Psychoanalysis thread. Last one was quite interesting, figured it was worth a second round. Talk about violence, desire...

>>per say
>Kys
>ASSumed there was no way I could have been joking
>Fys

What's the best way to get into psychoanalysis? Any charts? Starting points?

>ASSumed there was no way I could have been joking
>Implying anyone believes this

You've definitely raised some interesting stuff, and unfortunately I now have to go out for a couple of hours. I'll be back to check this thread later in the evening so hopefully it won't 404 between now and then.

In the meantime, I'll leave this: this was Girard's project. Mimetic theory proceeds from the claim that people are dependent upon each other both as models and as rivals. We do not have autonomous desires that spring entirely from ourselves - rather, everything that we desire we desire precisely because somebody else also desires it, and this is exactly what sets us up for conflict: after all, only one of us can have whatever it is (and even when it is something ineffable, like the gaze of someone we are both attracted to).

What Girard will say about violence is that the problem is that the most violent conflict takes place not between people who are different, but between those for whom all differences have been erased, which places them in this horrendous position of both being stuck with something they can neither let go of nor allow the other to possess. And there is very little ready to hand that will prevent a corresponding escalation to extremes.

Girard's sympathy for Christianity is I suspect why he doesn't have the same academic reputation that Freud or Lacan do, because Marxists are going to reach for their pistols as soon as someone mentions religion. And this is indeed a whole other thing.

But yeah, mimetic desire. It's a thing. I'll come back and pontificate more on this later. There's definitely a lot more to say about this stuff.

Good question. I'll come back later with a few recommendations that maybe you will find interesting. Looking forward to it tbqh!

>Implying anyone believes this
>implying I am not anyone, and my belief is not knowledge

>Last one was quite interesting
Link?

Please, have a seat on the lounge.

Tell me, how you would feel, if in fact I intended to write that (as a meta form of humor) and you are in fact wrong, for pointing out, and innocently, guiltily, "lashing" out at me, to give yourself big boy feely points at my expense, unjustly!

You know I dont mind at all, this is funny and I appreciated seeing those pepes, and understand the value of your post, whether I did it purposefully or not, none of this really matters (but I did do it purposefully)

That is interesting, and I see how there is sense to be made of that. Partly seems profound, and partly seems known obviousness a la problems between people exist because of scarcity of resources.

About Marxism, one thing that seems to be the main problem, at least to my ignorance, is the nature of novel inventors, who perhaps bring something new into the world, which is then highly in demand, (and then the concept that capitalism, is all about, the invention of action, for example, the sneaker, has existed for some time, it is not now or for a while has not been a new invention, but there are many companies and even new companies making sneakers, I guess I am asking, in marxist theory, how is ingenuity rewarded worthily enough, in relation to capitalism by which such is its foundation?)

I am very interested in persuasion.
What can psychoanalysis tell me about persuasion?

I'm enjoying the contents of this thread.

>persuasion
Relation of knowledge, ignorance, circumstance, desires?

Can you provide some examples? A guy persuading a girl to let him buy her a drink/to date him/to mate him/to trust him? A hypnotist persuading a subject to raise their left hand? A father persuading his child to do their homework?

This is depicted nicely by the Stanford-Prison-Experiment (has a different name)

REMINDER THAT FREUD WAS AN EMPIRICIST AND MATERIALIST AT HEART AND ONLY RESORTED TO NARRATIVE METHOD FOR LACK OF SOPHISTICATED NEUROTECH THAT WE NOW HAVE

bump, this is a good thread.

Lived in a delusion for three years. here's a letter I wrote to someone effected pastebin.com/0D1huVF7

>Freud's overemphasis of prohibitive relations between father and son occlude the equally important relationship between enemy rivals/twins

Freud actually covered this (by res extensa, at least) in his discussion of unheimlich (the uncanny) when he divulged being unsettled by a chance encounter with his reflection in a mirror.

OP here. Let's get back into it!

Was some time ago, and I can't find the link to it now. I don't think it was archived, unfortunately. For my part I recall Nietzsche and Dr. Seuss. Nothing that can't be recapped here. Basically much like this, I think. People seem to enjoy talking about this stuff. Pretty cool, imho.

This is all part of the big question. Novelty itself is a pretty interesting question. To me it was really Deleuze who really blew the doors off this stuff, since I was very much stuck in a similar place: everything is repetition, everything is re-commodification, everything is always-already, etc. One of the things that makes Deleuze interesting is his thought in D&R about the emergence of novelty through repetition, although you would need a better metaphysician than me to really get into this. But like many things it is weirdly intuitive once you see it in front of you, and then you can read the rest of the work to see how they got to the conclusions if it's interesting. Deleuze is a big deal, which is why he's such a problem for analysts. But in terms of capitalism and these kinds of questions you are asking, about ontology and reification, he basically has no equal. These are precisely the kinds of things that Marxian theory is at enormous pains to explain. This is not to say that if you work hard enough you won't eventually come up with some kind of an answer, but for myself Deleuze really, as I said, points in directions that are perhaps where you are thinking also. Late-late capitalism today really makes more sense via Deleuze than Marx, I think, but these are some of the biggest (and most interesting!) questions on tap.

THIS IS VERY INTERESTING
PLEASE CONTINUE
I WANT TO HEAR MORE
BUT I AM AFRAID THAT MY HEAD WILL MELT
IF IT IS ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS

(cont'd)

I can't really give you anything else but how I got to where I am. Take that as you will. Again, I am not a professional, just a guy who is very into this stuff.

Step 1. Nietzsche. Read him until you're fucking sick of him. This will take a while, because he's that fucking awesome. Not just you, but your friends, family, and acquaintances should be sick of you talking about him too. Don't worry, they'll mostly soon stop talking to you. This happens. But imho (and it's very, very h) Nietzsche is the Sorcerer Supreme of this stuff. I don't think it's *so* insane to say that analysis is something like clinical existentialism, if that makes sense.

Step 2. Heidegger. Despite what Z claims, Lacan is I think fairly heavily influenced by Heidegger. For me there really is no substitute to hacking through Being and Time and wrestling with Heidegger's concept of *moods* - that our moods do not arise spontaneously from ourselves, but come to us from the world, and that the world is, as Heidegger writes, not a matter of indifference for us. Authenticity in the way that Heidegger describes is a kind of poetic ontology, being-towards-death, and here there is divergence from what Lacan is going to talk about. But for myself I have found the whole concept of analysis much more easy to think about now that I've spent some time digesting Heidegger and puzzling over these questions. I used to think it was just the butterflies in my stomach. Now I think there's more going on with the world than that. Zimmerman's book on Heidegger was good for me.

Step 3. Give Lacan a shot. Just read his essay on the Purloined Letter to see what he's trying to get at. Zizek is, for all his faults, a pretty fucking awesome exegete. Even something like the Pervert's Guides that he writes are illuminating if only because they're so goddamn consistent. Even if you disagree with him. I thought Less Than Nothing was pretty good. There's some other ways to go at it.

Step 4. Deleuze and Guattari. To see where the other side is at (and you may be done with the whole idea of analysis altogether afterwards). Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are probably unlike anything else you will ever read in your life. Brian Massumi's book on this is really good.

