Lacan and Logic

Reach around and take off disc as quickly as possible then run through the door

Lacan is pretty weird when it comes to gender though. Sure, he uses Masculine and Feminine (Father and Mother, Man and Woman, etc.), but it is always in some symbolic (and thus non-imaginary) sense. It makes it really difficult to understand him when it comes to "queer" situations that don't really fit on some single play of male and female (like a biological female that identifies as male, etc.), but rather imply a plurality of possibly contradicting positions concerning the same person at the same moment in time (someone who doesn't fit in any gender or fits in several). I'm sure there's some way to account for these things, but in my experience, psychoanalysts are content to just mumble "insufficiently castrated" and move on. I don't mean to rant, but at times it really does feel, like Deleuze says, as if psychoanalysis makes it impossible for analysands to truly speak despite being a talking cure.

I don't think Lacan, or most thinkers of the French Theory are hacks, but that one college girl that cites Derrida 8 times in her essay on one of Tarantino's film to talk about ''space'' and ''gender'' is absolutely a fucking hack.

A guy would never do that

I ranted about this in another thread today actually. The main problem with these thinkers is how badly their ideas are communicated to humanities students. Thus, your Tarantino-girl.

>but at times it really does feel, like Deleuze says, as if psychoanalysis makes it impossible for analysands to truly speak despite being a talking cure

semi-serious question: isn't it that talking itself is overrated? if talking is both the disease and the cure, then isn't silent awareness of your own symptom just the thing?

to be able to shut the fuck up and be capable of a shared silence with a loved one would seem to me to be the point of an analysis, if it's not enlightenment itself. right?

to me i think the fact is that people think talking is the point. i really think silence is the point, the capacity to be able to do stuff and think things and not feel the need to talk about them. but maybe that's just my own dingbat reading

don't take pic related too seriously, but i do think there's an element of truth in this. what if the point of analysis was just to help people to live without feeling the need to speak? isn't talking itself the problem?

here's a better quote.

isn't it just the case that people are addicted to talking (or, in my case, shitposting?) isn't the point to be able to shut the fuck up?

>tfw this is what i have been trying to accomplish my whole life, live without having to explain myself or smile politely while others explain themselves

There's only two genders though

>what if the point of analysis was just to help people to live without feeling the need to speak? isn't talking itself the problem?
I recently came upon this Sadhguru talk where he discusses that you can't use intellect to dissect being. There's no use to learn something when there's nothing to learn about it, he said that existence predates thinking.
It's a very mystic sort of thinking but the whole 'seeing reality as it is' appeals to the practical side of me. Whenever I see anyone trying to confuse the issue and make mountains out of molehills I try to reduce the question to 'what is he really trying to say?'
I can't get past the point where philosophical debate doesn't turn into a wank of whose concept or system is more complex when the real world and the science behind how the mind works suggests that all beliefs are learned. If that is the case, and all beliefs are incorrect, the correct answer is to defy beliefs and concentrate solely on the reality in front of you.
Anyone have another viewpoint?
youtube.com/watch?v=QQn8X4FbpTM
one of the guru's talks. I usually can't stand guru types.

is that logical problem some kind of joke?

3 of us, 3 white placards, 2 black. places placards, only black remain, i must have white because we all have white because we are three and white are three and there are no whites left so i have white.

''existence predates thinking.''

Hello Sartre.

these eastern philosophies have as a fundamental quality a presumption that at his core man is nothing. interesting they were able to discover this with a cognitive faculty and then use this discovery via cognition to assert that you cannot cognate being. western thought gives man a bit more to work with by saying hes an image, and behind that image is god or whatever.

man as image cannot look within and find answers, he must pull from within and actualize without (via art) to self reflect. a novel does not contain within its pages meaning, man, by using the novel as a mirror, sees meaning brought to the surface from within him by the novel.

those who try to derive a complex system of understanding are too caught in the socraten (apollonian) mode of self knowledge, and eastern thought has the opposite problem in rejecting the apollonian and elevate the dionysian.

you must radically unify this duality, good luck user.

seeing the two whites across from you, how can you be certain you do not have one of the two remaining black disks?

The prisoner doesn't know the colour of the remaining discs, he only knows what he can see (a white disc on each of his fellow prisoners)

The answer is in this situation it is impossible for any single prisoner to go forward and announce he knows with logical certainty that he has the answer.

