Kim - 05/23/01 10:59:18 EDT
I do regret having expressed any curiosity over "Grauss's" use of the word in question.

spectre - 05/22/01 20:50:30 EDT
now someone's using my pseudonym, a prospect i had not forseen. I could change, but to what end? anyhow, i don't see why mystique shouldn't motivate comments posted on the message board. transference, after all, is at the very heart of psychoanalysis. i don't believe it's possible to ask an entirely disinterested or unsexed question. the only criterion for posting should be that messages open conversation rather than shut it down, that the comments posted be interesting--which, as we can see, is not necessarily the case.

spectre - 05/22/01 18:32:57 EDT
Maybe this conversation is being propelled forward only because there is someone, apparently female, using the word "cock."

Louis Bologna - 05/22/01 18:28:31 EDT
Regarding quantity, which is the mainstay of any good man's desire, I can say that I have fantasized about taking a woman's second virginity -- that is, penetrating the hymen as well as the cervix. I succeeded once, but it was unintentional, and therefore missed the opportunity to enjoy it.
Recently, a fetus came to play a role in my fantasies. On this occasion, I was able to pierce the hymen and the cervix and be fellated by the developing child at the same time.
I reveal this not to be facetitious -- but only to hope that somewhere, out there in the community of Lacanians, is someone who, too, can imagine what it is like to have those soft, prenatal fingers grasping his cock.

spec - 05/21/01 08:33:11 EDT
I might also point out that television might be seen as that prop, that frame for the object, which is somewhat unique in that it comes with a variety of controls--i'm thinking of the ultra-sound machines i've worked with--all of which function to tune in on the inaccessible object of desire, give of at least the semblance of a messure of control over it, an ability to name and articulate it, a sense of mastery. what intrigues me is the degree to which it has now become possible to exert not just fantasies but full-blown strategies of perversion onto the foetus in the womb. Lacan was not so wrong when he spoke of the signifier, the network of signification, anticipating us before we are born into the lacuna.

spectre - 05/20/01 22:57:33 EDT
i notice a lot of kids out there unusually attached to television.

Kim - 05/20/01 20:18:15 EDT
Spectre and Terry1--
And what might Freud have written had he had lived in the age of Ultrasound?--where the woman has the experience of seeing this penis (infant, and possibly infant with penis) inside her? What is the consequence of this visual?--so much of Freud being centered around the image. This struck me especially when I saw a two-year old boy watching his mother's ultrasound. Freud, in his time, might have suggested, should this little boy grow to develop a fetish, that the object he used as a substitute was something he was fond of (a satin slipper, et al) at roughly the same time he discovered his mother was castrated. But to see one's mother (in the process of an ultrasound) and being told that what is on the screen (what she is in possession of) is what's inside her (this image he is seeing appearing much larger than either he or his father's penis)--well, what might Freud have said about this being part of a child's early image track? The future of perversions should be rich, indeed.
And Terry1, your story of the man walking into the bar also recalled for me the children's book "Are you my mother?" in which the little bird, separated from the flock, goes from animal to animal with that question. It is a story meant to teach children, I suppose, to the distinguishing characteristics of animals. But what is charming about it, is that for a moment the bird believes they might be.

spectre - 05/20/01 00:13:47 EDT
hey Kim--
This is getting pretty interesting, isn't it? I do believe there are female perversion, but they are different from the male's. I know there is at least one book on the topic, though I confess I have only intended to read it. I would guess, however, that whereas male perversions have much to do with gaining the phallus--either by mastering the penis or the woman's body--female perversion have much to do with being the phallus--either by mastering the penis or her own body. We certainly know of many current examples of women trying to do the latter. And with regards to the perverse mother, don't forget that for Freud the child is for the woman always a penis substitute. "Cock?"

Kim - 05/19/01 21:37:38 EDT
...and how does this story of desire differ (or does it) from: A man sees a woman. He approaches her with desire and curiosity. She is pretty much what he had in mind. He loves her, AND, he keeps looking anyway.

Terry1 - 05/19/01 15:41:38 EDT
The majical power of words

Terry1 - 05/19/01 15:40:26 EDT
Does a woman exist?......To quote fromthe London Exhibition of Lacanian Art at CFAR:
'A man goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman. He looks at this woman with desire and then attemps to approach to satisfy his desire and curiosity. Just before he approaches the woman a friend says : 'Its a man he is man dressed as a woman'......The man turns away and moves to another space. What happens to the desire of this man? Where did the desire go that compelled him to approach the woman?

Kim - 05/19/01 13:48:23 EDT
Spectre--What is the pre-castrated state for a woman? Can women be perverse, or simply hysterical.

Gauss--What is it about the word cock for you? It never offends me to see it written, but I find it a word impossible to say in a situation of true arrousal. It seems to me a word on an "actress" would say. Penis spoken aloud can, I suppose, be kind of cute.
Does this discussion stray to far from Lacan? If so, please disregard.

Kim - 05/19/01 13:35:22 EDT
Gauss--p.s. Perhaps I wear the flesh-colored slip to show you something I believe has been taken from me--is no longer there. My penis may never develop a tic--but my phantom penis has quite a case of Tourettes.

Kim - 05/19/01 13:23:03 EDT
Spectre- okay, i see. the "transparency" would not serve the perverse strategy at all. It would not provide the double disguise I think we agree is necessary. Perhaps the mask is made, rather, of that black crochet or lace worn over a flesh colored leotard or satin slip. To recover the power that was taken from me, I must show you the thing that I can never show. And then there is my mother, not a pervert exactly, but a woman who, nevertheless, cross-dresses as a woman--pretty face, nice skirts, a good neighbor--to disguise, not her craving for power, but the power she possesses, or rather believes she were possess if she could only believe she was a woman.

C. F. Gauss - 05/19/01 01:07:50 EDT
Perversion appears to be a reflexive, counterintuitive reaction to an immediate desire, desire being exulted to the level of juissance for the actual desire is socially unacceptable. I do not profess to be lacanian, but I conclude that this discourse, that being a liberal definition of what is being written, has become something approaching fantasy, the very thing which allows one to imagine infinity and be fascinated by insanity, but I am not amused by the word cock, and spectre, do not imagine my penis ever acquiring a tic. „Kim‰‚s last revelation echoes de kooning‚s woman.

spectre - 05/18/01 23:59:12 EDT
errata: But NOT because the glass is transparent . . .

spectre - 05/18/01 23:57:24 EDT
I'd agree with you on the notion of the pervert's mask being glass. But because the glass is transparent so much as because it is fragile. The pervert is always aroused by playing at the breaking point. As far as the erection is concerned, there the pervert attempts to gain mastery over an involuntary organ, to deny or reverse castration and pretend exist in a pre-castrated paradisaical state. Of course this is impossible/prohibitted, and the pervert risks being punished (the whole cherubim-and-flaming-sword business), which is precisely where the thrill is for him--a direct encounter with the Law. I like what you're saying about a male's fear of his own feminine desires, though I see that more as a hysterical trait. The more the man tries to mask his supposed sissiness, the more he loses control of himself, developes tics everywhere.
Thanks, Kim. This is good discussion and I'm sorry I stayed away for so long.

Kim - 05/18/01 20:52:56 EDT
Or is, perhaps, the pervert's mask itself made of glass. A mask that manages to provide a double disguise because it appears at first to be transparent--to reveal the dark desire. I am a man terrified of my own feminine wishes. So I dress in feminine ways and ask women to strike me with things. It would appear I am revealing my desire-- but I take this beating in the service of an erection--that proof that I am a man. The fact that I get an erection when I act like a girl proves I cannot be one and keeps my crucial deception, my feminine wishes-- hidden after all.

spectre - 05/18/01 17:18:07 EDT
Yes, Louis Borgeouis has a very big penis!
Kim--
I see it this way: the obessive attempts to juggle two or several masks, feeling each one represents a legitimate aspect of him, and tries to assemble them into a coherent whole while being unwilling to discard any of them; the hysteric adopts and discards an infinite series of masks, all of which seem to work for her only provisionally and rhetorically; the pervert clings to just one mask with relentless determination, always attempting to stretch it and play with its every possibility without ever breaking face. The psychotic attempts never to express at all, afraid that at any second his face could shatter like glass.

ghost in the machine - 05/18/01 17:17:51 EDT
talking of integrity, that's something very difficult to accomplish (I remember when someone first stole my name, impersonated me, and the uncanniness of this doppleganger effect destroyed my psychic space, albeit a virtual one). Here identities are constantly in flux, unstable, questionable. But isn't integrity an absolute, an ideal, a form of solipsism?
Avant-gardists sell out, compromise, provide the public with their prettified, banalising symbols. They cultivate their own myth, and like us, embody the paradox of being "outsiders" yet existing within a community; a community that is essentially imaginary. I can only consider artistic integrity as being finely nuanced and chrystallising at the point where language disintegrates, and conventional formalism is reduced to pure mood, or attempts to encapsulate a theory of the universe in a single image (Mondrian). With pure mood I am thinking late Turner/Mark Rothko. Yet these works do still communicate, despite their absolutist integrity.

