems strange to me that we'd have the notion of an ideal I this early. That what you're saying in terms of restraining your impulses like that all comes. That's super ego talk. That all sounds like it's after society gets to us. Why would we have an ideal before that?

1:12:00 Wes: So Initially, your libidinal impulses. You have a libidinal impulse towards the mother. Let's say you can redirect that libidinal impulse towards yourself. That's what an identification is. So you say, I'm going to be just like Mommy. And then you love yourself for being like her in just the way that you loved her outside of you. These identifications are a form of incorporation. You figure out, what is it that mom wants from me? What does she desire? And I gave this example. Obviously, an infant isn't thinking. It wants to become a doctor. But it's a more obvious example for an adult. Someone who becomes a doctor and realizes that that desire was based on an identification with his mother and his mother's desires. So in that sense, I think it's fictional. It's fictional in the sense that it wasn't really his desire, it was his mother's desire.

1:12:48 Dylan: This is where the notion fictional becomes confusing. Because when you say that it's not really his desire, it was his mother's desire, that doesn't seem to quite get at it. He had unarticulated desires, and then he appropriates a desire that's in line with his mother's desire. But to say that there's no association between his own desires and his mother's desires. Or his appropriation of his mother's desire isn't somehow his own. It certainly could be possible. That was the case. And I can see in these kind of pathological instances where you would have conflict between them.

That there was an appropriation that was somehow undesired, or you appropriated it, and then there ended up being a conflict within you that was previously unarticulated and so forth. But to say that it's fictional would mean to say that that's always the case. That that desire is appropriated without any desire on your own part. That it doesn't involve your own desiring at all. It only involves imposed desire. I can imagine that being the case in some instances. Only limit it to purely pathological cases or traumatic cases. And that kind of thing.

Not all influence and not all appropriation is going to involve you taking on desires that are merely foreign to you. It could be an articulation of your own desire that you actually had. That it fits perfectly well.

1:14:11 Wes: Well, many of these desires will end up being things that you couldn't really have without a society. Right. They're so socially complicated that.

1:14:20 Dylan: Yeah, but that doesn't mean they're not your own.

1:14:22 Wes: In a sense. They are, of course, your own. To the extent that You've appropriated them, but we're talking about their foreign origin, which is cultural. And we're not to culture yet here, but we're.

1:14:32 Dylan: Yeah, but this is where this whole language of fictional. Not fictional, real, not real. Saying that it's a fiction implies that there's a truth. That is the thing that we must get to. I take a lot of this analysis to be that it's a fiction in the way in which all storytelling, as true as it is, is also a fiction in the very symbolism of it. It's not touching the thing in itself. And so therefore, to that extent, it is a fiction that's a different sort of fiction than something that is not true.

1:15:05 Mark: Yeah, I think we've already established that he uses real and reality to mean opposite things. So the fact that he's using the word fiction in a way that it's not accord with our normal uses of it, and it seems to imply a contrary that he in fact then will deny as well should not be surprising to us. I think this just goes part and parcel with his general style.

1:15:26 Dylan: But it's a general kind of provocativeness that uses that way of speaking and then denies, Tries to deny the terms of the provocativeness. You say reality or the real, but you don't really mean real, you mean something else.

1:15:38 Wes: Well, I think most people, though, attribute to themselves a kind of agency and decision making. They underestimate the extent to which their desires and their psychological makeup and all that stuff come from the outside. And lots of people are alienated. Lots of people don't know what they really want.

1:15:57 Mark: For instance, the fiction here is that each of us comes fully developed with a set of desires that we have only to figure out.

1:16:07 Wes: Yeah.

1:16:08 Mark: The analogy here, and it's just an analogy, is by seeing yourself in the mirror, you see yourself as a whole. He says the subject anticipates in a mirage, the maturation of his power. So it's like we're seeing this whole thing and saying, ah, that's who I am. Yes, now I've got it figured out. Like, no, you don't have it figured out at all. In fact, you are pretty much an empty vessel that as soon as language gets to you, it's gonna fill you full of crap that is not really you, because there's nothing that's really you. And if you're gonna develop a sense of independence, it's gonna be a long road of creativity. It's not just a matter of self discovery, let alone just, I need to get back and rediscover this whole feeling of power that I had as a six month old when I saw myself in the mirror.

1:16:55 Wes: Right. That's something that a lot of people never give up pursuing that sense of power.

1:17:01 Mark: Look, and I think the point, as I just articulated, that he's trying to make and your objection, Dylan, to his style, both are relevant to the argument that I think you said at the beginning of this podcast, that he's obscure on purpose is because in the Fink book, toward the end, there's an argument, it's an actual argument for not writing clearly, which is fascinating to me. And the idea is that if you understand what I say completely, that can only happen in a case where we are already speaking according to a common framework. And I'm just filling in some details.

If we're playing Tic Tac Toe together and I don't want to write right now, so I'm just telling you X in the upper right and then you put the X for me. Well, the only reason that you understand X in the upper right so clearly in that situation is because Tic Tac Toe is a simplistic, stupid game that you already fully understand. So X in the upper right can only mean one possible thing. That is a paradigm case of understanding as assimilation. You are assimilating one new piece of data. The fact that I want to make this move here, and he thinks that that is analogical to what the analytic philosopher, to someone who demands clarity out of every explanation, wants out of you.

He says there can't be anything fundamentally new that is taught if all the other person is doing who's explaining something to you is filling in the details. If they're saying anything the least bit new, then they're setting up some kind of new framework that is going to take you a little time to understand. And so he purposefully speaks elliptically. Obtusely. Is that the right word? Not obtusely, but opaquely. So that you are challenged to figure out where he's coming from. And then once you're immersed enough in the world, then it'll be a little clearer.

But even for folks that have been following his teachings all along, and this is sort of his desired audience, his desired audience, I think, is himself. Somebody that's already read everything he's ever written previously to this moment, even that person should kind of be stunned a little and thrown off a little, because look at me, I'm throwing out a new curveball. I'm giving you some new insight here. And so that's his excuse, which is not ultimately that different from Heidegger saying, look, I'm creating a fundamentally new ontological system.

