Is Lacan a useless fraud?

Did you crawl from Idpol riddled SRS?
Paglia is enjoyed because she I the only feminist that's countering political correctness and provides evidence as to why the insane claims of third wave feminists, even gay rights extremists are wrong.
She talks about how men have sacrificed blood, sweat and tears to help build society, while the modern feminist shrieks about how men are "evil".

I'm not "too lazy to read books".
I want to know if Leftypol think he's a fraud or not.

Someone explain to me what he meant by $ (barred signifier) and how that relates to the constraining effects.
Who is constraining whom? What is the nature of the constraining? How does that fit in with castration?
How would you describe the nature of the Big Other?
No obscurantism or wrong math pls.

I piss on you Americans and on your annoying family drama about your retarded liberals and conservatives. I wish you would all finally kill each other so that we don't have to listen again and again to your retarded conception of politics.

Imo he has his fraudulent moments and if you're not interested in psychoanalysis then he's going to be useless. You can read Žižek and his crew if you're interested in political use of Lacan. Žižek even wrote an introductory book "How to read Lacan".

I read it, that's where I got the impression that he's the petit-bourg flavor of the week con artist.
Also west european socdems are maybe even more reactionary than americans.

Well, psychoanalysis itself is bourg right from the beginning, that's why you read Lacan politically only if you're going to steal some useful concepts from him, but Žižek has already done that. However being bourg in itself doesn't make Lacan a fraud, he's more of an ideologue of psychoanalysis, trying to take Freud further.
I'm not from western Europe, but they're definitely not as extreme as Americans at all, even if they're already quite americanized. You can discuss politics with a lot more nuance there, they don't even have the same categories to begin with. The only exception I know is Germany, I've heard they're getting insane about idpol as well.

She's not a feminist in any relevant sense that people use that word in, regardless of what she calls herself.

I'm not really sure myself. The problem with the way he writes is that if you're not a PhD in Lacan, you're not going to pick up on whatever possible mistakes he makes. Occasionally he'll say something blatantly wrong and people will line up to defend really weird, reactionary statements (I.e. "I am against transgenderism" – "oh you see what Zizek really meant to say was… blah blah blah)

Why is being against transgenderism necessarily reactionary? It doesn't necessarily imply you want to return to traditional gender roles, it just means being opposed to its particular ideology, while you can still try to imagine something different that isn't based on liberalism and the whole liberation of sexual identity project. For example, why so much emphasis on some mystical identity rather than on sexual act itself? If we consider the concrete act then there's no use for gender and transgender anyway. You seduce, you're seduced, you fuck. This allows for far more substantial experimentation than thinking about who you are and how to call yourself.
Actually, transgenderism is itself reactionary, historically as well, because it returns to gender politics. At one time these people didn't care about gender, they just wanted to fuck in new ways and destroy the family. Demonizing them didn't work, so they were colonized by liberalism in order to integrate them into traditional social relations (at first partnership, now family) and to neutralize them through identity politics.

Critics of Lacan are bourgeois counterrevolutionaries.

I'm not even a Feminist but this is retarded logic.

What kind of critics and why?

Well that's just one example off the top of my head.

timeshighereducation.com/books/the-shrink-from-hell/159376.article
>Lacan portrayed this break as the result of an ideological conflict between the old school and the progressive, true Freudians represented by himself. Actually it was about his greed. He needed to maximise his throughput of patients in order to finance his lavish lifestyle. (He died a multi-millionaire.) He started to shorten his sessions, without a pro rata reduction of fee, to as little as ten minutes. Unfortunately, Freudian theory fixes the minimum length of a session at 50 minutes. Lacan was therefore repeatedly cautioned by the IPA. According to Roudinesco, he gave several lectures to the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris arguing that shorter sessions produced a beneficial sense of frustration and separation in the patient, "turning the transference relationship into a dialectic" and "reactivating unconscious desire". Additionally, he lied to the IPA about the duration of his sessions. Despite this belt-and-braces approach, he was rumbled and out he went.
>Faced with loss of income, he established his own French School of Psychoanalysis, over which he had absolute power. Its work, Roudinesco says, "concentrated on desire, transference and love, and all of these came to be focused on the person of Lacan himself". Now he could make his sessions as short, and as expensive, as he liked. Even when they had contracted to a minute or two, he would often see his tailor, his pedicurist and his barber while conducting his analyses. In the final years, the process of shortening reached its natural conclusion in the "non-session", in which "the patient was not allowed either to speak or not to speak" as Lacan "had no time to waste on silence". With the help of non-sessions he averaged 80 patients a day in the penultimate year of his life. Non-sessions were perhaps an improvement on sessions, in which, disinhibited through dementia, he would indulge his bad temper, raging at patients and occasionally punching them or pulling their hair.
I think Lacanians on leftypol should follow suit and should turn their discussions with us plebs into higher-level non-discussion.