Terry1 - 05/18/01 15:43:23 EDT
Why did Van Gogh do 60 paintings in the few weeks before he died? He walked the streets in London with his old boots, when he taught at a school near Hounslow. I think he wanted to be seen.....but nobody would look? Goya can be credited as the founder of Modern non-Lacanian art. His follower and exemplar of modern Art Manet said:: 'I have two Gods, Goya and the sun' The real Goya was born when he went deaf at 45 ( the Beethoven of non-Lacanian art) Any comments on William De Kooning, Louis Borgeouis or Francis Bacon..........What about somebody who has integrity and is ONE.... Terry

Kim - 05/17/01 22:57:18 EDT
I stand corrected.

hustler - 05/17/01 21:20:26 EDT
Kim - I don't think that hustler of a jongleur understood everything you just said, beyond the night of penicillin and something again painterly, but what made me take offense was the idea that "there resides a place where one may increase the capacity to observe one's own consciousness," as if the capacity were not a constant which one filled when one enjoyed being rightfully conscious.

Kim - 05/17/01 20:30:43 EDT
dear Juggler-
My given name is Kim, but I keep secret who gave it to me. And you are correct. I could be damaged under any name, if humiliation is damaging. But you asked about the observance of names a signifiers of identity. And I wondered about such a possibility in a place where faces are not linked to them. Lacan wanted analysts to create a space in which a logical questioning could take place so that the analysand could see something. And Spectre has described his giving him(her)self these different names as a way to use this site as a place increases the capacity to observe one's own consciousness. Perhaps Van Gogh looked at his self-portraits to see where he had tarried lately. I am not Korean. My father, who is North American missed that war by a hair. And I wish I could say I liked their movies or their art better--but I don't care for it much. Though one of Kyung Hwa Kim's paintings recalls Matisse for me, that yellow and blue he liked to use, and whom I adore. I am about so beautiful as a Night of Pencils. Not repulsively beautiful so as to be paintable, thoughI have a twin who is. She gets the flu a lot. I have visited the Symposia and can't figure out how to talk there but the essays are everything one could want.

jongleur - 05/17/01 17:21:46 EDT
Kim - I take it that Kim is your legal first name, your remarks upon Van Gogh's self-portraiture are of interest when inquiring about self identity, but do they reflect what is at issue in the observance of names as signifiers of identity? One is not subject to the rule of properly identifying one's self in this medium, and because it appears you have taken it upon yourself to identify yourself with your messages there is the liability that you will be identified by the audience by how you respond while you will in turn identify with how the audience reacts to you not as a speaker but as Kim. Are you Kimberly, Korean, repulsively beautiful? The audience may wonder, but it is precisely the obvious which you spoke of with which I identify you with, the techniques, pallettes, styles which your manner of writing betrays as a self-portrait would. A name in the messageboard may allude simply to the tone of the message, the intention, the ego of the respondent and so forth but this will not save one from emotional damage, when one becomes attached to one's words and identifies one's self with one's every utterance, i.e. for those who value words to have some revelatory significance. This trauma reminds me of the susanfrank confusion and the ensuing dilogue about identity and gender (archive 4). Is Terry a real name, or does he/she simply wish to tarry? In any event, as opposed to the messageboard, the symposia used to be a medium where one could explicitly provoke and be challenged, and mourning this fact, I am inviting Kim to the Lacan symposium.

Kim - 05/16/01 13:13:54 EDT
Spectre--Having already been accused of being easily intrigued - I will confess that the book I own that I most enjoy is a garden-variety coffee-table book. It is a collection (beautifully printed) of Van Gogh's self-portraits. There are, I believe, more than 50 portraits and the book has, thankfully, very little text beyond the dates he painted them. (Thank God the editor doesn't make the stupid suggestion I've heard before that Van Gogh used himself because he was poor and made a cheap model.) It would be to dwell on the obvious to talk about how it shows his progression through techniques, pallettes, styles, weight changes. And these are, of course, not what really remains after the mathematical proportions of his face disappear for you anyway. I Spectre, you asked about the power of "proper names"-the name's implication's for our fragile egos. (Could one say Van Gogh was dealing with the "proper face?" ) In any case, your explanation of your journey through these names on this site recalled this book for me. But when you said it allowed you to be "inconsisitent" without being "dismissable" I wondered about the twin desires that define the obsessive, desires she believes to be mutually exclusive. In this case , perhaps they are: 1. I wish to speak so freely and bravely to the world that I will soon reveal my inadequacies. 2. I wish never to be judged inadequate. Changing names would be a neat trick in terms of protecting the ego and solving this problem -but you appear more complex than this. I am curious as to the question (for you) of who has been constructed as the judge who might dismiss you? And does the judge-the "big other"--change with the name you choose, or drive this change in name? ie. Is "Spectre" writing for Perfume and "Goo Pai" for Terry1? Even if we wish to seduce the entire world, of whom is this world made up-that could confer on us a self our ego would agree to to own? It does not appear that Van Gogh attempted, ever, to make himself appear beautiful-but, rather, to make himself appear. But did he wish to be seen? What seems to shake me up with Van Gogh is how utterly, eerily personal what remains is. Is this what you are up to as well?

spectre - 05/16/01 03:31:40 EDT
KIM--
it's intriguing, though, how quickly we become attached to our pseudonyms, begin to identify with our characters. this tells us, as i believe ghost is suggesting, something about how our proper names function for us, are the props which sustain the illusion of having an ego. i admit i've changed names a few times over the last year, though it's not as a result of seeing "spectre" getting trashed so much as me wanting, often in mere play, to entertain a viewpoint different from the one i've been arguing without seeming inconsistent or unsure or entirely dismissable. so i decide to use a new name for just one message, that message gets what i perceive to be a serious response, and suddenly i invest in the new name. more often then not the old name suddenly ceases to hold my attention, disappears for me. i adopt a very different set of interests. does this say anything about subjectivity and the signifier?

Kim - 05/16/01 00:40:43 EDT
ghost in the machine--
Indeed, a single color does not make a picture, nor a single facet a sculpture--but is there more at stake in a masquarade of this magnitude? Perhaps this is what you meant by being saved from alienation. To take on these different names--in an almost limitlessly public, yet utterly private space-- to be spoken by these signifiers as much as to be speaking with them? What is this symptom being spoken here? What is the desire one desires from the other? If I make a naive query under the name of Kim, and answer it well under the name of Marciella, in view of Perfume, am I saved by, as you suggested, not really being seen-- or am I like the victim in the film "Peeping Tom" who is forced to watch his own murder in the mirror on the spikey tripod of the killer and see himself at once as subject, object and audience?

Terry1 - 05/15/01 17:33:00 EDT
Point taken Kim, sorry to hurt your feeling, and well proven the mecannaisance in speach. All communication is based on misrecognition.

Kim - 05/15/01 17:23:29 EDT
ghost in the machine-
Thank you for taking me seriously. This is exactly what I was after. I wish I had written it in answer to myself, under the name, perhaps, Marcella, which has always appealed to me, to redeem Kim in the eyes of Terry1. Look, I'm not accusing this venerable site of being infiltrated by Eddie Murphy, who is playing all of the roles for the amusement or consternation of unseen strangers. (Though Lacan.com wouldn't be a bad name for such a site). Did "Fight Club" or "Rashamon" or "Vertigo" signal lost integrity on the part of filmakers? This is not an issue of integrity. But there is an interesting "staining" to seek in this display. This monolithical speech.

ghost in the machine - 05/15/01 16:50:57 EDT
Kim, when I wear this mask I am a Lacanian. Remember, we are only talking here since we have something to share, a common territory. Essentially, we are talking to our mirror. Symptomatic of modernity is a resignation to fragmentary and often composite identities.
Here I have only one dimension; my speech is monolithical. I am also inhuman, since a single colour does not make a picture. A single facet does not make a sculpture. As subjects "out there" we are strictly atomised, yet overcome this by assuming many different masks. Our ability to masquarade saves us from alienation. Our communion is the price of speech.
I do not like to be seen.

Kim - 05/15/01 15:54:07 EDT
Terry1--To elaborate a little futher (my last post was reactionary because you hurt my feeling). It did seem that with obvious noms de plume like "Spectre" and "Ghost in the machine" etc.-- that these need not be discreet, separate individuals. And I guessed that, rather, there are posters to this list who engage a particular identity from which to post a certain thought. This "masking" of identity-- so easy to do on the internet-- has implications in Lacan because it triggers questions at so many levels -- "the real" and of the idea that "there is no relation" between us -- "the names of the father", names as fetishes, etc. I thought I might spark a discussion of Lacan's ideas, not slam the site. I'm surprised you didn't see that.

Kim - 05/15/01 15:19:25 EDT
Terry1 -- You are easily insulted. And you misunderstood me. My suggestion was that I was detecting something quite serious and interesting (if still playful) going on. People splitting themselves up in mysterious ways. I thought that, if I am right, it adds an interesting dimension. If I am wrong, I meant no disrespect. Carry on with your integrity.

Terry1 - 05/15/01 14:20:11 EDT
mimi..'Why does a letter always arrive?'........What is being asked here is why are we always able to find a symbol to use that enables us to think and thus to speak?...Our ablity to use symbols stops psychosis happening.......The letter/a letter enables signification to work. All meaning is created by signifiers which line up in a battery to create meaning for us. Meaning is never fixed it is always 'slipping' like a pin that holds a broach on a blouse it slips continueosly. As long as we can create meaning through letters arriving in the unconscious we are OK......Even a nihilist or an existentialist has no problem becaudse a letter always arrives. When a letter doen'st arrive we are in a state of psychosis.