All three prisoners seeing this can conclude they all have white

you're overhasty in

1. suggesting that the unity of apollo and dionysius is symmetrical

2. identifying socrates with apollo.

for the first you have to remember what nietzsche saw as the respective formal embodiments of each spirit. apollo found himself in the unitary figure of the tragic hero, while dionysius was manifested through the audience's projection of itself into the chorus. the tragic payoff was the moment when the chorus felt the hero's pain, thus transmuting it in a sensuous, pleasurable form back to the audience. tragedy as form may have endured, but the tragic moment was brief, a fulguration of emotion and force. don't underestimate the rhetoric throughout the Birth of the instantaneousness of the tragic—it was a flash both in history and in the local time of the performance.

the second problem is a properly dialectical one, and can be fairly reduced to the passage of quantity into quality. i'll explain historically: the radical leap from competitive market capitalism to monopoly capitalism in the early 20th century started first simply as the logical consequence of capitalist accumulation. as the capital held by individual firms grew, those firms themselves inflated and push others out of the market. eventually however that market shrunk, so you see an expansion of those firms out of those markets. this precipitates first intra-industrially, with the buying up of other firms, then extra-industrially, with horizontal integration, and finally internationally, with the expansion overseas of the great banking, railroad, and oil giants. this last reflects a change not only in the quantity of accumulation, but in the quality of capitalist relations—we have entered a new stage of the logic of capitalism, where the dominant factor is no longer market competition but competition among monopolies for control OF markets.

likewise with apollo transforming into socrates. at a certain point of formal accumulation, form itself breaches its own boundaries and becomes socratic doubt, logical inquiry, and dialectic. form continues to refine itself until it explodes out into the questioning of form as such.

i think the Birth is Nietzsche's greatest work.

certainty, no. but i can accuse the prison guard of being a colorist and desiring to withold all the black discs.

or i can appeal to human desire for order / consistency and declare that keeping the whites together separate from the blacks would appeal to his reasonable faculties or perhaps a subconscious preference.

i can assume the black discs are worth some amount of $ and he wished to abscond with them for profit.

these might be statistically based but if pressed i could dance around the statistical quality of these appeals.

also the 3 white 2 black setup is lame.

>impossible to determine with certainty
>certainly uncertain we must agree problem solvd

...

I'm a Lacanian by the way, so maybe that's why I could get it and these other plebs couldn't

sorry, it's not that the markets shrunk, its that they were too small for the firms. i let dialectics get ahead of me

yeah, that's sort of the answer lacan gives, in that formally it bears the same result. but the reasoning behind that result is not based on uncertainty. on the contrary lacan's prisoners become very assertive.

in any case your solution would result in all three being hanged, because basing an answer on the likelihood of uncertainty indicating this or that is a probabilistic one, so you have not satisfied the guard's conditions.

keep going, i think you can work it out.

dont take the socratic analogy too far, im using it more to illustrate modern mans obsession with self knowledge via empirical methods such as science (apollo) vs a spiritual/extrasensual connection with the one (diony), which can be achieved during either a pure expression of will: performing music, preferably extemporaneously; and perhaps good sex. i cant fathom other methods of deindividuating without chalking it up to lmaodrugs. so maybe drugs too. this is going a little beyond birth (which im 2/3 through) and applying it to a personal ideology.

its the socrates:modern man analogy im making, not socrates:apollo. and modern mans rejection of the dionysian urges within himself as easily found in our cultural rejection of divine madness (mental health industrialization) and our current sexuality.

i dont particularly think the unity would be symmetrical, nor do i think it was implicit in my previous post, unless you equate "radically unify" with "unify equally". and i dont think its a leap to identify socrates with a qualitatively apollonian mode of thinking, considering fred makes the comparison on multiple occasions.

sorry if i was overhasty in my reading of your post, then, but chalk it up to polemics for the sake of stimulation.

i actually tend to think modern man in his consumptive (read: sphere of circulation) life is excessively dionysian, though this is certainly as a compensation for the overwhelming socrates you rightly identify in productive (i.e., "scientific") life. though this is nothing new—what i think nietzsche has to tell us about this attempted resolution of the circulation/production contradiction is that the symmetry sought after is not dialectical, and so can only end up chasing its own tale. it's like working yourself to dust for the weekend, going ballistic through it, then showing up monday hungover and having missed emails, or whatever. trying balance them (quantitatively) cannot get you anywhere.

