Slavoj Zizek, Todd McGowan, and Russ Sbriglia discuss Jacques Lacan
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 มี.ค. 2022
- Slavoj Zizek, Todd McGowan, and Russ Sbriglia explore the points of greatest strength and greatest weakness in the thought of Jacques Lacan. They focus on the notion of surplus enjoyment, the formulas of sexuation, and the four discourses. They frame this discussion with analysis of the current Russian aggression against Ukraine, which they look at in psychoanalytic terms.
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You 3 should have a regular Lacan podcast!! This was incredible. The chemistry is off the charts
Yes, encore!
Although with Cornel West & Chris Hedges,Zizek is my favorite(living) intellectual,I don't like his dismissing of Dostoevsky,cause of one quote & his "Jungian slips" when he's talking about unconsciousness & he corrects himself immediately,as if Jung has never existed😆😆😆😆😆
Yes I would also appreciate this
Love how comfortable everyone is with each others’ presence. It makes for a fantastic viewing.
My anxiety is for when Zizek dies-what monsters may arise in his wake, without his voice to pull the brake on his train.
_”Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted Zizek, in various ways. The point, however, is to change him..”_
we all share that anxiety!
I’m just imagining myself as “Zizek’s Lenin”: the next guy will be his Stalin!
For real, that anxiety is there.
I’ve been patiently waiting for this discussion to pop up on your channel, Todd. It did not disappoint. Really great stuff!
thanks for this. great to hear from all of you. make it a regular thing!
I can't make up my mind what I enjoyed more: the brilliant conversation or Slavoj's hilarious passion
Love the thumbnail!
It's amazing
great talk! I am a recent fan after learning from discourses between Theory Pleeb and The Dangerous Maybe, which onboarded a ton of knowledge for me in Lacan. Here are my timestamps for this talk:
19:37 - politics and jouissance, "Lacan's theory of j is indispensible to any sort of political ideological analysis"
20:30 - Seminar 20's Sex and Gender and the formulas of sexuation "Are masc and fem are essential qualities to sex?, to what degree are hte ljbiana school is teasing this out. sex is the fundamental cut, gender is the second,symbolic cut
21:45 - "the pure subject position is femininity, do we have to update Lacan to save it from a sort of essentialism from gender/sex? or is that the only proper way to read Lacan?"
22:18 - ?Gila Gofey? - his english is fine, he thought, wrote a book on , by tying the formulas to sexuation, Lacan in a way falls for that line by Ernest Jones "god did make them man and women", he thinks the notion of feminine is going into mysticism
24:19 - women are totally into symbolic order, nothing is on the outside, Lacan's great case sent ?terriza?, "it's not just the statue of the cover on Seminar 20, he was wriitng like crazy"
24:57 - this idea of of femininity of some elusive point of mystical real which always eludes the symbolic grass? is precisely male fantasy, "I think Lacan himself is ambiguous about this". The feminine non-all means precisely no exception, nothing which is outside the phallic dimension, you undermine phallic logic from within by universalizing it, in the sense of precisely no exception, at some point Lacan didn't think things through the end thorugh, there's already a mystical tendency30:30 - ?the whole point of a joke is at hte central point, you arrive at hte feature hta tmatchmaker cannot explain aw ay, what do we want her to be perfect?
30:50 - Lacan doesn't get the Lacanian point of the story, I look at Lacan as an author who is much more inconsistent, trying new possibilities, the game Lacan plays with his seminars end agree?, as he emphasizes in seminars he's not teaching he himself is an , improvising theoretical free associations, in agree? he is then an analyst giving formulas
39:20 - Donald "Unknown Knowns" Rumsfeld: this is still the notion of repression, not yet for closure: you have a tension, an unconscious: you don't know what you know. "I misread Rumsfeld, its not in his dealing with WMDs, it's not he was determined by unknowns knowns, he was in a psychotic way fully identified with what he thought what he knew with known-knowns. The depth of his psychosis foreclosing every reality, he sincerely thought there were weapons of mass destructions there.
40:20 - "I still stick to my interprtetation that not only Rumsfeld and generally the Bush administration were not really sure Saddam has WMDs, they positively knew that Saddam DIDN'T have them." This is why we don't attack North Korea right now!