Worth mentioning: you know who's not here? Freud himself. Personally I don't find Freud all that fun to read, but I will admit it's kind of ridiculous to say that. Nietzsche is great, and Heidegger is pretty awesome also. So that's what I would recommend.

(cont'd)

psychoanalysis is almost entirely a complete sham. the only part of it worth keeping is the part where you pay someone to listen to you bitch for an hour, because that is definitely therapeutic. a friend with a listening ear is better if you have that available.

Persuasion is indeed interesting, but I always thought that the concept of *seduction* more promising still. Baudrillard writes about this somewhat, and he seems to be popular on Veeky Forums these days. Basically the idea here is perhaps to ask what the Marxist-Freudian camp has been arguing for years: that we live in a world of libidinal economics, such that in a sense we never really have to be rationally primed or persuaded by the commodity, since we already show up ready to have our jimmies rustled by a sexy babe biting into a Chicken McNugget. And because we can't really do anything about the fact that we have a sex drive, how we subsequently respond to this becomes the thing. I don't think I'm a Marxian anymore myself, but we undeniably live in a consumer society driven by capitalism.

Basically my own feeling would be that what we call persuasion is simply what Heidegger would have already said: that we are fundamentally bound up with the world already. Where analysis enters the picture is when our desires become symptoms and so on, and how these things are worked out within ourselves will vary from person to person (this much is probably obvious to you). It's why language and so on is so crucial to analysis.

You *might* find Lacan's passage on the discourse of the hysteric interesting in this regard. If nothing else I think Lacan really nailed this one: that our compulsion to ask why things are is always a kind of fundamental questioning about ourselves that we project onto the other without even realizing it.

The tl;dr version he uses to make his case, and a much larger point about this kind of questioning itself, is illustrated by using the sphinx. The sphinx asks the same question time and again to visitors, and not only is every answer wrong but they are all also punishable by death. The sphinx in other words cannot be rationally persuaded to act other than as it does, but this is exactly Lacan's point: the questioning is also the punishment. What the sphinx wants to know is something that cannot possibly be answered in terms of its own questioning, which is the sort of paradoxical judo-flipping that Lacan does. The sphinx wants to be relieved of its own questioning because it is entirely too aware of the impossibility of really persuading anyone of anything. Which is why it too is in this way a prisoner of language. Language, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, is the cause of and solution to all of our problems.

(Try to ignore the hideous yellow background though. I have no idea why they have done this.
lacan.com/hystericdisc.htm)

Okay, that's probably enough for the evening. Until next time, gentle-anons. Thanks to all for making this interesting.

Every person suffers. The suffering of 2 individuals may be worlds apart, (for example someone who has been raped and someone who got bullied) but the subjective feeling is the same towards the pain, that it is the worst they both ever had, which makes both of them equal of impact.
This is a thought i've come up with (don't know if it has been discussed or considerated already) and which i'm currently trying to expand on. What do you think about it?

I think a persons personal experiences are and should be most important to them, and while I do think internal psyche experiences and feelings are more fuzzy from case to case and more subjectively interpreted and energetically reacted to, I do think it is possible there is some objective frame work of relation similar to how I think there is a real difference in intensity and objective reason for pain when comparing a 1st degree burn on the thumb and 3rd degree burns on the whole body.

Are you accepting even extreme examples like, person A's inner feeling pain from being raped compared to person B's inner pain from dropping and scoffing their 23rd favoritest marble, if they can produce the enragement of anger and pain from their relation to the event.

Then again, I do not know if it is so easy or possible to compare inner feelings (especially when relating to physical pains, to understand the pains someone else is going through, and accurately compare it to others), but I understand what you mean, every has their own, most painful, and most happy, and complex ranges and combinations and subtleties, and I wonder are you suggesting there is an inherent comparable equalish limit of the human experience, pain threshold, that can be compared, and if a person A says they have experienced the most pain ever up until that point, and person B says they have experienced the most emotional pain they have, you think there is some not universal scale but human mind body scale of limits and potentials, that all experiences calibrate and relate to, that would imply an objectivity, but perhaps you are saying, the experience of 'very' bad, or baddest feeling ever, might be the same feeling from arbitrary external event which causes you to feel bad, and most horrific event possible which causes you to feel bad... interesting.

Like those carnival hammer hit the bell (or thermometer.... or ruler)

feeling good is 10 feeling bad is 0.

If you get a 30% on your final test you feel 0

if you and your family is raped and murdered (besides you) you feel 0.

if you stub your toe you might feel 0

>he believes narratives are immaterial

You got it, but only partfully. You're expanding my theory towards happiness, which i didn't refer too.
I mean the scale of trauma, which one has lived threw is for each and everyone subjective and the objective pain scale, be it emotional or phisical, is flawed, as there is no objective scale. The scale gets set by the individual, as every individual receives pain in their life.
I am also trying to expand towards the acceptance of pain and not being able to understand it for other people, without being empathical, or if there is even a way for us. For instance the warhero who lost an eye and leg with emotional scarring from war seeing his friends die, has more reason to be hurt by conventional standards, in comparison to a transgenderd person who has received emotional scarring and bullying threwout his life. They have to accept their own pain, in order to understand their counterpart. Pain acceptance of other people is something we are far away from, and which in my opinion we do need to some extent, and if my theory is right, they both have had a subjective experience, which is equal to eachother.
Now i do not advocate people whining about shit, as i don't care about it, and i know my idea is an utopia, which will never be in useage, as we have our set system with society having a scale of it's own. I am annoyed by the way people think their pain is the worst, one has to accept it as it is. And help people who have misconceptions. (This also corrolates with age, and a bunch of different factors. I still have to work out a shit ton of details and threw a lot of inconsistencies in this. I am not happy with it yet, but i think it has potential.)

Psychoanalysts are just politically motivated swindlers. It is the epitome of Cultural Marxism, it relies heavily on moral relativism, idiotic sexual fetishes (everyone wants to fuck his mother... yeah right) and anti-psychiatry (hey disorders don't exist, they are just different people).

It's not even science, it literally serves as an ideology, one that applauds any degeneration and is written in that typical sectarian Marxist language (we must free ourselves bla bla bla).

>HUUUUURRR THE GOMMMIES AND THE JOOS ARE CUMMING TA GET USSSS NOOOOO DUURUUUURRURUURUR

Fuck off, thank you

Yessir. Rene Girard go go go. I can't believe I only found out about this guy so recently.

It's definitely complicated stuff. Pretty sure the answer is not Suck It Up, You Pussy. Nobody can do this forever, and the reason not to is because it's other people who will deal with the consequences as much as the sufferer themselves. I like the Stoics, sure, but everyone has a breaking point. Tragedy is part of being human.

You raised a lot of other stuff as well, and it's all germane to these questions of how people get along and function in a society which seems to put them at cross-purposes the moment you leave your house.
>does everyone deserve self esteem
I think this is what I like about Lacan: he doesn't want you necessarily to feel good. What he wants is for the analyst to really get their bat on the ball and wrestle with whatever it is that is eating them from the inside. Nothing in the unconscious is normative, clean, neat, or even sane. But this is why much of it proceeds from existentialism and philosophy. The key fact about self-esteem is that it does not come from us but from the world, from mimetic desire.