Degenerate is used as a word for when you call something absolutely amoral.

Literally just ad hominem, no reference to his writings or lectures. I thought leftypol was more intelligent. There's a thousand smear campaigns out there about Marx, or whoever you personally obsess over.

I mean the one minute session thing is a little ridiculous at face-value. But there is an actual theoretical reason for it that seems sound to me when you accept the premises. The problem is that to accept the premises, we also have to go down the rabbit hole of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Telling what a person does is not an argument against the merit of what that person says, except when the two are linked. To disrespect Richard Feynman as a theoretical physicist because he was a terrible musician would be an example of a silly ad hom.

The practice of the super short therapy "sessions" is not some stupid little thing Lacan did on the side, therapy is THE THING he did and wrote about. And if you have a problem with shelling over $$$ for his one-minute session, you have a problem with his words as well.

You're leaving the criticism to common sense without being able to account for how they fail or succeed in reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis. You're not actually engaging with the theory… you're basically appealing to common sense based on how something comes off.

Not that poster but to what purpose? That's like a fundamentalist asking a scientist to prove that the Earth isn't 6,000 years old, and the scientist can only use a King James Bible to do so.

I don't care, when we talk about Lacan we mean his writings. For all I care he could be the most radical opponent of psychoanalysis outside of that. I mean, this is tabloid tier, how can you seriously consider this a credible critique? Only if you're just interested in burning his books for some petty reason.
And I don't even like Lacan or psychoanalysis, at all. But if you're serious about philosophy and not just circle jerking then that's the relationship you have to all authors. You approach their work in order to gain as much as possible from them, or to better construct your own opposition to them, both of which imply having some sort of respect for their work. Btw, an intellectual respect for your enemies is strategically essential, otherwise you don't even understand who you're opposing.

I'm not asking him to defend his claim using Lacan's terms. I'm saying that "look at this thing that seems counterintuitive isn't it obviously wrong" isn't a good argument.

wonder what they all have in 🍀🍀🍀common🍀🍀🍀

Lacan wasn't Jewish if that's what you're referring to.

i think user is suggesting he was irish….

his father was Jewish

Have we finally identified the creator of cultural freudism?

Great argument m8, I see you really pulling people over to your side.
Lacan doesn't look like a fan of psychoanalysis either, with his one-minute sessions (silent ones, even).

You don't need to respect people in order to read them, and certainly you don't need to respect somebody after reading them.

Political enemies are people with different politics who write in order to persuade others of these, e.g. Brad DeLong. Lacan isn't even an enemy, he is simply a fraud.

...

I don't care if lurkers start reading Lacan or not, this isn't even what we're talking about. Is everything just marketing to you or something?
Who said anything about people? You're really not getting it. Just read again what I said, and read it slowly. You seem like the type of person that won't read Heidegger's work because he was a member of the Nazi party. Well, your loss.

Yeah, yeah, "Marx was a leech on Engels" & "Zizek is just an academic" … Your ad hom is def. justified!

(different person)
>You don't need to respect people in order to read them, and certainly you don't need to respect somebody after reading them.

Take a guess what impression your skillful rhetoric makes, Mister Suave.

Well put.

He's a usefull fraud, the self-aware version of the usefull idiot.

That's like saying Kautsky was the OG of Marxism.

At what point did lacans writings became the psychotic rantings of a dementia sufferer, instead of proper lacanian theory?

His students couldn't tell.

He's a freakin' Perv.

not really, I dont think he ever implied he wasnt just making shit up and pretending it meant something

a lot of idiots keep buying his books, long after his death

…do you mean Zizek?

youtube.com/watch?v=Maex3jW0Yw8

Lacan used notation from math and formal logic without even having basic familiarity with any of it. He pulled from his ass a mirror-stage theory about the mental development of babies undergoing a sudden revolution when they see themselves in the mirror for the first time, and after reading a mountain of pretentious prose about how that creates a sense of self, somebody who isn't brain-damaged might wonder: Hey, wait a minute. If that's true how come people born blind have a sense of self?

Lacan was bullshit from beginning to end.

Haven't read Lacan, but I'm sure it's not a literal fucking glass mirror, it's probably anything that reflects you in the world back to yourself, or something like that. And that notation probably has more to do with Saussure.

I honestly don't know what's the problem with appropriating science metaphors and notations. It has nothing to do with pretending to be scientific, this could not be more obvious if you actually read what these authors say.
Some scientists and most science-lovers are way too triggered, even more than people who constantly complain about "cultural appropriation".

