I attended a whole winter seminar on Lacan at the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1984 scarcely understanding what was going on but knowing that it was important. The lecturer was the late Xavier Thevenot. I still have my lecture notes complete with diagrams that I now know were from Lacan's seminars. Only in the last while have I opened those notes again. It's taken me half a lifetime to get to this stage! Fascinating.
This video has the feel of instructional videos they use in the 90s but the content is "phenomenological" as Hegel would say if he was alive. Thank you for this
I enjoyed this almost demystification of Lacanism In all discourses "la lutte" of the Amoebic Lonely creature that Humanity is vital.even when it is not struggling it is struggling and that is the Imagery the Symbolic and the Real what a drama.Thank you Marcus.
OK, the ego is the rider, but he is not "trying to control his desires", he is trying to satisfy his desires in approved ways. Next, 'analysand' is not a gerund (which would mean 'the analyzing', see, and English gerund!), it is a gerundive; it does not mean "he who is analyzing" (active present participle) but, in fact, it means "the one to be analyzed"; cp. agenda, gerundive of ago "to act" = things that are to be done (passive). As for black holes, well, as of last week we can really see what a black hole looks like because radiowaves that escape the event horizon can be mapped over the visible spectrum and have just produced the most amazing image of what a black hole is (like). Third, that an assertion implies its negative is not the problem with the Symbolic. The problem is that the Symbolic is slippery, manifold, and always barred from the signified. This goes back to Nietzsche: the word "leaf" is a lie -- there is a gap, a bar, between the word 'leaf' and the haecitas of any of the millions of leaves that the one word summons but does not present. It is not the language cannot say it all, that something is left out, which at a trivial level is certainly true and we did not need Lacan to point that out. The point is that language is alienated from its referent, and that recalls the fact that we are all alienated from ourselves, we are barred subjects (of language). The real is all that which cannot come into language -- and were it not for the fact that we live in a world of language, one might say that the real is the everything that language covers over so that we can deal with (the illusion of dealing with) it (id). Oh well. Cheers all.
There is speech. Language is a supposition subtending speech. The unconscious is a supposition of structure functioning in speech. Speech affects the speaking being. The unconscious is the knowledge the speaking being does not know, the determinates that organize the subject despite what the individual claims. Therapeutically this dynamic of frustration is modified by affecting the determinates that cause the speaking being to believe in the “meanings” they imaginarily attribute to the world.
Didn't Lacan say something roughly along the lines of, "My words always say more and less than I intend them to." As I understand it he re-cast elements of Melanie Klein's partial-object as the "petite object a/object of desire" or "little other" which is understood to be something which is always lacking in the chain of signifiers, like a bit of signified (or meaning) which they can approach but never fully reach, thus keeping language from totally grasping the Real.
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.
the problem post-modernists have with language isn't with the words themselves, but with the interpretation of them. how do we read things in a true way? when should we adopt a skeptical approach and when should we take things naively?
This point about occasionally actually speaking the 'truth', doesn't Lacan say, quite often, that the truth can only ever be half said, or never fully stated? Is it more that the achievement of truth is an experience of truth. A statement or collection of signifiers that creates a stop, an ending, disconnected from the chain of signifiers?
Can anyone explain the similarity or difference between the concept of "emptiness" in Buddhism and "real" in Lacanian psychoanalysis? Any discussion about this?
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).
He is not saying Hawkins discovered black holes. Hawkins discovered "Hawkins Radiation" that is emitted from a black hole. Thus his analogy of how we can observe a black hole from this radiation is correct.
