Lacan, the materialist?

Hello Holla Forums, today I would like to propose you a passage from Adrian Johnston's "Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change" wherein he goes over one of Zizek's four biggest masters: Lacan (the other two being, broadly, Hegel, Marx and Althusser), and whether he can be considered a materialist or not. You can find the source of what I'm about to share without you in PDF related, pages 119 to 124.

Without further ado:
(Cont.)

Other urls found in this thread:

dubtrack.fm/join/leftypol-comrades
youtube.com/watch?v=PV5yOlsix20
plato.stanford.edu/contents.html?highlight=WyJIZW5yeSBFYWdsZSJd
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
youtube.com/watch?v=Fv5VMf-RJx4
marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm
lacan.com/badjohannes.htm.
entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

(Cont.)

(Cont.)

(Fin)

Bump for Lacanian theory's potential in aiding the communist movement in subverting.

bump

Also join the Dubtrack: dubtrack.fm/join/leftypol-comrades

bump

I don't understand any of this but I know I like Zizek

kys

I can help you understand.

The main topic of the book revolves around Badiou versus Zizek, with Badiou following a very traditional marxist line of dialectical materialism + neo-Platonism and Zizek following a weird mixture of Hegelian theory ("concept-thing" in Hegel he considers oddly materialist and in line with Lacan's later works), various Marxisms (dialectical materialism, Althusserian structuralism) and finally Lacanian psychoanalysis.

I can briefly introduce you to several of these concepts or link you to much longer but comprehensive introductions (the best I know of, in each case), if you'd like.

In conclusion, Johnston concludes that Lacan is a materialist in virtually every way later on, but more idealistic in his early work. Since his psychoanalysis really took off from his later works, we can say he is indeed a materialist either without realizing it (doubt it: Lacan was an admirer of Hegel and Marx and a graduate of philosophy) or didn't want the field of psychoanalysis to come into the battle of idealism versus communism, which only Marxists really care about because it rests on their legitimacy for the communist movement (largely supported by materialism).

no u

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Edgy.

Is that who you think I am?

Someone who posts hilarious pictures with the filename ebid

das me

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hey

bump

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Here's your (You). Now are you gonna stop shitposting?

typical trash

I'm not too concerned with STEMfags. In due time, they will also realize their predicament (if not faster than many others, because they are majority disposable labor), and they'll be able too leave behind vulgar scientism to help contribute to an emancipatory movement with their valuable skills.

"philosophy of science has no impact on physics"
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Thank you for your screeching bump, but try to keep things a few more minutes separate as to ensure your energy is well-spent.

social signalling is gay, these boards are an eyesore. This desire to have these perfect threads is gay as well

Let's talk about people like the STEMfags again. Start with WEBM related, and we'll get right into the discourse, okay?

Yes technology, which demands constant progress, maintenance, adjustment and lebensraum destroys the fabric of entire cultures. It denies humans their sense of self as a requirement for technical society, you cannot think like a human and coexist with technology. It is impossible to reconcile utilitarian, expansionist, consumptive algorithmic functioning with the spontaneous, often irrational and organic function of the species. Zizek doesn't touch on how the people in those colleges don't resist their fates because their minds since birth have been imprinted upon to reflect the thinking processes of a computer program. The average normie thinks like a Facebook, Tindr filter. It is barely sentient, could hardly be called human. Then we get into the extraction side of the issue. The small plot of land that's used by the techno-capitalist apparatus is totally decimated. it has not viablity for organic life, because machines don't care if their is no room for organic life. They see no reason to protect the sustainability of an ecosystem as they are easily able to relocate and begin extracting from somewhere else OR to improve themselves to the point that they don't need the ecosystem's resources anymore. Zizek says we're replacable, but we forgets to mention is that we are literally manufactured. Materialism's greatest crime was its suggestion that we have no souls, that we have no self, that we are not agents and that we can and should be engineered. side note: i desperately want to see zizek on lsd

Idealist: technology's function and needs are not irrespective of material conditions. Would a post-law of value be free of the need to mass-produce dragon dildos? Let me rephrase: would a post-law of value be free of first heavily investing in advertisement for dragon dildos and then mass-produce dragon dildos?

Ultimately, as you later on imply, you're the one who's suggesting we have no souls; that we are husks with a soul that informs us regardless of where we are, except for how many machines surround us. A soul so preacarious it can't examine productive modes or elements of it as basic as the commodity to see that technology is not pivotal.