Terry1 - 05/14/01 08:26:08 EDT
Kim.
You are easily intrigued. The object of this site is act as a forum for the exchange of Lacanian ideas. Playing with identity can be left to the worst sites on the web. Try to keep the integrity of this site by acting in good faith.

Susan - 05/13/01 22:24:07 EDT
Terry, I'm writing to ask for help not for a lecture... Patience is not only a psychological state. It also means time, energy, and interest in the subject to me. I definitely don't have all the luxury right now... Term papers, final tests... imagine the life of a student...

Mimi - 05/13/01 05:10:13 EDT
Hi, does anyone have any information on Lacan's article " The insistence of the letter in the unconscious"? A few key points of his theory in this article would be very appreciated. It is so hard to understand and I don't think I have the patience to read on to grasp his idea.

Thanks in advance... Terry1 - 05/12/01 15:57:48 EDT
Antonia
Your points are very interesting......The painting and the stain that you mention.... I agree we cannot see ourselves seeing. The gaze is the object that we want. It is object (a).....Does the 'Art' of it take us into psychosis or the 'Real'?.......The Lacanian understanding of Art has radical implications for practice as I'm sure Perfume can explain.......In cotradistinction to the Lacanian model of Art is a Platonic or Classical model of the 'forms' of art as access to the Neumenal world of the 'forms' as expounded by Plato. A Cranial surgeon ( who did a first degree in Art History) once told me that he became a Cranial Surgeon because as a child he had broken his foot and the sugeon hadn't repaired it propely. This resulted in him walking with a limp as an adult. His love for conventional Art forms led him into the surgery of repaing smashed or deformed faces. He said that his Art training enabled him to repair these faces..........He said that when he repaired a face he had to do it PERFECTLY........He drew on the Platonic forms of perfection as re-presented in conventional painting. Standing over the patient with the patient's face upside down he would WAIT until the left side and the right side of his brain came into union with the ONE as he put it. Then with a calmeness he would start his surgery. His effort being to make the face PERFECT in an Artistic Platonic sense........drawing on images of beauty that has been represented in paintings.
The convetional forms of Art have their uses if a patient has to live in a social world. Lacanian Art I would argue goes further seeks to represent the Real in all its TRUTH. Lacan is art for the mind.

Terry1 - 05/12/01 15:32:02 EDT
Debbie ..The painting that you referred to was held up at a seminar once given by Bice Benvonuto....She has written on Lacan I believe the reference you want may be in her book. I hope this helps

Kim - 05/11/01 20:00:41 EDT
This site intrigues me. It has seemed to me there are only handful of voices (speaking from a somewhat wider field of names. Is this literally true and obvious to everyone? If so, is there something Lacanian about using this electronic medium as a way to play with identity?

ghost in the machine - 05/10/01 12:48:50 EDT
When I meet my own gaze, where is my mind?

Goo Dai - 05/09/01 18:27:57 EDT
Whatever happened to the fine writings of spectre? Are you still in the chatroom?

El Fayed - 05/08/01 15:39:40 EDT
I think what Bill is trying to say is that the French are a bunch of failed Spaniards. And no philosopher worth his salt would bother to study anything they write.

bill - 05/08/01 15:31:20 EDT
i think that you do too mcuh when you say that art is soemthing that had the gaze to do with it. you know there is somehting more.

Dayzi Woods - 05/08/01 15:20:35 EDT
Hey, I am desperately looking for the "Kid A In Alphabet Land" card set, i know they say none are available any longer, but anyone's help as to where i could look would be greatly appreicated!
Thanks Dayzi crazy_dayzi@hotmail.com

melisa - 05/08/01 02:10:20 EDT
Marcus Sodré - did you try the links page?

Marcus Sodré - 05/07/01 16:05:45 EDT
I am looking for sites of Lacanian Societies and/or Groups in the US and Canada. Thanks,
Marcus Sodré
sodref@gbl.com.br
Rio de Janeiro - BRAZIL

ghost in the machine - 05/04/01 15:32:16 EDT
After postmodernism comes the illness of romanticism (in the cycle of epochs). What crushes us is finitude/gross corporeal existence. We desire transcendence. Art is the only legitimate communion left. There is no rapport, since we are forever atomized. Love is impossible. Surrealism was another glorious ideal. It failed. All ideals fail. The present state of modernity progresses faster than language can codify our experiences. Language becomes banal, we resort to solitude, self-destruction. What Dali says, what Magritte says, is the we cannot attain beauty, we cannot communicate to others what I am. All sublimity is a nostalgia for the womb. All our poetry yearns for death - the only means of return. patrick.

ghost in the machine - 05/04/01 15:18:00 EDT
I am also thinking of Magritte, and "the human condition"... patrick.

Debbie - 05/04/01 05:58:57 EDT
to Terry1
Hi! I am new in the neibourghood and I would to ask you a question. On a message of yours on the 28th of April you refer to Lacan employing a painting by Dali to refer to the impossibility of the human condition. Do you know where I can find that? By the way I've been following your debate with Antonia on painting and the O/other, which I find very interesting. Thanks in advance.

object a - 05/04/01 02:39:26 EDT
you bet antonia, I free float further than the Other... (he's coming to get me)

antonia - 05/03/01 23:50:08 EDT
Terry1 - Doesn't the part that has broken free float further than the Other it belonged to...?
when I say the painting becomes and object a, I refer to the spot in the painting, the stain, emptiness - from where you "see".
Images maybe emptied, I agree, but don't we need the art of it? Say for instance, Andy Warhol's Cambell soup. The image is not empty right away...only after the artist takes the can, puts it in a gallery is that you may say it's not there for you to open it, pour the contents in a bowl, drink it...and so on.

The Other - 05/03/01 13:56:30 EDT
Do any of you guys, know what BION said?

Yu all wat to be analysts so you are not....

The Other - 05/03/01 13:55:26 EDT
The "skin" of your empty look...no girls here to satisfy my narcissus?

The Other - 05/03/01 13:54:42 EDT
I've (in)volved

The OTHER - 05/03/01 13:53:35 EDT
how are you mirrors?

Terry1 - 05/01/01 15:19:27 EDT
Happy May Day to all!

Terry1 - 04/30/01 02:35:44 EDT
Antonia as you know an Object (a) is a small part of the big Other (A). This small part object petite a has broken free and floats. So the painting is not real, it cannot transcend the big Other but is subject to it...... from one object (painting) to another so do they all behave, images are not objects they are empty..The analyst is unseen like the big Other

antonia - 04/30/01 01:00:26 EDT
Terry1,
you say the painting occupies the place of the analyst -an Other, right? now the painting trascends the Other as it becomes an object a... again the analyst in its very discourse.
I look - I search.
I arise in the Other, a subject/an object - the painting in the depths of my eyes, I am not in the picture.
The irruption of articulation is what does for the gaze: I see - I've stopped looking.
Is this better, prettier, embellished enough?

Terry1 - 04/29/01 16:28:42 EDT
Antonia - can you embellish your analysis for us?

Terry1 - 04/28/01 16:58:41 EDT
The painting is empty like all images. They rest upside down on the back of our eyes. The gaze is what we seek. We cannot see ourselves seeing. De Chirico's work labelled futurist or vvortex is an example of art that transcends art. Lacan used a painting by Dali to show the impossibility of the human condition. A volmptuous naked woman lying carefree with a tap over her head and out of the tap comes a hand with a feather that is tickling the woman.

ghost in the machine - 04/28/01 15:46:22 EDT
so, my instinct is to identify with the Other, yet in attempting to assimilate it, I estrange myself to the point of having to abject it, in order to retain a psychic equilibrium?
Surely, for a moment, I must be in the picture? Or rather, it only becomes a 'picture' once I realise I'm not in it. patrick.

antonia - 04/28/01 12:39:50 EDT
The painting occupies the role of the analyst...the Other... as subject I should arise there, in the Other... now the painting trascends the Other - it is an object a...it stole my eyes...
it looks - in the depths of my eye the picture is painted, but I'm not in the picture.
I see - means I've stopped looking...
the painting is looking at me from the point of light at which everything that looks at me is located...as it accounts for the "here" and "there," for the "this" and the "that" - for the "I" & and the "It" it marks the irruption of articulation in the visual field...

ghost in the machine - 04/28/01 07:04:35 EDT
I should rather say the paintingS of de Chirico - namely, 'the disquieting muses', 'mystery and melancholy of a street', and so on. This is where uncanniness strikes. patrick.

Terry1 - 04/27/01 18:04:54 EDT
'What is a picture?' The painting occupies the role of the analyst. What is the painting Ghost in the machine?

perfume - 04/27/01 16:56:29 EDT
shhhhhhh bill... I'm sorry I have aggrieved you with erasing the message...it wasn't at all my intention...as for next time I'll ask you to rewrite it...ok?

ghost in the machine - 04/27/01 16:48:01 EDT
if a painting disturbs me (for no rational reason), what does this mean? I am thinking of a painting that, for me, is pathogenic - it produces a symptom, yet not abjection, but mania. But why do some people go psychotic, and others experience a momentary, ontological crisis? Is it possible to be psychotic for this brief moment? Surrealism, for example, deliberately tries to do this. patrick.