I don't understand why Lacan thinks the unconscious is structured like language. Obviously this 20 min video can't be expected to give a full argument behind all of his points, but doesn't this idea go directly against Jung's claim that the unconscious was specifically not representable in language, and that symbols/archetypes were the closest thing we could use to reason about it's contents? Obviously Jung can be wrong, but I'm interested to hear what kind of evidence Lacan has to make him go against Jung's theory. I suppose Jung's methods weren't entirely scientific(arguably) but I think anyone, regardless of their level of insight, should have pretty good reason before assuming they know better than Jung about the structure of the unconscious
A very nice summary. Mistake at 16:59: he says "Freud's" three orders of the psyche (imaginary, symbolic, real) when he means "Lacan's." Probably not a Freudian slip. :)
The thing that is wrong with these kind of introductions is that they just offer a synopsis of the ideas of the philosopher at hand. It should include the strongest criticisms of those ideas (steel man arguments) -- and why they do or don't hold up.
Very interesting . But to say that the unconscious is structured like language is anthropomorphic and simplistic . One has nothing to do with the other . We have language , and there is the unconscious . Apples and oranges can sit side by side in the same fruit basket , don't you think ?
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?")
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.
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.
6:01 "The Unconscious is... in what we do and what we say... So, rather than simply have Psychoanalysis as a place, where we can build up the strong defenses of the Ego against our various desires, he aims to entertain... a conversation... speech... Then what's required is a very immanent practice of listening and intervening... trying to understand... significance..." 13:57 3 principle blocks that orientate all psychological thinking: #Imaginary| #Symbolic| #Real "… this drive for completeness&wholeness… think about #collectors!… the promise of #completeness!… imaginary identification…"🤓 #Psychoanalysis #language
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.
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.
The variable session continues to be very problematic. How is it that the "subject supposed to know" (but actually doesn't) really knows that the analysand has found something on which to end the session? Or, conversely, knows that there is nothing more to add to that session? This is where the absurdity of the 55-minute session or similar actually makes sense. Because it is commonly accepted. It is stupid. And it is impersonal. It does not belong to one particular analyst. Time must not personally be up to the analyst for, if s/he is, s/he is imbued with a dangerous mastery over the analysand. Is this partly why Lacan's disciples - including many current or former analysands of Lacanian analysis - seem rather hypnotised by his works?
Where id was, there shall ego be.(Freud: New Introductory Lectures, 1933) By the way, Loewald contends the famous quote should have been translated "there shall ego become."(1970) In other words, Lacan's Unconsciousness is not a structure. Like language, it is a process of becoming, in a state of flux, incessantly changing.
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.
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).
But where have you all been - it feels like psychotherapy has been living under a rock ? this is not modern knowledge this is ancient Vedic (Yogic) knowledge thousands of years old. Freud’s idea of the horse rider that’s a story of the charioteer from one of the ancient yogic texts. “Knowledge is structured in consciousness” ~ Maharishi Maheshi yogi. Western knowledge seems infantile in comparison. Sanskrit is a language of creation … sound is part of all form including humans …Yoga has so much to contribute to the theory of psychotherapy, as does quantum physics … I’m just so surprised by the lack of collaboration between Eastern and western schools of thought
4:15 Unless you define what a language actually is, you cannot claim that the subconscious is ordered similar to it. This is a logical fallacy of faulty comparisons since you cannot tell us what language is, or what the subconscious is, or what this structure is that makes them the same. As Chomsky said in a letter to me when I asked him about Lacan: "The word “language” is used in such varied ways that it’s become almost impossible to talk about (its use or) misuse. The only way to proceed sensibly is to state as clearly as possible what one means by the term...far too little is understood about the unconscious for anything to be said along these lines."
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?
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 🤣
But of course the unconscious is NOT structured as a language. This notion was a conceit on Lacan's part in response to the influence of structuralism in French thought, stemming from the work of Levi-Strauss (the anthropologist, not the jeans), which had become extremely fashionable. Anything and everything had to be structured "as a language," so why not the unconscious? A much more meaningful, and radical, approach to the unconscious was developed by Norman O. Brown, whose "Life Against Death" contains much that resonates with Lacan and other thinkers whose work, like that of Lacan, post-dated Brown. Brown doesn't focus on language but on the (repressed) body, i.e., biology, which for Freud constituted the basis for psychoanalysis.