I gotta make up some new language to deliver that.

1:19:23 Dylan: It's way different than that.

1:19:24 Mark: That it's different in that it's a moving target.

1:19:26 Dylan: Heidegger would say that he's being. It's very difficult because he's making up new stuff, but not that he's trying to be purposefully obscure. So as for your own damn good, you'll figure out what it is new that's in what he's talking about. He should just read Meno. There's a perfect example of somebody being taken through an idea and discovering something new and coming out dumbfounded at the end and still not being sure what they understood yet seeing that it's there and being now pregnant with the notion that there's something that they didn't know about in the world, all the while it being utterly clear.

1:20:06 Mark: Just to clarify, Dylan is name dropping. The part of the Platonic dialogue in which Plato leads a slave through discovering the Pythagorean theorem or something like that. Some basic mathematical fact.

1:20:17 Wes: And when we say leads, we mean really leads. And the slave just says, yes, okay, yes, yes.

1:20:23 Dylan: And that's why I picked that example, right? Because the conceit is that by being clear and leading along that you cannot have a student discover something new. And it's just not true.

1:20:35 Mark: I still see the comparison that he thinks the main thing that humans are guilty of is thinking that they understand things already that they don't. That we think we have. This I already figured out, but it turns out it's a fiction. Ha. There is me. I am already mapped out. And this is. Obviously, it's not as articulated as that the baby doesn't have language and things, but we have this great conceit that flows into us and he is trying to, by being more conceited than we are and expecting us to follow him around like as if we have a string tied to our nose.

And this is an example that one of my professors used for following Wittgenstein. You have a string that you tie between your nose and the tail of a tortoise, and you have to follow it around. This is something that some kind of Buddhist monks or something used to have to do to prove their patience. That until you are humbled and patient enough, you will never be able to learn true wisdom. And so, of course, Lacan is the guy who's then set himself up as the master that is the only one capable of bringing you to this enlightenment.

1:21:40 Seth: Well, if that's the case, then he succeeded magically in confounding you. He's tremendously influential and popular, if only in the kind of name dropping sort of way he obviously taught thousands and thousands of students. People came from all over the world to get in on his ideas and study. He was tremendously influential, which makes me wonder. And I'm not going to sit here and say he was popular, so he must have had something significant to say. But anybody who's that influential, I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and say there's some meat on the bone.

And I'm also inclined to give the benefit of the doubt from a. I have a project, and I make conscious choices about why I do things. And so if the seminars, as opposed to the Écrits, demonstrate that he has the capability to express himself more clearly than he chooses to in the other works, then we have to say, okay, well, there's a reason he's trying to do this. And I am perfectly okay with the idea that, taking Mark's point about Heidegger, maybe Lacan is trying to write in some way that forces us to disrupt or confuse our embeddedness in the symbolic order and see if he can't kickstart some kind of recognition of something that's currently real for us and not reality, and institute a new symbolic order.

And we may say, okay, well, he fails miserably. Right? Or you can't create your own language, right, that it has to be done dialogically and dynamically. And I don't know that he ever anywhere said, this is why I write the way I do, or even alluded to it. Right. But I feel the same way about Derrida, that Derrida's method, in a certain way, kind of necessitated that he articulate himself in a very bizarre way, or at least he felt it did. And so even if we say, okay, don't get it, can't understand it, project isn't a success, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That being said, I'd rather read Fink.

1:23:41 Mark: Well, let's go back to Fink and at least try to make some headway through some of the rest of his theory of self. Before we give up for the night. We inserted that thing about the mirror stage, if only to fill in a little the detail of how we get into this alienated language in the first place. So we developed the conscious ego as a product of language. We're saying it's really what our parents, or what we figure out through Interacting with our parents tell us it is. And the way our desires are tamed by being socially articulated. Do we put the castration part right in that same step there?

1:24:20 Seth: No, no. There's a few steps before castration, I think.

1:24:24 Dylan: And do you mean tamed in particular, Mark, or do you mean just shaped?

1:24:29 Mark: I think they are shamed that the. Did I just say shamed?

1:24:34 Dylan: You just said shamed.

1:24:35 Mark: I meant shaped and tamed. They were shamed, man. That's exactly the.

1:24:40 Seth: Wow. The other just came through and erupted you.

1:24:46 Mark: And yet I can give a perfectly reasonable explanation of it.

1:24:49 Unknown speaker: Which is?

1:24:49 Mark: Which is that I wanted to say both shaped end team that they are the same thing. And perhaps shame is one of the ways in which we can do that. No unconscious was needed to account for my utterance there.

1:25:00 Seth: Well, actually, all you did was you just brought that real into reality by putting it into the symbolic structure.

1:25:06 Dylan: Reality sub 1 or 2.

1:25:10 Seth: We'll have to wait till we hear Mark's song about this to know which reality it was.

1:25:15 Dylan: Tamed, shaped and shamed seem to be. Be importantly distinct. That's all I would say.

1:25:23 Mark: All right, well, take us to the next step.

1:25:24 Seth: Okay. You're alienated by language, which means you move from everything is me. And there's no sense of articulation of desire or self or anything like that. And then you have to come to grips with the fact that you and your mother are not the same. Specifically, your desires and your mother's desires could possibly conflict or don't align. And what this means, this alienation, as soon as desire comes into play, where desires conflict or you can't satisfy the desire of your mother or vice versa, then it shows a lack. And Fink says that lack is an ontological term for Lacan, which represents something out of place.

So alienation is this institution of the symbolic order and simultaneously the creation of this disruption or the recognition of this lack or something being out of place. So what happens is that the child will try to fill that lack. It tries to first of all be everything for the mother that the mother desires. And it realizes that it can't be that. And one of the things that it realizes that the mother has desire for the father or maybe the name of the father. I didn't quite get what the difference between.

1:26:36 Wes: Or for anything else, anything other than

1:26:38 Seth: the father or for anything at some point, the child's recognition of and the way that it deals with this awareness of the lack and the presence of the fact that the mother has other desires that the child can't fulfill will dictate what type of mental state it's going to have later on. If it fails to successfully confront this and recognize and be okay with the fact that the mother is going to have other desires and that that other desire might be the father or the other mother or something like that, then it will have one type of psychological disorder, let's say, that needs to be treated in one way.