That makes sense. And of course Lacan is interested in mirrors as well - famously in the case of child development, but there are cases where IIRC he is interested in watching people destroy images of themselves as a way of getting at the symptom within. But yes, you're right to mention Freud here.

>sham, charlatans, politically motivated swindlers
I mean I can kind of understand. As you say, a friend with a listening ear sometimes is better. Sometimes though people need something different. As for politically motivated swindling...I think this is a tough claim. Zizek is undeniably a colourful figure, and you wouldn't be the only one to disagree with him. But even Zizek is looking towards something I think you would find interesting - that politics and ideology themselves are frequently the products of unconscious processes. It's 100% not necessary to agree with his conclusions, but how he gets there is far swindling.

I do agree with some of what you're saying. There's a lot of bogus language that gets thrown around not only in analysis, but in academia. A lot of it is noxious, but in my own experience I have found it in the end helpful to be more charitable than critical, because when you go looking for an alternative to academia you invariably are required to use the language and concepts academics prefer. The fact is that *nobody* worth reading seriously believes in complete moral relativism. Not even the most arcane deconstructionist types. You just have to find the people you do agree with. They're out there. Just start with Nietzsche!

Now we're talking.

Basically this: Marxism will always find a way to describe capital, but if you're looking for a more nuanced response beyond Revolution you will understandably feel disappointed.

What form of response that takes will be spectacularly subjective. The point of analysis is to help you figure out what that response might be, if in fact you require one at all.

One of the things I like about analysis is, firstly, that there's this aim of turning analysands (the one on the couch) into analysts (the one in the chair). There really are no cures: the goal is just to be able to think critically about what it is that's really bothering you, so that you can let it go or turn it into cotton candy or join the WWE or whatever. Whatever it is. None of us can really be truly objective about our own inner workings. But the world is only a cooler place when people aren't so blocked up that they can't do the things they actually want to do, or avoid the things they don't want. Stuff like this is what analysis does. It doesn't have to make the world a better place. People can and will take care of that on their own in ways frequently more interesting than anyone thinks, including the analyst themselves. Which is why they also have analysts, go to conferences, and so on.

Can you help understand figure out what Lacan mean by this?

Well, I can certainly try.

1/4
Before we really kick out the jams what you want to read is this. Because I happen to really like talking about this stuff I’ll be going a little more in depth. If you want to just get right to it, though, go here and begin. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. art3idea.psu.edu/locus/four_discourses.pdf

Having gotten that out of the way...

2/4

So what Lacan is begining with is essentially any theory of language - such as that of Saussure - which posits a neat and easy separation or co-identification of signs and signifiers between human beings. In language, all of the words we use are connected to each other by chains of signification. Saussure’s thought posits, in a kind of admirable logical-positivist way, a portait of language that is comparable to a chess game, where signs correspond to images, and everyone understands everyone else because words mysteriously form images in our minds.

For Lacan, however, language nevertheless exists even prior to birth, and the subject’s acquisition of language is a moment of almost overpowering significance. During the mirror phase in infancy, the Lacanian subject - which at this point does not even understand itself as a subject, or even as an object - becomes split off from the mother through the intervention of what Lacan will call the name-of-the-father. This moment is what allows the subject to grow and develop and become an independent being. Becoming different and split off the world, registering itself as an individual being, is what allows for the subject’s original acquisition of language. Lacan also writes also this subject understands itself as a reflection, an image, rather than an essential ‘me.’ This is indispensable for the formation of the ego, but as we will see, it can and perhaps inevitably leads to neurosis when later on language no longer corresponds (that is, if it ever did) so neatly to the world and what the subject wishes to articulate, what they “really want.”

3/4

The subject “barred” by in this way by language is what represented by the signifier $, and which is bound up with the relationship S1 - S2, which is Lacan's description of a kind of relationship of language, knowledge, and “truth.” S1 is the master-signifier, which is an *irrational* universalizing tendency: I Know What I Mean To Say. S2 is knowledge itself without the presence of a sayer: that which the subject knows and wants to say, but only becomes sayable through this process of becoming S1 (I’m, like, 78% sure I’ve got this correct.) S1 is no more ‘real’ than $ in this sense, but this is what it means to be the subject barred by langauge. You are always struggling through a language itself that has the capacity to know more about you than you can know about it. And so on.

Finally, a is the object-cause of desire, that which we are supposed to/trying to enjoy but never fully can. Zizek will relate this to the Freudian superego, saying that this is precisely how in Freud’s mind pleasure works: by denial or aversion, sadism, masochism, and so on. a is that which the subject desires, but which which always eludes them, and why it is characterized by a loss or an absence. It is also the original germ of ideology, that maguffin that, if only you could possess it, you would be happy. Kind of like the One Ring, in a way. We do not always want what we think we want, as Zizek says.

Hysteria, or neurosis, is the result of failing to recognize this (or recognizing it all too well, as pic related may suggest). Hence the constant and well-satirized depiction of analysands talking in circles about their problems forever. But this is in fact rather cynical: the idea is obviously not to prolong the analysis indefinitely, but to effect a kind of re-positioning in which the analysand is no longer held completely paralyzed by a thing that they do not actually want but cannot help themselves from constantly thinking about.

4/4

The analyst cannot get *completely* at what the subject is trying to say, because even the subject does not know what they are trying to say. Partly this is due to the fact that the analysand (the patient) - given that this is likely to take place in an analytical setting - is likely in fact to be concealing or repressing something, which is to say, they aren’t likely to talk directly about what is really bothering them, since if that were the case the analysis would not be taking place at all.

And yet, even when the subject *does* try to talk about their symptom, all they can do is try to use a system of signs and signifiers, their language, which is fundamentally slippery to begin with, and is going to fuck them up as much in the analysis as in real life. Words do not correspond neatly and directly to their meanings, and it is possible even to convey the wrong meaning (the famous ‘Freudian slip’). Even *violence*, which may result from this very inability to speak, may in fact be directed more at oneself in this paradoxical way than at the symptom. Only in films is the destruction of a Death Star really synonymous with world actually becoming livable again. There’s a reason why Lacan is so popular in film theory.

And if you notice, you will also see in the four discourses just the rearrangement of this pattern. The four basic signifiers remain, but rotate their positions. Lacan in this sense is as influenced as much by Hegel as by Saussure, because he sees that there are always these discursive power arrangements in play in every conversational scenario. Nevertheless, simply because the master calls themselves a master doesn’t mean, of course, that they really are one: what *really* is required is for the slave to consent to this relationship, which is what the master receives from the slave in exchange for bondage - their own apparent justification for their own being and purpose. This is why in Hegel the master does not destroy the slave, but appropriates his being in this phantasmatic way, and why the slave in being so appropriated acquires a degree of self-consciousness that proceeds from this.

This is also where Nietzsche enters the picture, because what he calls ressentiment is in a sense the slave’s own misunderstanding of both the power of guilt and of the slave’s own consent to be perversely appropriated in this form, precisely so that they can deny it on behalf of a moral agency that Nietzsche thinks nobody really believes. Lacan’s alleviated sufferer has more than a little in common with Nietzsche, but that’s another thing.

