Thoughts on the writing of Lacan?

let's as chomsky what he thinks. bonus: zizek included

>What you're referring to is what's called "theory." And when I said I'm not interested in theory, what I meant is, I'm not interested in posturing--using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there's no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can't. So I'm not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don't see anything to what he's saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't see anything there that should be influential.

let's also ask chomsky about cambodia, see what interesting theories he has about that

It wont be what you've heard other people tell you without bothering to check what the man himself says

this

I don't even like chomsky but the khmer rouge defense chomsky is a stale meme and zizek is a buster for repeating it

HMMMM then lets see what chomsky has to say about 9/11, see what interesting facts we can gleam from that, hmm

be sure to quote the man and not what others say he said

Man, I wish I could be half as sensible as Noam.

Oh gramps and his stories from days of old

>(Lacan not pictured)
Really? I was 100% sure that Lacan was a hot girl. Guess you do learn something new everyday.

>triggered autist alert
this guy's autism gave birth to a couple good ideas 50 years ago.
>Why this is influential, I haven't the slightest idea
maybe because
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEE WHY ARE HUMANS SO MEAN AND DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO ME ANYMORE
holy fuck i can't believe people don't see through this guy's intrinsic immaturity and inability to accept that his clownishly simpleminded ultrarationalist approach to understanding the deepest pit of inquiry humans have ever encountered (the problem of meaning) doesn't impress people who aren't actively gagging on his dick

Bunch of bullshit. Read schopenhauer instead.

"Fun, intelligent, vibrant" authors or "Fun, intelligent, vibrant" nudes? For me, it's nudes.

Your tongue in cheek quip in brackets has made it clear that you're pure trash

>working closely with fun, intelligent, vibrant authors.

Being read by absolutely nobody

That'll change.

this is my problem with the more eccentric branches of lit crit. a queer Lacanian feminist reading of Ulysses might tell you something about those disciplines, but little on Ulysses itself

Who is this jism prism?

>if you can't rub your dick on something then it must not be real

On the “writing” of Lacan; the fuckin worst.

On this thought though, incredibly profound. I’m a student of neuroscience and I found his work had a lot of affinity with how I understood the mind and brain, albeit in a different register. In neuropsychology we talk about ‘spreading activation across connected neurones’ which seemed to fit well with Lacan’s chains of signification, or how he talks about the unconscious being structured ‘like a language’, specifically in that it’s formed by strings of signifiers which are stripped of their referents, just webs of signs pointing to signs in a syntax with no semantics. It also reminds me of how Jerry Fodor talks about the mind, in that particular respect.

Lacan is very good.

>Being read by absolutely nobody
Who cares? Do you just listen to Bieber because he is popular?

The concept of the real was the only thing I found really useful (and brilliant). That being said, it all made me very insecure. Nice thighs, too

>Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on... well I don't think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let's look... I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that." And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that "No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn't yet know enough, so... you know." But I totally reject this line of reasoning.

>For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn't it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years ('75 to '77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called "Angka," an organization -- not communist party of Cambodia -- an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask "Who is my leader?" your head was chopped off immediately and so on.

>Okay, next point about Chomsky, you know the consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on -- and that's my basic difference with him -- and precisely Corey Robinson and some other people talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don't need any critique of ideology, you reach symptomatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted. We just have to bring out the facts of people. Like "This company is profiting in Iraq" and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.

>First, more than ever today, our daily life is ideology. how can you doubt ideology when recntly I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he demonstrated how this idea of austerity, this is not even good bourgeois economic theory! It's a kind of a primordial, common-sense magical thinking when you confront a crisis, "Oh, we must have done something wrong, we spent too much so let's economize and so on and so on."

>My second point, cynicists are those who are most prone to fall into illusions. Cynicists are not people who see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing financial crisis. It was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social democrats who are spending too much. The crisis exploded because of activity of those other cynicists who precisely thought "screw human rights, screw dignity, all that maters is," and so on and so on.

>So as this "problem" of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever "no" today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in the humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: it's brutal. Who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations and so on? We are totally marginalized here. I mean look at my position: "Oh yeah, you are a mega-star in United States." Well, I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me "I didn't get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!" He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him "You almost got it, but then somebody says "Oh, if Žižek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him."

>So I claim that all these "how popular we are" is really a mask of... remember the large majority of academia are these gray either cognitivists or historians blah blah... and you don't see them but they are the power. They are the power. On the other hand, why are they in power worried? Because you know... don't exaggerate this leftist paranoia idea that "we can all be recuperated" and so on and so on. No! I still quite naively believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. It's not as simple as to recuperate everything in. But you know there are different strategies of how to contain us. I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because people like to say about me, "Oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah blah blah." This is another way to say "Don't take it seriously."

>I think that that the differences in our political positions are so minimal that they cannot really account for the thoroughly dismissive tone of Chomsky’s attack on me. Our conflict is really about something else—it is simply a new chapter in the endless gigantomachy between so-called continental philosophy and the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition. There is nothing specific in Chomsky’s critique—the same accusations of irrationality, of empty posturing, of playing with fancy words, were heard hundreds of times against Hegel, against Heidegger, against Derrida, etc. What stands out is only the blind brutality of his dismissal—here is how he replies when, back in his December 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged, he was asked about the ideas of Lacan, Derrida, and me:

>>What you’re referring to is what’s called ‘theory.’ And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.

>And he goes on and on in the same vein, repeating how he doesn’t see anything to what I’m saying, how he cannot discern in my texts any traces of rational examination of facts, how my work displays empty posturing not to be taken seriously, etc. A weird statement, measured by his professed standards of respect for empirical facts and rational argumentation: there are no citations (which, in this case, can be excused, since we are dealing with a radio interview), but also not even the vaguest mentions of any of my ideas. Did he decode any of my "fancy words" and indicate how what one gets is "something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old"? There are no political references in his first attack (and in this domain, as far as I can see, I much more often than not agree with him). I did a couple of short political books on 9/11 (Welcome to the Desert of the Real), on the war in Iraq (Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle), on the 2008 financial meltdown (First as Tragedy, then as Farce), which appear to me written in a quite accessible way and dealing with quite a lot of facts—do they also contain nothing but empty posturing? In short, is Chomsky in his thorough dismissal of my work not doing exactly what he is accusing me of: clinging to the empty posture of total rejection with no further ado?

>i have her nudes if anyone's interested
empty promises

Agreed, can't stand his writing, but going to psychoanalytic seminars makes me realize there's a lot of rich stuff there.

I think its silly to just flat-out dismiss incredibly important philosophers just because its the trendy thing to do. I'm more a phenomenologist, but I still realize the merit in Lacan's work.