Way, and if it gets stuck in another way, it'll have to be treated in a different way. And somehow. And this I'll leave Wes to explain this is that castration is somehow kind of like an ontological term, like lack to describe one way of either getting stuck in or relating to this recognition or this stage.

1:27:32 Wes: Yeah, I mean, ultimately castration. Right. Is really just giving in to the realization that you can always have what you want and that you are beholden to rules and regulations. That's really ultimately what that's about. So it's insofar as we're socialized, insofar as we internalize all these superego prohibitions and we say, yes, I can't have dessert until after dinner and I can't do this and I can't do that, I can't have everything I want, then I've accepted this psychological castration. Really what I'm accepting is I'm individuating from the mother.

I'm accepting that I'm not the only thing that my mother desires. I come to see her as a subject and with her own desires and needs that don't have anything to do with me, which is a terrifying process. Right. If you think that the infant starts out seeing the mother as the sort of godlike figure who provides for all its needs and is there whenever it wants, the idea that she would desire something else, have her own lack and have her own desires is sort of a terrifying thing. But it's something that has to be ultimately has to be accepted. And that's castration.

1:28:44 Mark: Well, and isn't part of it is it's a relief because relating to the mother in this initial way, when you're trying to be all of her that she desires, is that the mother is godlike. The mother is, insofar as she has desires herself, these desires are unpredictable and terrifying. And it's just as awful to be smothered as to be neglected. And so it's good that the mother's desire gets channeled somewhere else and that she wants the father or something else in her life, because otherwise we would be overwhelmed by this. So this is where that term jouissance comes in, right?

That I am there at the mercy of my mother's, of someone else's desire. It could be wonderful, but it also could be horrifying. And it's the passing forth between those that is part of what makes jouissance. Why it's not just sorrow or joy or something, because it could be either. It's this libidinal, big, scary energy, right?

1:29:42 Wes: Well, yeah. It's important to think that the mother is subject to the law herself and subject to certain cultural norms and necessities because. So think about, for instance, when a mother says, okay, I'm sorry, you can't be with me today. You have to be at daycare and I have to go to my job. The job can be take the role of the father. It could be her work. It could be any number of things. And what she says to the child, she doesn't say, this is what I want. My work fulfills me more than you, or equally as much as you. And so therefore I'm going to work.

She says, I have to do it. You know, it's a necessity. It's almost like a law. And that's a comforting thing because otherwise it could seem almost persecutory. The absence of the mother can come to seem persecutory. That. That's the one of the basic principles at work here. It could seem like her whim. Anything that's frustrating to you could seem simply a matter of her whim and her sort of incomprehensible desire. She desires to be away from me. So the father figure or the job or whatever takes the mother away from me means that, yeah, she's not going to overwhelm me with her desire.

I think that's marked as the point you were making. But it also means that I don't have to create this persecutory explanation for why she's neglecting me.

1:30:58 Mark: Right. So we had that move. And that move then introduces the third part of the relation, which is the father, or as Seth said, the name of the father. It could be an actual father, but it's sort of a stand in for society in general, for rules. And he says that this name of the father, then he talks about this as becoming a master signifier.

1:31:20 Unknown speaker: Right?

1:31:20 Mark: Right.

1:31:21 Wes: Yeah. So the name of the father is a signifier. Right. And there's always a signified for every signifier, which ends up being the phallus, which is to say whatever it is that is, I speculate, that is fulfilling to the mother. But ultimately we get a substitution. The master signifier comes in to substitute for the name of the father. And the phallus gets fragmented into these object A's. These objet petit a's, which are. I don't know. I don't know how to explain that.

1:31:52 Mark: Object A. The other's desire. Yeah, whatever that is. And that becomes an object of fascination for us. What is it that could hold the mother's desire?

1:32:01 Wes: The name of the father.

1:32:02 Mark: Yeah.

1:32:02 Wes: I think, Mark, it's best to think about this in terms of culture and law, societal rules.

1:32:08 Mark: Right. And then just to connect this to where's the thing About Hamlet, page 65. To the conflicts with the unconscious we were talking about earlier. And this is where. A small example of how Lacan could be used for literary theory. We can see in Lacan's discussion of Hamlet in 7R6 that the subject finally gains access to the signifier of the other's desire. In other words, the name of the father. In other words, whereas the other's desire had simply been named through separation, that name was fixed, static, and thing like in its unchanging effect, rigid in its limited power of designation.

When we just know that the mother is fascinated with something, it's like the MacGuffin. It's just a name that holds all value. But until it is pinned down, then there's a problem there. In neurosis, the name generally remains to be adequately separated from the other's desire. The name is not the death of the thing the signifier is. As long as a rigid connection subsists between the other's desire and a name of the father, the subject is unable to act. Hamlet, according to Lacan, has no access to the phallic signifier prior to his duel with Laertes at the end of Shakespeare's play.

And that is why he is incapable of taking any action. It is only during the duel that he's able to discern the phallus behind the king, to realize that the king is but a stand in for the phallus, the phallus being the signifier of desire that is the other's desire, and can be struck without throwing everything into question. Until Hamlet could finally dissociate the king and the phallus, the king is a king of nothing. Action was impossible, for to take revenge on the king would have threatened to make Hamlet's whole world collapse. It is only when the king, the object of the queen's desire, is signifierized that a power can be discerned beyond the king.

A legitimacy or authority that is not embodied in the king alone, but subsists in the symbolic order beyond the king, above the king. It's really that last sentence, even if the rest of it didn't make sense as it was going through, that was the thing that got me here. It's that when the object of the mother's desire, the name of the father, gets introduced, it's like the society as a whole bearing down on you. And in this case, Hamlet couldn't take any action against his uncle, who was the king, even though he knew the uncle had done some bad stuff, because he associated his uncle here, the king, with the whole institution, with power itself.

1:34:25 Wes: Right. And that power is the only thing separating him from his mother and her jouissance and incest and merger and these sort of horrifying possibilities.

1:34:37 Mark: Yes.