In doing so, you've managed not just to blame the automatic permutation of technological development on materialist philosophy, but to say that there's essentially no way out of the antecedentary consequences of technological developments (within the context of capitalist production, but that appears to be too far out of your reach, so I digress) besides reaccompanying capital's need to expand even further with technological developments. In a way, you admit that capitalism is a thing, that it isn't inherent to the human condition, etc. precisely by omitting its workings. This is why you'll be the first to welcome band-aids on capital like rentierism, the sharing economy and basic incomes, because you're ideologically so consequently prone to taking them in via easy bourgeois perversions like the nation state, ethnic lines and culture. You will be, as Zizek says, fully incorporated into global capital, but with the decoratory appendage of populist aesthetics.

The only drug Zizek needs is the sublime.

Thread theme: youtube.com/watch?v=PV5yOlsix20

Start with providing strict definitions for these useless buzzwords from 19th century first.

plato.stanford.edu/contents.html?highlight=WyJIZW5yeSBFYWdsZSJd
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Off to bed, ttyl.

Akshually, one more vital PDF for new comrades before I'm off too snoozeland.

bangp

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At the end of the book Zizek answers Jonhston's questions in one of his most condensed texts I've read on 21st century materialism. Highly recommended. Johnston's first part of the book on Badiou is a very good intro to Badiou's thought.

requesting black lacan

in the hood

Yes, Badiou and Zizek are bros but have a fundamental divide on the subject of the formation of human desires and perception.


kek. LeQuan givin' us dem analysises.

bmp

bu m p

>>>/fringe/

Now there's a meme I haven't seen in a while.

youtube.com/watch?v=Fv5VMf-RJx4

synchronistic coincidences

No the soul arises from the organism, it isn't an inherent possession of the organism unless they are born into a culture that inculcates it. The soul is real, but fleeting. It can be destroyed by damaging the nervous system or inducing severe psychological trauma.
This is nonsense, you people need to learn to speak English. I'm not reading your rationalist tripe to decipher what you just said. I'm ignoring it because you're disrespecting me by using language I have no grasp on (not complex vocabulary but niche nonsensical definitions that mean nothing outside of Marxian analysis)
I gather you're saying that without souls, we know we are in a technological age? I hope so, because that's vaguely what I was suggesting.
I have a soul and what you said again makes no sense at all. You need to speak English, your grammar is bad and your choice of words is nonsensical. I don't read your fucking nonsense Marxian literature, speak English or don't speak to me.
Yes I blame it on Materialism which Descartes is indirectly responsible for. If there was not an alienation of Mind from Body and of Self from World there would be no technological police state.
The only way to stop technology is to destroy all of it, save blueprints and equations for later use and then build up in a most cautious and careful manner the necessary levels of industrialization to sustain the species without impacting people's psychological existence or the planet's biosphere.
Capitalism is after technology, the technological revolution started in Rome, Greece and the Arab world. Moved to Italy and the Netherlands/Germany and then began expanding outward with capitalism at a rapid pace, they go with each other. But one precedes the other, technology is a bigger problem than Capitalism as seen by the uninhabitable dead zones in China and former USSR territories where unbridled technologization of a culture leaves nothing behind for organic life.
NO i don't know who you think you're speaking with by i'm acutely aware of how the Welfare Capitalism, Ethno-nationalist State Capitalism, Feminist capitalism and racialized capitalism function. I'm not stupid at all, you are talking to me like I'm stupid though. Part of the reason why i despise communists is exactly that. Talking down to other people whose views you don't even fully comprehend.
Yeah collectivism and the nation-state are gay, i think you're getting the wrong idea about what I want.

What a fucking waste of my time, you just talked down to me and argued as if I was a populist ethno-nationalist or some other shit. Nice job appealing to Zizek instead of thinking for yourself. 10/10 leftypol very good discourse…

No, not just that. They have vicious disagreements on materialist ontology itself. Read the book, gomrad!

makes me kri evertim

starts by Johnston retelling that altough Badiou and Zizek find themselves broadly in the same theoretical position, if they were to find themselfs post-rev in a politburo they'd work to gulag the other as soon as possible.