47:25 - "The absence of words are words, this is symbolic efficience at it's purest!", pure symbolic strategy
51:50 - Zelensky is a native Russian speaker, "all throughout the world everyone thought Putin was bluffing except for CIA", Zelensky is not just demagoguery, "don't talk too much about certainty of invasion, because this automatically raises temperature"
54:15 - "I think it was correct politics to discipline Russia but he shouldn't have said it publicly, Biden tries to balance helping Ukraine by nonetheless by avoiding a new total world war, it's not true that Biden is pushing for a total conflict"
56:15 - Putin read wrong lesson from Afghanistan fiasco, he thought "West is weak I can invade", all European countries now want to enter NATO, including countries such as the great northern troika (Finland Norway Sweden)
57:02 - Putin said 2-3 days after the war, he made an appeal to Ukrainian army "why don't you depose the leadership and take over, it will be much easier to work with you". Zizek: "THE WEST MUCH TELL THIS TO THE RUSSIANS, IF YOU WANT PEACE SUPPORT ARMY AND SECRET POLICE, SAY 'ROSEBUD' AT LEAST RUSSIANS!"
59:22 - paranoiac direction where Lacanian thinking has gone, on covid in particular, it's kind of related to mystical moments in Lacan
59:47 - ?Lanca? wrote on conspiracy theories and has a good interpretation of "Don't Look Up" movie
01:00:05 - as a lacanian, the principle of the nomme-du-pear was entirely forgotten, related in. way to Russll's claim that Zizek was misreading Rumsfeld and unknown-unknowns
01:02:30 - there is a certain military joy directly targeting LGBT sexually oppression, global warming, whatever. now reality is here, forget about all those bullshitting self-help problems with global warming, political correctness, but now there is conflict there, giving sexualized meaning in the most traditional sense
01:04:45 - conspiracy theorists claiming this is not a serious war, but now there is war conspiracies are now doubling down on aliens. conspiracy theorists are preparing the terrain to keep us in shock and invoke even aliens, very saddening
01:06:20 "these are middle class people in Ukraine!" as if there weren't any middle class doctors in Iraq, the sympathy level is entirely different
1:11:20 - Putin is a war criminal, when Russians regime bombed Alleppo (biggest city in Syria) the bombing was absolute/total
1:11:47 - we in europe have to confront this probelm, otherwise we'll be losing this battle in the i-dont-like-this-name the third world, eg indonesia
1:13:13 - symbology I need to understand
It’s so cool you made a list of time stamps for this one! You are a theory saint!
Guy le Gaufey is the guy who wrote the book on the formulas of sexuation
Phenomenal discussion, thanks gents.
thank so much for sharing!
Great talk, thanks for sharing! Todd, you gotta up your bookshelf game.
But Todd’s paltry shelves are a radical act! He’s refusing a position of supposed symbolic mastery! All jokes aside though, and no disrespect to anyone because I appreciate everyone involved in this, but I do find it amusing that the dude I’ve never heard of is posed in front of a zillion books while the dude whose work I appreciate most is seated in front of two very modest shelves.
Loving Todd's Bengals hat as ever
Because Bills put everytime! :D
Thanks for the talk! Absolutely loved it. Maybe you could bring Zizek to talk about Kafka? Hope your channel grows a lot.
thank you
.......WHAT IS GOING ON TODAY IN OUR GLOBAL WORLD, HOW IS THIS WORLD STRUCTURE ?KEY QUESTION AT ALL THANKS to SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Todd, I don't understand why you don't have a podcast form of your TH-cam channel. WhyTheory is one of my favourite podcast and it is how I discovered you. Please consider.
I would be happy to do it, but I have no idea of how to do it. That's the only reason why not. Nothing more than that.
@@toddmcgowan8233 I'll do it for you
@@user-xh5wj4tw8k That would be phenomenal, thanks.
@@user-xh5wj4tw8k Was about to say this. Thank you, both of you!
@@user-xh5wj4tw8k Will it go up on iTunes? Awesome!
Please, share the complete version
Miller’s journey towards singularity structured only on jouissance is the ultimate decay of psychoanalytical discourses like that of Tantra which tended towards such a particular kind of singularity through Panch Makaar, i.e., taking madya(alcohol), māṃsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudrā (grain), and maithuna (sexual intercourse) as the elements of only Taboo-breaking.
Lacan had a deep understanding of Tantra Shastra of India and even quoted at many places its greatest ever thinker Abhinavgupta (11th century AD) as a Hindu thinker when he discusses language type structure of unconscious in his Ecrits.
would anyone be able to link to Alenka Zupančič on Don't Look Up?