Terry1 - 04/27/01 14:54:30 EDT
Lacan 'Returned to Freud'......He recognised that Freud couldn't do everything. The role of language and the unconscious as being constructed by language was his unique insight. The ego as being a 'linguistic construction' differs from Freud's view of the ego. Freud never had time to reach Lacan's understanding.Lacan built on Frued's work. His valuable insight of the role of language to give the body a structure was seen when as a child stood over a praying mantis. He found that if he stood over the the insect long enough without touching it it would die. For Lacan language was like this in an indiviual. Language stiffens us up... or melts us. We can fall in love with the use of words or go to war through the use of words.
We are written through with language. Although born a catholoic ( Lacan's brother was a catholic preist) He rejected religion but the Bible comes near to understanding the powere of language in a Lacanian sense when it records : 'Adam seized the word......'
The subject is spoken. Language uses us we dont use language.

Terry1 - 04/27/01 11:55:44 EDT
perfume -

Thanks.

bill - 04/27/01 11:54:39 EDT
there wasnt anything incoherent about my mezsage. i think you just dont want to hear what I have to say/. the messageboard shouldnt play favorites. he said that lacan's starting point was Freud and that on the first of all is something you could argue about but if then agin you think that its a faithrul reading lacan makes for freud than you ask how is lacan different? the logical side and mainly the cybernetics part

perfume - 04/26/01 19:49:34 EDT
Terry1 tells me he did not write his last message, though it had his name, and this is how I erased it.
Also I erased two messages with the name "perfume" - they weren't written by me. And I erased a message written by "bill" which was incoherent.

ghost in the machine - 04/26/01 16:33:18 EDT
yes spectre, but if transcendence is the antidote to abjection, does if follow that "superstition" is the sublimation of the uncanny? If sublimity is there for us in order to avoid depression/suicide, do we construct ghosts/deja vu/phobia in order to avoid psychosis? God is to the mother, what ghosts are to the father. patrick.

spectre - 04/26/01 01:13:30 EDT
doll as uncanny because in it the subject sees himself being seen. from where? the future.

ghost in the machine - 04/25/01 16:14:37 EDT
if anyone has any more thoughts on "the uncanny", i'd much appeciate it. if the uncanny produces as its symptom mania, how exactly does this relate to the death-drive and foreclosure? I can accept the idea of mania, but I am still unclear as to how it functions in this context.
thanks, patrick.

The Samurai - 04/25/01 08:51:10 EDT
i am such a monkey-brain

patrick - 04/24/01 21:22:15 EDT
Really, Samurai? Where does he mention that?

Terry1 - 04/24/01 17:13:06 EDT
Samarai--- Lacan's starting point was FREUD

Terry1 - 04/24/01 16:08:39 EDT
Is the language system an algorithm?If not why not?

bill - 04/24/01 11:45:50 EDT
i was wondering maybe if when you have enjoyment and the body and then there's an ejoyment in the body, bodily jouissance, if thats tha same as saying some bodily siginifer has been foreclosed.

The Samurai - 04/24/01 06:47:45 EDT
You might want to look at where Lacan takes his starting point -- cybernetics. Many of the "revolutionary" points understood to be uniquely Lacanian are commonplace in cybernetics.

Terry1 - 04/23/01 17:39:51 EDT
To change the discourse Daniel Dennet see language acquisition as an error in the evolution of the subject. Langauage for his 'bottom-up' model of the human subject is an algorithm. He postulates that consciousness is a result of the vibration of microtubels in the cerebral cortex. Dennet in 'Consciousness Explained' believes that an artificial intelligence is possible. He believes he can build a conscious machine...What would Lacan thin0k of this cognitive neuroscience?

Terry1 - 04/23/01 17:31:18 EDT
Does language castrate us all?
Terry1 - 04/23/01 15:50:24 EDT
Samurai--- I elevate the feminine because I like the idea that Woman is not castrated.
Whereas Not-all simply means she changes her being, exhanges her being. It is not crossed out, like it is for that unpleasant masculine side. (So many people who aren't nice!)

Terry1 - 04/23/01 03:20:21 EDT
Enjoy your symptom?

Terry1 - 04/23/01 03:19:39 EDT
Samarai--- Keep cool. If you like it here, OK, if not there is no problem. Enjoy your life.

The Samurai - 04/22/01 15:38:57 EDT
(cowers, quivering) Please don't hit me over the head with your dissertation, mr. big bad doctoral candidate! i'm just an unedookaytid cuntry bumpkin, lacking even a high-school diploma. I didn't know i was in the presence of such august eminences as yourself! Far be it from lil old me me to soil your sublime messageboard with my obtuse comments. i agree, i am not worthy to speak here, and shall never do so again!

Terry1 - 04/22/01 15:27:22 EDT
Samarai--- 'The truth is structured like a fiction' Lacan

patrick - 04/22/01 13:18:17 EDT
Samurai--- Yes, it does matter. I'm writing a dissertation. Maybe you're in the wrong place here?
Regards, Patrick.

The Samurai - 04/22/01 10:02:09 EDT
No, I don't care to explain. If you're interested, take a look. I just like it, that's all. Does that require an explanation? On the other hand, I'm put off by the stuffy intellectual discussion in here. Does it matter whether dolls are really uncanny or just seem that way?

Terry1 - 04/21/01 17:36:38 EDT
The Chora

Terry 1 - 04/21/01 16:31:14 EDT
Can you carry on...........explain the evocative inscription?.Yes she speaks about the Thora..The unnameable place....

The Samurai - 04/21/01 14:43:45 EDT
I also like the evocative inscription about love in the preface.

The Samurai - 04/21/01 14:41:53 EDT
It's the title of a novel by J. Kristeva, denoting the people who go without psychoanalysis. "They just bleed," she writes.

Terry1 - 04/21/01 06:11:07 EDT
Samurai --- Your name is interesting can you explain why you use it and what it connotes to you?

Terry1 - 04/20/01 18:37:21 EDT
Samurai--- If we find a painting disturbing it is we, who construct the disturbance. A painting does in effect take the place of the analyst......We try to make sense of the painting by the use of metaphor, metomymy, diacrony..etc. As we would with an analyst. A woman can make a hand or a brain, here life is art. She is the cause of a man. A woman can be thought of as the 'not one'. It is harder to be a woman than a man. Women have access to a knowledge that men can't have.
The question of Art or Lacanian Art should really be addressed to Perfume....She has the very best photographers capture here image. Non other than the Turner prize winner in the United Kingdom.....Art and production is related to the feminine. All of the best male artists have a close association with feminine. Leonardo was brought up by his mother. She poured love into him. He was homosexual like Michaelangelo. This creative dimension in the homosexual is interesting. Lesbian women like the company of women. Homosexual men like the company of women. It is woman as the feminine unnameable creator who has the power to produce art such as a hand, a foot or a brain. The woman's body does this. Her body splits into two when she reproduces. The man's body can never do this.

The Samurai - 04/19/01 11:27:56 EDT
Terry1 - i feel as though you are not sharing with me your voice.

patrick - 04/18/01 18:41:05 EDT
spectre, the uncanny is not about "fear" as such, more disorientation. Yes, certainly nostalgia. Something has revived itself, and that something is a self-recognition, yet of being strange. The object is uncanny since it takes us back to being children. Yet at the uncanny moment of identification, time freezes since what we are tempted to identify with is inanimate, therefore we are inanimate, and therefore dead. The uncanny is the sense of death in life. Even the "complete" doll is dismembered, since it is dismembered from possessing life. The reason it is no longer frightening to us adults is because we evacuate this self-denying paradox to either to our own stupidity (I say to myself "don't be silly, dolls aren't alive!") or to superstition (I think "I must be psychic!", or "its simply a mystety"). Through this, it gains its significance, and I avoid psychosis. patrick.

Terry1 - 04/18/01 16:46:20 EDT
A work of art takes the place of the analyst. A woman's life is art

The Samurai - 04/18/01 12:48:15 EDT
terry1 - No, the task is not to make one's life a project, but rather to make it a work of art, which entails a certain lack of any project at its very core.

spectre - 04/17/01 19:03:29 EDT
i can see how the doll would function as a transitional object, but i don't see any particular reason why it should be uncanny, especially for the adult. if anything, it makes more sense that the doll would evoke feelings of nostalgia. dolls do seem at times to have a disturbing effect, but usually to children. all adults to some extent are subject to feeling of the uncanny, but i dont' know to many who actually fear dolls. if the doll were to produce an uncanny effect wouldn't that result from their dismemberment and degraduation--whatever evoked a return to the imaginary.

patrick - 04/14/01 14:27:28 EDT
spectre-- for me 'the doll as death image' goes deeper since it provides the uncanny with a certain historical dimenstion (in terms of locating it in the subject's ontogeny). It also brings in the maternal; the doll as a phobic signifier for the abject. The uncanny may well be merely a symptom (and not a structure), but it is nevertheless an archaic one. For me at least, this requires some elaboration. We all know how uncanniness feels (and what evokes it), but how did it get there?
regards, patrick.

spectre - 04/13/01 20:45:28 EDT
patrick-- how would the doll as death image go "deeper" into the uncanny?