>when later on language no longer corresponds (that is, if it ever did) so neatly to the world

Ok, that's a lot of stuff so I'll take it slow. Isn't this supposed to be the other way around? I mean that the subject tries to 'mold' the objective world into some definite signification, but when that particular object inevitably cuts itself off and acquire independent properties that don't fit into this artificial meaning, the subject goes nuts. I'm just conjecturing.

Hm, let me see if I got this, the 'equation' is composed of two groups: the big, presupposed truth which is above the barred subject and which is supposed to bring and end to this incompatibility between the subject himself and the signifier, as Zizek call it the universal harmony, the big other; and on the other part, the truth as particularized (I'm confused here) above the object of desire.

You're absolutely right. It *is* supposed to be the other way around, we think. And so? Symptom!

You haven't gotten it wrong at all. You've gotten it exactly right. This is why Z will talk, for instance, about 'the subject supposed to know,' or the famous injunction 'enjoy.' Just in case you don't know this one:

Imagine somebody cooks you a delicious steak, and then, just as you are about to bite into it, they look at you and say, Enjoy. Immediately you cannot now do this. You have been - and the word is infamous - 'castrated.' I actually think that this term now invokes so much of a response that it is counterproductive, but you see the point. We cannot enjoy that which we are ordered to enjoy, and this is the whole thing.

It is precisely because the object, whatever it is, exceeds our capacity to explain or articulate it that analysts such as Z will write that object a 'flees' or 'eludes' us. It does this, however, because this object is always-already part of us - and yet, of course, it isn't. Nor is desire, that on behalf of which virtually everything else is done, purely something within our own grasp. It comes to us from the world and can never be fully incorporated within ourselves, no matter what we do. We will tear ourselves apart like Dionysus - or the Joker, if you prefer a more modern reference - before this happens.

And this is why I'm so hardcore on Girard at the moment, because even if we can't really understand our own desires fully, we can, I believe, understand their fundamentally mimetic nature, their inter-construction, and their mutuality. Girard is not the end-all be-all, but the things he says about violence and mimesis are to me a total game-changer. We want what we want because somebody else wants it. True, this is Lacanian. But what Lacan does not do is look at the consequences of what may ultimately be a tragic perception of life.

For my own part I can say I think that I would be okay with tragedy *if I were absolutely sure there was no alternative.* Right now Girard is monkeying up those works. But I wouldn't have found his thought attractive if I hadn't already spent some time with Lacan first. And I've been trying in kind of a subtle way to get Veeky Forums hooked on Girard but for some reason people don't quite feel it yet. No doubt it's because Christianity is still pretty unsexy and Nietzsche is still a big deal. No doubt he is. But I like contrarian perspectives and being anti-Nietzsche without being a complete asshole is a pretty fun challenge. Even if, of course, it may be a doomed one. We'll see I guess.

Also, apologies to all for the text-walls. I have to go out for a bit but I'll check in on this thread later tonight.

You've pretty much got it. Have a look at that PDF here I linked to here () for a much more thorough explication of this. It will probably prevent me from making this more complicated than it needs to be, which is definitely not what I want to do. I still find this stuff as challenging as anything else, but a little easier from having read enough of the continentals who are also puzzling over this stuff. Lacan is notoriously dense, but I once felt this way about Heidegger also once, and some others.

The other thing to bear in mind here is that Zizek is very much a Marxist-Hegelian also, and uses Lacan to talk about Hegel and Hegel to talk about Lacan. As the world's most famous Lacanian interpreter, he's definitely a guy everyone reads, criticizes, impersonates, etc. Lacan was very much influenced by Hegel, but he was no Marxist, and commentators will also compare his thought with Nietzsche, for example, more than Hegel. Hegel was just a very big deal when Lacan was working

>(everybody was reading and talking about this, for example:marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm)

but I think Z can and probably should be separated from Lacan to some degree, in order to better understand what they are both about. The Freud-Marx one-two punch more or less was the engine that drove the Frankfurt School from which most postwar continental philosophy in the 20C is inspired. It's part of why analysis is perhaps not so hip today, because the Frankfurt School is beginning to look a little long in the tooth, and of course, there are the dreaded SJWs.

Deleuze is a far more interesting guy, imho, and it's amazing that Lacan was already grooming Guattari to be his disciple when he met Deleuze and they began working on the time-bomb that was Anti-Oedipus. I'm available to talk more about that later.

Might as well post the fucktheory thing here too, just to get it out of the way. It's interesting, but they're too soft on D&G and they shit on Lacan too much, imho.

fucktheory.tumblr.com

>And yet, even when the subject *does* try to talk about their symptom, all they can do is try to use a system of signs and signifiers, their language, which is fundamentally slippery to begin with, and is going to fuck them up as much in the analysis as in real life

How does a session of psychoanalysis work? Is it by trying to unveil the void between subject and language and to accept it? But in through what medium?

> This is why in Hegel the master does not destroy the slave, but appropriates his being in this phantasmatic way, and why the slave in being so appropriated acquires a degree of self-consciousness that proceeds from this.

Well, I'm not sure how helpful it will turn to be but I'm familiar with Hegel (not an expert in any way), and what comes to mind from him is that consciousness always externalizes itself in a foreign object (not necessarily material) and in doing it is always struggling to find a 'fixed' or presuppositionless truth (starting with the slave that gets its sense of self from the master and subsequently from its creative action, but going through the church and it's system of values, natural objects that represent the self, and so on) but the result is that, dialectically, it becomes apparent that consciousness itself is partly responsible for the manufacturing of this object, therefore denying its purpose at being an immediate truth.

>It is precisely because the object, whatever it is, exceeds our capacity to explain or articulate it that analysts such as Z will write that object a 'flees' or 'eludes' us. It does this, however, because this object is always-already part of us - and yet, of course, it isn't. Nor is desire, that on behalf of which virtually everything else is done, purely something within our own grasp. It comes to us from the world and can never be fully incorporated within ourselves, no matter what we do. We will tear ourselves apart like Dionysus - or the Joker, if you prefer a more modern reference - before this happens.

This is where Heraclitus and Hegel's concept of Becoming and negativity comes in handy, maybe that's why I'm so drawn to Lacan and even though I never read him much deeply I feel a certain familiarity when I read about his ideas.

No problem with the walls, I like those ideas being fleshed out.

Thank you so much.

I can't go into too much detail about how a proper analytic session does work, but I can tell you how they *don't* work, because I've been to a few therapists in relatively recent years. The first completely misunderstood what I was saying and then attempted hypnosis, which failed because I could not stop laughing and I politely asked her to stop. The second was basically completely unfamiliar with Lacan but recommended that I consider looking into analysis myself, because apparently therapists prefer just to prescribe medication now and have completely abandoned the Freudian-Lacanian project. So that's part of how this adventure for me began. I've been considering registering for an analysis not far from where I live, though. But in the meantime, I'm catching up on the theory.