I attended a whole winter seminar on Lacan at the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1984 scarcely understanding what was going on but knowing that it was important. The lecturer was the late Xavier Thevenot. I still have my lecture notes complete with diagrams that I now know were from Lacan's seminars. Only in the last while have I opened those notes again. It's taken me half a lifetime to get to this stage! Fascinating.
Please share your notes!
Share the wealth, brother.
Share the notes!!
Donal Leader, I hope you still have them. Very valuable footnotes.
Instablaster...
This video is the ultimate exemplification of lacanian lack
How?
very true !
This video has the feel of instructional videos they use in the 90s but the content is "phenomenological" as Hegel would say if he was alive. Thank you for this
A first-rate survey of Lacan's thought and contribution to psychoanalysis.
Even if he can't pronounce Lacan :)
I enjoyed this almost demystification of Lacanism
In all discourses "la lutte" of the Amoebic Lonely creature that Humanity is vital.even when it is not struggling it is struggling and that is the Imagery the Symbolic and the Real what a drama.Thank you Marcus.
that's one of my lecturers!
He seems really good at explaining things.
Like the speed of presentation. Gives me time to think and file- maybe remember.
Please put the full video online, it's great!
Language is the communication of subconscious thought. The structure of thought is carried over into language.
Nice slip at 16:56 -- Substituting Lacan for Freud ;)
Can you do Hegel, Please finish the Zizek Trio!
OK, the ego is the rider, but he is not "trying to control his desires", he is trying to satisfy his desires in approved ways. Next, 'analysand' is not a gerund (which would mean 'the analyzing', see, and English gerund!), it is a gerundive; it does not mean "he who is analyzing" (active present participle) but, in fact, it means "the one to be analyzed"; cp. agenda, gerundive of ago "to act" = things that are to be done (passive). As for black holes, well, as of last week we can really see what a black hole looks like because radiowaves that escape the event horizon can be mapped over the visible spectrum and have just produced the most amazing image of what a black hole is (like). Third, that an assertion implies its negative is not the problem with the Symbolic. The problem is that the Symbolic is slippery, manifold, and always barred from the signified. This goes back to Nietzsche: the word "leaf" is a lie -- there is a gap, a bar, between the word 'leaf' and the haecitas of any of the millions of leaves that the one word summons but does not present. It is not the language cannot say it all, that something is left out, which at a trivial level is certainly true and we did not need Lacan to point that out. The point is that language is alienated from its referent, and that recalls the fact that we are all alienated from ourselves, we are barred subjects (of language). The real is all that which cannot come into language -- and were it not for the fact that we live in a world of language, one might say that the real is the everything that language covers over so that we can deal with (the illusion of dealing with) it (id). Oh well. Cheers all.
Lovely, clear presentation. Very helpful. Thank you.
There is speech. Language is a supposition subtending speech. The unconscious is a supposition of structure functioning in speech. Speech affects the speaking being. The unconscious is the knowledge the speaking being does not know, the determinates that organize the subject despite what the individual claims. Therapeutically this dynamic of frustration is modified by affecting the determinates that cause the speaking being to believe in the “meanings” they imaginarily attribute to the world.
Thank you. This was an excellent lecture.
is there a follow up? want to learn more about 'the real'. thanks
0:54
_that actually comes from Plato in essence_
Is knowledge a driver's license ?
Best introduction so far, when there will be the full video available ?
Who did the background art? Nice touch.
"The unconscious is structured like a language" Lacan ....& so is DrJohn Dee's Enochian
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.
Thank you for a great explanation of his works
Didn't Lacan say something roughly along the lines of, "My words always say more and less than I intend them to." As I understand it he re-cast elements of Melanie Klein's partial-object as the "petite object a/object of desire" or "little other" which is understood to be something which is always lacking in the chain of signifiers, like a bit of signified (or meaning) which they can approach but never fully reach, thus keeping language from totally grasping the Real.