The Samurai - 04/13/01 19:21:09 EDT
What do people here think of the thesis recently advanced by a Lacanian author (whose work, alas, I have not read) that modernity is a state of collective psychosis to which we are, of necessity, in thrall? It makes the ego-psychological ideal of 'adjustment' into a state of learned (or, a Lacanian would say, mimicked) psychosis. What possibilities of engagement are there with a society, in this sense, gone mad?
To claudia - is Lacanian psychoanalysis also a mode of sublimation, or leading to one? If so, which?

patrick - 04/10/01 18:13:32 EDT
spectre, very interesting about your ideas on 'uncanny belatedness'. Yes, Schelling‚s definition of the unheimlich is Œthe name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.‚ For some reason I keep thinking it bears some sinister relation to the Mirror Phase; an encounter that evokes "a return of a repressed", a brief avowal of meconnaisance, (since the uncanny is disquieting precisely because it centres on a simultaneous self-recognition and alienation; a sense of being embodied and disembodied; and a hesitation over inanimate sentience). I think you're completely correct in your analysis about the appearance of organic nature becoming mechanised, but I think it goes deeper. For example, there's also the idea that the uncanny derives from the doll as death-image, when the nascent child appropriated it as a transitional object between mother and "I". I can't remember where I read that one. patrick.

bill - 04/10/01 10:28:46 EDT
them chinese are getting way too crazy
we need to bomb them

Terry1 - 04/09/01 16:46:48 EDT
Kenneth--- The need for love is caused by the desire to be complete. To be one with the lost object. (Parmenides = the one is one). Jouissance = to have and to own, to be complete. The human being is the only animal born crying. It cries because it lacks. All language is a cry or call for unity to be one with the thing that made us, the m/other. All meaning is variable and based on reference back in the signifying chain of meaning. Language is a system of difference, this difference is caused by the treasury of signifiers that line up in the big other object A to create meaning. If language was not a system of difference all meaning would collapse into homology. All communication is based on meccenaissance or misrecognition. We are speaking beings who desire to be complete. We find this completeness in others, but it is never enough:'From one object to another so do they all behave'. When we love someone we love in that person something more than that person, what we love is the truth. All love is the love of truth. Language is a pharmakon a poison, when we speak the truth it is healing. What can we do with another person other tear them to peices or imbibe them, eat them up. We internalise, object petite a, that other person. When we look at the love object, it is already inside us, upside down on the back of our eye.
What do we do?.....Our life must become a project. We must speak the truth and have a goal in our life. As Spinoza said : 'We must become what we were meant to be'.

spectre - 04/08/01 19:08:57 EDT
erratum: the photographer in question is Karl Blossfelt.

spectre - 04/08/01 18:51:32 EDT
patrick--- i'm enjoying our exchanges. you'er right about the uncanny as modern, but its not how our knowledge of modernism helps us understand the uncanny but how the uncanny helps us understand what modernism in fact is.
you should check out not only freud's discussion of the uncanny but also Schelling's discussion of it's etymology. anyhow,i don't see the uncanny so much in terms of deja vu as I do in terms of belatedness. for example, i suggested you to consider the mechanical nature of the uncanny. the uncanny for us moderns appears when we suddenly chance upon a view of what has been surpressed by modernity, the wildness of the animal. but as we see animals in their radical otherness, in their unhesitating efficiency and un-self-conscious grace, they appear to us as what? perfect machines. the point is that the same very movement away from nature allows us eventually to recognize how nature has been ahead of us all along. reference this to walter benjamin's fascination with the photography of herbert blomstatdt, in which plants anticipate modern iron work. here you can get a terrific sense of what is meant by the future anterior.
- or again, consider aeneas docking in carthage, ready to tell the tale of the fall of troy, only to find what? that it's already been monumentalized on the gates of dido's city. it produces a subjective effect, but not depression. aeneas speaks, narrates in the way Burke describes the indefatigible chatter of old people. they can explain everything that has happened to them, and we listeners in fact already know everything about them, yet there's still unnameable something that seems missing from the tale for them, and so they keeping talking and talking and talking.

patrick - 04/08/01 15:30:41 EDT
spectre, thanks for your elaboration of the uncanny, its been a help. Yet, take an example such as deja vu: am i right in thinking this is a kind of "abjection of self" where the experience is sublimated to the abstraction of superstition? At this point, logic fails us. As I've discovered, uncanniness only seems to appear as a cultural manifestation after the Age of Reason, where rationalism left remnants of the unexplained, and along with a more general theological crisis, the uncanny fills this void with ghosts and reminders of bodily dismemberment. Yes, the uncanny symptom is mania - so, am I right in thinking this is a kind of momentary foreclosure, with this frightening signifier evacuated to 'superstition', the supernatural, dismissed as imagination?
regards, patrick.

spectre - 04/07/01 17:09:22 EDT
"BONINESS of the body"

spectre - 04/07/01 17:07:41 EDT
patrick-- I wrote you a rather long message outlining the difference between the uncanny and abject, and, as usual, lost the text due to a connection failure. here's the abbreviated version.
abjection--should be associated with excess and overspill, whatever flab or bodiness of the body makes us uncomfortably aware of gravity and can't be mad to conform to our sense of orthopaedics. thus the abject produces as its sympton depression.
the uncanny marks the point at which the organic in its throbbing pulsitivity begins to remind us of the machine, which is why Freud finds it best example by the automaton Olympia in Hoffmann's The Sandman. rather than depression, the uncanny produces as its sympton mania.
wynship is right to point you to Bataille, but i think it might be easier and almost as rewarding only to read the brief essays "Solar Anus," and "Jesuve." happy dissertation.

The Samurai - 04/07/01 09:34:32 EDT
...I think I detect some veiled anti-science sentiment in Lacan. ;-)

claudia - 04/06/01 23:58:56 EDT
Lacan, in his Ethics, relates the mechanisms of hysteria, of obsessive neurosis, of paranoia, to the three terms of sublimation: art, religion and science. You sublimate in relation to the Thing-a void...
- Art gets organized around the void... this accords with hysteria and repression. - - -Religion eludes the void and respects it... it entails obsessive neurosis, and displacement.
- Science doesn't believe in the void, it eludes it...this comports paranoia and foreclosure

wynship - 04/06/01 20:07:56 EDT
Patrick --- My suggestion is to read Bataille, _The Accursed Share_, all three volumes, but with particular attention to Vol. II, 'Eroticism'. Kristeva bases her work heavily on Bataille, especially in that book (I say this retrospectively, having read _Powers of Horror_ before Bataille). As for the distinction itself, however, I cannot help you.

patrick - 04/06/01 19:01:49 EDT
Thanks to those who helped me with formulating the Sublime. I'm on with Lyotard right now, etc. Yet I am curious about something else. If any of you have read Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, you may be able to help me with making the distinction between 'the uncanny' and 'the abject'. I've looked at Lacan, and the nearest elaboration of Freud's notion of 'the uncanny' seems to be his 'extimité'. I've literally been thinking about this for weeks, since a Kristevan reading of uncanniness is going to be the subject of my dissertation. Any ideas? Thanks, Patrick.

kenneth - 04/05/01 14:14:15 EDT
terry1 --- Is that really what Lacan has to say...I thought that love was a change in discourse...perhaps similar to what, in some cases, some linguists have called register change...are you sure that need and love can be equated in such a functionalist way?

bill - 04/05/01 11:46:52 EDT
ive neveer read Taussig. is he some body worth reading? i dont know if i could veer go back to reading some of thatstuddff because it get sofo long and boring. then, again, who knows what you have inside of there becasue theres a peace here or there anca that can be very good to read.

Terry1 - 04/04/01 14:26:29 EDT
The problem with Labov and other such as Sapir/Whorf is they do not look at the dynamics ot =f the langauge system. Basil Bernstein here in England wrot e about an 'elaborated' and 'restricted' code of language some time ago. The problems with these theorists is they emphasize the static nature of the language system unlike Lacan who shows that words are in exxece created through desire. They are a by product of our need for love. When we have everything we want we dont speak.

Kenneth - 04/04/01 11:49:57 EDT
spectre --- sorry...I put your name in the author field on the last message...I meant to address the message to you...a telltale slip?

spectre - 04/04/01 11:48:07 EDT
Thank you *very* much. The "difference" I am referring to is probably best summed up by indicating a few authors: Wm. Labov, Dell Hymes, J.J. Gumperz. These "sociolinguists"--specialists in "Language in Culture"--are central to the fieldwork techniques I am trying to rework. Taussig is great, of course. But the analytics of language that I depend on are probably best found in Peirce, Jakobson, Sapir and Whorff. A few current writers of interest for linguistic anthropologists are Judy Irvine, Michael Silverstein, John Lucy and Wm Hanks. But, overall, I think there is something missing from the traditional linguistic-anthropological approach...that's why I'm reading Lacan.

spectre - 04/04/01 02:36:18 EDT
Kenneth--- There's a pretty decent essay on the four discourses by Bruce Fink. It can be found in a collection titled Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, edited by Dany Nobus.
Let me inquire regarding your slightly different perspective on Lacan. Just how non-restrictive is that first subordinate clause of yours? I've done a few amount of reading in structural anthropology, though recently I've been reading Michael Taussig and Alphonso Lingis. Has their writing been of interest or assistance to you?