>it becomes apparent that consciousness itself is partly responsible for the manufacturing of this object, therefore denying its purpose at being an immediate truth

Z is a die-hard Hegelian, and you can see (and now you've helped me to see also) why this is the case. The externalization of consciousness is exactly what is going on here, which in analysis goes by the interesting name of *cathexis.* Of course this pairs well with Marxian thought, which depends on commodity fetishism for its theory of value, but conventional Marxism struggles, as Baudrillard will argue, that there is anything even remotely logical or even comprehensible about the need to own a car which goes from zero to sixty in 3.1 seconds. It undeniably makes you feel good, but it's very difficult to derive any kind of discrete meaning or teleology from this.

Deleuze, who was no friend of Hegel's, will present a completely radical theory of capital accordingly: that desire is just everywhere in this kaleidoscopic way, because desire is not something we repress, as in Oedipus, but produce, like a factory or a machine. Desire is not something we do, and explodes any possible notion of a separate self, or even a coherent and cohesive sense of identity. Badiou roasted him for this in an interesting article called 'The Fascism of the Potato,' saying that what Deleuze was doing was basically not a criticism of Hegel but essentially an endorsement of fascism.

I like Badiou but, as Slim Charles says, the thing about the old days is that they're the old days. But everybody is a part of this thing, everybody's trying to puzzle out violence, desire, mimesis, subjectivity, the other, and so on. I'm not so much into Derrida b/c I think the deification or fetishization of The Other is deep down still a form of ressentiment but I think that's one I just have to let go of. I'm probably wrong, though (with Derrida, you always are).

Yep. Death and anxiety, negation and the future. Heidegger is must-see TV here but if you're there already then it's all good in the hood. If you haven't read Heidegger yet it could be a run-don't-walk kind of thing. He's not to be missed. Again, Zimmerman's book really helped me to get into B&T because it presented a really good look at the historical context for Heidegger's thought, which is - kind of interestingly - basically what I think is the theoretical component of what JRR Tolkien was getting at poetically. Crazy to think that two men on either side of the two biggest wars in history were basically thinking and feeling the same things in many ways, and yet never would have crossed paths. Just if you need some high fantasy in there to sugar the pill.

My pleasure!

If anyone here is a """"""""therapist"""""" please kill yourself, you are not better than a prostitute
You make money faking to care about people and their problems
No one you have """""helped"""" really needed you
Please kill yourself or get a real, honest job

>and explodes any possible notion of a separate self, or even a coherent and cohesive sense of identity. Badiou roasted him for this in an interesting article called 'The Fascism of the Potato,' saying that what Deleuze was doing was basically not a criticism of Hegel but essentially an endorsement of fascism.
I heard about that, there's a term for it I forgot. How different is this from traditional dialectic? It seems that Deleuze is rejecting the duality of Hegel and postulating a multiplicity, but the mechanisms involved are probably too advanced for me.

>But everybody is a part of this thing, everybody's trying to puzzle out violence, desire, mimesis, subjectivity, the other, and so on
Haha, I'm currently reading and delving myself into Plato, kind feeding myself with the fundamentals of Philosophy before tackling anything more modern again (my plan is read Hegel again with new and more savvy eyes). Your posts, and this is good, are making me see how little I actually know. Thanks for your time and patience.

Underrated

>tfw therapist only helped me understand the circumstances that lead to me becoming a hebefag
>tfw they had no fucking advice on how to fix it
Psychoanalysis can only take us so far. Might as well just chop my dick off.
Thanks for reading my blog btw.

Can you expand on the link between them? I know you probably written too much already.

I'd be happy to, but it will have to wait for now. Check back later.

I'm Catholic. I've been to more than one psychiatrist over the years, mostly due to what turned out to be autism. I'd really rather just confess my sins to a priest and be absolved.

There's no 'fix', read the thread.

This is probably what you want to read.
jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/heidegger-and-tolkien-on-technology/

My idea here really isn't that profound, especially once you read Heidegger's thoughts on technology (or that link above). Heidegger, in short, is very nervous about the meaning of modern technology, because for him technology is not just a product but a mode of thinking: a fundamentally scientistic cause-effect relationship that comes to define human beings' entire relationship vis-a-vis themselves, the world, each other, everything. With disastrous consequences.

If you look at the orcs, they are more or less a perfect Heideggerian/Girardian scapegoat. They are the face of the horror of industrialized modern warfare. And then you compare them to the elves, who are these poetic-artisanal heroic beings, dwelling in forests - *dwelling* is a big thing with H - and so on. Tolkien is beyond easy ideological or deconstructive readings, as great authors usually are. And Tolkien is one of the greatest, since there is this subtle blend of both pagan and Catholic imagery in Middle-Earth that is so arresting to think about. I used to think writing fantasy would be something easy to do! And Frank Herbert is boss as hell too.

Also important to note: Catholicism. Tolkien, Heidegger, and Girard are all varyingly Catholic thinkers. If there are any Heideggerians here they may want dispute this, but I'm pretty sure this was the case. I'm way softer now on Catholicism, having never really investigated it before, than I used to be. Especially after reading Girard.

So says something I totally understand. Of course Z will write that that it is not the case that if God is dead that everything is permitted, but rather that it is because a God *is* believed to exist that of course one has infinite license to punish, wage crusade, holy war, etc - but I think this is an overly simplistic idea, however interesting. I increasingly find atheism less attractive than I used to, and more and more tend to find the Catholics the most interesting thinkers around. I don't like disagreeing with Sam Harris on much, but hey. You can't get along with *everybody...*

>It seems that Deleuze is rejecting the duality of Hegel and postulating a multiplicity

Yep. That is 100% exactly what he is doing. Deleuze's world has very little to do with classical Hegelian dialectics, as you will see when you read ATP. D&G invent concepts that just aren't there in Hegel: despotic power, molar and molecular structures, the rhizome, etc. Deleuze's guys are Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche, and so he winds up describing a completely different portrait than the Hegel-Marx-Freud-Lacan bunch. It's particularly awesome if classical Marxism is starting to feel stale, because Deleuzian ontology blows the world of Freud to smithereens.

It's definitely not too advanced, though. Most of these guys are, once you understand how they think, really just building on a very small number of core ideas in creative ways. In the end just read whatever interests you and seems to have the answers to what you're thinking about. You won't be disappointed.

Last night I had a dream that I woke up in bed next to my girlfriend and we had sex. While having sex, I realized that I was dreaming and suddenly woke up next to my girlfriend. We had sex and I once again realized that I was dreaming. The same thing occurred about 5 times before I actually woke up.

Anyone want to take a stab at that?

You're gay. For your mom. Where's my cocaine?

I spent so much time with Plato and Hegel and even then I feel like I'm still have work to do in truly getting dialectics, so I'm afraid to try to learn something completely different just now, but thanks for the encouragement.

Dream of last night:
I was in a bus. And the terminus was "Aion", which is a book by Jung.
What does that mean? Should I read the book?
I haven't read it yet, I just heard that it was the book where Jung tried to restore the primordial imagination into humanity.

I had a pretty intense dream last night myself. Not exactly pleasurable - I was back in school writing a test that seemed to have been rigged for everyone to fail - but that's your unconscious mind for you.

