Lacanianism

Alright, I used to think there is some substance to this guy after a certain introductory book but why is he such a fucking obscure faggot?

youtube.com/watch?v=N7v19ZKIpuU

What did he mean by this? How does he contribute to leftism in any substantial way?

Other urls found in this thread:

fabula.org/atelier.php?COMMENT_RENDRE_UN_TEXTE_INCOMPREHENSIBLE
mega.nz/#F!DJdkhYTR!gNrR2Hm7we5O0dyfwBHG0g
mega.nz/#F!eUlWRQxR!9LG4fzKLvNTiM0CKgUjqvA
lacanonline.com/index/find-a-lacanian-psychoanalyst/
quora.com/What-exactly-is-Žižeks-view-of-Lacanian-psychoanalysis-in-regards-to-the-act-of-rejecting-capitalism
youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0
m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=f1F-zysTjWg
youtube.com/watch?v=N7v19ZKIpuU
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

What's the matter you brainlet ? 2deep4u?

Lacan is a hack. Seriously, if you read French, please read this article.
fabula.org/atelier.php?COMMENT_RENDRE_UN_TEXTE_INCOMPREHENSIBLE
Literally "How to make a text impossible to understand". Lacan checks all the boxes.

By making Zizek feel like he's super intelligent

Read Fink's books that get posted around here, that helps to get a background. Lacan explicitly took that style with the purpose of making his words ambiguous and requiring closer examination: the more you comprehend immediately, the less you understand, or something similar, were some of his words.

He should have read Boileau.
"Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairerement,
Et les mots pour le dire viennent ainsi aisément."
[What is soundly conceived is clearly enunciated
And the words to express it come so easily]

What he probably wanted to maintain was a form of ambiguity in his speech. But he is not as hard as some make him out to be. At least from the parts of seminars I've read, which probably need background in psychoanalysis. However, Ecrits, in his own words, was not meant to be published, being pretty much his private notes.

I'm thinking Lacan is the OG fraud and Zizek is trying to stay afloat using Lacan's ghost to scare public universities to pay him.

When a French literature teacher openly proclaims he has not a single clue about what Lacan said, and when I understand him much better when he's translated that in the original French, there is the problem of clarity.
That's being a hack. Being as vague as possible as to never be wrong, and leave your own speech open to interpretation so you can denounce critics as people who "haven't understood".

Irrelevant, the article analysed in my link was publicised in a magazine and in the vid he's speaking on National TV, blabbing ambiguous garbage to a clear question.

Zizek has the decency to make himself understandable. He just can't follow a plan for his lectures and always derails.

1997 → 2007 → 1995:
mega.nz/#F!DJdkhYTR!gNrR2Hm7we5O0dyfwBHG0g

Study help:
mega.nz/#F!eUlWRQxR!9LG4fzKLvNTiM0CKgUjqvA

Find a Lacanian analyst:
lacanonline.com/index/find-a-lacanian-psychoanalyst/

Going to try this but I hope I'm not getting memed

Yes and that's what remains of Lacanians after taking away the super-vague jargon. Do I support this or that reform idea or not? Will it work and make the big change more likely? Will it work and it will be actually a bad thing as it will pacify the population? Will it fail and in that way end delusions and radicalize the people? Will it fail and delegitimize not just the moderates, but also us? These are the questions we wrestle with and fancy-pants Lacanians have no more coherent positions here than any other random asshole.

And the ambiguous syntax.

>Zizek is merely coming along and telling people they're crazy if they don't go along with the joke, because having all your property confiscated is just so much more better!
quora.com/What-exactly-is-Žižeks-view-of-Lacanian-psychoanalysis-in-regards-to-the-act-of-rejecting-capitalism

All syntax is ambiguous.

lojban is not

It's a scam to get you to pay some hack to feed you a line of bullshit. You're better off scrounging through the reading thread for texts or going to libcom, endnotes, or whatever to read up on obscure leftist movements or theorists.

Some syntaxes are more ambiguous than others.

Subject-Verb-Complement is straightforward and clear.