1:34:38 Wes: Until he can realize that actually, no, there's a law beyond this particular person that does that.

1:34:43 Mark: Right. My uncle is just a dude, you know?

1:34:45 Wes: Yeah. And I don't need him to avoid my mother. Essentially, killing my uncle does not imply incest list.

1:34:54 Mark: There you go. Did that example make sense to you guys when you were reading it, or did that come out of the blue?

1:34:59 Seth: It made sense to me. So I'm reading Fink, and I'm trying to read Lacan like a philosopher, right? So I'm like, okay, well, let's understand what this term means, and let's talk about alienation and subjectivity. And when it starts dropping into clinical practice terms or whatever, I try to think of them as being more theoretical, although it's difficult, Right. And people talk about castration and the phallus and the name of the father and the M, capital O, others desire. It's hard to see that ontologically or whatever, but given everything that had been set up to that point, the Hamlet example actually makes a lot of sense.

Although there's something that's slightly perverse to me about doing a psychoanalytic reading of a fictional character like that that I'm not saying it's invalid. It just seems kind of weird to me because the psychoanalytic thing is a clinical practice. It's therapeutic, and it's the talking cure. To use it as an interpretive tool on a literary text is kind of weird to me. Although I guess it shouldn't be, right. Because the whole life of the person is a text, blah, blah, blah. It didn't illuminate anything for me, I should say.

1:36:10 Mark: Well, it's not supposed to illuminate something about Hamlet. It's supposed to illuminate something about Lacan's concept.

1:36:15 Wes: Right.

1:36:15 Dylan: It seems utterly empty if it's not meant to do both.

1:36:19 Wes: Well, there's the idea of explaining a concept by using an example and saying, hey, here's an example from Hamlet which will illustrate my point. And yes, it serves as a little mini reading of Hamlet, and to the extent that you buy it, it can explain the story. But even if you didn't buy the explanation of the story, even if you thought it were an erroneous interpretation of Hamlet, giving him the benefit of the doubt about that, it would still serve to elucidate the concept. You have to bracket off whether it's a very good reading of Hamlet and say, okay, yeah, it elucidates this particular

1:36:48 Dylan: concept only insofar as you understand the concepts being used in the way he's using it to interpret the story. So you might, in the end, decide his interpretation is terrible, but I understand all the ways in which he's doing that interpretation. So this suffices as an example because of the way he constrained the interpretation. Fine.

1:37:06 Wes: We're just trying to understand what Name of the Father means. Yeah.

1:37:09 Dylan: There's a different part about this example, and it just happens all the way through, is that I find myself just consistently and utterly distracted by the psychoanalytical baggage of the whole thing. At the surface level, exclusively sexualizing desire and inclination. It seems to me that Freud does that explicitly, but that here we have with Lacan and Fink saying that these things are more analogical. So libidinal means desiring in a very broad sense. And phallus doesn't mean dick. It means some signifier.

1:37:44 Wes: Signified.

1:37:45 Dylan: Okay, signified. Sorry.

1:37:48 Mark: And castration doesn't mean castration.

1:37:51 Dylan: Castration doesn't mean taking a razor blade and cutting off your balls.

1:37:54 Mark: He's using his out of respect to Freud. Right. Just that they're similar enough to Freud's concepts.

1:37:59 Wes: No, he's building off of Freud's ideas. And these aren't meant to be taken entirely literally. These are about.

1:38:05 Mark: Even for Freud.

1:38:06 Wes: Yeah, even for Freud. Even though there are cases in which Freud thinks, yes, the threat of castration is used to get little boys to stop masturbating, for instance. Yes, that's a phenomenon. But that's just the beginning of something that leads you to a much larger concept. Even for Freud, when we're talking about castration and the mother. When Freud talks about the Oedipus complex, it's a very abstract account of what it means to individuate from the mother based on the idea that her desire is not totally devoted to you, that's completely faithful to Freud.

1:38:39 Dylan: Okay. I don't want to get into a quibble about whether or not Lacan is faithful to Freud or whether Lacan is taking a leap away from Freud. I just get utterly distracted by the sexualization of the language. And I find it very hard to take seriously the notion that it's meant to be bracketed off as purely analogical. Because I think that is such a constraint and a kind of withering of the nature of desire. Sexual desire seems to be one case of inclination of wanting. And to persist in such explicit sexualization of it just seems to me kind of weird.

1:39:19 Wes: Psychoanalysts agree with you that sexual desires one kind of wanting, but to persist

1:39:24 Dylan: in it, it's fetishizing it.

1:39:26 Wes: The idea is that at bottom, we don't start out with sublimated desires to be a scientist or to write a poem. When we're a baby, we're trying to get to the primordial stuff out of which desire is made. And to do that, you look at childhood sexuality. When Freud talks about sexuality, he's not talking about it in the layperson's sense of sexuality, even though he thinks of these things as sexual in the sense that. That it involves erogenous zones on the body. It involves the pleasure of urinating or shitting, for instance, or the oral pleasure that you get from sucking at the mother's breast.

Those sorts of very visceral, sensual experiences. And then, yes, ultimately we have lots of different types of desire and wanting, but arguably those are sublimations of the much more primitive desires we start out. This is a long standing kind of. And Freud and Jung, this is one of the big thing that they fought

1:40:21 Mark: over, that ultimately we all just have the hunger for God and that we sublimate that to specific material things. Instead of.

1:40:30 Wes: Jung wanted to argue that libido should be thought of as desexualized. And for Freud, we have lots of desexualized libido. He just thinks that all starts out as sexualized and then derivatively it becomes desexualized and sublimated and so on and so forth. In the same way you might look for unified theory in physics. He wants a unified theory psychologically. And so that's the route he goes.

1:40:55 Dylan: Socrates thought that the root of all philosophical desire was rooted in sex.

1:41:00 Wes: Yeah. In eros. Yeah.

1:41:02 Dylan: It's not new in that respect that we would understand desire in that way. I just find it the lack of graduation from that language both distracting and also minimizing. It seems to me hard to buy that all desire is merely sublimated sexual desire. That there isn't even in the account given psychoanalytically, that we are not reduced to our physiology necessarily, that we interact with the world constantly, and that the evolution, even as an individual, takes place over time. And. And it involves the generation and the development of desires that aren't wholly reflected in those things. And that just trying to characterize them all those desires as sublimated sexual desires, seems to me to oversimplify.