Kenneth - 04/03/01 13:05:09 EDT
I am an anthropologist, who approaches Lacan from a little bit different perspective. I have become particularly interested in the four discourses Lacan lays out in Seminar 17 (the hysteric, the analytic, the master, the professor) as a way of looking pragmatically at what we might call a "discursive division of labor". Seminar 17 also contains numerous references to Marx, and it seems to me that Lacan was trying to take on social theory in a significant way that year. Does anyone know of work done on Seminar 17, or Lacan's approach to Marx?

spectre - 04/03/01 12:53:36 EDT
patrick--- i also should mention a book by Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, standard to any research into this topic.

spectre - 04/02/01 03:00:10 EDT
Patrick--- i've read Lyotard's lessons on the analytic of the sublime. i found it to be a very useful but a very difficult book, a maddenly exhaustive reading. but there's plenty to be gained from suffering through such close work. i recall reading birth of the clinic immediately afterwards and suddenly finding foucault not only illuminating, but perfectly (though still implicitly) orderly, and thinking that this sense was a direct result of having read lyotard. if you want to look at something not so terribly time consuming, you might try various essays in Lyotard's The Inhuman. Also look at the issue of Umbr@ dedicated to aesthetics; some of the articles are quite good. Chapter two of Zizek's tarrying with the negative is quite lucid, and certain chapter's of Altieri's Subjective Agency might be of some interest to you.

Wynship - 04/01/01 22:32:56 EDT
patrick --- in my limited understanding of this, i would suggest works by jameson or lyotard, though i am not sure they will lead you specifically to affects or even to psychoanalysis. Of course, lyotard has a book entitled _Lessons on the analytic of the sublime_ but I have not read it.

Wynship - 04/01/01 22:28:04 EDT
Terry1 --- those are the words (among all others) the meanings of which I am unsure (and shall remain so).

Terry1 - 04/01/01 17:10:15 EDT
The displacement function is the name of the father, it displaces the mother. The name of the father is dependent on the ego-ideal. The unconscious is NOT a metaphor it is structured like a language. The human being is brought into being by introjection and splitting. The symbolic is the place where the eye is. We find an order because we inhabit language. Language is the building work of our cities. Language puts the eye in a position. The material of language is something that gives perspecive. The mother whom humanity disappears in front of. Language does not make us see, it is only through language that we can rejoin the thing that we have lost. When we have overcome the phallus we are in the void. Pychoanalysis can only take us tho the veiled phallus. Love and work is the end of psychoanlysis. Work is love at work.

frozen music - 04/01/01 16:10:11 EDT
hello, very simple question: can anyone help me regarding a psychoanalytical formulation - or merely cast some light upon - the affects of 'the sublime' (in aesthetics)? or provide me with a reference or two? kind regards, patrick.

Wynship - 04/01/01 10:38:25 EDT
This is regarding Julia's comment months ago: Does the (m)other signify that which gives, grants, or bestows existence? (on the Heideggerian register, the truth of Being?)

GooDai - 03/31/01 17:11:31 EST
Is Derek Jeter a Lacanian male?

patrick - 03/30/01 07:04:22 EST
that was a question by the way (freudian slip).

patrick J. - 03/30/01 07:03:05 EST
Is position of Hannibal Lecter in the film 'Hannibal' the closest one can get to the Law

Terry1 - 03/29/01 16:52:32 EST

Teer1 - 03/29/01 16:52:12 EST
Love is narcissistic. I love myself in the other. Being in love is an investment of the ego in the object. It empties the ego. A piece of the ego becomes other in love. In civilization there is malice. The army goes to war but inside the army is peace

Ernesto - 03/27/01 22:27:38 EST
Pau Biedler, you can go to the Symposium at, https://www.lacan.com/forum.htm

Paul Beidler - 03/27/01 19:57:37 EST
I'd like to be part of a Lacan or psychoanalysis listserv discussion--is there one? I'd sign up immediately if someone could send the information to me at BeidlerP@lrc.edu. Thanks--

bill - 03/15/01 08:09:21 EST
I think you should do a lacanian reading of Pleasantville.

perfume - 03/14/01 20:12:42 EST
Thank you for your congratulations on the new index page Terry1, I really appreciate them.
I didn't see Sleepy Hollow but I can tell you, of the headless subject of drive, that Lacan talks about it in Seminar XI - chapter 14...

Terry1 - 03/14/01 15:44:03 EST
Congratulations on the new index page design another 'master' piece. Can you outline for us ththe 'Homuculus Problem'?

Jemsum - 03/14/01 11:54:34 EST
Perfume --
How does the 'subject' resolve the homunculus problem? Isn't the subject a homunculus?

jane - 03/13/01 17:56:24 EST
well, I saw it recently--I thought it rather fascinating. Tim Burton said he was drawn to the story because of the contrast "between a character who lives entirely in his head, vs. a character who has no head." Isn't there some Lacanian idea of the "headless" subject? Not to mention the more obvious obsession with blood, holes, cuts, and the mother in that movie--there's a cut in almost every single scene. I'm especially wondering about the scene in which the little boy has to listen to his parents being killed, and sees his mother's eyes in her severed head through this little peephole. This seems to replay Johnny depp's character's "memories" of seeing his mother's death (which occurs through her whole body being punctured with holes). Or how Johnny Depp cannot stop being sprayed with blood throughout the film--which starts with this fake blood dripping which is really from a letter sealing a will. This is just off the top of my head--there's an abundance of things in that movie to talk about.

Terry1 - 03/13/01 14:40:26 EST
Jane can you tell us what you think of the film Sleepy Holow

spectre - 03/12/01 17:58:01 EST
les aconsejo a los que hablan castillano que busquen al sitio del Centro Descartes. pueden encontrar su direccion debajo el titulo "links" que se encuentra arriba. hay varios libros escritos en castillano que a mi me han interesado bastante. especificamente quisiera mencionar los de juan-david nasio.

jane - 03/12/01 17:23:26 EST
Would anyone care to share their psychoanalytic insights into the movie Sleepy Hollow?

miselina - 03/12/01 15:39:45 EST
every time the messageboard takes a deep breath someone has to come up with the revelation: the messageboard is dead, psychoanalysis is dead.....

Mary - 03/12/01 15:38:33 EST
Dave, go to https://www.lacan.com and look at Lacan's bibliograhy in French. Good luck!

dave - 03/12/01 13:38:25 EST
Hello. I'm trying to locate Lacans paper (Ecrits) on Psychoanalysis and crime but have no idea where to look on the web. Does anybody know of any good sites or journals where I might find this or any related articles??
Any Info would be greatly appreciated!
p.s Is psychoanalysis dying?

Gregory - 03/11/01 00:21:16 EST
Because the body is sick of truth psychoanalysis exists. When the bodies cease to obey the knowledge in them: hysteria. Freud expressed this juncture in terms of repression and the return of the repressed. The body refuses the dictates of the master signifier. It's the double refusal of the hysterical body, and the subject of this body refuses the body of the Other, then sexual relationship becomes problematic. Freud already discussed repression in terms of representation before doing so in terms of drives. Maybe this is so because repression deals with representations that impend the consciousness of others. And this group he called the Ego.
Is there anyone to discuss the matter?

Violet - 03/07/01 05:59:43 EST
misha - there is a book called The Purloined Poe - Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading - printed by The Johns Hopkins Univ., in 1988, which could be useful to you.

misha - 03/06/01 21:00:43 EST
do you know something abouth some lacanian interpretations of derrida? (soory becouse of my english)

Ernesto - 03/05/01 20:13:52 EST
You cannot wright? other wrighters? please explain

karin - 03/05/01 11:23:55 EST
Thank you all for your advise. Unfortunately I can't read or wright french! So other referenes, and maybe shorter texts would be a great help for me. It doesen't have to be written by "He himself" (Lacan)other wrighters would do! Or maybe you have some thoughts yourself. Or perhaps some clinical material on the subject: "Girls with absent fathers"

Violet - 03/04/01 21:10:58 EST
Miselina, can you say more than Wow about Miller's paradigms?

miselina - 03/03/01 22:49:26 EST
JA Miller's paradigms.......Wow!

miselina - 03/03/01 03:08:53 EST
not in Spanish robin 1.m.........

Ernesto - 03/02/01 20:54:40 EST
robin 1. m., en "la sesión analítica - " https://www.lacan.com/anaforum.htm - de "symposium" - https://www.lacan.com/forum.htm - se habla castellano.

robin l. m. - 03/02/01 14:51:59 EST
Soy un principiante lector de Lacan, pero me interesamucho conocer mas sus trabajos. Aqui es mas revisado Freud, pero Lacan es muy importante y es un poco complicado entender sus obras.

Rudolph - 03/02/01 13:18:12 EST
Karin, Seminar V is called "Les formations de l'inconscient."

Rudolph - 03/02/01 13:16:22 EST
Karin, where to find something about this is Seminar V - in French.

Karin Lidbaum - 03/02/01 10:55:38 EST
Hi everyone. This is the first time I'm here, but I need help with ideas and references for a paper I'm writing.The subject of my paper concerns the question of the effect of an absent father on the development of the girl. I am aware that it theroretically is perfectly possible for the mother to refer to the symbolic father without there being a real or imaginary father present, but I'm not too sure about this. What are the consequences of the lack of a real father even though the symbolic function is present? I would be very happy if someone could give me some hints as to where I could find something about this. Please!
Karin Lidbaum

miselina - 03/02/01 01:14:10 EST
Ernesto.....deconstruction is Derrida

Ernesto - 03/02/01 01:12:50 EST
where else is the word DECONSTRUCTION in Lacan?

Violet - 02/28/01 22:04:54 EST
ghosts bickering:
they fight for the sake of "desconstruction", and so they wrongly impute the term to Lacan. Problem is Lacan's word on chapter 13 of Seminar 11 is Démontage, which means dismantling, rather than Deconstruction as Sheridan chose to translate it.