What do you guys think of this?

youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0

SEETHING

If you can actually read Ecrits with a straight face you're a lost cause. Zizek is an admitted professional troll. The fact people take him seriously here as some kind of great philosopher is insane. Jung and perhaps Guattari are the only interesting psychoanalysts besides Reich, Bernays and the like to see how Freud was used in the 20th C as a template for an deeply encoded method of mass societal control. And realizing this will always automatically happen with human science as long as we have these systems (global capitalism) in place, becoming exponentially more dangerous as neuroscience advances. Freud borrowed heavily from ideas around at least 100 years prior, like he didn't invent the unconscious by a long shot lol, and came up with a decent synthesis, but straight up made 90% up. It's purple prose and metaphor overlaying some pretty basic psychological ideas.

SEETHING

No I love Zizek. I'm just amazed at the autists here who aren't in on it.

Having read the intro texts cited here I find Écrits to be still somewhat challenging but nowhere close impossible. But is this really a surprise? If you are completely new to a field, jumping onto the leading theoreticians, the cutting edge texts, etc. without even knowing the basic terms used is impossible. How is this different from any human intellectual endeavor?
"If you can actually read Heisenberg with a straight face, you are a lost cause" – said the man who is yet to tackle Newton.

Just further excuses for anti-intellectualism. Not even elaborate.

An arch-idealist. The first regression from Freud.
"People suffering from psychoses are actually a positive model for revolutionaries!"
Orgone magic!

Isn't this an implicit acknowledging that there's "something to it," then? Von Neumann's theories are used for societal control. Does this mean that he was a baddy, or that he provided us with a neutral tool?

2/10 troll. Be less obvious.

Lacan > Freud > jung

(paraphrasing:)
"I don't know about you, but I'm a Freudian. It's up to you to be Lacanians or not!" – Lacan

“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist” – Marx

haha. yeah you're such an initiate, and it shows, so you felt no need to provide any actual content showing you understand the material in any way.
i said it was laughable, not particularly "difficult" - inscrutable and excruciatingly baroque maybe. but unlike you i can differentiate between ornate artifice and complexity. it's called a "bullshit detector".
sorry if that rubs you the wrong way. note: you'll have to do better than rote recital of some of the jargon to actually come across as impressive, as appears to be your inexplicable goal here, user.
what makes you think i havent? i take it you've at least read james as well then?
oh come on hahaha. same league, ballpark, galaxy? no. do you want a pop quiz now on quantum mechanics too? or don't try be cute like this again.
leading according to who, exactly? i guess the bourgeois academy surely wouldn't be in the business of pumping out ideology?
maybe in the 1970's. for a small clique of foppish parisian dandies looking for the next big "wow". now? no.
do you get paid 0.02c every time you say this? it's becoming a meme. grating.
oh boy messianism at its finest. your rabbis sure bifurcated history with their special scientific interventions and must not be circumvented once it is done. sure. anyway you need only compare "totem and taboo", a shoddy imitation to jung's real deal to see who was the real top dog.
i did notice how you skipped the part about his unoriginality. would you like to delve into his case history next?
yeah they were clearly just binging on classical psychedelics but who gives a shit it's an amazing read. it's all about 2 anyway. and he's only interesting via proximity to the big D.
nah it's about the psycho-sexual theory of fascism. pretty interesting if you want to know what was really going on with the "sexual revoluton", which i'm sure you feel was somehow organic. just normal standard operation of capitalism, right??
of course. as a conduit. but he takes the special credit which obscures the true provenance of the ideas. criticism isn't just accept/reject.
kind of a bizarre counter-example. do you not see the special uniqueness of psychological realm?
are you seriously trying to claim science is 'just neutral'? not very leftist tbh fam
then why reply in detail? little insecure about lacan? you should be. it's pure trash. calling me an anti-intellectual is a little rich when you feel the need to uphold this nonsense as serious, degrading the entire enterprise.

I'm getting too old for this shit.

woah nice comeback. you sure showed me. nazbols btfo

...

If you make something hard to understand but get enough people to agree with it, it will perpetuate itself. The people who believe in it will happily inform other people about [thing] but not properly explain it (because they often can't), because the more people who don't understand it, the more superior the people who "do" understand it get to feel. Obscurantism is fundamentally reactionary because it demands hierarchy.