It is at 56:38 that professor Žižek says: "All European countries now want to enter NATO, even countries which always avoided it, like the great Northern "Troika": Finland, Sweden, Norway". Professor Žižek's motives for not knowing what he is talking about aside, but in this particular case professor Žižek refers to there is no such thing as "the great Northern "Troika": Finland, Sweden, Norway", since Norway itself has already been in NATO: moreover, Norway is a founding member of NATO and has been an active participant in NATO since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on the 4th of April 1949. Norway therefore has never "avoided" entering NATO, as professor Žižek falsely claims.
Can someone post a link to the Alenka (Zupancic?) review of "Don't Look Up"?
Love it
Mr Todd can you do a video on psychosis and foreclosure so that we might be able to understand zizek’s argument?
Love the intro music--I've been working on learning that piano piece, Beethoven's opus 110 in A flat, for the last ten years! I almost have it, still developing the chops to pull off the last movement but I think I can get it by 2025.
Good luck bro hope you're getting close
Jouissance gets it's first mention at 4:30. In a recent talk on Interpretation given by Darian Leader for the University of Kyoto, he referred to Jouissance as an "unfortunate concept'', unsurprising given his recent book on this topic. Any thoughts or plans to address or talk about this book with Leader?
I will address it sometime relatively soon on Why Theory
@@toddmcgowan8233 I'm glad I asked as I had no idea that you did a podcast!
@@toddmcgowan8233 ...any chance this may be addressed on Why Theory in the near future?
@@EMC2Scotia Actually, a very recent episode addressed my position on jouissance/enjoyment in Enjoying Right and Left. I think that I displayed enough enthusiasm for the category that my rejection of the idea that it's an unfortunate concept was clear enough. I think Leader's a very smart guy, but I think this is the decisive concept, so I disagree on this issue.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated. Looking forward to reading the book as well.
thanks todd!
at 31:11 , so hilarious! he is an analyst giving formulas with the hope that we the readers will discern the meaning of these formulas / which lacan himself does not know! in the ecrit . 😁💙
References which Zizek is talking about as Buddhist references are actually from the writer of Tantra Lok, Abhinavgupta.
He whispered “Rosebud”...
ok, at 3:55 we have Jewish Songs (the generated captions) for jouissance. Then at 4:25 we have symbolic illustration for symbolic castration...."and so on" Todd, I think it would be hospitable, and not that hard, to fix the errors in the captions; the hearing impaired would appreciate the hospitality.
What is the name of the song at the beginning? Is that Bach? It rings a bell...
it’s movt. 1 of Beethoven’s sonata 31
@@miralupa8841 Thanks pal.
Beethoven opus 110 Piano Sonata in A flat major. Amazing piece but very hard once it gets going, I've been working on it for ten years and still have a way to go on the last movement...
@@TheCyborgk Thank you. I knew it sounded familiar. Gorgeous piece.
What about Kojeve though...
About the death of Abhinavgupta it is said that he along with his thousands of pupil entered in a cave near Srinagar (Kashmir) and they all never came back. It is all the same like that Lacan in his last seminar just appeared for a minute before an audience of 500 people and went back uttering few words only. This is the end of all Ontic thoughts which makes one vanish to oneself
❤️
58:00 Poetin was also secret police right?
Little lesser known fact: If you hug the Zizek, you become part of the Zizek. The blob consumes you, devours you entirely. You gain the incredible ability to kinda understand Hegel, but it costs you and the blob 5 shirts per day.
If zizek is invited to talk, I am certain to hear from no one else lol!😂
At time 7:20, it seems that Zizek is ready to renege on what he had often said about the sinthom, i.e., about the importance of identifying with our sinthom to overcome the superego’s perversion.
Maybe, but I think that he would say that the point is that there is not just the sinthome, that there is still the master signifier playing a role in creating symbolic efficiency that allows us to talk to each other rather than remain stuck in our own psychotic reality.
So we are Jouissance islands, and the lack of lacks makes us project unto the other what we repress from our univers, within the shared symbolic space... of course.
22:13 How do you spell the name of the theorist mentioned here?
It's Guy Le Gaufey. His writings are all here: www.legaufey.fr/Textes/Attention.html. One book is translated into English, but there are numerous recent articles also written in English (if that is a concern for you).
Peaceful tones of such noble music played with resolute tact make me feel as if entering a place of hope. Though I know it can’t be.