Terry 1 - 02/28/01 16:50:38 EST
The war of the ghosts

Our Very Own Pubic War - 02/28/01 09:39:10 EST
The one remedy for this -- prohibited by law -- would involve an old lamp and a plate of dentist's tools. Attending to origins -- you can't catch me! -- as proscribed by this latter-day Brahmin is another way of expressing how the Last Man stands there and blinks.
The entire sky could burst into flames, fire and insult rain down from the Heavens, and devotees of psychoanalysis who never quite made it to the crib before being taken away by that dark stork -- they would silently stand and question their own desires on the matter.
Attend to one's origins
You stand accused!
You stand accused!
You stand accused!
Thus one comes to respect, for knowing is impossible, one's origins.

spectre - 02/27/01 18:46:12 EST
dear wendy and friend--
as you say, the real is THE PLACE of a hole. Noone agrues that a hole cannot be constructed. Go ahead and construct a whole or a circle or any other figure, and that construction will not be the real but the place from which the real was excised. you seem to feel i am not speaking with sufficient authenticity. the greater the truth, the more compromising the speech to the speaker as well as everyone else. all speech is a matter of compromise, in every sense of the word. but i wasn't aware that i was perversely acting as nuncio for zizek or anyone else. and i'm sorry you didn't stop to consider that i wasn't taking the term "construction" from zizek but from a rather more venerable source, euclid; though i will admit my initial "pure" reading of the Elements was later punctured and corrupted by reading Husserl. the point is that noone can speak a pure discourse. all our speeches and thoughts are bound to a variety of incommensurable discourses. if anyone out there really believe that a speaker can spontaneously generate a new metaphor, without lapse or contamination, without feeling as though someone or something else were speaking out of his mouth or bursting out of her innards, then that person ought to spend less time in front of the mirror. Just observe, for instance, Rudolf's verbal punic war. Should he argure even harder? post even more messages? try to convince us that he has been Caesar all along and we were just too resistant to get it? Perhaps he should attend to his origins. what, to return to althusser, was the whole point of For Marx, let alone Reading Capital, if not to suggest that deep within Marx's writing, beginning around The German Ideology, the very bower of humanism was gradually and imperceptably beginning to feel the gnawing pressure of an alien entity within--the concepts of science. This immanent alterity, while leaving the external appearance of communism intact, proceeded (so slowly that not even Karl was able to perceive it) worked blindly but insistantly--until the break. All of this Marx was unaware of, could not control, and yet we consider him a poet, a genius and the originator of a discourse. Or perhaps you would also disagree with this.

Terry1 - 02/27/01 17:32:48 EST
Rudolf - why do you find it necessary to use words like deconstruction? I think you are having problems handling the ambiguity of the system. The human mind struggles to make sense of non-sense. It is digital in its functioning. I think you should explore ALL of Lacan's system, the envelope. the mirror. the borromean knot, the gaze, the look, the sinthome,etc.

In 1965 Lacan returned to the subject of causality where he distinguishes between majic, religion. science and psychoanalysis and there relationship to truth. Lacan plays on the ambiguity of the term since besides being ; 'that which provokes an effect ' a cause is also : 'that for which one fights, that which one defends' the cause of the unconscious is a lost cause'

Rudolf - 02/27/01 16:40:59 EST
"of course speech always "involves" misunderstanding. It IS misunderstanding. But a "letter" is a different story. The real letter is not mere speech, mere babbling, its a writing, and the terms of understanding/misunderstanding at a point become totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter--there's a real to be confronted and constructed, and it has nothing to do with understanding or not. " An important distinction. Though it is anathema to everything I represent, I will concede that your expectation of precision is, indeed, your own.

Rudolf - 02/27/01 16:32:38 EST
Spectre: I hereby assert, against most analysts, that the overlap of the Other and the superego is something specific to the epoch of modern subjectivity.

Rudolf - 02/27/01 16:28:58 EST
Wendy: You'll notice that the paraphrasing that goes on here, though not necessarily of Zizek, is a sign of the absence of original metaphor. These people are not subjects. You can thank Lacan for that.

Rudolf - 02/27/01 16:25:13 EST
Terry1: You're a deconstructionist, then.
wendy - 02/27/01 16:01:47 EST
spectre, I beg to differ.
let's say the real is the place of a hole. you can "construct" a hole, knot it, discern its place in a logic. you don't have to throw up your hands and mindlessly paraphrase Zizek-- who, I notice, has no construction whatsoever, just endless blathering. Topology is not a mere social convention or "social construction." It has a relation to the real that is very different.

Terry1 - 02/27/01 15:40:31 EST
Rudolf - Logic is a word. All words are symbols. All symbolic meaning is based on reference back otherwise all meaning would collapse into homology. We can 'read' the meaning of a word by understanding the system of difference that enables it to function as a word. When we read a book properley it should fall from our hands because we are readng something that isn't immediatley there.

Rudolf - 02/27/01 15:03:48 EST
Terry1: The notion that thought is language, bearing with it a little affect that submerges the language part, is not supported by the everyday experience of a listening to a logical argument or even a simple syllogism. In these cases, things "fit into place" and I would say this experience is not merely the experience of the sense of one or any number of sentences like "That makes sense," or "I have been taught that makes sense," or even "I'd like to believe that's true." There is such a thing as logic. Psychoanalysis can be distinguished from something like deconstruction on this ground, among others. Look at the amount of interest Lacan has in logic -- strings, knots, symmetry, etc. No one says that in all this Desire is absent, however. If anything, Desire is not possible without it.
Violet, spectre, et al. --
Wishing for an end to all hurt is the same as wishing for death, or the end of all things human. This attitude, and it is easily enough found these days, comes from today's quasi-psychotic distancing from anything forceful (especially any S1s) and into the bizarre world where any rivalry (or, human desire as it has long been found) is experienced as intrusive.

Rudolph RSI - 02/27/01 02:12:59 EST
Spectre, interest for life seems to lie in its connection with jouissance in so far as life deserves to be considered real. The body affected by jouissance is neither imaginary nor symbolic, but a living one. Nothing prevents to locate jouissance as affection of the body, and the deal here is to make sense of this adjective which cannot be elided, and which seems to be less precise than adjectives belonging to the imaginary or the symbolic. To consider life as the condition of jouissance means to view it as condition of the body, as condition of the signifier. If the symptom is drive satisfaction, if it is jouissance as conditioned by life under the form of the body, then it implies that the living body is prevailing in every symptom. Can the drive of death be translated as drive of the superego? Are life drives - adverse to drives that lead to death - not drives of self-preservation, but of reproduction? „The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive. But all the sexual drives bring out death as signifier.‰ Maybe Lacan deemed his ethics a doctrine of the superego...In that case Spectre...'Cause this basically means a tendency against adaptation, a tendency leading towards the return of a primal satisfaction, meaning jouissance. The superego as Jouissance...Pas mal, hein?

spectre - 02/26/01 23:48:37 EST
no such thing--the real isn't what is constructed but rather a reality is. the real lies entirely outside history or all social constructions.

violet - 02/26/01 21:48:28 EST
wendy,
I can follow you to the point where a "letter" is a "writing" and even to the point where there is a real to be confronted...but to say that you are up to construct a real gets me confused - a new real?

spectre - 02/26/01 01:31:48 EST
it strikes me that the truth is not evil. rather it is our response to the truth which may be evil, the extent to which we insist upon our truth.

Ernesto - 02/25/01 16:48:25 EST
Wendy, are you a psychoanalyst?

miselina - 02/25/01 16:20:57 EST
violet, that is a very tricky message

violet - 02/25/01 14:35:54 EST
I say Truth can be Evil, Ernesto - if Evil is what can hurt somebody else. I can't think of something more harmful, as to hurt somebody else, than the very Truth.

Terry1 - 02/23/01 16:42:00 EST
'A thought is a sentence with a sense. Thinking is language. All thoughts can be stated in sentences. What cannot be stated cannot be thought. A sentence is a picture in language. Tautologies and equations say nothing about the world. The only neccesity is embodied in tautologies. There is no necessity in the world. We do not know if the sun will rise tomorrow. Logical truths are tautologies and say nothing. To understand a sentence we must compose it.
Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. A new langage game would embody a new form of life. The limit of my language is the limit of my world' Witgenstein : Tractatus (4)

Rudolf - 02/23/01 09:20:23 EST
Shnookums, pumpkin, sweetypie -
It could just as well be either way. For the purposes of instruction, you‚ll find the doctrine arranged so, but consider it in the context of solipsism and my earlier comment: the reason why solipsism is impossible to believe and the reason why it is miscommunication in the last instance are the same.

spectre - 02/22/01 22:49:52 EST
dear--try it the other way around: communication in the last instance, but that instant of perfect communication never arrives. yes, there are moments of capitation . . . but they are not all.

wendy - 02/22/01 16:20:20 EST
of course speech always "involves" misunderstanding. It IS misunderstanding. But a "letter" is a different story. The real letter is not mere speech, mere babbling, its a writing, and the terms of understanding/misunderstanding at a point become totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter--there's a real to be confronted and constructed, and it has nothing to do with understanding or not.

Ernesto - 02/22/01 15:01:07 EST
So now it's me jumping in with a question:
Can the Truth be Evil.......Miselina?