Nice anecdote, or is it fiction based on an anecdote or what you read in Psychology Today while cocking back your daily three tablets of escitalopram? If we're going with anecdotes, we might as well give mine a chance:

The only negative and undeniable thing about Lacan is that despite having incredibly thorough and coherent theory that is fundamentally based on a materialist theoretical view, was self-admittedly also purposefully very obscurantist in many of his talks and literally wrote and published a text, advertising with it that it literally wasn't made to be read. Otherwise that Zizek quote above is true: I'm far from a genius and Lacan is very easy to understand beyond what appears to be very complicated topologies and theoretical terms, especially if you approach him through texts that simplify Lacan or make him more digestible like Fink and Miller. And I think Zizek is right to say that it's useful for Marxists, not just because it's materialist like Marxism, but because such a materialist psychonalysis lends itself well to elaborating on the otherwise crude and now seemingly incomplete Marxist notion of "false consciousness", which have otherwise frequently been filled up by deceivingly idealistic bullshit like Gramsci's and Lukács's theories of consciousness (the former being expressly awful because they conclude that a culture war is necessary for the communist movement, and look where that got us).

Lacanians/Freudians/Althusserfags are smug fedora tipping scientistic positivists minus anything resembling science

This is how Lacan himself practiced psychoanalysis. He would ask big sums of money for sessions as short as 5 or 10 minutes.
Good for you if you found a good and honest analyst though.

My main problem with Lacanfags is how they are unable to explain simply what it is all about.
Even some Hegelian ideas can be summarized and dumbed down for the average non-philosopher (thesis -> negation -> negation of negation, history as a dialectical process). But Lacanians never say why they like him. They only say "dude just read him lmao".
I'm sorry but if you can't tell me why I should care, why should I ? Hell, Freud's ideas can be summarized easily. Why not Lacan, who was all about "going back to Freud" ?

Instead they respond to criticism with "muh big pharma" and saying that every other forms of therapy are just there to help porky to pacify workers.
If you think clinical psychology is nothing more than a choice between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, I'm sorry but you are ignorant. Look at cognitive behavioral therapy for example. When it comes to anxiety disorders, it immediately make sense to learn to someone how to defuse negative thought patterns based on irrational fears.
And regarding the latter argument, the situationnists literally said the same thing about Lacan in the 60s.

How is it materialist ? As someone who studied cognitive science, which deals with the material ascepts of the brain, I'm genuinely interested.

whats the issue? he's simply interrogating the significance of the question being asked at all. this isn't supposed to be a direct answer.

Psychoanalysis =! Materialism
Lacan =! Materialism
Freud =! Materialism
Zizek =! Materialism

Freud and Lacan are pure Anti-marxism and Anti-materialism. Zizek is the same but with marxist phraseology.

You made it too obvious. Try reading who you shitpost about first.

I want to start on Lacan. What's a good introductory text for someone completely clueless, out of what you've linked or elsewhere?

I'm not him, but the year numbers given stand for the numbers you should follow to have a good intro to Lacan. The first book, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis is pretty good to start with. You will be acquainted with some of the most important concepts of psychoanalysis. After that, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, then The Lacanian Subject. All three are written by Bruce Fink, should be in the MEGA folder in that post.

This is like discrediting communism because in the name of communism things have been done that are not desirable. If I were to treat modern psychiatry and psychology in the same way I would be able to write them off just like that.

That's because it's complicated. The Einsteinian wisdom, like all other wisdoms, that goes along the lines of "if you can't explain it to a five year old, you don't understand it at all" is utter bollocks if you put yourself to the task of comprehensively explaining quantum physics like you're reading out of an Ikea manual.

But does that really explain you anything at all? It just provides you with a bunch of buzzwords open to interpretation and distortion. If, say, reading The Phenomenology from front to back while making notes gives you about a 40% understanding of the material, then this simple dialectical schematic (which is bullshit and even here vulgarized if you actually tackle Hegel BTW) does not even give you 0.00001% of an understanding of Hegel.

It seems to me like you're unhappy with a vulgar explanation here. Why do you not make peace with this? Could it be because it really doesn't give you a good picture at all?

