aa - 09/09/02 13:41:32 EDT
Besides, Sokal got it wrong. His criticism of Lacan implies that Lacan would be attempting to actually do mathematics, and that such at attempt was obviously ridiculous. Lacan wasn't doing mathematics, he was trying to set up some sort of model for the unambiguous transmission of psychoanalytical concepts. Whether his choice of mathematical-like figures was the best one is another question.

aa - 09/09/02 13:37:46 EDT
One thing is what Lacan actually said, another thing what his followers/devotees/commenters may say about it. Likewise, the difference between what Freud said and the bullshit spewed by the American ego psychologists (i.e. Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, Erikson, Loewenstein, etc.) Try actually reading Freud and Lacan, man. Preferably, in the original, not the terrible English translations. Oh, and Lacan eventually left Sylvia Maklès/Bataille for another woman - a fellow analyst, I believe, commonly referred to as "the concubine".

skeptic - 09/09/02 12:18:07 EDT
cf. sokal and bricmont, fashionable nonsense.

ALexandra - 09/08/02 00:17:26 EDT
Hey this board is automatically posting things three times. I didn't do it. Is there a webmaster in the house who might look into this!?

alexandra - 09/07/02 13:36:47 EDT
It's a pity, this board used to be so lively. Now the same anti-lacanian posts over and over and over.

skeptic - 09/06/02 18:03:56 EDT
To me Lacan represents one extreme of the obscurantist, terminally digressive mode of psychological-philosophical discourse ascendant since the early 20th century. Discussing Lacan seems to be a kind of sport, an engaging leisure activity, and hardly useful or serious academic discourse.
I often get the feeling that Lacan was, to some extent at least, playing a Dada-inspired joke on his readers by making his language so clouded in jargon, dense metaphor, and puns; maybe by the last decades of his life he began to believe in his own profundity. Sycophants can have that effect.
And what business did J.L. have marrying the beautiful Sylvia of Renoir's "Une partie de campagne"?

skeptic - 09/06/02 17:59:24 EDT
Does it give you fellows such great satisfaction to write in a manner that purposely excludes most English speakers from the conversation?
Curse the moment when it became in the scholar's interest to be *less* comprehensible.
Also, why must you Lacanians translate the pleasures of popular culture in to some kind of abstruse psuedo-psychological formulation? Why the distrust of pleasure?

Dan - 09/05/02 09:30:14 EDT
Terry!, what do you mean they will confront themselves in paranoia? The very theories that are construed by "science" will contain that element within them. So, for example, quantum mechanics, in which nothing can be observed without changing it by observing it. Is the paranoia in there? Or is it with the particular scientist in his or her quest? How would scientific theories incorporate an object a?

Terry! - 09/04/02 14:12:36 EDT
Cron
I met Alan Sokal at the Conway Hall in London...several years ago after he published his spoof.
He does not undo Lacan...Rather Lacan undoes him.......For Lacan believed in the exact sciences .......BUT they need to be conjoined with the linguistic sciences for us to make any sense of the world or a human being.....Lacanians have as their cause Object (a) whereas exact scientists have no object (a) as cause and will confront themselves in paranoia in their continued quest for 'truth'

Antonia - 09/04/02 00:26:19 EDT
It isn't a great book, I agree with Tom.

Tom - 09/03/02 06:44:10 EDT
Is a great book
No it isn't.

Cronopio - 09/01/02 23:13:38 EDT
I just want to say I can't believe there's so many people who really believe on Lacan theory. I recommend you all to read a book dedicated to the non-postures of science...it's an essay which has lots of critics on many theories (Lacan's included) and I really think it could be really interesting for a lacanian, maybe for re-planting your situation and what you think about this man, or maybe for making yourself feeling even better about your position, since a book couldn't make you change your mind, and of course you have good reasons for it (which I think would be pretty hard, but that's my opinion). Anyways...the name of the book is, in Spanish at least, "Imposturas de la Ciencia" (which would be something like un-postures of science), by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Is a great book, and I really think all Lacanians should read it.

Terry1 - 08/31/02 18:24:33 EDT
Om. I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor 'chitta'
Neither the ears, nor the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight,
Neither ether, nor air,I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.

Any comments on this as a description of Jouissance and the big other object A

I am neither the 'prana',
Nor the five vital breaths,
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor the hands, nor the feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organs of action.
I am Eternal Bliss and awareness.

Neither fear, greed, nor delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I,
Nothing of pride, of ego,
Of 'dharma' or Liberation,
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor the object for its desiring.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.

Nothing of pleasure and pain,
Of virtue and vice, do I know,
Of mantra, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or Sacrifice,
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.

Death or fear, I have none,
Nor any distinction of 'caste',
Neither father, nor Mother,
Nor even a birth, have I,
Neither friend, nor comrade,
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.

I have no form or fancy,
The All-pervading am I,
Everywhere I exist,
And yet I am beyond the senses,
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.

Thats what you are. You are Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
Consciousness. The pure Consciousness.

Antonia - 08/31/02 14:10:57 EDT
You have and you own in Jouissance... but most of all YOU ARE, right?

Terry1 - 08/30/02 13:59:14 EDT
Joissance is completeness....You have and you own in Joussance.

Antonia - 08/30/02 04:28:53 EDT
Terry 1 - meaning stops... jouissance begins. Is jouissance meaning, more meaning, a different kind of meaning?

Terry1 - 08/28/02 17:55:12 EDT
Antonia very circuitious.......The meaning of meaning.........Meaning is created by the semiotic chain of the big other A which resides in the unconscious. When meaning stops jouissance begins. The great chain of meaning is a semiotic chain of connotaion and denotation. Meaning ripples through the imagos of words. Words are after all little pictures.

Antonia - 08/27/02 16:47:42 EDT
meaning of meaning...
the phrase has meaning, we cannot say otherwise, since if I say "a child is being beaten" everybody can understand it. Besides it has a grammatical construction which is perfectly correct. However with the subject that is talking to Freud it is, "I don't know, a child is being beaten." Already the phrase has another meaning, an arbitrary meaning with regard to the etimological sense of the term - not solvable in context. A mystery for the subject itself for whom it appears knotted to a: "I don't know."

Terry1 - 08/27/02 13:28:22 EDT
Lacan teaches us how to find the meaning of meaning.

Ernest - 08/26/02 13:01:30 EDT
Does a phrase like "A child is beaten" have meaning in itself, or is it rather that it generates meaning?

Antonia - 08/24/02 11:16:11 EDT
The fantasme is not in harmony with the rest of the neurosis - Freud says this at the end of the second phase of A Child is Beaten. Then when it comes to the contain of the analytical experience the fantasme remains aside from all other neurotic components. In other words, Symptom and Fantasme are in different places.

Rupert - 08/22/02 19:28:16 EDT
If the unconscious "works" like a language, then it is made of signifiers and the subject scattered therein, therein where the fantasme takes place. Is it then in analysis that the subject re-appears as subject of enunciation? Only there? Or else the fantasme officiates as agent of signification in everyday life?