To unlearn again, my friend, what has never been the case.
“If we look at this together,” the Good Doctor says…
A Tratschbude beyond scale. But, I claim, very amusing😊
Hilarious and pretty devastating. Respect from Bolivia
Lol the thumbnail looks like a happily married couple 💜
Glad to know I'm not totally missing the sexuation concepts. The paranoia / cynicism space is still troubling to me. 😅
fix Fix Fix implementation strategy walk it like I talk it migos mag gog or nah????
6/21/2022
As is usual with Zizek, I find this 'conversation' (read: soliloquy) both illuminating and frustrating....Maybe that's a good thing?
The macro-political points, especially about Ukraine, are more or less on target. The nitty-gritty about Miller and Lacan is ... well, idiosyncratic. Which is fine - if Z was honest with himself enough to admit them as such. I don't think he is, because he is in thrall to a master signifier called 'dialetic'. This is a mystical and trans-historical truth, a last whispered thing that animates everything he does. I am glad it does so for him, not so much for others.
To suggest that either Miller or Lacan junked the social field because they de-emphasised the master signifer is ridiculous. They de-empahsised the master signifer in favour of the sinthome because the latter is a practical building of one's subjectivity in relation to the social field - in relation to the idea that no signifier can 'master' across a lifespan, people like Slavoj excepted. The master signifier is fantasy. It partakes more of the Imaginary than the Symbolic.
If one doesn't localise a dialectic - i.e. furnish it with limits based on premises - it reveals nothing but paradoxes - and, boy, does Z love paradox. He then makes this paradox the truth ....of capitalism, sort of ... see how quickly he backs off when certain examples do not answer to this truth, the endless, somewhat endearing, caveats, and so on and so on.
It's no wonder that Z loves Lacan's concept of the inverted message. Surely it is evident everywhere! People misread each other, (military) plans go wrong, or seemingly achieve the opposite (a new resilient NATO). Of course - it must be an inversion! . ...If only life were that easily read!
Set the terms of your logic wide enough and it will read tautologously back to you, like an equation.
This is not to say that life cannot be understood, that everything is really noumenal. It is only to say that it cannot be understood purely dialectically. This, by the way, is probably what Lacan was trying to intimate via 'the feminine'.
For years, I too thought this was a (anti-femnist) mystification, almost like the liberal racist idea of 'native' peoples and cultures Z has frequently and elequently spoken of.
No, it is a refusal of a complete accomodation by an Other's understanding. There is always something else - if only a limit, a wall. It is somewhere where metaphor (concept) begins collapsing.
Lacan named it 'feminine' because he wanted to have a go at philosophers and scientists (almost always men), and their love of concepts, their love of totalising concepts, their *demand* for concepts, and that their concepts should always prove to be the case.
Deleuze, a philosopher, didn't like that approach, which he saw as puritanical. He also disliked Wittgenstein for similar reasons, even if he demonstrably had never read him; viz. the embarassing W section in abecedaire. So he, and Guarttari, changed the terms: philosophers are creators of concepts, and this creation is always a 'line of flight' away from the current logical terms - but it is never a complete disavowal of those terms.
The implication is that no concept is without limits (an amusingly Wittgensteinian idea) including especially the concept 'dialectic', otherwise any thought of, and logic of, conceptualisation is a nonsense.
There are elements of the universe that remain 'silent'. This does not mean that there is a transcendent, religious, mystical 'outside'. It means that 'the unconscious' does not speak until it is spoken about. That is, one's speech and actions are reconfigured and rethought and respoken in relation to the subject's reception of the concept 'the unconscious'.
This concept, too, has a limit - which is the end of an analysis.
Great insights, way to go!
If - as you argue - "no concept is without limits", then what about the limits of the very concept of "limits"? How many "concepts" of limits there are and what types of "limits" can be thought of?
When claiming that "this concept [i. e. the concept of "the unconscious], too, has a limit - which is the end of an analysis", you seem to equate "a limit" (this concept has) with "the end" (of an analysis). What if "prescribing" - rather than "describing" - as many different types of "limits" themselves as possible creates for the first time possibilty conditions for any analysis to ever happen?
Thank you.
@@Goran-Edgar.Bojovic Hi, thanks for your reply.
Yes, probably the concept that 'every concept has its limits' also has its own limits!