Again, this is hard to explain in just a sentence, let alone a post. I'll attempt to give you a vulgar one, though: where modern psychology establishes a picture of the psyche in normalcy based on the social average and then proceeds to redress psyches that stray too far off this normalcy, Lacanian psychoanalysis assumes that what is "healthy" is contextual, and indeed very much related even to a particular mode of production or a particular polity it is under (late neoliberal, for example), and then as such treats the patient in the temporal framework of societal functioning. Normalcy here is absent, because normalcy is understood to be a structural phenomenon. Therapy, or really analysis, will then proceed to question what type of development one went through to arrive at a point where functioning is impaired within the context of human society structurally, because it is by first unraveling the material origins of one's symtpoms that one may find a true way of perhaps permanently altering things. Is this good enough for you? I made a bunch of serious more than semantic errors here and vulgarized a lot, but I hope it will do.

There is a really good book called Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change by Adrian Johnston which deals with the question of whether or not Lacan is a materialist between pages 119 and 124, at length (because it also treats Zizek on his Lacanian side). It concludes that he indeed does think through a materialist lens; one we may even characterize as a discursive (dialectical) one, similar to Marx. If you want I can give you a link to a download.

my life is complete now

Lacan had patients who didn't pay for years. His payrate changed according to the patient's financial background, i.e. porkies paid huge sums, proles little to (in some cases) none. Proof: m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=f1F-zysTjWg

Shouldn't be hard. It's quite simple:

1. What's the Lacan's definition of matter?

From that we can talk then but it's the main point.

Yes, thank you. This is interesting and reminds me of Mark Fisher's argument about the individualization of mental illnesses, and also the "chemical imbalance" meme which pisses me off to no end, as if the environment had no effect on mental health.

lol just because he throws around a bit of topology and a few mathemes doesn't make it even close. stop doing this.

of the key problems with Lacan, is there is in fact no 'mirror stage' in early development. which is necessary for the formation of his peculiar self-alienated ego and alter-egos, which is necessary for most of the rest.

Wasn't this concept abandoned later? Also hi, fag.

not that i am aware of, tho i can't be bothered reading too much of him, thats why im prodding the lacanians for an explanation.

h-hello

I never said this. If you had read my post you'd see that I said that Lacan isn't particularly complicated at all, it's just that there's a lot to cover that cannot be summed up like in a PowerPoint slideshow you made in high school (it is, after all, an attempt to understand the human psyche's workings and intricacies on the whole).

It might be useful to explain why this is not the case or to at least bring forth the Lacanian theory that suggests there is, so we at least know you're somewhat familiar with the thing you supposedly already know is wrong. Don't pull an Academic Agent on us, though looking at how you've been posting otherwise, especially Re: Lacan to the Lacanfag shows you're not really bent on having a level-headed discussion. Here's to hoping you can prove us wrong.

No. It's fundamental to Lacan's (very materialist) conception of the human psyche's early developments. Covered in Bruce Fink's Clinical Introduction, but you can also check out Introducing Lacan by Fink which is a graphical rudimentary intro, available on libgen ezpz.

I've read Fink before, but I remember reading this somewhere on this board yesterday or I might have been dreaming.

anyway let's be real here. psychoanalysis in the freudian vein makes a lot of sense to jews because they're effectively describing themselves. it is much less readily comprehensible, and perhaps much more novel and confronting, to gentiles for this reason. that is why there is so much focus on neurosis, libido and the overbearing mother, and the like.

lacan is no exception. he acts in a typical way when charging full price for the 5 minute sessions, then when he gets expelled from his school for it exclaims "im being treated just like spinoza!"

i believe it was bloom, no rabid antisemite, who said something along the lines of "freud was the most jewish thinker, even if he could not, or allow himself, to see it".

it was more of a question. from what i remember mirror phase is critical to the whole show. otherwise you're left with maybe the three registers and not a lot going on. this is just from memory of course.

my next question to the lacanians is, unironically: are you jewish? could explain why you seem to have difficulty communicating these concepts to the "vulgate".

hahahahaha holy fucking shit

What the fuck is this shitpost?

prove me wrong. you literally can't. no need to be a nefarious motive behind it. just is what it is.

fun fact, most of the anti-lacanian STEM-shitters on Holla Forums have never even read freud, the fucking degenerates.