1:41:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't think we can resolve it. I mean, it's a big topic that's been long debated, but there are a lot of powerful arguments on Freud's side. I'll say that I'm willing to grant

1:42:03 Mark: the language to Lacan as long as it doesn't falsify his own, as long as he can still make his analyses work using the language. And that's what I'm not totally sure. And so let's give the next step of this. So now we've isolated the Name of the Father, and then one of the ways that we can. We already talked about a way that we could improve in therapy by gaining appropriate distance from the mother. Maybe we never. The mother never focused sufficiently on something external in the name of the Father. So we never got this object A, this MacGuffin created.

So that's one way that we can advance therapeutically. Well, another way is we get hung up on this object A on the Name of the Father. And through the Hamlet example, we just gave one way that we can demystify this object A as we actually see. Maybe it was our actual father that thereby took on some. Just like the mother was like a God before, now the father is a God, has this sort of. And if we can see him as an actual person with his own needs and problems and whatever, then we could demystify that and get there somehow. Now, the way this is put in Fink, is something about the traversing of fantasy.

And we use metaphor or analogy to become object A.

1:43:19 Wes: Let's make sure we say what object A is.

1:43:22 Mark: It's not just the name of the father. I thought that was.

1:43:24 Wes: Well, it comes from that. But it's whatever it is about a given object that when we have a desire to, it, induces us, causes us to desire it. So, for instance, if I'm really into gadgets and I'm excited about the latest iPhone that's coming out, it can become bizarrely obsessive. And you might be looking online and looking at all the images you can get the hands on reviews and really into this idea, into the aesthetic beauty of the iPhone, into whatever fantasies you have about how useful it's going to be. But the idea is there, is that the object A, it's whatever it is that produces that kind of relationship.

And it has something to do with the name of the father in the sense of it has something to do with whatever it is that the mother desired. Or it arises in some sense from some sense of what another has desired, which is again, the phallus. In this abstract sense, the object A is like a bit of the phallus that can be incorporated into any given thing that we want. So we want it not just because it's a nice shiny iPhone, but because it has a significance beyond that, because it gives us this sort of promise of having what it is that the mother wants, something like that and becoming more of what the mother wants, fulfilling her desire.

1:44:46 Mark: The new iPhone will have an actual phallus. Just so you know, Steve Jobs was the only one preventing that from happening for the last several releases.

1:44:54 Wes: So yeah, it'll fold out of the side. It's a good size Steve 1, but it's only 1 millimeter thin, makes up

1:45:02 Dylan: in width

1:45:04 Wes: that fantasy can be driving to us. It's not just about iPhones, but it's about all the sublimation we do of all of our pursuits, this fundamental thing that drives our desire, which has something to do with the mother's desire.

1:45:17 Mark: All right, then how in Fink's scheme do we traverse the fantasy and overcome our hang ups with object a? This is chapter five.

1:45:26 Wes: This is where we get. We have to inhabit the subjectifying the cause, I believe. Yeah, there you go.

1:45:33 Unknown speaker: Where?

1:45:33 Mark: So what you were just saying is that there's some element that causes the fascination in whatever we're fascinated with. And it's being able to identify with that cause and not say the cause is this mysterious thing that is I have no control over my attraction to the iPhone. It's to make a conscious identification with. No, that attraction is mine. And I've thought it out and it is rational or something. I don't know how you make this identification exactly, but somehow you do that where it was now am I. It's not a mysterious cause of my desire. It is my desire.

1:46:12 Wes: It's becoming conscious of something that's driving you, not merely letting it unconsciously drive you.

1:46:17 Seth: Yeah. And the language Fink uses is actually a little more direct than that on page 62, after one of these crazy little symbolic things that are completely unhelpful.

1:46:29 Mark: The little dollar sign is jumping over a diamond to hit an A.

1:46:34 Seth: That's right.

1:46:35 Wes: Actually, when you say it like that, it actually says a lot.

1:46:38 Seth: It says, the traversing of fantasy involves the subject's assumption of a new position with respect to the other as language and the other as desire. A move is made to invest or inhabit that which brought him or her into existence as split subject, which, by the way, we haven't talked about and I totally didn't understand, to become that which caused him or her there. Were it the other's discourse ridden with the other's desire. Was the subject is able to say, I. Not it happened to me, or they did this to me, or fate had it in store for me. But. But I was. I did, I saw. I cried out. This further separation consists in the temporally paradoxical move by the alienated subject to become his or her own cause, to come to be a subject in the place of the cause.

1:47:31 Mark: This is so much clearer than Lacan, isn't it?

1:47:33 Seth: Yeah, no shit. I was just thinking that as I was reading it, the foreign cause, that other desire that brought one into the world is internalized, in a sense, taken responsibility for, assumed, doomed, and made one's own. So I guess there's probably about 16 different ways you could interpret this. There's a sense in which there's taking responsibility versus being a victim. There's an active versus passive. But I think it's someplace later in the text, or it might have been in one of the other readings or something I came across in the Internet.

It's really just facing up. And when he says making one's own or taking ownership, to me, that's like taking responsibility and acknowledging that you are the central player in all of these dramas and not putting responsibility for what you are, how you feel or what you think on somebody else's desire or on something that's being sort of imposed externally. So if we relate this back to what we were talking about four about alienation and language creating the subjectivity that identifies a lack of that. Really what this is is that lack which identifies the other's desire and blah, blah, blah.

This is really fully inhabiting that space and saying, here's who I am, here's what my desires are, and not I am who I am because somebody else's desires are what they are.

1:48:59 Wes: Yeah, and some background here, which I don't think really gives, is this. He repeatedly refers to this phrase where it was I will be right, which is often translated from Freud, where the ID was the ego will be something like that. It's sort of a summation of the idea that the therapeutic process involves becoming conscious of what's been unconscious. So some of this is a pivot off of that idea. It's an elaboration of this idea that there's a therapeutic effect to figuring out what's been repressed and making that conscious. But the twist here is that you subjectify and that repressed thing is, say, the other's discourse.