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.
Where can I get the full version please?
the problem post-modernists have with language isn't with the words themselves, but with the interpretation of them. how do we read things in a true way? when should we adopt a skeptical approach and when should we take things naively?
What? What? What! Goddamit Steven Hicks!
yall know ima watch Dr. Pound
This point about occasionally actually speaking the 'truth', doesn't Lacan say, quite often, that the truth can only ever be half said, or never fully stated? Is it more that the achievement of truth is an experience of truth. A statement or collection of signifiers that creates a stop, an ending, disconnected from the chain of signifiers?
Can anyone explain the similarity or difference between the concept of "emptiness" in Buddhism and "real" in Lacanian psychoanalysis? Any discussion about this?
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).
He is not saying Hawkins discovered black holes. Hawkins discovered "Hawkins Radiation" that is emitted from a black hole. Thus his analogy of how we can observe a black hole from this radiation is correct.
hawking
DischordInMyHead oops
I don't understand why Lacan thinks the unconscious is structured like language. Obviously this 20 min video can't be expected to give a full argument behind all of his points, but doesn't this idea go directly against Jung's claim that the unconscious was specifically not representable in language, and that symbols/archetypes were the closest thing we could use to reason about it's contents?
Obviously Jung can be wrong, but I'm interested to hear what kind of evidence Lacan has to make him go against Jung's theory. I suppose Jung's methods weren't entirely scientific(arguably) but I think anyone, regardless of their level of insight, should have pretty good reason before assuming they know better than Jung about the structure of the unconscious
A very nice summary. Mistake at 16:59: he says "Freud's" three orders of the psyche (imaginary, symbolic, real) when he means "Lacan's." Probably not a Freudian slip. :)
The thing that is wrong with these kind of introductions is that they just offer a synopsis of the ideas of the philosopher at hand. It should include the strongest criticisms of those ideas (steel man arguments) -- and why they do or don't hold up.
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.
Lacorn.... if you say lacan and actually mean cornflakes. Repressed oral desire. I guess this interview was made in the morning before breakfast😂😂
Great introduction! TNX.
Thanks for this clear explication! Good stuff.
are they gonna upload the whole thing???
it is amazing Marcus
Thank you, this is very helpful.
where when is the full version that was promised?
did you find it?
So the link does not work, where can we see the full video?
Very interesting . But to say that the unconscious is structured like language is anthropomorphic and simplistic . One has nothing to do with the other . We have language , and there is the unconscious . Apples and oranges can sit side by side in the same fruit basket , don't you think ?
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))
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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))
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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?")
anyone know how to spell the French word he says at around 0:08 ?
Enfant terrible.
Why did it cut out at the end?
Why is the link to St Johns dead?
wow thanks so much marcus pond!
What about body language - does anyone know?
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.
Great explanation
I held out as long as I could and then I broke - it's la + con, or even la + carn. But, please, not la + corn!
Great video!
If i hear Lacorn again...
You've ruined this for me.... I can't stop laughing! Thanks ; )
can't wait for the next video, this was wonderful! :)
Still waiting? lol
i love the background
This is great.
Hawking, not Hawkins
+altomatomer ". . . Hawking's famous discovery." Listen properly instead of accusing
His anaysis at the start is absurd. I worked at Riggs and the emphasis was on analysis and the whole personality.
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.
6:01 "The Unconscious is... in what we do and what we say... So, rather than simply have Psychoanalysis as a place, where we can build up the strong defenses of the Ego against our various desires, he aims to entertain... a conversation... speech... Then what's required is a very immanent practice of listening and intervening... trying to understand... significance..."
13:57
3 principle blocks that orientate all psychological thinking:
#Imaginary| #Symbolic| #Real
"… this drive for completeness&wholeness… think about #collectors!… the promise of #completeness!… imaginary identification…"🤓
#Psychoanalysis #language
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.