none of them will ever be willing to engage with lacan on his own terms because, simply, i dont think they can. yes, the ecrits are hard to understand, but that's usually because youre not reading them after the corresponding seminar, or you're just jumping into some random essay without situating it in the context of lacan's work up to that time.

lacan is not an easy thinker, but things that are hard to understand or exist outside the domain of the natural sciences=/=idealism.

psychoanalysis is just 'jews describing themselves,' even though lacan, the most relevant analyst after freud, was not jewish, and freud himself clearly did not care for his jewish heritage. gotcha. i would also love to see your evidence that neurosis, libido, or 'overbearing mothers' are somehow inherently jewish phenomena.

do you think lacan's 'full price' was a set number for all of his patients, or shit, even a flat rate for each individual session? do you know precisely why he was expelled from the IPA? how exactly has the mirror stage been 'disproven,' and who funded these studies?

what's happening here is obvious: you are acting as someone who has knowledge of an entire theoretical field of which you clearly have no actual experience with, and even better, you've managed to fit it into your perverse antisemitic fantasy. you should feel embarrassed.

can someone please actually answer my question what he meant in youtube.com/watch?v=N7v19ZKIpuU and how does Lacan contribute to leftism?

news to me. perhaps not biologically, but spiritually very much so. unless you hold Judaism to be strictly a genetic phenomena??
lol. to start you off, here is the exact quote from renowned literary critic Harold Bloom in the forward to "Enchanted Chains", a seminal work on Kabbalah by Moshe Idel, student of no less than a respected authority than Gershem Scholem:

Why did he have to synthesize Evola king of retards with Heidegger, one of the smartest people in history?

Why did who do what now? If Lacan wasn't in some way spiritually Jewish, why did he specifically compare himself being kicked out of IPA to Spinoza's excommunication for heresy? See again Bloom's quote for a view on what Spinoza means to Jewish intellectuals.

this is a lie. there is not a single instance of lacan claiming to be jewish in any sense. what does this at all have to do with analysis?

a third party thinking freud is jewish 'in spirit'=/= freud is ideologically jewish. again, why is this where you have directed the conversation instead of discussing theory?

we are not going to continue this line of argumentation. the question of freud or lacan's ties to the jewish tradition is not related to the worth of lacan's work/psychoanalysis itself.

psychology is not a homogeneous field of study which progresses in a uniform fashion. there are schisms within it which permeate down to the level of how one fundamentally conceives of the human subject. historically, one of these branches, that of behavioral/cognitive psychology (aka the psychological approach which has been VIGOROUSLY embraced by capital), presents us with a quantifiable model of the mind, an epistemological move which is entirely at odds with the psychoanalytic model. despite this blatantly obvious gap, the vast majority of the studies which triumphantly claim to have 'disproven' psychoanalytic concepts have been conducted via questionnaires and the like which ask subjects to rate themselves on things like happiness or satisfaction, even though such a 'study' is completely foreign to how psychoanalysis understands a category such as happiness (see 'why psychoanalysis' by elizabeth roudinesco for further information on this topic). in other words, one should always be suspicious of empty claims, such as yours, that a certain psychoanalytic theory has been 'debunked' when no real evidence or historical context for this 'debunking' has been provided.

the early cut of a session has immense importance for the work of analysis. you again show your ridiculous bias for quantification. what is the point of an hour long session when more can be accomplished in the same session with an accentuating cut? in fact, one can argue that the rigid adherence to fixed-length may actually be harmful.

>no. i clearly do not pretend to know all of lacanianism.
your problem is that you claim to know anything about it at all.

well i was genuinely curious if the lacanians here were literally jewish, that was the point of me bringing it up. you know, just asking perfectly innocent questions. i mean if they all were it would add weight to my little working hypothesis here about Freudianism wouldn't it? interesting how you find it abberrant to even bring it up when as i have shown mainstream Jewish scholars seem to have no issue in discussing it as an unproblematical notion.
i am aware it is a contested area and the checklist methodology of mainstream psychology is often dodgy at best. this is a general run down you have given me though, earlier i said i had no problem with Jung, who was written off as "an idealist" (cake and eating it too).

i was more asking the Lacanians to tell me more about the data on the mirror stage. you see the thing with these people is you have to trigger them into saying anything or they'll just tell you to read x,y,z and never try put shit in their own words. instead going to pains to explain why they can't as in this thread, which i found amusing.
no one has a problem with flexible sessions in principle it's the ~2 minute sessions he was doing. is that really just quantification bias? lmao
well i've seen enough from its adherents, and read enough about it to dislike it. feel free to educate me about the mirror stage and ego/alter-ego formation at any time now

>>Holla Forums and the majority of the community thinks that your Jewish conspiracy theories are laughable.