Maybe I can claim Russell's paradox for that particular concept? The set of all sets that does not belong to its set etc. ... Perhaps this concept is an exemplar of setting premises too wide, and so creates its paradox and its own proof? That feels a little casuistical though...
I see an analogy - or even a correspondence - between concept and metaphor. Both appear to break down when stretched far enough. Is this because 'there is no metalanguage'? I don't know. It seems to me that popular phrases, especially in our heightened times of social media, such as 'Everything is political' are actually rather unpolitical, offering little insight into social relations because there are no explicit terms upon which the statement is based. The suggestion behind such a phrase is that the terms are material - but those terms are quickly lost, if ever even considered.
As to how many "concepts" of limits there are and what types of "limits" can be thought of, I've no idea. Perhaps as many as there are concepts? That is, a complete but infinite set, as there can also be one more after the last one? I do think that the sinthome is similar to D&G's idea of philosophers as creators of concepts. I'd like to turn D&G's idea on its head: new concepts arise not only in response to older concepts, but as an expression of the older concept's limits. Is this dialectical? Maybe. But the lack of a metalanguage limits what we can say about it; i.e. that the operation *always is and will be* dialectical.
"When claiming that "this concept [i. e. the concept of "the unconscious], too, has a limit - which is the end of an analysis", you seem to equate "a limit" (this concept has) with "the end" (of an analysis)."
Whether 'the unconscious' literallly exists (in a psychoanalytical sense rather than a neuroscientific 'subconscious') is moot. The subject-supposed-to-know doesn't actually have much idea of the analysand's unconscious. But the concept 'the unconscious' is accepted between analyst and analysand (with resistance!) to reconfigure and reconceptualise speech and actions, past and present, in the clinic and outside. It's a setting of terms. In other parts of life, those terms will not make sense. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And in the clinic, those terms - picking up on parapraxes etc - will eventually cease to work in the way they once did. At the same time, and with hope, the suffering that a subject had experienced, their relation to the world, will cease to manifest in the way it once did. Or at least, they will now experience their suffering as part of 'general human unhappiness' rather than as 'the end of the world'.
"What if "prescribing" - rather than "describing" - as many different types of "limits" themselves as possible creates for the first time possibilty conditions for any analysis to ever happen?"
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean 'prescribing' the terms of an analysis, and therefore its direction of treatment, after consierable acquaintance with an analysand and their speech versus 'describing' limits (as conditions and pathologies) in the manner of the DSM-V etc?
Thanks!
I always think of how Biden went to Russia right before the invasion. Correct?
from external hermaphrodite to cycloptic body of cogito
canceled without sublation
Lacan: he’s an Academic charlatan.
Lol "discussion"
Women can do no wrong. Even when they cheat and steal and prey on others, they do it, of course, in a way that makes them "a true hero". And a woman committing domestic violence towards her husband is just engaging in purely reactive violence in the effort to resist "the patriarchy", right? If this - never holding women accountable for their actions - is not misogyny, I don't know what is. And this is a repeating pattern with Zizek, this male chauvinism is one of the few consistent threads in his oeuvre, despite him always criticizing people and behaviors - often where it does not apply - for being "male chauvinist". Zizek is "the one good man", and as such is the embodiment of the male chauvinist.
This is also true in his theoretical work - when women are not held accountable, it means that we see them as victimized both if they are and if they are not a particular thing (thus, paradoxically, essentializing the very non-essentialist position of women being always the other - but at the same time not the other, and so on and so forth), and that's why Lacanians have to say that women are both fully - more than men - in the symbolic, while at the same time claiming that women, precisely because of this - conveniently enough -, have access to something other than the symbolic, an otherness of which men are deprived. So that women get the best of both worlds while men are left in an ethically and socially subordinate subjective position. This is precisely the false elevation of women that Zizek constantly warns against.
So glad he brought up "Inventing Anna". It was amazing to see this persona that was ultimately hollow parallel the bank loan where, if it weren't for the intrusion of the law initiated by the ex-friend, it seemed like project would have gone off without a hitch. I feel like it brings us close to the dynamic of fantasy and reality when the money doesn't actually have to be there for things to continue, we just have to believe it does. The fact that she was so close to obtaining the loan despite the lawyer's sophistry, pulls back this curtain.
Its as if her sin is better equated to class impersonation where its revealed that lower class members are barred from upper class functioning. She was caught in the act of upper class functioning, exposed as a member of the lower class.
IMO a much better version of "Catch Me If You Can" with regard to theoretical fruitfulness.