LACAN BY MARCUS POUND 

Please share your notes!

Share the wealth, brother.

Share the notes!!

Donal Leader, I hope you still have them. Very valuable footnotes.

Instablaster...

How?

very true !

Even if he can't pronounce Lacan :)

Still waiting? lol

He seems really good at explaining things.

did you find it?

I don't know what "emptiness" means in Buddhism but I know that "real" in Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to an impossible to think. Science is full of impossible thinking, such as what was before the Big Bang, or what is the absolute zero, things like that. The "real" according to Lacan is a limitation and a thinking we can never really fully grasp. Death is the ultimate "real" experience, it defines us as living beings thanks to the limit it gives to us. How we will deal with this "limit" or this "border" is how we will deal with symbolic castration, how we will learn to live without someting, or lacking something forever. I hope this explanation will help you, and I'm not English so I hope you will understand something out of that! In return, if you could explain to me what "emptiness" is in Buddhism, I'd like that!

two years later, but can be useful for someone (maybe)... "Emptiness" is like terminal stage, a desirable state of inner peace. It is closely connected with the idea of immanence, putting aside earthly anguish (because in Buddhism, the origin of pain is desire, then, if we stop desiring things, we stop suffering). It is what one hopes to achieve. . In contrast, the "real" in Lacan is not something that one should aspire to know - in fact it cannot be known (at least not being a human with a "functional" psyche). The real is "opposed" to the imaginary and the symbolic as long as things -including the psychic structure- ceases to make sense there. The structure is disarmed, the meanings no longer make sense. Hmm, it is comparable to the concept of a black hole, everything that supports our symbolic world stops making sense. That is why a person who has experienced a strong trauma must "reassemble" the meanings of the Self, of his life and her world in order to continue existing after that. We need the "fictitious" and symbolic part of our lives to make sense of it (the projections of what I am, of what I want, the expectations (gaze) that we impose on others, and those that in turn are imposed on us).

hawking

DischordInMyHead oops

Enfant terrible.

Fascinating observation please see my documentary on you tube on Dee The masters of darkness series

Indeed. The Enochian can very well be a manifestation of the Unconscious and a bridge to intelligence from other dimensions.

What? What? What! Goddamit Steven Hicks!

Ben Zzz body language is subject to interpretation which is itself another signifier metonymically continuing the signifying chain which is a discourse subject to the determinations of language. The subject is revealed in both the interpretive structure as well as its elaboration. In the idiosyncratic constellation of further signifiers a unique organization takes shape as the “person”. Body language may be simply a symptom.

Why? They don't have all day to do these videos. Surely, equipped with the basic knowledge of the thinker, you can do some research of your own.

Yes. This is why his further concepts, such as the Real, Symbolic, Imaginary etc, cause such intense confusion even for the most erudite students of Lacan. As in, does he mean the Real in the same sense as he did in the previous Seminar? Etc etc. This is different from a thinker changing and/or developing his or her concepts over time, as is claimed for Lacan. One can only be reasonably sure of something changing if one had a reasonably clear idea of how it was before the change.

Jim Walker Jim Walker that's because anyone with their thinking cap on (and although I love Chomsky for his straight forward politics) knows something very simple about language: that language is not simple and is full of tautologies and metaphysical nuances. Interestingly, you sort of answer your own problem: obviously the subconscious cannot be defined totally, similarly neither can language be defined so easily. When Lacan says structure we must remember the most important fact about that structure: object petit a, the part of the structure that EVADES definition, the remainder which stands for the self as such. What's my main point? We can't define language TOTALLY, and so it makes sense for Lacan to say "subconscious is structured LIKE a language." You can't be so logical with Lacan, because his first view is that language is not complete, that language is structured around a basic premise which CANNOT be proven, it's simply a tautology.

Chomsky takes Analytic approach to defining Language. Lacan and others who use his thought as a tool have a certain pre-understanding of language and unconscious - that is why philosophers can use terms such as ego, symbolic, etc. without having to redefine them at every turn; a pre-understanding is not reckless or unthought - Analytic inquiries go in circles forever. We can only make statements about our own deadlocks within understanding, which is exactly why Lacan, Zizek and others are repudiated by Analytic philosophers.