Being the king of pseudoscience must be good fun

You mean like Marx?

What?

Oh, don't you know? Marxists make the claim that Marxism is science!

Like who? Because it seems like this guy is more obsessed with the idea than Marxists 8ch.net/leftypol/res/1002241.html

Like every traditional Marxist, especially in the 20th century this claim was made constantly. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were very similar in that regard because they both wanted to have a complete monopoly of interpretation. Marxists were far more eager to do it, though. Whereas now I think you will find on both sides fewer people claiming that.

Well there you go

A metaphor never perfectly corresponds to what one is describing, it always breaks down at some point, so this argumentum ad antfuckingingum is of course not the criticism that should be made of Lacan or anybody. The charge is rather that the borrowed terms don't even roughly correspond to anything similar when imported. What the pseudo-intellectuals bank on is that somebody not familiar with the field the term comes from will not ask for clarification and instead give the author the benefit of doubt:

>Lacan, S&B show, makes advanced errors – muddling the very specific technical meanings of certain terms from topology (such as `compactness') and so on. But he also makes elementary ones, as when he confuses irrational and imaginary numbers or the universal and the existential quantifier – the latter the kind of mistake a first week student in mathematical logic would not perpetrate.
physics.nyu.edu/sokal/tallis.html

An irrational number is a number that can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. So a rational number is 1/3. The square of two is not a rational number. An imaginary number is a number that can be written as the multiplication of a real number by the imaginery unit i, where i squared is -1. In the symbol soup of logic, an existential quantifier means "there exists at least one such thing", whereas a universal quantifier means "all things are like that".

The relationship between student and guru is not one of equals. A student encountering strange logic symbols for the first time might be too intimidated to ask what that shit is supposed to mean, so the guru gets away with anything.

Well Lacan was trained psychiatrist so you would want the upmost level of precision in your language, especially if you intend to contribute to the general field of psychiatry medicine.

This is true, but they are triggered precisely because there are so many people who believe in backwards shit. I'm not a positivist but "science" as we know it has revealed so much more of the universe than any New Age self help crap. And yet when the scientists point out how some theories don't have any ground with which to stand on, or have any practical use in the scientific sense, all of a sudden it is their proponents that are triggered.

Yeah, therefore is equal to

But it's a use of popular imagery, it's not meant to have a direct connection with hard science. Science has replaced religion and theology in that way, if you read a few centuries older philosophers you will find religious imagery in their work, it didn't matter whether their philosophy had anything to do with God or not.
Those Lacan's confusions are pretty cringy though. Not necessarily that what he's trying to say is bullshit, but he's forcibly using those notions for bullshit reasons.

Not a fan of psychoanalysis at all, but I don't think that's a fair description since psychoanalysis is actually pretty depressing in comparison, it says you will always be fucked up, at best you can understand your insanity a little bit and somewhat manage it. Zizek describes this far better than I can.

Depends on who and how. Psychoanalysts can be really bad at this because they were once a dominant psycho-therapeutic practice, now they're butthurt when technocratic CBT has replaced them. But other writers that are attacked by scientists reply more in the sense that they never had any pretension to be scientific in the first place, science simply produces some of the best metaphors for the current age, which is a compliment.
And not being scientific doesn't diminish the value of something. Politics isn't science, yet it's the most important subject in relation to how we live together and the world we live in - it's actually only because of having political implications that science becomes of such importance at all, otherwise it's a useless hobby in the noble Aristotelian sense. Whether scientists reflect enough on their politics is another story, it seems they almost never do, except for a few great ones that do it retroactively (sometimes in horror). And when people outside of science become critical, you have scientists acting as if they are beyond any ideology, which is the definition of pure ideology. Science should be brought down to earth and treated for what it is, instead of being a quasi religion (with far more material consequences and therefore a more dangerous one than Christianity).

That comment precisely describes what the problem is and why you should be kept away from scientific terminology.

I think you missed the point of what the user was trying to say. It's like Descartes using the malignant demon v. using the brain in the vat. It's just a metaphor to make a point, it's not a comment on actual theology or the world of science. Or at least I think that's what he's getting at.

no

Except that's not what Lacan does. What Lacan does is along the lines of stating: "The penis is a tumescent organ because its structure is blue".

Is anyone here familiar with the work of Stanislav Grof? He combined psychoanalytic therapy with psychedelic therapy, and discovered a dialectic within the human psyche - one of ego death. Richard Tarnas (who's book "The Passion of the Western Mind" is where I found out about Grof's work from) gives a talk on him here.

youtube.com/watch?v=swgMEAfDqgM