1:49:44 Mark: Yeah. And this is, I mean, a point to sort of end his account is subjectifying one's fate, that foreign cause, the other's desire that brought one into the world. Alienation can be surpassed. That that is ultimately, it's a bright spot. You know, you might think that analysis just goes on forever. You'll never get out of alienation. But at least according to something that Lacan said once and Fink said well later, he never contradicted that. Maybe he didn't dwell on it, but he left it out there, this positive point that if you could subjectify your fate, if you could take responsibility for it, which that way of putting it in the way that you were putting it, Seth, sounded very much like existentialism sounded like. It's this authenticity.

1:50:29 Seth: That's how I see everything.

1:50:30 Mark: Which I don't think that accurately represents how pessimistic Lacan is overall about an authentic self or an authentic subject. So you said we didn't cover this before. Let's just splice this subject into this story. So we already talked about this ego that is an imaginary creation, that is society. Language is pushed on a us, and then the unconscious, that is also a product of language and certainly is nothing that we identify with. Well, this idea of the split subject is that for most people, for everybody, I'm not sure the subject is split between those two things.

It's like neither of them is really the subject. Neither of them is really the I. But together, they kind of COVID the bases between this fake thing, this self that you've erected, and the. The things that are sitting there, repressed in the unconscious between those two things. Well, that's a subject. And then you were just saying in this section, we're trying to combine those things in a way, because we're trying to take some of what was unconscious and make it conscious and say, that is actually me. This thing that's been torturing me this whole time that I didn't know about, that's been Me, torturing me.

And so even if just recognizing that doesn't make the self torture just magically go away, just the fact that you've taken responsibility for it. I just think the important thing here to keep in mind is it's not that you're discovering that you were responsible after all, because really all the pieces in here are foreign. They all come from language. They're all equally. Not me natively. There's nothing. There's not a matter of discovering your true self here. It's a matter of creating a self and making that self you create include those things that are there in the unconscious that you were denying and saying, yes, myself really has been split over these things, and now I'm going to try to be whole and gather these things together.

Does that work? Or is there. Do you have another interpretation there?

1:52:24 Wes: I think that's good.

1:52:25 Seth: I'm okay with that.

1:52:26 Dylan: The only question that comes to mind to me is whether or not there shouldn't be things that you should get rid of about yourself. I mean, it presumes that you're authentic.

1:52:37 Unknown speaker: Whatever.

1:52:37 Dylan: This real, authentic self is something that. That you ought to hold on to, but it doesn't.

1:52:42 Mark: I'm saying there is no real authentic self.

1:52:44 Unknown speaker: But.

1:52:44 Wes: Right.

1:52:44 Mark: I can translate what you said into terms that don't use that. That should you identify and be whole, including these things that are really, you know, you really want to kill people and you're going to identify. I would think that, yes, you want to take responsibility, not that you want to become a killer, but that you want to be a whole person, to have a whole personality. You would take even those. Those most horrible desires and you'd want to know that you have them and say, those actually are mine. That's not the same as saying they're good.

1:53:14 Wes: These aren't just like you're a killer. These are. Everyone has aggressive impulses, and repressing them can lead to lots of problems and symptoms and behaviors which are counterproductive. But when you say, oh, yes, I do have these aggressive impulses, and that doesn't mean that I'm going to act out on them, and that doesn't mean that they're going to really happen in the world. That can be therapeutic.

1:53:34 Dylan: It's therapeutic in the sense that I understand more about myself, but it provides no input into what I ought to do.

1:53:40 Wes: Yeah, we're talking about there are people for whom even having an aggressive impulse. Right. Is so taboo even thinking it, that it leads to say, for instance, obsessional symptoms, OCD or.

1:53:53 Dylan: And this gets the whole problem here with this way of thinking being focused on pathological.

1:54:00 Wes: We're all subject to these pathologies to some degree. That's the idea. To some extent, it's about being. You don't believe that.

1:54:07 Dylan: I think the analogy only goes so far because when the examples become ones that were at the end of the discussion where I say, well, how does this apply to my life? Or how does this apply to the way I make choices? And the example that's brought before me is, well, they're really pathological. You know, they.

1:54:23 Wes: I'm like, well, whatever, okay, ultimately this is all about freeing people up to do two things, work and love. To be able to have better relationships with other people and to be able to work. People have lots of inhibitions to those things. They have lots of things which interfere with that. And this is about removing them. I mean, you can call it pathology. Not all of this is hospitalizable pathology. Supposedly most of us are simply neurotic and we just want to become more free. We want to become less subject to that neurosis and to the ways in which it interferes with our desire, with truly inhabiting the place of desire. And I think that's where I like the Lacanian account.

1:55:08 Mark: I think you're just pointing out the distance between the clinical and the ethical. The problem is, it's not just that Lacan says, okay, well, this is about mental health. And of course it's an open question. Even if you're mentally healthy, what ethically is the right course and how should you run your life? That's just a different sort of thing to think about. But chapter nine of the Fink book talks about how Lacan, much like Marx did, pretty much tries to submerge all forms of discourse under the rubric of analytics. So it's not just that analysis is like going to the doctor and getting a wound treated and then you go.

And that's completely unrelated to then what you're going to do for a job and how you're going to treat your spouse and all this kind of stuff. Lacan, like Marx, has a very cynical view of where these ethical prescriptions that seemingly have no relationship to psychoanalysis actually come from that they are in fact just specifying the dictates of the other, of society. Or he has these different types of discourse he describes, none of which are, are intellectually honest in some way. It all comes down to some ideology. Yes, ideology. Some sort of psychological hang up or fact about what your status is toward object A and the other and that will kind of determine what you consider to be a reasonable course of action and what ethics you see as admirable, et cetera.

So he really is trying to undermine the rest of philosophy.

1:56:48 Wes: That part I think we would all agree. Rejecting. That's where you get into that sort of gets dangerously close to relativism and.