You most likely heard Zizek saying this line over and over again: "my good friend, Alain Badiou, sniff" – well, their friendship hinges on a common enemy. Post rev they'd kill eachother.

why theory threads die:
:(

kys

also bumpin cuz i wanna read later

read later what?

The former is completely in line with Marx: the organism is matter, and it is a matter capable of shaping the human brain within which the spirit resides. You also specifically appear philosophical materialist, primitively but certainly, when you say: "unless they are born into a culture that inculcates it". That is to say that for Marx too, the shaping of man out of the soul-inhabited organism is developed through matter consequently. This is why Marx insulted people in his time and called them retards: because the soul has agency in being retarded or not, to think about what retardation is, et cetera. You've got a concept of materialism so divorced from its basic premises as outlined by Marx that you've indeed created a materialism within which man is but an organic machine, which is retarded, because Marx's materialism is dialectical (in discourse with itself, which is a non-machinical process unlike his predecessors like Diderot, but a developmental and authentic one).

Bruh, I'm using incredibly basic philosophical terms, and have given you easymode tools in and to rapidly patch up anything where necessary. You're here either being a demagogue, wilfully ignorant or outright lazy. I respect you fully by acknowledging that your conception of dialectical materialism is a shit one, for example, and explain to you things you either do not grasp whenever you decide not to read a fucking book.

No, I'm suggesting that this soul's form, as I believe it to be, is dependent on its discourse with matter. It's not this atomized thing that but does what it desires or whatever the fuck you're suggesting the soul is like when you say that the mere existence of industry and its development of new technologies completely rids it of its agency.

If you have a soul, make it use your eyes and read a fucking book. Or has technology already made you incapable of that?

Faggot.

Kek, holy shit. Enlightenment idealist mumbo jumbo is the basis for the modern late capitalist ideological and repressive state apparatus. Read Althusser: marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
(Cont.)

Utopian primitivism. Now I've seen it all. Is your plan of action unironically a full dark enlightenment acceleration towards putting humanity on the brink of extinction and then rebuild it with your Luddite messiah-led clique?

Technology proper, at its most basic, starts with sticks and stones. Humans are inventive and once again have agency when faced with their material conditions. The first catapult and spear were reflective of that, and the only categorical difference between primitive technology and modern techonology is that of being descriptive of different stages of human society: hunter-gatherer versus slave/feudal societies, which as modes of production depended on basic developments in technology (slave societies needed basic agrarian development and the bullwhip, feudal society needed the saber and the formation of man-made structures born of their materially-conceived ignorances like the church or state, et cetera).

Yeah, and then you accuse me of:
Pic related: we communists, despite mostly being the culmination of material development, have agency too, because we're also lit by a spirit. We can thus learn from our poor praxis and faggotry just like you can, although our mission is that of overthrowing capital instead of being the next neo-Luddite persuasion.

A Luddite primitivism without the principle of the human collective? Explain yourself.

You unironically used a variation of the term "virtue signaling" and other Holla Forums-tier low level discourse terms like STEMfags, implying Marxism and leftism are a religion, appealing to our supposed allegiance to the (bourgeois) state as communists, et cetera. If you're indeed not a Holla Forumsyp but your own brand of neo-Luddite, I fucking welcome it and really wonder what hole you crawled from, but you can't fault me for not suspecting the obvious, and you are indeed a stupid faggot who despite it all actually offered good discourse I had to think about, so please reply if you want.

I'm gonna sleep now, peace out and ttyl.

Where do I start with Lacan?

This is pretty credulous considering you're just repeating verbatim whatever Zizek says, albeit in a more nuanced way; it's only working because you're deliberately distorting the premises without bothering to understand whatever the poster has written, which is why you can't actually tell the difference between:

Don't bother saying these are two different points addressing two different posts; with your brilliant euphuistic genius you've managed to argue against what you think is an 'idealist' position by using the exact logic Marx critiques, confusing everything into one long narrative. You don't know you're doing this because it involves words like soul, post-value, and discourse. How about reading a fucking book that isn't co-authored by your idol.

There is an elementary book of lacan with drawings, wish I could find it tho

no ideas exist on its own entirety so it's fun to trace back the origins (or mere influence) of radical new concepts of mathematics or theoretical physics but tracing scientist brain's trajectory does not necessarily lead to new radical math/science ideas.