Antonia - 08/22/02 12:56:18 EDT
Rupert...Actually the agent of the beating - invariably the father of the person having the fantasy - is erased in the fantasy. The task of analysis is to restore it. The child who is being beaten is not an anonymous child, but he himself in relation to the father - the patient will come to recognize it.
This construction does not represent a remembered reality but may be a desire. Again it need not be a desire to be beaten.

Antonia - 08/22/02 12:42:26 EDT
Alan, you want to know HOW "...my father is hitting the boy that I hate he loves only me" works in phantasy...
Freud says the times erotic incetuous fantasy reads as "The (father) loves only me and not the other child, since he hits him." But then guilt investigates in the victory... "No, he doesn't love you, because he hits you."
The second phase fantasy - in which the actual subject is abused by the father - gets to be a direct guilt expresion into what the love of the father indulges. He has thus becomes a masquist. Guilt transforms sadism into masoquism.

Rupert - 08/21/02 18:28:22 EDT
Antonia - precisely "I don't know..." In French the word barré, like in sujet barré, means that the subject has been "exonerated," something has been put on it, but is still present, has not been deleted or suppressed. In fantasy the subject is a deaf, mute and blind witness by the presence of objet a. Afterwards it copes with...

Alan - 08/21/02 15:08:47 EDT
Antonia can you make clear HOW the phrase : '...my father is hitting the boy that I hate he loves only me' works on phantasy?

Antonia - 08/21/02 12:21:35 EDT
Rupert - why are you saying the equation of fantasy excludes the verb...?
Freud's famous phrase, which Lacan in turn takes up to explain the fantasme is:
"A child is beaten." The verb is in the passive tense, so far that doesn't mean there isn't a verb... Moreover that is the title of Freud's article. When Freud tells of the complete phrase, the exact way the patient says it, it is: "I don't know, a child is beaten." The "I don't know" is as well significant ....

- 08/21/02 10:23:16 EDT
the hat's part body

Kurt - 08/21/02 06:49:52 EDT
Okay already Selma, let's round up all the psychotics and put them to work at saving the world. Is that what you want to hear?

Selma - 08/21/02 05:30:09 EDT
The movie wasn't about the moral right to go to war. Of course, they presented it as the poor little rich kid. Nash helped discover a plot to attack the U.S. in the movie. I don't know if he did this in reality, because Hollywood, you know.

Lisa S - 08/21/02 02:01:27 EDT
Can any one help me locate an article/seminar paper by miller "Extimiter"

Lucy - 08/20/02 10:26:26 EDT
So with Tom - it is the hat body part...

Rupert - 08/20/02 10:18:44 EDT
In the equation of fantasy, <> seems to be a relation that excludes the verb, therefore the incidence of the subjet, of the barred and divided subject, is hard to define. Lacan exemplifies the crossing of the fantasy with the Moebius strip where the passage from desire to demand is "unnoticeable." Nash helping the military, and for that matter any weirdo, is to say the least disneyfied. Again the construction of the American perception of reality reminds me of Deleuze/Guattari schizo-machines. America's moral right to go to war...

Selma - 08/20/02 08:55:24 EDT
I don't know about Joyce, but John Nash was very different than Mr Ripley because the latter's psychosis had no redeeming value. Nash did actually help the military through his pattern finding abilities. His most destructive delusion, which was more or less victimless, was a continuation of that beneficial work--only the "real" people were no longer asking for his help.

Eleanor - 08/19/02 19:59:02 EDT
Tom cuts up the hat and mistakes his wife for the object petit a. Is it that Joyce hallucinated, had delusions. Does anyone know?

Ernest - 08/19/02 17:08:03 EDT
The problem with Tom is that he stutters

Paul - 08/19/02 13:00:25 EDT
Tom, your language is desintegrating!

Tom - 08/19/02 10:52:40 EDT
h t
The man who mistook his wife for a (a).

Antonia - 08/19/02 03:12:18 EDT
With Lacan there aren't levels of psychosis . It is always whether you are or you are not a psychotic.

Selma - 08/18/02 20:20:09 EDT
The branding of someone as a "psychotic" versus the exploration of psychotic episodes seems important to me.

Cathy - 08/18/02 18:22:10 EDT
I often mistake people for psychotics...but I'm usually wrong.

Antonia - 08/18/02 15:23:22 EDT
before you get to ralize she is a hat.

Lucy - 08/18/02 12:01:58 EDT
it doesn't work the same with the hat and the woman, Paul now the man mistakes the wife for a hat, she must look like a hat... how does anyone look like a hat?

Paul - 08/18/02 11:23:07 EDT
now, you mistake someone for a psychotic, he must look like a psychotic...

how does anyone look like a psychotic?
The Talented Mr. Ripley looks like a psychotic before you get to realize he is one...

Eleanor - 08/18/02 08:48:08 EDT
Yes I agree that Tom's statement is accepting the speaking void. If the man mistakes her for a hat, she must look like a hat.

Selma - 08/18/02 06:27:52 EDT
Paul, I think you were saying below that James Joyce used his writing to "patch the ego." Or do you mean he used the delusions to patch the ego. From the movie, John Nash definitely used his delusions to build a world where he was important, and had a mission that was essential to the safety of the world. And in this delusional world, he was able to use his dispositional talents, that is he liked to find patterns in things. And the patterns he found in magazines and newspapers were meant to locate a nuclear suitcase bomb. I can see the appeal of thinking what you are drawn to do is essential to the well being of everyone. But the amazing things to me, are 1) the way he overcame the delusions. By habituating himself to not believe them. and 2) that he was a brilliant mathematician, with real talents that exceeded the average person. And was it the lack he felt, that was the impetous for the delusional world.

Paul - 08/18/02 03:14:14 EDT
It is a question of the psychotics's irony - not of his humor. Besides the psychotic has no humor. Although irony and humor both make us laugh, they are different from one another by structure.

Lucy - 08/18/02 03:08:50 EDT
What makes you say this, Paul?

Paul - 08/17/02 14:44:35 EDT
Tom - Isn't yours a pyschotic statement?!

Tom - 08/17/02 06:30:50 EDT
I for one cannot imagine more than one person could "mistake his wife for a hat".
There could be if there was a woman who looked like a hat, and she re-married.

Antonia - 08/16/02 23:33:26 EDT
There are plenty of common traits to psychosis... A schizophrenic, for instance, will determine himself or herself by not being caught up in any discourse, nor in any social link.

Lucy - 08/16/02 23:15:26 EDT
In Oliver Sacks stories nothing is common with psychotics. I for one cannot imagine more than one person could "mistake his wife for a hat".

Ernest - 08/16/02 02:49:15 EDT
is John Nash's way out "Nash teaches himself to recognize the delusionary people as delusions" common to other people suffering from the same?

Antonia - 08/12/02 21:26:18 EDT
Paul - I was trying to decipher Rupert's post...