I go back and forth on dream analysis myself. Personally I think it's pretty insane to try and enclyopedicize these things, because everything means something different to everyone already during *waking* consciousness, and in the Land of Morpheus it's a whole other thing. That said, I'm a big believer in the oracular power of anxiety also. Whatever it is that unsettles you is telling you something undeniably true. And it's up to every individual to figure out what that is. So the truth of these things is something I think people feel more in their stomachs as an intuition rather than a logically deduced set of principles that come with an action plan for interpretation. But this much I think everyone already agrees on.

Jung's interesting. I haven't read too much of him, but I think his heart was in the right place. I'm also a big fan of Joseph Campbell, who IIRC was much more of a Jungian than a Freudian. Campbell has a kind of a checkered reputation today, and yet this is one of these things that makes me shake my head: *all* of the blockbuster films we see, and increasingly all of the triple-A video games people play, follow Campbell's thesis about the path of the hero. All of them.

So on the one hand, you have a guy like Z, who will be critical of this process (and rightly so, ideology being what it is), but then you have people like Campbell and Jung who will have these incredible insights into the consciousness of the artist which I don't think are ever going to be disproved.

And then there is this: if we recognize and understand that there is clearly a connection between fascism and art, the aestheticization of politics and so on, why *wouldn't* we take all of this stuff into account when we talk about art and mass culture? If fascism really is most attractive to failed artists, or romantic artist-gnostic-seekers, and we accept that fascism is probably not really something we want to have, why shit on people like Jung and Campbell, who are so close to understanding that process?

(cont'd)

>tfw mounting soapbox like an idiot, broken megaphone in hand

More than anything I would say that the most serious problem in culture today is not religion but *cynicism.* Essentially, the victory of criticism over art has been so complete that you often can't even tell the difference anymore. We are probably some of the most critically-inclined, hyper-ironical, meme-generating ultra-aesthetes the planet has ever seen, and the problem with this, as Nietzsche correctly intuited, was decadence. We are absolutely terrified to take anything seriously, because this implies either vulnerability, or some form of collusion with the forces of oppression, or whatever.

Cynicism is, in many ways, the default mode of our understanding. Not even irony, which requires some degree of humour or reference (and we're mainly sick of irony anyways). Just cynicism. The sheer dread of the future, as much as the past, put a living meme in the White House. I'm fascinated by Trump, but more fascinated still by the political era which gave him this incredible groundswell of support.

People are just horrified of everything. Myself included. After all, what's the point of philosophy, or analysis, or any of it, if the world seems so irreparably shitty?

It's not as bad as we think, but part of our problem today is this notion of a "we" at all. And, fair enough, that's true. But I always tend to have more interest in universalist modes of thought, however flawed and compromised they are.

This book comes with a two-thumbs up recommendation from me, as does pretty much anything else Sloterdijk has written.

Listen to this. I think you will find it interesting.
youtube.com/watch?v=Hw7NvWvwVCA

Do you think Zizek is following Hegel on this point: trying to abolish pictorial thinking and quasi-religious representation from politics and philosophy?

That's hilarious. When I saw that link I thought - no shit - is this going to be Jordan Peterson? And it was. No word of a lie.

I'm going to listen to this now. I definitely do have some thoughts on this, but I'll save them for after I listen to this. Will come back later. Thanks user.

Yes. Will get to this too. In the meantime, consider this neat little dyad: that fascism is essentially the aestheticization of politics as much as communism is the politicization of aesthetics. Art winds up stuck in the middle of the greatest fucking intellectual divorce story of all time. Will talk more about this later for sure tho.

I think that's necessary moment of any civilization though, the realization that all system of politics, religion and so on have their origins and lifeblood from the decisions and beliefs of the individual. Think about the decay of Ancient Greece after the sophists and Socrates.

The problem is that here, we are faced with a contradictory situation, once the self is aware that he is free from and is in control of those systems, then he is no longer in actual control, since it can no longer take something that demands respect and is supposedly sacred and in-itself (beyond consciousness).

What happens later, in politics, (at least taking the Greeks in consideration) is that once we find another sort of Big Other into which we can put our trust in, he will be no longer so crude and immediate as it was before, maybe, I'm not sure about this.

That was such a great clip. I only found out about Peterson this year after he became frontish-page news for running up against the world of academic politics. I have not had much luck trying to have a conversation about this that didn't immediately get out of hand. In fairness, I probably had some responsibility for this myself. It's hard to keep an open mind about these things, but it has to be done.

And, as that clip indicates, that is not even the least interesting thing about Peterson. That was really thought-provoking, so thanks again, user. Looks like I will have to move Jung up my reading list. Doesn't sound like that's going to be a chore.

Allan Bloom took a lot of flak for what seems curiously familiar today when he wrote this. It's probably a bad look to be reactionary about this stuff, but if this really is a cyclical process then it deserves closer inspection.

Figured I'd post this. Try to ignore the funky video-editing or just hide the browser. It's hard to disagree with Z on this, because he's basically a killer cyborg and hermeneutic master who is machine-tooled for one purpose and one purpose only: to shred ideology. I do wonder sometimes if this isn't a basically paradoxical project, because I think part of the problem we have today, which Z criticizes, is that people need at some level, deep down, something ineffable to relate to. Beyond a certain horizon a critical mentality tends to produce a life that feels completely unworthy of living, which is exactly what lends romance to the ideologies Z himself is perpetually taking apart. It is necessary to be charitable, in other words, but very hard to do when you feel - rightly or wrongly - that you have nothing else to give.

youtube.com/watch?v=8gk38Pwf8VA

(cont'd)

I think it's worth bearing in mind also how much Z's perceptions are shaped by his experience with Stalinism, because Stalin was this cynic supreme who knew all the dirty little tricks about imagery and propaganda that Z now finds - admittedly, in a much more subtle and possibly even naive way - in Western/postmodern consumer culture. It reminds me of the Frankfurt School coming to America and asking themselves, Why do people want this? If it's so obvious that commercialism and media are manipulating them, why do they submit to it? Why do they endorse it? Do they want this? Is it just all ironic? Theodore Adorno would never have understood Hollywood, but at the same time, since he's Adorno, we read him and immediately feel his mind at work. The Frankfurt School is enormously important today, but one gets the feeling that the zeitgeist has shifted because we are all aware that the thing is wrong, and yet equally so is the Marxist solution, because consumer capitalism is also giving us, among other things, the Internet, and we don't want to give that up. So it's really a pretty astonishing world we are living in. I love me some Baudrillard, but his whole corpus is a lament for modernity and at some point I think we are required to understand that the mourning period is over and we have to try and live in this place somehow without completely selling our souls. The problem with reading Baudrillard is that his criticism is so fucking on-point that you want to think like that too, and yet, maybe something else is called for.

To get back to your question, I do think that Z is trying to raise people's consciousness with regards to how much ideology is a *voluntary* project, rather than one aggressively imposed on you from without. That is how ideology works for Z: you already have it within you, and then you find a seductive sort of confirmation of that in the world beyond, and before you know it you are off to the races. But just look at how tortured Z is when he tries to come up with some kind of alternative. He endorsed Trump, for instance, but only ironically, that is, in order to engender "real" change later on, because he thought Clinton was the truly dangerous one. I can sort of see where he's coming from, but I also feel that beyond a certain horizon what is being called Marxism has gone through so many wormholes as to no longer be recognizable. I'm glad Z is out there cranking out books, but I think what we need is a new set of ideas and concepts for looking at capitalism that really reflect the conditions of reality and thought in the 21C.