Dip Jonrd I cannot define this, and I cannot define that. Therefore, this and that are the same (fart noise). Oh, I forgot. I "can't be so logical with Lacan, because..."tautology"... because those have nothing to do with logic. I think I get it now: postmodernists only like logic when it helps their own theories. I just wasn't 'deep' enough to 'get it' before, maaaan.

NietzscheanMeatPop I'm pretty sure Lacan isn't a postmodern philosopher although many postmodernists have made use of him. Your name has Nietzche in it and your making fun of Postmodernism? And to top it all off your profile pic is Terrence McKenna? Do you know wtf you are?

You've ruined this for me.... I can't stop laughing! Thanks ; )

There are different notion of unconsciousness at play. Lacan, and French philosophy-literature generally includes unconscious as inner thought, as conscience, and consciousness as perception, appearance and actions like speech, gestures and movements. However, many other people think of consciousness as internal and the unconscious as what is suppressed, forgotten, and under repression - what cannot be thought but has effects in spite of the person. So, Lacan's structural notion of the unconscious and language is the same as mind and speech whether that speech is subvocal or enunciated immediately to another person who is socially present. This ambiguity is overlooked by Pound who does not recognize a spectrum of definitions of the unconscious, particularly the individual's own biases and blind spots or symptoms, nor of the several levels of language use - the primary one being internal talk to self and to part objects and only secondarily to others as loud speech acts or performances. The speech acts internal to others - the sending-receiving circuit - must also be accounted for in any discussion of language usage.

i love deleuze

+altomatomer ". . . Hawking's famous discovery." Listen properly instead of accusing

how can you "know" that you exist, that you think, or even that you have an "I" without using language? We must refer to the basic ontological questions, to Descartes, to Plato (or to phenomenology). That is why Lacan speaks of the stage prior to the Self (mirror stage), we are not born with the idea -and the recognition- of an "I"; that is formed in socialization, and therefore it is closely linked to language and symbolism (of course, that's the hypothesis; we just can't "know" what the "self" of an infant is like before he speaks and can implement complex abstractions with language. The "self" is subjective). One simply cannot think without language; when Descartes arrives at his "cogito ergo sum" he is taking for granted all the cognitive development that he already has; we reason and use logic because we have language. (There you have to go fully into the theory of language, and there are only 2 or 3 great general views on its origin: nativist/generationists (Chomsky and associates); Social interactionism (Výgodsky and successors)) . Ultimately, whatever we say about anything is based on human subjectivity: we speak, see and analyze the world from our experience (Nagel and his "what is like to be a bat?")

how can you "know" that you exist, that you think, or even that you have an "I" without using language? We must refer to the basic ontological questions, to Descartes, to Plato (or to phenomenology). That is why Lacan speaks of the stage prior to the Self (mirror stage), we are not born with the idea -and the recognition- of an "I"; that is formed in socialization, and therefore it is closely linked to language and symbolism (of course, that's the hypothesis; we just can't "know" what the "self" of an infant is like before he speaks and can implement complex abstractions with language. The "self" is subjective). One simply cannot think without language; when Descartes arrives at his "cogito ergo sum" he is taking for granted all the cognitive development that he already has; we reason and use logic because we have language. (There you have to go fully into the theory of language, and there are only 2 or 3 great general views on its origin: nativist/generationists (Chomsky and associates); Social interactionism (Výgodsky and successors)) . Ultimately, whatever we say about anything is based on human subjectivity: we speak, see and analyze the world from our experience (Nagel and his "what is like to be a bat?")

Riggs was a psychiatrist not a orthodox Freudian. Maybe you worked in the kitchen. The point here is Lacan sussing out the semiotic nuance of Freud. Your point itself is absurd as it betrays your ignorance.

Incedibly well put! And the orders of the Symbolic and Imaginary are structural representations that serve to reduce temporality (processual dynamics) to a static unification of identity and category. The Real, that not only resists symbolization, but is the very failure of the symbolic to secure consistent self-identity (complete self-enclosure; a totality of meaning), is the very site where in which time itself, as the pure production of material forces, marks its effects upon the order of subjective representation. The Real is the very effects of time's disruption of the signifier. Lacan's theories explore the fundamental tension between spatialized static structure, and the subversive quality of temporal movement.

+Derrick Mullins I would like to put "tension between "subversive" spatialized static structure and the temporal movement.