1:56:56 Mark: But I agree, insofar as Dylan, you were outlining, just sort of, this is the existential problem that we have, that even when we figure out what would make us psychologically healthy and identify with all of our deepest, darkest desires as being ours, that does not clearly give us a moral direction. That we could then be irrationally healthy Lacanian person and be the killer in no country for Old Men. Maybe. So that's the existentialist challenge.

1:57:27 Wes: I don't think so. I don't think we could. Because the killer in no country for Old Men is a sociopath or psychopath. And that's a character structure that you wouldn't have at the end of this process if you could get that prognosis isn't good for psychopaths, but if you could cure yourself.

1:57:43 Dylan: I have to think about this following distinction, but it seems to me that there's a distinction between therapy and training. And I guess that's part of the direction that I find myself finding some usefulness in therapy, in the therapeutic activity. But it seems to me that it becomes sort of merely a kind of existential acknowledgement. Unless it moves into training in the broad sense. What do I do to deal with my incontinences and what do I do to. Improve myself or move myself in the direction that I need to go? And part of that might involve some therapy. But it seems to me, me, I mean, therapy is some activity that is therapeutic. But it seemed, I find myself just sort of left like, okay, fine, where's the training?

1:58:56 Wes: Psychoanalysis I see as an extension of the concept of the examined life completely in the same tradition as the Platonic tradition. And this is. At some point we'll have a discussion about a Jonathan Lear book where he sort of tries to bridge Plato and Freud. But until then, I can say that I think there's actually a lot of crossover. And it really is about figuring out what the best life to live is. It's just at the psychoanalytic level of examination, beyond getting rid of obviously like pathologies, there is a self actualizing, positive component to it.

And it's about being able to adequately sublimate. Most people aren't going around wondering whether or not if the Nazis show up at the door whether or not they have to tell them Anne Frank is there. Those sorts of ethical dilemmas are not the ethical dilemmas that people have problems with. People have ethical dilemmas over, should I be dating this person? That really is an ethical dilemma. And you really have to know yourself better. If you're at a point where you don't know yourself well enough and you can't answer that question, you're in an insoluble ethical quandary.

And the only way to answer that is not through more abstract ethical deliberation, but by knowing yourself better. That's really the only way out of it. Knowing your own desire better. Or what should I do for work? What do I really want to do with my life? Those sorts of things.

2:00:46 Mark: That sounds like a good transition to some closings.

2:00:49 Wes: All right.

2:00:51 Mark: Would you like to start, Seth?

2:00:54 Seth: Sure. Very much enjoyed reading the Fink book, more so than I thought. It's a challenge. The section that I read the little quote of is not indicative of the the book, so it should not be scary. I found many of the ideas intriguing. I'm particularly excited by the idea that language is an alien thing that is imposed upon us and that it somehow is responsible for at least the initial stages of creating subjectivity. And I am sympathetic to the project, you know, that in my mind seems to be inherited from Hegel about the development of consciousness and self consciousness, but simultaneously understanding that the process is fraught with difficulties that can lead to psychological disorders.

Let's say somewhere on Facebook, before we started this episode, somebody said that they were skeptical that the psychoanalytic framework that sort of generalizes and brings everybody under one sort of structure and then differentiates only by the type of disorder is inherently problematic. That there could be one narrative for the way that we all develop, and I think there's probably something to that as well. There are quite a few interesting, I think, ideas that came out of this for me. But I, you know, in a similar, similar vein to Dylan, although probably not as stridently.

I am looking for the philosophical significance, I guess, or maybe some more general conceptual significance of the work. And so I have to whether it's the right thing to do or not. I find myself trying to abstract from the language of sexuality and sexual desire and the familial relationships and so forth, to try to see them as indicative of some kind of ontological term. And I'm not always successful in doing that. The clinical aspect of this is less interesting to me than kind of the theoretical underpinning. But all in all, considering who we are and how difficult this topic is and the significance of this particular thinker and the tradition that it came out of, I thought the discussion was pretty productive.

Even though we ended up in a few little eddies in the stream here and there.

2:04:03 Mark: Yep. Coming from sort of the same. Same place as you, Seth, and wanting to get philosophy out of this as opposed to what works in analytic practice. I was looking for some clarification on the subject and the subject's relation to the ego. And despite reading a whole book called the Lacanian Subject, I feel like I don't understand or find it arbitrary what he's considering the subject and not the subject. Now, I understand the growth of the self. I understand the alienated, linguistically constructed self. I understand why you would maybe not want to call the unconscious the self if you think that it's a bunch of strings that have been submerged, but yet there's something that you might want to identify with.

So that whole story about becoming unified, you know, that all makes sense to me. But the way he talks about the subject through this book, that the subject starts out as split. And then when we come to identify with the thing that has caused my desire for object A, he says the self is contained. The subject is contained in the swift movement between those things, between what I was before and what I am and all that I'm trying to get at the relation. By comparison, Sartre, who is kind of hard to read back in our Transcendence of the Ego book, was much, much clearer in the distinction between the self as this public thing that is created.

And fundamentally, my access towards my own self is not fundamentally different in type from your access towards myself. They're both public things. They're sort of this. This image and a bunch of roles and looking at my behavior and making generalizations from it. But then Sartre makes the sharp distinction between that and consciousness itself, which, I mean, I can barely make sense of. Sartre's view on consciousness is nothingness. It is this entire transparency of just our exposure to the world. But what is the. You know, that's the whole question here.

Well, reading Lacan didn't help clear this up at all for me. I don't feel like I know what the subject is. I felt like it was a technical term for him. And I'm not even sure what its use was or what philosophically can be gathered from it based on what we have laid out here today. So I go away rather unsatisfied.

2:06:57 Dylan: I find myself, I guess, unsatisfied as well. I came to this whole thing never having read Lacan and being only a little bit familiar with Freud and so forth. So I find myself maybe a little bit further back trying to process the different. What seems to me a kind of whole point of view about the relationship between the self and the world and a whole language of speaking that I find as pieces that are enlightening or really interesting. And other pieces that I find just. I don't really get. And I haven't completely, completely sorted that out.