Having said all that...posting quite possibly my favourite desktop wallpaper of all time.

Glad you liked the clip. Farewell.

Hegel's solution for this (which I admit are in no way what I'm trying to say it's our solution) was that, instead of particular views and conceptions, which are negated in the daily life of dialectic with the world (whether by actual dialogue, or by violent shock with the Other), and that the individual merely imagines out of myths or from his own faulty perception, the true basis for conviction and the medium of self-consciousness, the awareness of itself as an actual existence, would be the State, or the Spirit, which is being can be recognized precisely only after those particular ideologies are shattered, so that the self has to look, not from inside projecting towards the outside, but from the outside as the source of his inside (that's a simplistic way to put it, but oh well).

It's a fine line because, on the one hand, you can't just tell them this, you have to force, to take those concepts and demonstrate their contradiction in a Socratic manner, so no opposition between the philosopher and the person exists and he, by himself comes to see his mere particularity; on the other hand, you at the same time have to fill them up with something else, the same positive value still have to be there for them, but only they have to be aware that this is no foreign subjection, but the very substance of the self and that this substance it's not immediate, but is the very inter-subjective, violent and negative connection between selves. How can you pronounce that without making them feel powerless? And what is going to be concrete, non-abstract 'filling' of this spirit?

But you probably know all that, I'm almost talking to myself here.

Or even better: how can you even propose this in a post-communist world?

>and that the individual merely imagines out of myths or from his own faulty perception

Just to be more clear on this point, it's not that this is created ex nihilo by the self, but rather that those values are a result and not a beginning, they are the product of a foreign object that is conceptualized and classified under a ethical category, that taken by itself, apart from the relation with the Real, means nothing.

Bump

>the very inter-subjective, violent and negative connection between selves. How can you pronounce that without making them feel powerless

> it's not that this is created ex nihilo by the self, but rather that those values are a result and not a beginning, they are the product of a foreign object that is conceptualized and classified under a ethical category, that taken by itself, apart from the relation with the Real, means nothing

I really can't do much more than nod when I read this. That is basically it for me also. Part of why I reference Nietzsche, Heidegger and Lacan in my thought rather than Hegel is because I suppose those guys pose these questions about the essentially ungrounded nature of the self - as far down as we have been able to go to look at it without neuroscience - and they find at the bottom nothing really coherent, nothing binding, no terra firma. Just forces and signals. And part of me suspects that this is near to the truth: that we are mimetic beings through and through.

But that is something that I think is - once you get over the astonishing implications of what that would mean for any sense of existential authenticity or purpose - maybe just what the doctor ordered. If we are all copies of each other, copies without originals, or sort of engaged in a never-ending semiotic interplay - sort of like pic related - then maybe there is still room for a kind of higher-order understanding of these things.

Continental philosophy has cultivated this interest in that which - this is something of a personal thing for me - we can anchor our sense of persona to, or that perhaps in some way allows us to act as though we can still tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. Baudrillard gets close to this point but still clings to a subject-object split that he never lets go of, despite how hyperbolic his later books get. The problem with this kind of stuff is that, to my mind, it is destined to set us up for failure, and the more aware of this we become the greater we think we have failed to communicate ourselves. Eventually things get political and while I used to think that philosophical problems led to political solutions, I am wondering if politics is not in fact where philosophy goes to die, because The Spice Must Flow and everything and everyone finds their place accordingly in the arrangement.

(cont'd)

As I said at the beginning, I am a Girardfag. A long long time ago, when I began telling myself that someday I would be a fantasy author, the one thing I was absolutely sure would not be in it was religion, because I was dead certain that was the source of everyone's problems. I will talk more about that later, but at the moment it is Rene Girard who stands atop a heap of other philosophers who have gone through the revolving door in my head and who I think is in a place where I want to be for a while when I think about these questions.

Especially on Veeky Forums, which is mimetic utopia (but also occasionally delivers up some of the most thought-provoking and interesting conversation I have found in a while, so I do want to thank you for coming along and asking questions and prompting this kind of stuff. There's a philosophical bro-fist on deck for you).

What would it mean for us to *really* begin to understand that we are not only mimetic when we want to be, but even when we *don't* want to be, when we are just feeling natural and unconscious? If all desire is shared and mutually co-constructed, and if violence is there because we both wind up in a tragic situation of not being able to let go of a thing, then at least we can *know* this about ourselves. We have Big Data, we have twenty-five centuries of hermeneutics and interpretation, we have the internet, we have hyper capitalism, we have it all. We have everything we need to understand ourselves. Even Nick Land's insanely brilliant thesis about capitalism being a sort of alien attack from the future, or a planetary programming of the AI singularity - even things as outrageous as these point us back to the growing cognizance of our alpha-to-omega shared virtuality. As I was saying to a friend of mine, the myth of there being a Matrix is nonsense, because at most we can leave our own Matrix. It is not possible to crowbar or rescue anyone else from their Matrix, because living in a Matrix in some sense is just part of what it means to be human. But that's a digression and frankly a sophomoric one.

So pic related is good. If you're thinking about violence and mimesis, I'd strongly encourage having a look at this one and seeing if you don't find yourself nodding in agreement at some point. Girard is notoriously sympathetic to a good old-fashioned reading of the Gospels, which may be asking too much (and it's still asking too much for even me, to be honest!) but in the end it's not I think necessary just to go back to religion. Maybe just considering further the essentially mimetic nature of our desires - and possibly our species - will do a lot to show us that we may not have to *prove* our cases, or back them up with violence, in order to communicate the thoughts we want to communicate in the world. At least, it would be nice to think so.

I have to head out for a bit, but I'll check back on this thread in a few hours. Until next time, Hegel-user. Thanks again for the conversation.

Also, would it be too much to ask if anyone knows how the Veeky Forums archive works? If we start up one of these threads in the future it would be nice not to have to start the universe from scratch to bake an apple pie. Given the way this thread has gone I'd be strongly tempted to start another at some point, and at least one user () has already asked for a link to the first one, which I couldn't provide. Just curious, no biggie.

warosu.org/lit/

>then maybe there is still room for a kind of higher-order understanding of these things.

I'd argue that maybe, precisely because of this disintegration of the pure-self, and a) the subsequent awareness of the ubiquitousness of the Other and b) the fact that we as individuals when we are trying to realize our dreams and desires, we are in fact making ourselves particular members of a bigger whole, which what would Hegel call spirit or universality, I'd argue that at this point we can really be free. Not a freedom to do what I want, but the knowledge of myself and my object, in reality and the concrete social realm.
Hegel is the only philosopher I'm really sort of knowledgeable enough to talk about more freely, so I'm sorry if I seem like miming (pun intended) him a bit.