Miselina - 02/21/01 23:49:14 EST
Hubert, Evil was thought to be feminine, but also Truth was thought to be feminine, if not woman herself. We have Nietsche's famous line opening Beyond Good and Evil: "Supposing truth is a woman - what then?"

Terry1 - 02/21/01 15:14:32 EST
Rudolf- the 'proof' you are looking for can only be found in conventional or 'exact' science we know that this is NOT enough for a compete understanding of the concept of 'cause'. We need the 'linguistic sciences' also. Your answer is in the other.

Hubert Hemmins - 02/21/01 14:57:50 EST
I couldn't help but jump in:
Points to Consider
1) Psychoanalysis does not rid one of all of his identifications. One does, after all, come to believe he has a body. The tactic of favoring the subject over the ego in analysis does not go so far as to cancel this belief. To the extent that it is rooted in his jouissance, that body image may be worked over, but never compromised, save in psychosis where even the power of jouissance to assemble this image may fail.
2) Regarding Evil: The point to make about evil, viz a viz Lacan‚s concept of Œsexuation‚, is not so much that, historically, the feminine was thought to be evil, but rather that evil was thought to be feminine.

Rudolf - 02/21/01 14:56:59 EST
No doubt, given how nothing is said here without the aim summarized as follows: "Look at me, I'm smart."
Proof is the way these responses are really about nothing at all. Did your response address any of the points I made? No. In fact, your response admits to what everyone else here would dogmatically deny: That a static understanding of psychoanalysis is fine.

Terry1 - 02/21/01 14:01:00 EST
Rufolf by knowing how mecconaisance (misrecognition) operates we can understand everything. All language is a demand for love. The ego is a linguistic construction. Forget Althusser, when he murdered his wife he lost himself. It may have 'always already occurred' we can still understand the truth of truth is we see the goal of language as silence.

Rudolf - 02/21/01 10:25:03 EST
A testimony to the fact that when you avowedly believe all speech involves minsunderstanding, you misunderstand everything.

Indeed, letters do always arrive. That makes all the difference. Borrowing from Althusser, not too grossly, we could say, "Misunderstanding -- always in the last instance, though the last instance never comes."

Has anything I have written been anything other than a defense of psychoanalysis against the few of you who think psychoanalysis is deconstruction? Well, since language invites misunderstanding, you are excused in your ignorance, then.

Misunderstanding is not something revealed in a "practice" by a reflecting ego, sitting in front of his typewriter, subverting the Western tradition. It will have "always already" occurred. And given the choice between the reflective "practice" of deconstruction, and the analytic practice, whose display of misunderstanding, of the truth of truth, is more forceful?

spectre - 02/20/01 20:08:19 EST
terry one is back--
thanks for the tips. i really appreciate them.
as per thinking and shitting: isn't it in the precise moment at which the cogito is positted, when thought itself becomes reified by descarte's methodical pursuit of closed-off self-knowledge, that something is evacuated radically from consciousness? suddenly the cogito is confronted with it's other: the body as automaton, as denatured machine free of jouissance, hygenic in its operation.

wendy - 02/20/01 16:30:13 EST
Given that this is a website & a messageboard purportly for those interested in lacanian psychoanalysis, one wonders what your point is, Rudolf? Do you belong to the group of people who seem to be unable to define themselves in any other way than by trying to negate and oppose psychoanalysis-- or rather, some fantasy they retain of what psychoanalysis supposedly is about?
Not that it cannot be critiqued, by any means, but at the same time, there is the phenomenon of those who cannot sustain their own thought, evidently, without opposing it to "Freud." You make certain statements about "analysts," and still the question remains, what does this mean to you? That is the unspoken distinction, it seems to me.

Terry1 - 02/20/01 15:33:39 EST
Rudolf - The distiction between thinking and shit?. Are'nt they both gifts Frued : ' A gift of shit'. Letters always arrive. We stop thinking when we stop delivering feaces presumerably when we are dead?

Rudolf - 02/20/01 09:40:24 EST
The unspoken distinction is between "to think," and "to shit." Though they may in blind alleys meet, they are not, therefore, reducible to each other, save for the sake of instruction to anaylsts who need the point illustrated. Moreover, and then some, it is not to much to think, and to think that one may speak of deconstruction -- that there are, after all, people from whom these words, or practices, originate. If I were, for example, to put a bullet in the head of the last deconstructionist, deconstruction would stop. A fortuitous correspondence. Though you gasp, violent intent. Though more violent, and arrogant, is it to speak of the discourse of philosophy without instead saying there is a discourse of the Other; as if the days of the week belonged to a teleological discourse.
Hermeneutics? Descriptive practice? A bunch of people getting off, God help me, I cannot see it another way.

Terry1 - 02/19/01 18:04:22 EST
Sorry I've been very busy havn't seen the Limey. An old film 'The Perfect World' a reading of the Lacanian male. Analyze it closely.
An Indian film: 'Umrao Jaan' based on a true story , majical realism a woman as a reflection. Indian film reflects religous belief. In each film there will be 6 songs 6 dances..........
Another old one 'Breaking the Waves' as the lacanian position the woman. Sembene Ouseman: 'Certificate of Poverty' These films as general world cinema.

spectre - 02/19/01 03:17:09 EST
terry 1--i asked you ealier if you'd ever seen The Limey and got no response. Do you have any films to recommend to us?

Miselina - 02/19/01 00:23:07 EST
Bravo Terry1.........and welcome back

Terry 1 - 02/18/01 16:45:30 EST
Miselina - I'm still Terry1.........

spectre - 02/18/01 14:05:46 EST
rudolph seems unable to perceive that the perversity in his simple injunction to just think, as well as his attempt merely to do so, is wholely confined within a very specfic discourse and hermeneutical horizon called philosophy. one also begins to wonder if he has ever bothered to notice the profound influence of freud on writing and difference, if he has read deconstruction in any other than its redacted forms? if he has failed to understand deconstruction is not a hermeneutics so much as an inscriptive practice? what does deconstruction offer the reader if not the thrill of seeing one's own prior misrecogntion of fundamentally orienting bounded texts, of seeing that one has cathected a monster? who, i ask, is the true purveyor of commonsense? am i the only one who senses an irrascable insistence in rudolph's messages, in his determination to draw strict demarcations? and what would be the unspoken distinction upon which he most insists?

Rudolph - 02/18/01 02:09:02 EST
dear Miselina, I am Rudolph from Ruritania, not Rudolf from Romania...'A simple game, that I made up, in the dark.' so the poet said.

violet - 02/17/01 20:47:02 EST
so let's see, we scroll down, we have Rudolph (already on 02/11/01) at 18:33:10 EST
and the next message, this same day 02/11/01, at 22:37:45 EST, two hours later, belongs to Rudolf! It certainly looks like a Rudolf provocation, if may say so.

wendy - 02/17/01 16:12:55 EST
My point is not that one cannot see or find in Lacan certain philosphical interests, etc. But psychoanalysis is not philosophy--a fact that seems to continually, utterly escape the philosophers. For one thing, analysis begins with the impossibilities of thought, what cannot be thought, understood, imagined, etc. The UNconscious.

miselina - 02/17/01 03:22:06 EST
why that some people in this messageboard have to parody other peoples names...so spreading confusion...what's the point of doing this? We already had Terry having to become Terry 1.

Rudolph - 02/17/01 01:41:43 EST
'The psychoanalytical experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the word as the law that has formed him in its own language. It manipulates the poetic function of language in order to give his desire its symbolic mediation.' So Rudolf, it's the singer not the song.

trace - 02/16/01 21:58:35 EST
Rudolph, if I understand you correctly (not at all sure of that, but I am certain you'll "correct" me if I'm wrong) you are mounting a defense of humanism. Fine. But, in Hegelianese, both Lacan and Derrida might both be properly characterized as "vanishing mediators," hence straw men of sorts for your argument. And yes, you are right to point out that no polemic is "just" anything. Polemics are generally destructive and ethically problematic, to say the least.

Rudolf - 02/16/01 11:32:57 EST
It is absurd that a general encouragement to think might be characterized as a philosophical approach.
Regarding deconstruction, psychoanalysis and deconstruction arrive at similar, though not equally worthy, accounts of subjectivity, causality, and so on. There are two final statements on truth by each: for deconstruction, paradox. For psychoanalysis, tautology. Deconstruction, if anything, does not „question,‰ it is very much the discourse of the Master to the extent that it does not allow the question be posed of its jouissance. The fruit of its questioning is that the questioner is never truly touched.
Deconstruction is the very picture of common sense, because it accepts the child‚s reasoning of „If I can imagine nothing, is it truly nothing? It can‚t be, because then it is something.‰ It proceeds with a notion of causality perfectly apparent to consciousness, only exceeding consciousness in its application. It does not begin with the idea, like psychoanalysis, that the causal mechanism is unconscious. Likewise, it takes „subject‰ in its unavoidable symbolic inscription and places it in a „context,‰ and in this way, it owes an awful lot to science; distrust of what you cannot see is very scientific. Rather than entertain a negativity which is not available to consciousness, deconstruction sticks with common sense and views the notion as a notion, itself dependent on symbolic context, etc. It ends up painting a pretty, mythical picture of meaning, the world as „deferred,‰ etc., which is as fanciful as Hegel leaving us with a grand culmination in the Notion. The sad fact is that there is jouissance, and an Other, and this can only be validated in analysis, a practice which, if not able to be validated strictly within the symbolic, still has its incontrivertible effects. Whether they be suicide or not.