Paul - 08/12/02 20:42:02 EDT
Antonia, let me try to follow the crazy story:
American media - with a paranoic profile - is America's ethics - mere perversion...
The conversion brings pleasure... Atta lives in a pink house.

Paul - 08/12/02 00:37:15 EDT
Selma - Lacan says of James Joyce, who has the name of the symptom, that he used to patch the ego - would this be at all the case with John Nash?

Lucy - 08/12/02 00:32:51 EDT
Cathy - Yours is in fact a very Zizekian conclusion. The enemy being "always invisible" this is how it will quickly switch faces throughout political manipulation. Still I find in America there is a kind of delighting in the raper. Remember when it was the father-raper? We even had pro-rapers at that point...

Selma - 08/10/02 12:39:51 EDT
I just saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, about the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. It's odd how the psychotic reaction so often has to do with achievement. In this case, original math ideas. In the movie, and I don't know the truth of it, Nash eventually teaches himself to recognize the delusionary people as delusions. The void is speaking to him, in the form of these people. And he learns to stop listening to them because they aren't real.

Cathy - 08/10/02 04:55:19 EDT
Yes, well I was thinking that to redirect attention of the American audience from American aggression and sympathy for the innocent elsewhere, the effect of the little girls kidnapping makes a subject of innocence in the backyard of the audience to focus on. And the aggression is re-located in errant invdividuals, rather than the powers of the administration.

Lucy - 08/10/02 01:28:05 EDT
Cathy - I guess one thing Zizek would argue against is the way the American press shows the kidnapping of young girls in America, versus the way it shows the kidnapping of young girls in Kosovo or Bosnia - most cruel images.

Antonia - 08/10/02 00:40:37 EDT
Rupert - In the making of fantasy the subject is not absent. $ a. $ (the divided subject) becomes a (an object), and viceversa. American media America's ethics America - Atta's house? a pink house - the president's house?

Rupert - 08/09/02 13:07:55 EDT
In the making of fantasy the subject is absent, it is reconstructed as such as subject of enunciation. The fantasme is a machine only in that it starts out when the DEMAND of the Other is disclosed. Big nuance! The American media is that machine, that agent of hegemonic and exclusive conciousness that shape America's ethics. What looks as paranoia in the external front is mere perversion (for the time being) at home. Let's not forget that Atta lived in a pink house...

Lucy - 08/09/02 12:13:08 EDT
Desire is the desire of a desire.
Not the desire for the mother but the desire for the Mother's desire - the desire of the mother is in the Other - the child will come to recognize it as his own.

Paul - 08/09/02 12:12:19 EDT
What comes to fill in the place initially left empty by the mother's absence is "the Mother's desire" or the desire for the mother?

Cathy - 08/09/02 07:00:28 EDT
I wonder what Lacan would say, or maybe Zizek is a better choice here, about the recent obsession in the American press with the kidnapping of young girls. Before the WTC were taken out, the press was obsessed with Chandra Levy who may or may not have been killed by a senator. Then they forgot about their obsession for awhile in light of the desert of the real. But now the press is reporting constantly about all these little girls that are getting stolen and often killed. I seems a topic Zizek would have a lot of good things to say.

Brad - 08/08/02 17:26:14 EDT
Thanks

Lucy - 08/07/02 20:30:33 EDT
Brad -- in the mirror stage the baby has formerly entered the symbolic - with Lacan the baby's cry is already language.

Brad - 08/07/02 15:57:48 EDT
Question: I understand that language has both an imaginary and a symbolic aspect. I also understand that we only see the mother as having had the phallus retroactively, after the intervention of the Law-of-the-Father. So it makes sense to me how meaning can be constructed retroactively, but I'm not sure this answers a lingering question for me -- in the mirror stage, how can the infant identify with its image and recognize its ideal ego, etc., if it has not yet entered the symbolic? Is it enough to say that this imaginary stage is articulable only after we've entered language if recognition and identification would require language/conceptualization in order to occur in the first place?

Lucy - 08/07/02 02:59:27 EDT
Freud discovers adults don't play because the fantasme is substituting for their infantile ludic activities. Akin to playing, to a game, after pain and enjoyment - it is because the certain Other left, that the child remains in a painful state - the fantasme produces pleasure. Thereby obtaining pleasure thanks to his ludic machination, the absence of the Other reveals his desire. Lacan constructs the paternal metaphor formula thereof - what appears as the Mother's Desire comes to fill in the place initially left empty as it accounts for the mother's absence. When she's not there he can ask himself which is his desire, what it is that he desires. The fort - da child produces his machination as the desire of the Other comes forth. The fantasme is a machine that starts out as the desire of the Other unveils.

Daraban - 08/06/02 07:14:50 EDT
Babalar, burada neler yaptiginizi bana da açiklayabilir misiniz acebalik?

Lucy - 08/05/02 19:19:25 EDT
Spaltung: Splitting

Reena - 08/05/02 09:03:39 EDT
"It is the repitition of the mother's departure as the cause of a Spaltung in the subject" Lacan says. What is the meaning of this German word Spaltung?
I think the little boy in the Fort-da is already exhibiting his obsessional neurosis. He is having too much pleasure. Although I do not understand this idea of too much pleasure in the obsessional neurotic.

Lucy - 08/04/02 23:40:27 EDT
Thank you Terry1...

Terry1 - 08/04/02 05:35:49 EDT
Very Clear Lucy.

Lucy - 08/03/02 23:57:38 EDT
The fantasme like a machine to transform jouissance into pleasure is a strictly lacanian concept. With Freud you can trace the thought throughout 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle.'
Beyond this principle there is a dimension of jouissance, the fantasme appears as a media to articulate it with the pleasure principle correlative. i.e. the Fort-Da game, where the subject dominates the situation and learns to obtain pleasure via the little machine his game sets out. The fort-da is an emblem of how the fantasme functions as machination to obtain pleasure.

Reena - 08/03/02 23:11:02 EDT
Are you trying to challenge god?

Reena - 08/03/02 23:10:39 EDT
How can you quote a quote that asks god to preserve us from quoting quotes?

Gertrude - 08/03/02 22:21:41 EDT
Terry1 - Wow, for your quote.

Terry1 - 08/03/02 17:58:57 EDT
'God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone can and must leave their contribution' Strindberg

Eleanor - 08/03/02 17:09:33 EDT
I'm just reading through this messageboard and I like the idea of the fantasme as a machine, since I've been trying to read Donna Haraway. Regarding Reena's question about the obsessional neurotic, I suppose doesn't need more pleasure, if the condition is already too much enjoyment.

Reena - 08/03/02 05:07:20 EDT
Lacan says in seminar XI that the obsessional neurotic enjoys too much, and the hysteric doesn't enjoy enough (the trauma of the primal scene). How is this so? A little more explanation could make it clearer.
I was hoping for a Zizek reference for the slave's action as hegemonic agent of ideology. Maybe the Sublime object of Ideology. It's so hard to refind these ideas.