I found the. Both the Fink book and the Lacan consistently scattershot interesting. I find little pieces of it that were interesting and then other parts that I. It wasn't even so much being confused as being wondering why what the use of going in this particular direction. We pointed to all these diagrams that are in the Fink and it's in. In the Lacan as well, that these diagrams and these shapes and the sort of proto mathematical language that gets appropriated for, again, shapes and set theory and stuff. And I wondered sort of what was going on with that and if it was meant merely to be.

Why appropriate that kind of language in this particular case, if it was meant to be a kind of gesture to Godel and that kind of thing, or if it was meant to just be a way to add weight to the arguments, to use a proto mathematical arrangement, or whether it was other information that was held in it. I couldn't sort it out. It wasn't at all clear to me. So I left. I'm looking forward to reading more the Purloin letter stuff because I feel like that will give us a chance to at least me a chance to focus on something very particular and read a couple people who comment on Lacan to try to get to understanding one relatively constrained feature of his thinking that gets referred to over and over and over again.

2:10:13 Mark: It's funny, most philosophers, when they throw in pseudo mathematical stuff, it's because they're trying to make that philosophy look like a science. But he's actually very contemptuous of the idea. He says pretty much science is not cool and advanced enough to accommodate psychoanalysis. He doesn't think it should be a science and you shouldn't try to make it a science. It is something else.

2:10:32 Wes: Yeah, it should remain under the humanities. And that, I think is true.

2:10:36 Dylan: That only underlines the question of why pictures of moebius strips and a way of writing diagrams and speaking that is clearly meant to use the symbology of mathematics and set theory and so forth, and why those particular things as opposed to Other kinds of mathematical diagrams.

2:10:55 Mark: He wanted to outdo Levi Strauss in his. All the structuralists and their tables and schematics and yeah, it's just an intellectual fashion in France at the time.

2:11:05 Wes: I think we have a passing familiarity with Lacan and I've always been infuriated by his style point where I refuse to read him, but reading about his ideas makes me want to understand them more. It actually leaves me fascinated and thinking there's something there that I need to understand better. That's the feeling that I come away with. Whatever my assessments about his style and obscurity and whether or not the mathemes are helpful and all of that stuff. Stuff. My approach to these things is trying to get what's good out of them and the idea of symbolic castration, for instance. I think it's an important, interesting one. So that sort of thing makes me want to read more books about Lacan, but not more books by Lacan.

2:11:46 Mark: If you read enough books, you'll get your object A. Your object. Awesome. Hopefully not next time. We're going to see how Lacan works in analyzing literature. And keep in mind we're doing this like next week. We're not adding in a three week. This is not a six week exploration of Lacan. We just wanted to read one more essay. So we said we'll have a second discussion about it. The focus is Edgar Allan Poe's short story the purloined letter from 1845 and Lacan's famous essay about it, Seminar on the purloined letter from 1956. However, Jacques Derrida wrote a response to this essay called the Purveyor of Truth.

So we're going to read that too. And while we're at it, we discovered that these things were packaged together in a book called the Purloined Poe, edited by John Muller and William Richardson in 1988. And so that has a bunch of other people talking about that essay as well. So we'll see how much individually we have time to look at in that book by next week when we talk about this. For an exact list of what we end up talking about, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com we are supported by your donations. Go to the website to make a contribution. Big donors since our last recording have included Connor White Sullivan, Laura Rankin, William Crawford, Patrick Findler, Thomas Sinclair, Marie Anne, Chidiak, Baris Arri, Brian Arsenault, Justin Christensen, Steven Brazel, Ivan Mazur, Mike Sinegal, Josh Weinstein, Stephen Goodsell, Michael Harlow, Gabe Ormsby, E.J.

sanders, Lenton Sims. Simon Taylor. Tony Gilkerson. Natalia Radakova. Thank you. Many of those people were people that signed up for our PEL Citizenship program, which means if you give us a recurring donation of at least $5 a month or $50 a year, then you'll have access to a bunch of discussion groups and bonus content and it's really freaking awesome.

2:13:39 Wes: But feel free to give us a recurring donation regardless of whether or not you want to do that.

2:13:44 Mark: Yes. And I gotta say, those repeated citizens, you know, if they've been signed up for more than a month, they've already contributed enough to have their names read here. But there's just too many of you. I'm sorry, I can't do it. You'll just have to accept my sincere thanks and I hope you're getting a lot out of it. If you're too cheap for that, we have a Facebook group.

2:14:02 Wes: We have.

2:14:03 Mark: You can follow us on Twitter, you can read the blog. We'll be posting some follow up posts on this. You can learn more about Lacan, fill in some of the details and if you got a minute, why don't you go to the itunes store and give us a nice review. Give us another five star rating to add to the million five star ratings that we have there.

2:14:21 Seth: Or 300 and some.

2:14:23 Mark: Yes. But I was trying to be modest in the way of Lacan.

2:14:26 Wes: Good night, everybody.

2:14:28 Seth: Good night.

2:14:28 Wes: Good night.

2:14:29 Dylan: Good night,

2:14:36 Mark: Sam.

2:15:05 Unknown speaker: And with the pain in your head comes something else and when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am on and on and off again and when I'm on I don't need your help Wave, wave,

2:15:23 Seth: wave, your

2:15:25 Mark: life is passing Wave and smiling down we go. Take my lovers, take my friends Take my good intentions take them, cast them to the wind Wake my anchor, wake my wrath Wake my inner pissing wake keeps the rushes Mix me up with

2:15:52 Unknown speaker: love and with the pain in your head comes something else and when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am on and on it off again and when I'm on I don't need your help. Wave to mommy, wave goodbye, wave until

2:16:27 Mark: your hands rot off your way because they will, I tell you soon enough. We, we,

2:16:48 Unknown speaker: we,

2:16:51 Dylan: we

2:16:54 Unknown speaker: with the pain in your head comes something else when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am going out on it I forget it when I'm on I don't need your help and with the pain in your head comes something else and when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am on and on and off again When I want to don't need your help,

2:17:35 Mark: Sam.

2:18:22 Unknown speaker: And with the pain in your head comes something else and when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am on and on oh, forget it. When I'm on I don't need your help and with the pain in your head Comes something else and when you're gone I can feel it in myself and I am on and on and off again and when I'm on I don't need your help Home.