but i do have to disagree with the static association of socrates with dionysius. for on the one hand nietzsche implies in the birth the socrates suffered from an excess of apollo, at the expense of dionysius—but can we not turn this on its head, and suggest that there is a sort of dionysian jouissance at work in that excessive formalization, that dogged, questioning pursuit of ideal truth, that stubborn death drive that made socrates lust for hemlock in pursuit of ethical consistency? and here we must betray nietzsche's letter to be consistent with his spirit: i see the emergence of socrates in this text less as a collapse of tragedy than as a dialectical expansion of it, less anti-tragic than post-tragic, in the sense that postmodernism is not anti-modern, but an intensification and reversal of those tendencies.

Since no one is coming forward and making a conclusion all you can deduce is that there isn't 'two black' discs, which you already knew because you could see there discs.

There could still be one black disc, your's withou anyone being able to come to an conclusion. So the fact that no one is coming to a conclusion doesn't actually help you.

>static association of socrates with dionysius.

with apollo*

fuck

keep going! think more about the fact that no one is coming to a conclusion. what else might this signify?

yes yes IF WE CAN COMMUNICATE, which i didnt think we could, i can via questioning determine we all are uncertain about whether we have a /black/ disc, and i can determine that given there are only two black discs, we wouldnt all 3 be uncertain about having a black disc. but i didnt think this would work given there were 2 black discs, but rethinking if one of us was uncertain we couldnt be certain about all having white, but given we are all uncertain i can deduce with certainty that we all have white thus i have white.

>There could still be one black disc, your's withou anyone being able to come to an conclusion. So the fact that no one is coming to a conclusion doesn't actually help you.
No actually I considered this. If there was one black disc the person who observes a black and a white disc and yet no one going forward would have to conclude he has a white disc.
Which would in turn give the answer to the individual with the other white disc, which would give the answer to the one with the black disc.

Ok so prisoner one has to think do I have black or white? Unknown. Let me assume I have black. Now he must think from the perspective of prisoner two, who prisoner 1 knows has white but this fact is not known to prisoner two. If prisoner two was looking at prisoner 1 in black and if he too had black then prisoner 3 would know for sure. But since prisoner 3 does not know for sure we can assume prisoner two has white. Any prisoner can do this abd come to the same conclusion.

Doesn't completely make sense to me when I think about it a little more but not sure what else can be said.

You're closest to Lacan's solution. I'll post it now.

>After having contemplated one another for a certain time, the three subjects take a few steps together and pass side by side through the doorway. Each of them then separately furnishes a similar response which can be expressed thus:

>"I am a white, and here is how I know it: as my companions were whites, I thought that, had I been a black, each of them would have been able to infer the following: `If I too am a black, the other would have necessarily realized straight away that he was a white and would have left immediately; therefore I am not a black'. And both would have left together, convinced that they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them. At that, I made for the door to make my conclusion known."

>All three thus exited simultaneously, armed with the same reasons for concluding.

Thanks. I was close.

This is still based on probability, it only pretends to be deduction

What a sham

How is this different than my answer ?

Dude, thanks, your snub on Lacan allowed me to understand a lot of Deleuzean shit I've been dealing with. Thanks, this is why I love Veeky Forums

How is that probability?

now the problem with this becomes that his reasoning is based on no one making a move. how can they all then make a move TOGETHER if their CERTAINTY ITSELF is based on mutual hesitation?

J'ai plaisir à faire ce.

It's not you just weren't clear about the process that goes through the prisoners mind in order for him to get to 'I have white'

Everything is probability on a certain level you clutz. It assumes a certainty in observing an uncertainty in others which is fair given they are motivated to get out first.

You can just as easily say you can't know for certain whether you are really seeing the colour white and not just an illusion of the colour white

like i said, the result is the same. but the problem asks also for the prisoner's reasoning, and yours was probabilistic.

>each of them would have been able to infer the following

>each of them probably*

>the other would have necessarily realized straight away

>the other would have probably*

If this isn't probability than economics is a strict hard science that just happens to not work all the time for some odd reason.

you're simply incorrect in making those changes.

>Everything is probability on a certain level you clutz.

That's false. I just like clarity in my puzzles, but I guess continentals wouldn't understand

>you're simply incorrect in making those changes.