Terry1 - 08/02/02 16:06:59 EDT
Gertrude look forward to seeing you in London. In London we have CFAR........the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research which is Lacanian based. To my knowledge we also have The London Circle of the ESP.

Tom - 08/02/02 11:12:00 EDT
Terry1 - but mammals other than us cry, no? And this would seem to call into question the way that any language, however crude, is for Lacan something "specifically" human - the cries of baby animals aren't (for him) rudimentary forms of language but are a conceptually different form of communication. What is the extra mechanism in humans that leads to the development of language, and how does this developmental stage relate its historical origin in the form of the murder of the primal father? (not demanding an answer from you here, this is just what I'm still unclear about).

Lucy - 08/02/02 07:17:15 EDT
Terry1 - We are cut from the thing (m/other) that made us, and this is how we make up an Other similar thing for it to keep on with the making - to say more than we know...

Gertrude - 08/02/02 07:14:11 EDT
Terry1 - I'm curious to know if you've heard of this NLS - New Lacanian School - in the English language, will it reside in England?

uh huh - 08/02/02 05:41:18 EDT

Rupert - 08/02/02 00:42:25 EDT
Terry1, there is also the call of the wild...Borges has a short story called The South...

Rupert - 08/02/02 00:41:16 EDT
Reena, these are just my words...but if you are curious, try Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as Foucault's History of Sexuality; then Zizek, Lacan, Badiou etc.

Rupert - 08/02/02 00:34:17 EDT
Lucy, I'm just questioning your savoir, it sounds a little funny...

Gertrude - 08/01/02 23:39:04 EDT
TERRY1 - I am on my way to London!
...from the President of the ESP after the Brussels Congress on the New Lacanian School in formation. This NLS in formation is obviously considering its own singularities in concern with the diversity of languages of the work communities composing it. The name of this School in formation, as well as the fact that its statutes will be formulated in English, indicate the interest of the WAP to have training take place in this language as well. The General Assembly of the ESP, held July 17, 2002 in the presence of the new Delegate General of the WAP, Graciela Brodsky, unanimously ratified this transformation of the ESP-Development into NLS. Alexandre Stevens, President of the former ESP-Development, indicated on that occasion the clinical orientation which will lead its formation.

Lucy - 08/01/02 21:24:11 EDT
Rupert - What is your compulsive questioning about?
- how can you be so sure...? how do you know...? what do you know...?

Martinuk - 08/01/02 21:17:45 EDT
I would like to know wich time you meet at lacan channel please write me at mfb2@ciudad.com.ar thanks

Terry1 - 08/01/02 14:39:33 EDT
Can I explain.......there is no new age in the phenomenon of language. We are speaking thinking beings. The first words we speak are a cry. This cry aims at unity, we are cut from the thing (m/other) that made us. We willnever be complete again only fleetingly which we experience as jouissance('to have and to own') a demand created by a lack. The goal of language being silence. We can push this and look at speaking and sound as vibration etc. In language all meaning is variable and based on reference back. As I've said before 'words lie' even Heideggars Lacan shows us how to read words and speach. 'If we read a book properly it should fall from our hands' When we say more than we know the truth speaks.

Tom - 08/01/02 14:28:44 EDT
Named and shamed.

Reena - 08/01/02 08:21:44 EDT
Or if anyone else knows where this might be stated , I'd appreciate a reference of some sort. much thanks

Reena - 08/01/02 08:20:18 EDT
Rupert:, do you have any reference (which book?) for what you wrote here: "Firstly S1 puts the slave to work, then the slave becomes the hegemonic agent that translates ideology on to objet a." I'm working on a project and would like to read more about this.

Rupert - 08/01/02 03:12:43 EDT
Lucy: the fantasme being a machine transforming jouissance into pleasure? the fantasme taming jouissance? how can you be so sure that jouissance does lead to displeasure? how do you know where jouissance leads? what do you know about jouissance, the fantasme and pleasure? As to language having its roots in "crying," what's that Terry1, middle-age crisis or you turning new age?

Rupert - 07/31/02 18:41:48 EDT
What about Heidegger's speeches at Freiburg ending with "three heils for the Fuhrer? If that's love...

Terry1 - 07/31/02 17:31:46 EDT
Gertrude is poetic she has a beautiful soul. Plato noted the soul has two wings, love and reason and flies home to the perfect world, the neumenal world, the unknowable world. The first words we speak are a cry. A call for unity. All language has its roots in crying. All language or discourse is a demand for love

- 07/31/02 11:20:18 EDT
Has anyone read the Phaedrus? (sorry if that's a stupid question.) I'm wondering what people think about the ending, where Socrates talks about the benefits of the philosophical life. The process he discusses sounds a lot like psychoanalysis -- exloring one's thoughts with an other in discourse. Forgive me if my citation is not exact - I read it months ago. I'm wondering how different psychoanalytic discourse really is from philosophical.

Richard - 07/31/02 08:46:18 EDT
Maybe there is not a Lacanian reason why animals aren't born into language, maybe it's biological. They don't have the mechanism for speech.

Lucy - 07/31/02 00:23:16 EDT
After Freud the fantasme - fantasy - allows for the subject to obtain pleasure. i.e. Freud's grandson's Fort-Da. Yet there is a necessary condition. The necessary condition of the Fort-Da is the mother's absence.
After Lacan the fantasme is like a machine to transform jouissance into pleasure - a machine to tame jouissance let's say, since through it's own movement jouissance doesn't head towards pleasure but towards displeasure.

Gertrude - 07/31/02 00:13:13 EDT
The written is an effect of discourse. The letter is an effect of discourse - it is conditioned by discourse. You read, in the flight of a bee going from flower to flower - the flight serves a function for the reproduction of plants.
You read, in the flight of a bird that flies close to the ground - that there is going to be a storm. But do they read?

Gertrude - 07/30/02 21:17:40 EDT
There you are being not - Terry1, being so lucid over the 'Fundamental Attribution Error.' And who should we attribute these words you write in quotes to?

Terry1 - 07/30/02 16:44:18 EDT
Tom you have made the : 'Fundamental Attribution Error' The cow is born into the phenomenon of language for us....you 'named' the cow.

Tom - 07/30/02 10:47:35 EDT
Why isn't the cow born into the phenomenon of language?

Terry1 - 07/29/02 17:44:52 EDT
We don't 'aquire' language we are 'written through' with language. 'In the beginning was the word'.....Adam says: 'We seize the word'.....The Hindus talk about 'OAM' the sacred sound of the universe that creates all things. Language is here before we are born and here when we die. The individual is born into the phenomonon of language.

Terry1 - 07/29/02 16:38:29 EDT
I am not here!: 'I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think'.