For you: yes. Otherwise no. And in reality: nobody cares.

...

Pseudoscientists "psychoanalysts" will defend this.

Saying "go read [insert author here] is not a rebuttal.

do i really need to read 8000+ pages to figure what the fuck he is talking about in that vid and get a rudimentary idea of how his work applies to leftism?

Quantum physicists will defend this!

I would argue that you don't, and that Lacan is a hack. He said himself that in the "television" series, he was more concerned with how the words sounded like than with their actual meaning.

Because I can actually process and make sense of every word in the picture, and if I had a textbook, I would be able to translate it in layman's terms.
Psychoanalysts never do that.

But that is literally done in Fink's books. Specifically, The Lacanian Subject has a part that treats this in chapter 8, Formulas of Sexuation. Why are you such an insufferable faggot?

There are many schools that have broken with Freud in significant ways, notably Jungian, Adlerian, self psychology and so on, dropping major features such as the Oedipal complex altogether. I meant to contrast this with Lacan who saw his work as a direct continuation of Freud's complete ouevre, and himself as the true successor over other more orthodox lineages such as ego psychology.

cuz trollan will surely inspire quality posters to come to the fore!!!! ::Dddd

Because you can't randomly assign numbers and symbols to make yourself look smarter.
Meme or not, Sokal critics are extremely valid when they come to Lacan, and this graph is no excuse.

The symbols there all have meanings within the theory. Like really, you claim that this is not comparable because no one explains it, yet I'm pretty sure you're a lazy faggot who never bothered to seek one. Then when I tell you where to find an explanation, you pull the epic Sokal card. These shitposts never really change, three elements are always preserved in them: le Sokal, le pomo, le hack. At least one of the morons ITT pulled some absurd, but fun 'attack' about psychoanalysis being jewish.

Was that a no? Why so defensive anyway? If original Freudianism is fundamentally Judaic, as I claim, and Bloom, who is no moron or right wing """conspiracy theorist""", might agree, and Lacan is the most ardently anti-revisionist Freudian, is it not more than reasonable to say there is a sort of Judaism at least latent in Lacan's theory?

It's interesting to see how culture bound theories of psychology may be over-universalized - as we see in the problem of what is known as "culture-bound syndromes". Surely you see the issue when applied to an ideally universally valid revolutionary theory which aims for the liberation of all.

It's also interesting to see how quickly the mind recoils at the mere thought of criticizing Judaism even jokingly. On an anti-Zionist, generally anti-religious, Marxist board that lives next door to the internet's premier white nationalist hive mind.

How is it materialism?

Lacanianism is -like all forms of Freudianism- fashion. It's unfashionable notions that are held as critical one day can be disregarded the next; penis envy, the fridge mother, dream analysis etc etc.. none of this casts doubt on the faithful, they're like Mormons in this regard.

I'm disappointed, you'd think Zizekian Hegelo=Lacanian dialecticians would be the first to see where I was going with this… :[

Well, the thing is, if you know anything about Lacan, it's that he isn't a philosopher, much less a great one. He is a psychoanalyst first and foremost, and that's largely what his work and theories deal with, the actual practice of psychoanalysis.

You are amongst the worst posters on this board, if not the worst. I want you to just lurk more or whatever, just stop posting here until you've reached a good level of being able to properly engage in rational disourse

That doesn't make anybody a materialist.

That's not materialism but being pure pre-Marxian. Nice Kantism and Idealism dude.

Psychoanalysis is "more materialist" than contemporary psychology/neuroscience – the pair that reduces subjectivity to functions – in that it is dialectical.