So all agents are rational?

You should go tell all the economists and generals. They just have been incorrect all this time on game theory and such.

but the nondialectical aspect of this problem of a/d duality unification is precisely why it requires a radical unification, that, if my previous attempts at unifying any duality are worth a whistle, is impossible to do without committing a dire injustice to both.

but thats not even the fun paragraph

even given the flip is his dogged pursuit...................................

its a nice way to unify without doing a major injustice to both tendencies....

id like to ask a personal question, do you have a degree/what in and was this reading of nietzsches introduction of socrates into this text provided by a professor or is it due perhaps to your depth of understanding of the text once enough context was gotten via reading related texts. i feel i had inklings of this when niet quoted socrates in phaedo about playing music.

for if socrates had played music he would have been who nietzsche was trying to be

or perhaps from an interpretive essay.

I think a more interesting question is how, for the purposes of this problem, Lacan requires (desires) the complete divorce of logic from probability, which is arguably a subset of logic.

>That's false.

No it isn't. We're getting Cartesian now. There's no such thing as absolute certainty in observation but I guess analytics haven't even read Descartes

Did his therapy actually ever help anyone?

see You can break the problem with a Humean argument against causal law pretty easily, but that doesn't make it a solution.

i just graduated with my ba in english. a younger, naiver me wrote a paper using what i had then conceived of as nietzsche's aesthetic calculus of a/d to furnish a prediction as to what happens after the cliffhanger ending in Pynchon's Lot 49. basically the idea was that Oedipa represents an apollonian agent trying to formalize an increasingly dionysian san francisco, and is doomed to be rebuffed every time. so the best guess as to the identity of the secret bidder is that it will be "just another clue."

i came to both texts basically on my own, though i think pynchon was recommended by a prof.

so i did a lot of research on the Birth so i could summarize its contents intelligently, and the main thrust of the argument has stuck with me ever since. i then turned to reading anti-oedipus for a while, and enjoyed thinking about apollo/dionysius in terms of the modulations deleuze and guattari walk paranoia/schizophrenia through in that work. after a while i just came to know it very well, and readings—some good, some bad, some interesting, some dull—just sort of pop up, like finding new subtleties when reciting a memorized poem.

so to answer your question it's a combination of things.

>i just graduated with my ba in english. a younger, naiver me wrote a paper using what i had then conceived of as nietzsche's aesthetic calculus of a/d to furnish a prediction as to what happens after the cliffhanger ending in Pynchon's Lot 49. basically the idea was that Oedipa represents an apollonian agent trying to formalize an increasingly dionysian san francisco, and is doomed to be rebuffed every time. so the best guess as to the identity of the secret bidder is that it will be "just another clue."

and as for this, i think this "new reading" of socrates would have something to say to the younger me who wrote that paper!

>There's no such thing as absolute certainty in observation

Is not the same as

>Everything is probability on a certain level you clutz.

Not my fault you aren't consistent and clear

Further, you just admitted that what Lacan needed, an answer not based on probability, is not possible

A sham

Oh you're not a serious person, whatever

You don't have to bring up Hume and I'm not bringing up his argument against causation. I'm just pointing out that this puzzle specifically saying "don't give a conclusion based on probability" makes it a sham because the prisoner is forced to use induction and not deduction to figure this out.

...

its fucking fascinating ty

Here's my take, with a focus on perspective.

Prisoner A sees Prisoner B and Prisoner C with two white hats. He has to entertain two situations: do I have a black or white hat?

If prisoner A was to entertain that he may have a black hat, then B would logically see A with a black hat and C with a white. If that were the case, B could work out his color by the response of C looking at both theirs, an easy answer for C to know he's white by the two only blacks being visible, or, crucially, in his lack of answer, confirmation that B must then be white. Prisoner A could then conclude that he could not then have a black hat, because that would mean C or B would be able to figure out their own hat. Over time, it would become more and more unbearably obvious to A (and at this point we will hold that A is not mutually exclusive to "A", B could just have easily been "A" and the result would be the same, in fact, is the same to all of them as they apply the equal but privileged reality of a second viewpoint). So to any of the prisoners it becomes certain that there is only one situation that has no way of providing any of the prisoners a way of showing their hat, which is white, and this lack of a solution becomes the solution, and this solution becomes more apparent with their inability to find an alternative. It becomes like one of those trick questions where the answer is that there isn't one, but in this case, that's the answer's very logic, and that logic is provable silence. Of course, it's hedge on the assumption that all of the prisoners are behaving rationally - if C was color blind the experiment would fall apart. So I'm not sure how "logically" provable the experiment even is, more like, logically assumptive.