Tom - 07/29/02 10:31:30 EDT
The aquisition of language is for Lacan what distinguishes us from animals, and yet (see postface to the Purloined Letter seminar) it can be traced to the child's acting out of the presence and absence of the mother - an increasingly complex grammatical structure develops around this simple binary structure. The mother's presence/absence, the offering/withdrawal of the breast, is something all mammals experience to a greater or lesser extent, but only in humans does this lead to the development of language in the Lacanian sense. Why?

unknown - 07/29/02 01:38:10 EDT
Terry1 is desperately looking for Sheila!

Gertrude - 07/28/02 15:14:17 EDT
desperately looking for Terry1.

Sebastian - 07/28/02 08:35:39 EDT
Speaking of this countermovement, does Lacan conceive of the 4 discourses as constantly shifting in any given situation, or somehow all operative at once.

Selma - 07/25/02 08:38:07 EDT
Re: the career woman comment--Did you imagine me to be a housewife talking about my husband? I was talking about my fundamental fantasy of my father when I was a little girl. The only master I have now is that fantasy. --...The changeless part was always true, the growing part was always new...

Rupert - 07/25/02 02:05:03 EDT
Sebastian, as I see it, in the master dicourse S1 acts as master signifier for all other signifiers (S2) meaning that one rationale discriminates for all other siginifiers, as an ideology. Its aim being the appropriation of objet a, cause of desire. In the university discourse S2 becomes a sort of scientific catalyst, a standard of domination. Firstly S1 puts the slave to work, then the slave becomes the hegemonic agent that translates ideology on to objet a. Note that the discourse of the hysteric implies a countermovement or backtracking.

Sebastian - 07/24/02 08:48:05 EDT
Rupert, how can the master discourse (where it has been said here relies on the S2 being conaissance) suddenly use the S2 of the university discourse. This doesn't track.

Lucy - 07/24/02 08:36:24 EDT
Dorotea - I assume the rhyming tale goes with the fantasme idea.

Dorotea - 07/24/02 08:09:36 EDT
Lucy I like that rhyming tale.

Selma - 07/24/02 05:21:52 EDT
Or more accurately:
Career woman does not exist.

Rupert - 07/24/02 05:17:24 EDT
Sorry! I misrepresented you!

Selma - 07/24/02 05:13:23 EDT
The career woman does not exist.

Rupert - 07/24/02 03:00:32 EDT
Is it not that the master in order to assure supremacy turns first to the university discourse, that is turns to S2? And the hysteric, is it not a discourse where anyone may be inscribed? At some point the hysteric will deceive "his" master. And then, is the career woman hysteric?

Lucy - 07/24/02 02:13:32 EDT
I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two. The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew. The changeless part was always true, the growing part was always new, and I wondered, when the tale was through, which part was me, and which was you.

Selma - 07/24/02 01:52:22 EDT
To try and please the master until she is so tired of his taking the surplus, the object a, and doesn't notice her dedication that she shouts: Tell me who I am! Can't you see I what am?
Or something like that. Maybe it's like the master discourse rotating into the hysteric's discouse.

Lucy - 07/23/02 22:35:27 EDT
Selma - the hysterical slave wants to do the master's work to what aim?

Rupert - 07/23/02 21:40:24 EDT
Lacan calls S2 "a battery of signifiers" already there and that serves to positivize the discourse as a semblance of truth, that is savoir. I think that the concept somehow "evolves" throughout the 4 discourses (from the master's to the analyst's), each time losing something of its savoir patina. Objet a, cause of desire and waste from the subject's division, dispels semblance, that is savoir, and finally carries the day. By means of objet a savoir (what must be said and what mustn't) becomes connaissance (what it's said and what isn't). But of course this is arguable. Romance languages as well as German have different words for savoir and connaissance. In any case the distinction goes back to St. Thomas of Aquinas and then to Arostotle.
As to the hysteric being slave, it's a blatant contradiction with Hegel's The Philosophy of History.

Tom - 07/23/02 14:00:33 EDT
Very useful distinction between saviour and connaisance - but doesn't this make it even clearer that the S2 referred to in the discourse of the university (which seems to be equatable with what Rupert calls saviour) means something very different to the S2 (connaisance?) in the other three discourses? And in analysis isn't it the subject who addresses the object a (played by the analyst) rather than the other way round? The unnverving idea of the object a _itself_ addressing the subject seems to evoke the discourse of advanced capitalism (think billboard advertising...)

Lucy - 07/23/02 13:15:00 EDT
Selma - can the hysteric's appropiation of the desire of the other as her/his own be read as identification with the other?

Antonia - 07/23/02 12:19:10 EDT
wow Anonymous, that's a compliment I love

Anonymous - 07/23/02 09:28:26 EDT
Does Antonia exist to add spice to life?

Selma - 07/23/02 07:41:39 EDT
So the hysterical slave wants to do the master's work, as she/he has appropriated the master's desire as her or his own. I am not so clear on perversion--the objet a is switched with the barred subject in the formula, but I am not sure what this mean in effect.

Selma - 07/23/02 07:37:58 EDT
The hysteric appropriates the desire of the other as her/his own. But the hysteric's desire can only be sustained as long as the hysteric does not become the other's object of desire.

Rupert - 07/23/02 05:46:59 EDT
"In analysis what gets hysterized is the analysand, not the discourse" is a rather bland remark. And with "the traverse of the fantasme is part of the process of analysis" you are stating the obvious. As to the master-slave thing...it reads "passee." You disappoint me Antonia...

Antonia - 07/23/02 05:11:08 EDT
In analysis what gets hysterized is the analysand, not the discourse. The traverse of the fantasme is part of the process of analysis. Thus "the hysterical slave to a perverse master" is a fantasme that could be traversed... And there probably is a perverse slave for an hysterical master but this is another fantasme.

Rupert - 07/23/02 04:46:10 EDT
Then...
Is there a connection between the traversee du fantasme and the hystericization of discourse?
Any relation to the discours qui ne serait pas du semblant as systemic rationale for the 4 discourses?
Is there not a perverse slave for any hysterical master?

- 07/23/02 04:27:44 EDT
No comprende.

Rupert - 07/23/02 03:45:44 EDT
No comprende????

- 07/23/02 02:53:11 EDT
It would be interesting to scan the links between the traversee du fantasme and the hystericization of discourse, just to break the bondage that ties the slave to the master.

????????????

Rupert - 07/23/02 01:18:15 EDT
Savoir belongs to the field of the Other. It's Father Knows Best, Donna Reed as Another Mother for Peace, the National Board of Education, George W. stating that he's not a stock picker, the IMF posing the rules to revive periphereal economies...Then one discovers (or remembers) that Father was a drunk, Dear Mommie is out there with a big pair of scissors, teachers are dumb and lie, Washington cheats on us and the IMF hasn't the foggiest idea on how to recycle the Third World. You see, for Lacan the analytical cure is a subversive act, here and now, an epistemological break. Besides he declares it plainly in Radiophonie: "Only the discourse that defines itself in the terms given by psychoanalysis manifests the subject as other, gives the subject the key to his/her division, whereas science, by making the subject a master, conceals the subject, to the extent that the desire that gives way to him/he bars him/her for me, as for Socrates, without remedy."
It would be interesting to scan the links between the traversee du fantasme and the hystericization of discourse, just to break the bondage that ties the slave to the master.