I suspect that Lacan himself would have raised his eyebrows to the claim that the unconscious is not a structure. The absence of serious thought about time - in all its forms; i.e. more subjectively like Proust or more objectively such as via an atomic clock or time's effects on the body - is a serious lack in his theory which, to my mind, kiboshes so much of his work.

I like this idea but unfortunately I don't think Lacan's concepts do this. "Time" is more malleable than the "Real". It is, for example, claimed by some physicists that time - at least our experience of it - is something of an illusion owing to our inability to experience more than four dimensions. Time can actually be slotted into each of Lacan's three somewhat spatial structural categories, RSI, which - as I think you would agree that time is something that directly affects humans or other lifeforms - suggests those categories are sorely lacking in their ontological descriptive power. Time can be semi-Imaginary completeness, such as "the time is now" or "the time of Napeoleon" or "the dinosaurs" for example. It can be also symbolic, such as the tick of an accurate or inaccurate clock, arranging an appointment. Time does seem to also be exemplary of the Real as you say - but only when conceptualised as purely synchronic. But our conceptions of time are also diachronic, as above with the examples of historical or contemporaneous periods: then, now, later. The diachronic means we can mark time, on how its passage marks our bodies for instance. And this movement also slips synchronically between the RSI categories: it can be really experienced, say, when we feel tiredness or pain in our legs after a run; it can also signify age, such as crow's feet or lack thereof; it can also be used as marker of something that happened a supposedly Imaginary manner - i.e. Napoleon was born or rose to power on this day and lost power or died on this other day - "the Napoleonic era". An Imaginary completeness, if you like. But it is not necessarily partaking of the Imaginary to say "this happened" or "this is happening" or "this will happen". This is, I think, why we can also sometimes - or even perhaps frequently - say what we mean, such as "I'll meet you in the cafe at 11am." The idea that we never quite say what we mean, or as in the video, we do mean only what our unconscious means, only makes sense out of time - a situation which itself is an Imaginary completeness, one that it is ironically difficult to imagine. Is this then actually the Real? The bit that is excess unsymbolizable? But we can talk about something being finished or complete! There are times when, even in speech (such as the 11am meeting - a trivial example, but important because it is trivial, day-to-day) nothing is lacking - otherwise, the whole concept of lack ceases to make sense - but those times are finite. They may be complete, and there is something beyond them.

I know this is a late response, but I'd like to clarify my previous statement if it seemed to easily reduce the Real to time. I'm trying to develop or work out how to reinterpret Lacan from a more Deleuzian perspective. So, since temporality plays a significant role in Deleuze's solo work, it seems comparable to how the Real functions as both a spatial "emptiness", a literal void within any given structure, but also seems to have this "excessive" quality at the sametime. This excessive quality is relatable to how Slavoj Zizek rethinks the notion of Death Drive (or just drives) as being this restlessness that propels life or reality into incessant activity, never satisfied within the domain of Lacanian desire, and seemingly enduring within the domain of "drive". I think Deleuze's early notions of Time can be equated with the Real (and I'm going to summarize as briefly as I can here) if we remember how in Difference and Repetition, there seems to be a distinction between time as the active dynamics of material reality, and time in and of itself, or Pure Time. The thing about pure time is that when Deleuze describes it, it is literally a form of time where nothing happens, it is described as "empty form", a void. What I'm getting at is I think Deleuzian ideas can be intertwined with Lacanian theories (empty form of time, the void of the Real, excessive drives, and Deleuzian vitalism).

nohaylamujer ...being offended is idiotic

The innermost subjectivity of humanity is inaccessible to empirical scientific method. This is not evasion but a true statement of the situation. Could you empirically prove that i dreamt last night of a titanium unicorn?

@@sawtoothiandi In such case, following the logic of your statement, I claim that Lacan's theories are completely wrong and inconsistent. Now, disprove me.

@@andreysimeonov8356 I cannot.

You don't get it. As soon as the Analysand tries to create an underlying structure to their struggles, the Psychoanalyst stops the session.

Nice, that's one of the main messages I get from all of this on lacan, as well; and that the Other, of course, does not exist.

The unconscious is the mirror of the outside world. That's the "people" you are reffering to, i can be people or a simple dog, or an atomic bomb also.

nice.

interesting. can you say more perhaps? just interested in more

Mike Nowacki lack orn... lack hawn... hahaha wtf random .. I imagine some French person shouting at him... AW AW LACAN!!! Ever since then he fucked it up 🤣