Am I correct here?

yes, and you've highlighted the two crucial points of lacan's proof

1. that you can only solve the problem if you admit A, B, and C are purely heuristic, a device for the observer, and that in situ each prisoner considers himself A and the others B/C

2. that the proof is based on B/C observing A's hesitation, and vice versa

>Lacan is pretty weird when it comes to gender though

There is only the male gender in Lacans works. Woman don't know what they want.

good work

do you have more of these?

I don't get it why that thing is repeated so often. In psychoanalysis nobody knows nothing. Men are just as prone to confusing the object cause of desire, object [small] a, with [empirical] objects of desire and getting into a cycle of desire, failure, disappointment, repetition as anyone else.

The place where it truly gets complicated is when talking about women as non-all and stuff like that, those theories feel almost mystical at times, even when Zizek explains them.

what should i read first from him and what are prerequisites?

What i do not get is why women love to dab in psychology where they hear about being shitty

Lacan makes references in his work to philosophers and writers throughout the canon so you should not feel the need to ever be fully prepared.

For most purposes an understanding of the terminology of Freud and Sausserian Linguistics are what you'll need to read him. A background in French philosophy of his period also helps a great deal.

Don't bother.

Disregard all post-1900 philosophy.

...

CenturyFrenchHacks

>Sokal and Bricmont
you mean the people who tried to trick a journal but were caught in the act, so lied about the events and then wrote a book congratulating themselves for not exposing something that doesn't exist?

someone hit me with some more logical puzzles

Seriously though how can you declare all 20th century thought is redudent. Where do you believe things went wrong?

>Where do you believe things went wrong?

With everyone who claimed to be influenced by Nietzsche whilst disregarding his most radical/unsavoury ideas.

is he marxist?

Basically yes, though not in a naive sense of the term.

"ooga booga women don't know what they want and I give therapy sessions while getting my nails done."

proustian nihilism is boring and distracts from better problems/questions posed in the 20th century

Related slightly to lacan
>really fucked up sleep cycle
>listening a lot of videos on youtube on philosophers trying to sleep
>very little material on lacan and about 80% is zizek rambling or in french
>he literally spends two hours in one video talking about his usual stories and not explaining a single idea from lacan
>a fat dude with a cigar and a tupac poster describes lacan better in two short videos than 10hours+ zizek videos

Why is he such a fucking hack?

"YOU ARE PATHETIC AND WILL BE ALONE FOREVER. NOW PAY ME!"

lol only a deluded marxist who doesnt understand money would hype a guy who's entire career was a ploy to seduce women with bullshit

>whilst disregarding his most radical/unsavoury ideas.

What are these?

hacks attract other hacks

lacan and marx are real easy to write about, zizek, too, must publish or perish

Zizek is a philosopher not an educator, what do you expect? His interest isn't in giving people fundamental introductory courses, when he speaks he assumes an audience that is already well read in the theory he discusses

>Zizek is a philosopher

Not arguments. Tell me where you actually disagree with Lacan rather than just posturing contentless disagreement

Tell me where he fails to qualify for that definition?

freud has been debunked countless times

Has he, such as when?

Strawmen have been debunked. Most of the people attacking Freud and Freudian theory have no idea what psychoanalysis is actually like.

he literally writes about how he sneaks naps in his therapy sessions

each session would have cost $450 euros today

im not challenging you so dont yell at me when I ask what it actually is? In short

reminder that there's no oedipal complex in sophocles' play

sorry if i hurt your feelings

If I was an old wealthy woman in Vienna in 1910 I'd be very alarmed

>Freud, Lacan, and psychoanalysis in general irrevocably BTFO

can someone explain lacan to me, as a guy who has read read heidegger, piaget, foucault, freud, levi-strauss, saussure, and a dozen other fucking related things and still never come across a reasonable description of lacan's project

it's always either too general or too jargony, and again i am fine reading jargon as long as i can get some taste of the meat behind it

His project is in the simplest terms an attempt to understand and map the structure of mind.