Fidel - 07/22/02 22:08:35 EDT

Lucy - 07/22/02 21:11:12 EDT
wish the Judge would expound on him becoming an hysterical slave to a perverse master.

Antonia - 07/22/02 04:27:39 EDT
1- it's for you to tell us of connaissance in Seminar XVIII...
2 - an alcoholic doesn't like to stop drinking, a drogatict doesn't like to stop drugs... I think though the utmost question is, why do we insist in doing what we do not want to do?
3 - language starts the unconscious, it's exposure you may have to read like Freud did in the Fort da, his grandchild's game, in the patient's recount of the dream...
4 - the subject (it) speaks - in slips of the tongue, errors etc.
5 - I say the object of the cure is the process itself. And thereby the pursuit of two clinical dimensions: The Symptom and the Phantasme.

Rupert - 07/21/02 18:07:36 EDT
1. "un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant" seems to side with connaissance.
2. can one not like what is good?
3. how the unconscious is "fabricated" and how is it exposed?
4. if the "supposed" is the subject and not savoir, who talks?
5. which is the object of that "knowledge" that motors the cure?

Antonia - 07/21/02 14:37:21 EDT
Sheridan translates sujet supposé savoir (SsS) as subject supposed to know.
Schneiderman instead translates it as supposed subject of knowledge - with him what is supposed is the subject and not the knowledge. The phrase is introduced by Lacan in 1961: Psychoanalysis evinces that knowledge cannot be placed in a particular subject, since it is in fact intersubjective.

Tom - 07/21/02 14:07:11 EDT
What you demand from the analyst does not stem from his Supposed knowledge - S2 on the lower left part of the diagram

Exactly - S2, knowledge, is *not* the unconscious, unacknowledged motor of the analytic process, which is what Lacan's positioning of it in the lower left-hand corner of the analytic discourse states it as being!

Antonia - 07/21/02 14:00:14 EDT
Rupert, regarding the pitied patient who gets his/her analyst's supposed knowlege back...
if you don't believe in you there is more than you, why bother with analysis or what have you.

Antonia - 07/21/02 13:39:16 EDT
Tom - the knowledge that knowledge is incomplete as constituting its completion well suits the idea of knowledge not having an object... Provided we are talking knowledge of the unconscious this should be the case, right?

Antonia - 07/21/02 13:19:09 EDT
The materialization of the unconscious I can picture over an image close to the one in issue 1 of The Symptom - a body of letters. Though this is rather personal, or maybe influenced by the word "body," which in Lacan is not implying the body as we understand it in common language. And there is also the image of the hole or the hollow around which - at the end of analysis - the signifiers whirl. As to savoir and connaissance Rupert, and how to differentiate those two in English, you tell us about.

Tom - 07/21/02 11:06:21 EDT
What if the knowledge that knowledge is incomplete constitutes its completion?

Rupert - 07/21/02 08:03:27 EDT
Wouldn't be fascinating to observe the materialization of the unconscious if only it would be possible? Well, pitied be the patient who gets his/her analyst's supposed knowlege back(?) via transference... But returning to Lacan it seems capital the difference between savoir and connaissance, the latter being on the side of the unconscious.

Antonia - 07/21/02 01:02:25 EDT
Tom - What you demand from the analyst does not stem from his Supposed knowledge - S2 on the lower left part of the diagram - through which transference emerges. Analysts are not entailed to know too much... indeed, what the role sets up is the inverse. Structuring the transference from his supposed place of authority the analyst tells the one beginning analysis: Say whatever you like, it will be fine. Supposed knowledge transfers back to the patient who can thus know more than what he knows.
The subject supposed to know fades as the unconscious materializes constructing the analyst as a semblance of jouissance - objet a, silence, dummy, death...

Antonia - 07/20/02 22:30:58 EDT
Tom - to edit your posts you send an e-mail to perfume@lacan.com with the new version of the text you want to upload and they change it for you in no time.

Tom - 07/20/02 18:37:20 EDT
Hey, you edited that post, Antonia (one more 'ji' than the last time I logged on). Can the rest of us do that? (Would save some embarassment at times.)

Antonia - 07/20/02 09:44:21 EDT
"...the university discourse seems to invoke a certain derision"? derision like ji,ji,ji ji,ji,ji ji,ji,ji? With my newest expression - this isn't seem clear to me.

Tom - 07/19/02 14:18:13 EDT
("Isn't seem clear" is an English expression meaning "doesn't seem clear"

Tom - 07/19/02 14:17:09 EDT
In the discourses of the master and hysteric, isn't it the case that S2 [imagine a little 2 there] has a significantly different meaning than in the discourse of the university? Its use in the university discourse seems to invoke a certain derision, since it refers here to closed, systemized "knowledge", whereas in the discourses of the master/hysteric it seems to refer to an authentic knowledge which can accommodate the Real. And is anyone able to explain the role it plays as veiled truth in the analyst's discourse? - this isn't seem clear to me. Thanks.

Claudia - 07/19/02 02:05:11 EDT
Selma - I did an ironical remark over the Judge becoming an hysterical slave to a perverse master, more precisely over the tacit warning and whining implicit in his line...

Selma - 07/18/02 21:42:14 EDT
Who is innocent here? That is a most baffling statement from Claudia, to whom does she speak? And Hamlet from Hell, I assume wants to taste Claudius's suffering (not Claudia's, or Josefina's for that matter). But the dimension of THIS desire? please elaborate...

Hamlet from Hell - 07/18/02 13:35:19 EDT
I must taste Claudiu's suffering or I will never know the dimension of this desire.

Claudia - 07/18/02 11:08:27 EDT
The exposure of innocence is a lie

Judge - 07/18/02 05:18:19 EDT
How would I what, Chris? Become an hysterical slave to a perverse master.

Selma - 07/18/02 04:39:32 EDT
Enjoying too much = suffering (albeit exquisitely)

Chris - 07/18/02 02:37:04 EDT
she enjoys your attention, my attention, she enjoys too much? This is all I want to give her!! how would you Judge?

Alice - 07/17/02 10:49:31 EDT
Stuart - can you tell me more of the blue of the past - the blue of transference which is not the blue of nowhere nor the blue of today's sky... please

Stuart - 07/17/02 06:21:48 EDT
And not the blue of today's sky

Stuart - 07/17/02 06:21:01 EDT
The only blue out of which transference comes is the blue of the past, not the blue of nowhere

Selma - 07/17/02 06:14:17 EDT
Transference only acquires meaning by virtue of the dialectical moment in which it is produced, wrote Lacan in Ecrit.

Ernest - 07/17/02 01:05:33 EDT
So go ahead no-name and tell us about this transference phenomena

Not out of the blue not at all - 07/16/02 23:24:19 EDT

Judge - 07/16/02 23:19:17 EDT
You can wait if you like, but she enjoys the attention too much. To hell with poor Hamlet .