I mean it will be immensely more effective but by the time philosophy of science researcher finished the analysis, said scientists would have already milked his idea to the limit and direct application will be all but applied.

Yes they do, read Hume

how about no

apparently with Freud. I am reading The Interpretation of Dreams which has been good so far. Lacan cites it as a text almost exclusively concerned with technique. Here's something else which might be okay too

Leftcom user

what exactly does it mean if Lacan is a materialist?

Since he's mostly a clinician, I suggest Bruce Fink's "A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique", available on LibGen.

There's also Zizek's "How to Read Lacan", also on LibGen, which along the way tells you explicitly not to bother with young Lacan and his neo-Freudian ideas, but with late structuralist Lacan and what books to check out afterwards too. This is also on LibGen.


So let's recap: so far, the only thing you've been able to retort with is yet another appeal to form: I use words too big, metaphors too complicated and paralleling critiques too scary. And you did so while introducing me to a new poetic term: euphuistic, stemming from an English philosopher-poet. Congrats.

Now either reply to the content (especially accusations of your neo-Ludditery), or remain a demagogue. Forever.


This thing? It's alright, but I'm not sure it will suffice for anything more than a very basic understanding. Then again, that's what the guy asked for so might as well. Wanted to UL it here for sharing's sake but I only have it in EPUB format.


Faggot. Read Hegel.


This could be a good path too, I suppose. It will mean a much more proper understanding of basis behind Lacan and his influences themselves, but will take longer too.


That we can use his incredibly useful theories on the human psyche and ideology to our advantage. "Our", because Lacan being a materialist means we Marxist communists have compatibility, for we are materialists too.

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I've written a response.
You've not understood it because you haven't put any effort in trying to understand what anyone is saying to you. Nobody is going to spend any more time than it takes to read to try to pick up the threads to explain back to you what you've written in your own posts, when you don't even understand it yourself.

But maybe you should use more big words.

We're still waiting on your Acceleration to the Rapture/Neo-Luddite Manifesto, buddy. Don't keep us waiting.

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Tell me more about your role model

I will if your coming posts bump the thread.

That means I'll only bother replying to your demagoguery in the future if you stop saging and contribute to my thread's livelihood, Kaczynski.

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Kill yourselves

Why can't you be an Anarchist?

no u

Ctrl+F "anarchis": marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm

That was your last argument too.

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Is this supposed to make philosophy look good? Because it doesn't.

Water boils at 100 degree.
There would be no person alive to turn on the AC.

Depends on your biases, but if you lean STEM you'll always be a tough scientism-ridden nut to crack at any rate.

We're talking 130 degrees outside here; probably the result of a group of elite Luddite primjas successfully activating the nuclear holocaust against civilization which now suffers from high atmosphere temperatutes, from which they likely masterfully cloak themselves in an ecological hut isolated with feces and mud.

Xjin vs Leftcomfag when?

130 degrees Fahrenheit

Probably never.

Besides, I've probably already been shoved into in his left communist opposition faction even if the Politburo doesn't exist outside of his mind and neither does left communism in any way outside of the modern ultra-left tendency of today, which is only left communist in legacy.

What for?

I can't even point out that Gagarin went to space in 1961, not 1962 - as was written in the book about Lacan - without getting being accused of some nonsense.

Do you know when the west got to hear of Gagarin's feats, syntrofos? Do you know when Lacan got to hear of Gagarin's feats, kommatiki tou ΚΚΕ?

spooky

Not the user you are talking to but define neo-platonism here, do you mean the Neo-Platonism of antiquity and renaissance or do you simply mean Badiou's own kind of a new Platonism?

Modern psychiatry and neoliberalism-y.

The latter: lacan.com/badjohannes.htm.

bump

Is there an english transcription of this ""Plato: For today" seminar mentioned in your link somewhere around on the internet?

Unfortunately, there isn't as far as I can tell. mariborchan.si, a website which collected all things Zizek and co., used to do things like that for Slovenian and I think French too, but it's out of order. I can check Wayback Machine to see if there's an archive of a Badiou translation-transcription, but slim chance.

Actually I just remembered that transcribed seminars are found here

entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm

Pour aujourd’hui : Platon !

Good, but not in English unfortunately. I know French and translation and interpreting is my profession. If someone were to convince me that this is worth translating to English for Holla Forums, I might give it a try…

It would be amusing.