On Lacan and Knowledge

That is why the method of textual commentary proves itself fruitful. Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis. How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me—I had the impression he meant this or that—that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go as far to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding. (Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 73)

To read Lacan’s texts then, one has to assume the intersubjective position of the analyst and to rest the text in the patient’s couch. Begin by thinking that you don’t understand.

The futility of the hunt for the past

Like a dog chasing after its own tail, the pursuit of the past—nostalgia—is forever doomed to failure, twice over. The attempt to recapture a moment that has already passed and slipped us by, is always at one remove. No photograph can sufficiently stand for the recalled moment in its entirely for the photograph is always and only a snapshot.

To exacerbate matters, our desires are even questionable as well. Are those desires really our own? For according to Lacan, the desire is the Other’s desire, the desire of the Symbolic Order. Much like canned laugher, we are always prompted on when to laugh and when not too. When an individual desires something, it is always a social product that is by no means an individual’s decision. Language, the Symbolic Order, decides your desire for you.

Three Cheers

Durkheim, in one fell stroke, has managed to negate my thesis entirely.

Whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false. (Les Règles de méthode sociologique, Paris: Alcan, 1901, 128)

Wonderful, I tell you.

Theorrhea and I

“From our present standpoint, however, the ideal of an immanent analysis of the text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a description of its functioning and malfunctioning, amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate , immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model, which it will be the task of the following pages to propose.” Jameson in The Political Unconscious, 23

Everyone should share my pain; parse the whole quote. If you haven’t noticed it, the above quote only consists of one sentence.

Theorrhea I tell you, theorrhea.

P.S.: Diarrhoea of theories, if you didn’t get it. One week and a day to go.