Digging - 07/16/02 22:50:39 EDT
I think Josephina should call for some order in the classroom

Ernest - 07/16/02 22:38:18 EDT
with pieces we are in the realm of desire, whether through the partial object or through the fetish object - the prototype object that causes desire.

Lucy - 07/16/02 22:29:30 EDT
how do we know it is out of the blue?

Paul - 07/16/02 22:29:00 EDT
Is this how it happens, just out of the blue you create a transference...?

Dorotea - 07/15/02 22:11:02 EDT
Lucky Josefina, everyone always loves her to pieces.

Josefina - 07/15/02 18:42:12 EDT
Terry1 - that's a nice way to put it...

Terry1 - 07/15/02 18:21:59 EDT
Josefina has created a transference.

Chris - 07/15/02 00:19:28 EDT
Josefina, I think you're beautiful!! If only you lived in London!! I'd visit you every day!!

joan - 07/14/02 02:10:00 EDT
The truth of desire for Lacan is full speech as opposed to empty speech.This is how Lacan puts it in Ecrits, chapter 3: The ambiguity of the hysterical revelation of the past ...presents us with the birth of truth in speech, and thereby brings us up against the reality of what is neither true nor false....it is present speech that bears witness to the truth of this revelation in present reality, and which grounds us in the name o that reality.

Claudia - 07/13/02 16:06:05 EDT
What analysis can do is change the analysand's tie to the fundamental fantasme. More precisely the relation of the subject with the real of the fantasme.
$ <> a The formula of the fantasme weds the subject to the object.
Indeed the subject encounters the object fusing, melting with it, on a surface divisible through a cut - losange. The action of the signifying cut together with the object renders the actual subject: Hamlet is at once the tortured Claudius, the one torturing Claudius, and the jouissance of the one doing this... The subject identifies with the signifier - with the act of torturing itself. The fusing function of the objet a in the fantasme takes place in the real. The subject unconsciously perceiving the object becomes it.

Rupert - 07/13/02 11:37:54 EDT
"To lead the analysand to articulate the TRUTH about his/her desire" seems a vast program, especially as to "truth." For what is truth? You should be more specific...

Selma - 07/13/02 11:06:25 EDT
But does "traverse" have some specific meaning? Other than get to know, become aware etc.

joan - 07/13/02 07:59:01 EDT
The analysis does not deprive the analysand of the fantasme. It leads the analysand to articulate the truth about their desire.

Rupert - 07/13/02 01:01:45 EDT
Is it not depriving the fundamental fantasy the traversing of the fantasme? And does Hamlet really get over the fantasme? It seems too easy (and hard to believe) that his desire is just having Claudius rotting in hell...

Antonia - 07/12/02 18:00:23 EDT
And how do we know Claudius didn't enjoy the torture Hamlet was inflicting him with?

Claudia - 07/12/02 15:43:56 EDT
The Law of the father acting over the desire of the mother precedes the Other in that it constitutes it. The subject arises in the Other - desire is always the Other's desire. The subject speaks in errors and slips of the tongue, thus it needs the response of the Other to know the sense of his speech.
As to the fantasme, who says the subject wants to be deprived of the very fundamental fantasme? Once Hamlet "traverses the fantasy" - gets to know he desires Claudius to suffer hell's eternal torture - he doesn't want to be deprived of acting his strange apathy on behalf of Claudius eternal torture...

Rupert - 07/11/02 23:13:50 EDT
Somewhere Lacan says that "the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other." Does this refer to the law and the Father or is it an instance where the mother as Other desires the phallus? In the fantasme the object of desire is objet a, cause of desire, which operates both in demand and in desire (mother and father) and structures the primordial fantasme of the subject. The analyst is the one who can deprive the subject of this very fundamental fantasme that regulates his/her universe of self-experience.

Gelf - 07/11/02 09:15:05 EDT
In seminar VI Lacan says there is no Other of the Other, but Zizek in "Did someone say Totalitarianism?" often refers to the Other of the Other.

Claudia - 07/10/02 00:11:38 EDT
Hamlet's drama is not to be found in such a divergence between action and thought nor in the problem of the extinction of his desire. Hamlet's strange apathy belongs to the sphere of action itself - its origin in a relationship to the mother's desire and to the father's knowledge of his own death. If Hamlet stops when he is on the point of killing Claudius, it is simply because to kill him is not enough, he wants him to suffer hell's eternal torture. Even if he doesn't believe in hell more than we do "To sleep, perchance to dream..." the case is that Hamlet stops in the middle of his act because he wants Claudius to go to hell.

Selma - 07/09/02 09:24:15 EDT
In analysis, slowly the fantasy of the analysand becomes more conscious, is this "traversing the fantasy?" Bringing to the conscious the way the analysand sustains their desire...the way they suffer, experience jouissance. And then the effort of psychoanalysis is to reformulate the jouissance?

Rupert - 07/09/02 09:23:28 EDT
Are you sure that Hamlet overcomes the oedipical injuction? Is he not devoured by the anxiety of "having it"? Is he not devoured by his mother's desire? In any case his symptom is best exposed in "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," since contrary to what has been said he is not bind to any proper name: there is no "symbolic debt in the register of the law" and he realizes his impotence to experience the phallus as an imaginary object. He is a character in search of desire.

Joan - 07/09/02 06:38:54 EDT
Hamlet's struggle is to act out his father's command--to destroy his uncle and to not fuck over (kill) his mother. The name-of-the-father is inscribed all too well. His is an oedipal battle, as he tries to resolve the injunction--you can not have your mother.

Rupert - 07/08/02 20:36:53 EDT
The problem with Hamlet is that there is no inscription of the name-of-the-father. The question "to be or not to be" (the phallus of the mother) is a question asked in the Other by a emasculated father. The challenge involved in castration is "to have it or not to have it." No paternal metaphor is passed since Hamlet is left in doubt as to his own identity: he is unable to make of the phallus the very symbol of castration, to be more precise he fails to recognize the phallus as "a signifier of lack" since castration ultimately implies "possession" not "being." He and Laertes kill each other in Ophelia's tomb (that strange objet a) where Lacan, I think, makes a pun with Ophelia's name and the phallus (phallophanies). There is an interesting parallel in English history, though with a different ending: the tale of the three Edwards.

Terry1 - 07/08/02 17:57:28 EDT
Agreed Joan!

Joan - 07/07/02 22:30:53 EDT
Hamlet neither is nor was a psychotic. Once the name-of-the-father has been inscribed the subject is formed.

Terry1 - 07/06/02 07:01:59 EDT
Hamlet WAS a psychotic.