Deleuze next!!!
i love deleuze
Interesting and very well explained. I'll recommend this video to my students. But please don't call Lacan "la conne". It's very offensive.
nohaylamujer ...being offended is idiotic
What is the scientific, empirical evidence that Lacan's theories are true?
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.
This lecture has been castrated by ferrari on smth?
The variable session continues to be very problematic. How is it that the "subject supposed to know" (but actually doesn't) really knows that the analysand has found something on which to end the session? Or, conversely, knows that there is nothing more to add to that session? This is where the absurdity of the 55-minute session or similar actually makes sense. Because it is commonly accepted. It is stupid. And it is impersonal. It does not belong to one particular analyst. Time must not personally be up to the analyst for, if s/he is, s/he is imbued with a dangerous mastery over the analysand. Is this partly why Lacan's disciples - including many current or former analysands of Lacanian analysis - seem rather hypnotised by his works?
You don't get it. As soon as the Analysand tries to create an underlying structure to their struggles, the Psychoanalyst stops the session.
Where id was, there shall ego be.(Freud: New Introductory Lectures, 1933) By the way, Loewald contends the famous quote should have been translated "there shall ego become."(1970) In other words, Lacan's Unconsciousness is not a structure. Like language, it is a process of becoming, in a state of flux, incessantly changing.
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).
love this!
Slavoj Zizek brought me here
"You say one thing, and you mean your mother" -5:51
Was this supposed to be a joke or was it an actual Freudian slip?
But where have you all been - it feels like psychotherapy has been living under a rock ? this is not modern knowledge this is ancient Vedic (Yogic) knowledge thousands of years old. Freud’s idea of the horse rider that’s a story of the charioteer from one of the ancient yogic texts. “Knowledge is structured in consciousness” ~ Maharishi Maheshi yogi. Western knowledge seems infantile in comparison. Sanskrit is a language of creation … sound is part of all form including humans …Yoga has so much to contribute to the theory of psychotherapy, as does quantum physics … I’m just so surprised by the lack of collaboration between Eastern and western schools of thought
4:15 Unless you define what a language actually is, you cannot claim that the subconscious is ordered similar to it. This is a logical fallacy of faulty comparisons since you cannot tell us what language is, or what the subconscious is, or what this structure is that makes them the same. As Chomsky said in a letter to me when I asked him about Lacan: "The word “language” is used in such varied ways that it’s become almost impossible to talk about (its use or) misuse. The only way to proceed sensibly is to state as clearly as possible what one means by the term...far too little is understood about the unconscious for anything to be said along these lines."
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?
Quite lucid interpretation to a difficult text.A good attempt.but failed to meaning the 'absence'.
hm
'infun tereeblee'
Ughh.
Great.
Oui oui.
The unconsious is just other people.
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
Break out la(pop)corn.
Useful but wrong
L E C A N P I E.
Jacques Le Corn
Call no man on earth father or teacher is very true dont trust in your priests or pychoanalists or abusive parents.
exceterra exceterra
Lack-on
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 🤣
Lacan was not a great writer.. Well in fact he was a great writer. But he was not a great writer.
ok-ish. fairly easy to watch but not very insightful.
But of course the unconscious is NOT structured as a language. This notion was a conceit on Lacan's part in response to the influence of structuralism in French thought, stemming from the work of Levi-Strauss (the anthropologist, not the jeans), which had become extremely fashionable. Anything and everything had to be structured "as a language," so why not the unconscious? A much more meaningful, and radical, approach to the unconscious was developed by Norman O. Brown, whose "Life Against Death" contains much that resonates with Lacan and other thinkers whose work, like that of Lacan, post-dated Brown. Brown doesn't focus on language but on the (repressed) body, i.e., biology, which for Freud constituted the basis for psychoanalysis.
Worthless nonsense
Who did the background art? Nice touch.
Who did the background art? Nice touch.
Who did the background art? Nice touch.
Who did the background art? Nice touch.