Rupert - 07/06/02 03:13:56 EDT
Hamlet's mother is that woman within the mother who desires a man who would be able to turn her desire into law. Any man. She seduces her husband with lies and sacrifices him to her desire. It is as much her as her lover who emasculate and kill Hamlet's father. Bluntly speaking, the old king is a man dispossed of the phallus and thereby unable to pass the paternal metaphor. Now, Hamlet is literally left with no words when his mother refuses to sacrifice her jouissance in order to avenge the dead king. She is the Other where Hamlet is confronted with the question of his own identity. Hamlet finds no words and when he finds them, his speech is rather incoherent: he lives in his own dream. Therefore he cannot avenge his father, he cannot desire Ophelia, he kills his best friend, he is lost for what he really fancies is his mother (or would you have him cry uncle?). When the paternal metaphor, a.k.a. castration, is missing, Hamlet cannot evoke the signification of the phallus and his answer to his father's call ( or rather lament) is a lack of the signifier itself. Foreclosure follows. In his last moment of lucidity he commits virtual suicide. Hamlet is a psychotic.

Lucy - 07/05/02 21:59:39 EDT
With Hamlet, there is another issue which should account for obsession. And this is his entanglement with the desire of the Other, the mother...

Claudia - 07/05/02 16:00:50 EDT
Terry1 - "Hamlet's symptom is his lack in completeness"? Isn't this something that is common to all? Otherwise, how else would we desire if it wasn't because we lack? What makes me relate Hamlet's behaviour to obsession is his famous doubts and his favor for impossibility.

Terry1 - 07/05/02 13:44:57 EDT
The ONLY law IS the law of language. When the signifier operates in Hamlet as he speaks his name this law operates.He is able to act decisivley.Hamlet's story/narrative can be told. Hamlet's symptom is his lack of completeness.

Claudia - 07/05/02 12:26:00 EDT
The initial point is that desire is the opposite of feeling. Socrates makes the very simple point: one who is hungry "feels" empty and then "desires" to be filled. Desire is for a state other than what you feel at the moment. Lacan says desire aims at a scene - dinner at your favorite restaurant - rather than at the state of repletion and satiety that follows the meal. Hamlet wasn't getting any closer to his desire through a deeper understanding of feelings... Still he can act on his desire only when the situation created by action in consonance with it is impossible. The actual symptom relates to obsession, I would say.

wynship - 07/05/02 11:11:19 EDT
perfume - yes

Selma - 07/05/02 09:45:03 EDT
A symptom being that around which you structure your life, I am still not clear on Hamlet's symptom before and after he mentions his name.

Jones - 07/04/02 08:54:04 EDT
In the book published by arkzin d.o.o. of Slavoj Zizek's Repeating Lenin, for the what, how and for whom 2 exhibition last july, does the author have any say over the many pictures that illustrate the text? Does anyone know if he had anything to do with it?

perfume - 07/03/02 15:34:52 EDT
wynhsip - the interview in lacanian ink 20 on the criminal girls?

wynship - 07/03/02 12:31:02 EDT
perfume - the one in lacanian ink

Claudia - 07/03/02 00:54:43 EDT
Hamlet has an obligation to modify the world as he finds it. But he instead tries to find a place for himself in it and this is what makes him a being of affect - to the point of competing with Laertes over whose affects are stronger. He is distinct from a being of desire as he privileges being over doing, having.
The connecting of himself as I with his proper name has everything to do with proclaiming a desire and acting upon it. And it even corresponds to the mythic act of parricide.
The parents discourse announces their desires for a child of his name. These potentialities do not become his until he accepts the name he has is his own. Still what makes the name designate him rigidly is not the intention of the person who has named, but rather a law of language - the One of the Logos, the symbolic phallus...

selma - 07/03/02 00:05:10 EDT
Terry1 is answering Fishing's question about Slavoj Zizek.

Rupert - 07/02/02 20:12:17 EDT
Oh man!

Hunting - 07/02/02 19:20:27 EDT
Indeed

Rupert - 07/02/02 17:50:46 EDT
Really?

Terry1 - 07/02/02 15:56:28 EDT
'Enjoy your symptom!'

Rupert - 07/02/02 14:53:35 EDT
If the name-of-the-father is that which structures the unconscious as language ("the unconscious is structured like a language") then we have that the symptom can only be grasped through language, at least in analysis. Later Lacan states that the symptom is "that which comes from the Real." Hamlet cannot kill Claudius - his father's killer, his mother's lover, and the usurper - he cannot love Ophelia, she dies in a state of insanity. Is it thus that he becomes "a being of affect?" Somewhere Lacan states that the objet a is suplus-jouissance...

perfume - 07/02/02 14:33:09 EDT
which interview, wynship?

wynship - 07/02/02 10:17:10 EDT
Josephina - Thank you for the interview. very interesting...

Selma - 07/02/02 07:56:20 EDT
Yes, What is Hamlet's symptom when he is "a being of affect"? And once "order is restored" he structures his life around the mandate of the ghost, to avenge the murder, no?

Claudia - 07/02/02 05:30:05 EDT
Terry1 - how could we call the symptom before and after Hamlet mentions his name and order is restored?

Antonia - 07/02/02 02:13:51 EDT
Fishing - symptom is this around what you structure your life.

Fishing - 07/02/02 01:39:59 EDT
Can someone explain the idea of "the symptom," and relatedly, how Slavoj Zizek relates to Lacan?

Terry1 - 06/30/02 16:10:10 EDT
Yes Claudia and this is the only time in all of the play that Hamlet mentions his name, just once, and order is restored. Thus the law of language exerts itself.

Claudia - 06/29/02 20:25:35 EDT
As Rupert points out Lacan will linger on the figure of Hamlet, specially on the question of why Hamlet is not capable of revenging his father's murder. Not from the point of vue of whether he desires his mother or not, but rather from what his mother's desire is: Say the mother's desire lies in concern with the temperamental Claudius it would implie his father's failure... Hamlet is entrapped by the ghost's mandate that bids him to murder Claudius, still no harm should come to the Queen. Challenged by the ghost to modify the world surrrounding him, he instead tries to find a place in it, and thereby becomes a being of affect.
Hamlet is not uncapable of acting on a desire. The issue is that he can act on it only when the situation turns to be impossible - doesn't he desire Ophelia most when she is dead? He utters his desire while jumping into her grave "It is I, Hamlet the Dane." Here, what asserts desire in Hamlet's line is the connection of himself as "I" to his name - he binds himself to his proper name by his own very act.

Rupert - 06/29/02 01:16:37 EDT
In Seminar VI, Le desir et son interpretation, Lacan comments on Hamlet's "to be or not to be," what he terms the anxiety of his desire: castration. He states that "there is no Other of the Other" meaning that the big Other as receptacle of truth is devoid of that signifier that could only warrant such truth: the phallus. So if the phallus is not in the Other, how can the subject be sure of not falling into the dependency of demand? In other words, if there is no inscription of the paternal metaphor and no phallic signification, then the name-of-the-father is foreclosed, and we end up with psychosis. So far the phallus appears as the signifier of castration that precludes desire of the big Other, desire which perhaps is but the demand of the mother.

Terry1 - 06/28/02 15:36:39 EDT
The psychotic is trapped in the real.