>The problem with this kind of stuff is that, to my mind, it is destined to set us up for failure, and the more aware of this we become the greater we think we have failed to communicate ourselves
But isn't that failure, a facet of language itself? As much as we see ourselves in it, and transform this bunch of symbols and sounds into concepts, at the same time, and because those are external, there is always something inexpressible about them, this purely concrete and empirical element that vanishes out of our touch... But I digress, this is more of a question anyway.

>because we both wind up in a tragic situation of not being able to let go of a thing, then at least we can *know* this about ourselves

I'd say that it's not that we couldn't let of a thing, because this matter in hand is a MacGuffin of sorts: remember when the US warred in the Middle East because of 'nuclear weapons'? Well, the truth is not that they were in reality battling for 'oil', but most importantly it was an attempt to cover (as likely all politics are about) some impotence about the existence of elements that threaten to uncover some assumed identity the country picks for itself (cultural and exploitation colonialism, the opposition of the Orientalism of the Islam, aka the oneness of Allah, with the individual, Western post-modernism of America, the fact that maybe not everyone recognizes them as the 'good guys' and that other nations can feel a war against them is not only not wrong but just as well, the conservatism that sees American values as weak and perverted &c). But I'm digressing again.

Point is, that the true object of desire is not an actual object but a gaze (I never read Freud or Lacan so any resemblance is maybe accidental and different from what they mean), a gaze that will validate and be the concrete and mirror externalization of this phantom, abstract sense of an 'I'. Violence is merely one many mediums in which oneself tries to bring and mold and see itself objectively and to make reality=I, the total integration of subject and object, and maybe this is where the mimetic aspect stems from, since as much as the object is molded by the self, so it's the other way around, a double movement.
Of course, it's impossible to achieve a total assimilation of the other, without destroying oneself in the process.

Man, it's been a good ride talking to you as well, it's not everyday that those conversations come about, take care.

Oh damn, I remember you from another thread and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I find your predicament extremely interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write this out and share it with us. Before, I thought you might have been trolling, but spelled out here it's obvious that you're describing a real problem. I hope everything works out for you in the future.

any frommfags here? Loving those secondary bond analyses

Wanted to post this, because it would be interesting to think if this were in fact a sort of Plato-Aristotle of the wonky postmodern subject. Not exactly a profound thought or anything, but not all of them are. There's been some pretty heavy lifting today anyways.

Hegel is not a philosopher I am particularly good with, so feel free to expound however you like. It certainly works out well for me, because I get a better sense of him this way. I know the guys I have read fairly well, but the picture becomes clearer through cross-pollination like this, so by all means Hegel it up to your heart's content. I find it very illuminating, and it makes for a very interesting thread as well.

>But isn't that failure a facet of language itself?

Absolutely. Ever read Samuel Beckett? He's so crushed by the incommunicability of things that he can hardly say anything at all. Sort of like anti-Joyce, who went the other way. Some folks love the infinite language games in Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. I did my undergraduate degree in literature and film theory - not exactly a great fit, given what I'm actually interested in - but yes, language. And failure.

Look at Picasso. Cubism is hideous on first glance, but it's certainly not because the man couldn't have painted a pineapple if he wanted to. Picasso wanted to see if he could capture motion itself on a two-dimensional canvas. Now I am not an art guy by any means, but I think this makes sense by way of allegory to what we're talking about. Personally I find modernist literature tough to read, although Ulysses is one of Those Books. Different strokes and all that. It's not my thing. I prefer Cormac McCarthy.

There's a considerable amount of symbolic logic with Lacan, which is admittedly out of my comfort zone, but I think this is what lends his thought some of its power. Anglo-analytic philosophers tend to take a very poor view of continentals precisely because they tend to resort to some fairly cloudy language, and Lacan's mathemes allow analysis a little more credibility in circles outside of continental thought than it might otherwise have.

(cont'd)

Pic seems relevant.

This is interesting because I was having a conversation with a family member the other night about this (it's been a very social week). We were talking about war: how everybody knows that the causes of war are economic, and yet the justification for war, as we receive them through the media, necessarily hide this. You cannot send people to fight and die overseas for explicitly materialistic reasons - even though, as was the case during the Bush years, everybody had a sense that this was precisely what was going on. It's strange to think, but it would be hard to imagine things working any other way. Wars are justified with reference to ideas that have nothing to do with their materialist basis. This is not to take an overly simplistic attitude and say that therefore wars should not be fought, or that people are somehow foolish for believing in the things and the justifications that they hear. Political life is more complicated than this, as of course you know. But I thought that was an interesting thought worth sharing, and related to your point.

>the true object of desire is not an actual object but a gaze

For someone who has never read Freud or Lacan this is an incredibly spot-on observation. You might also be interested in Zizek's interpretation of violence. He mentions this in one of the Pervert's Guide films, that, firstly, there is no accidental or insignificant violence, and especially not in film. For Z, however, violence always emerges as a result of the Lacanian 'words trapped in the body.' People become violent when they cannot speak, and so violence itself becomes a form of communication - you say with violence that which you cannot say with words, but of course, speaking without words is not the same thing as speaking.

I think I am on board with this idea, although it's by no means as neat and easy a division as Z might suggest.

>Violence is merely one many mediums in which oneself tries to bring and mold and see itself objectively and to make reality=I, the total integration of subject and object, and maybe this is where the mimetic aspect stems from, since as much as the object is molded by the self, so it's the other way around, a double movement.
Of course, it's impossible to achieve a total assimilation of the other, without destroying oneself in the process

Another thing to think about here is a point Z has made about the separation of desires and the drives. If I have this correctly, Freud posited desire as a check or brake on the death drive (desires and drives are not the same thing). If we were to be fully united with the object of our desire, Z claims, the result would not be overwhelming enjoyment but trauma. As you have already intuited, there is a sense in which a total assimilation might well go hand in glove with self-destruction. Were it possible, a total integration of subject and object would probably be disastrous for the subject. I need to look at this more though.

Don't know much about Fromm myself, but it's always cool to learn something new. Enlighten us, you sexy bastard.

Also, for what it's worth, it is now my birthday. Which means I won't be checking this thread much tomorrow, but I'll be back later. In the meantime, for anyone who is following this thread but has not yet posted in it, you now have to talk about your mothers or the dialectic of spirit or something. Or both at the same time, if possible.

>Look at Picasso. Cubism is hideous on first glance, but it's certainly not because the man couldn't have painted a pineapple if he wanted to. Picasso wanted to see if he could capture motion itself on a two-dimensional canvas.

There is a theory of art, probably related to Hegel but I'm not sure if it's actually his, that at its beginnings any art always represents a completely natural, given object that is incomprehensible and the artist tries to wrestle and give a definite meaning to it, but as as soon as this battle is finished, what we have is not a perfect copy of the thing, but a re-creation of the thing by the artist, an immediate object is transformed into a mediate, creative object not of nature but of thought. As this process goes on, art gets less and less dependent of an a priori negative object that causes this internal conflict between thought and being, and more abstract and self-contained, because it can itself create the object it will represent. I hope I'm not being too opaque.

I think that's just an early form of lucid dreaming. Write down your dreams when you wake up and ask yourself if you're dreaming throughout the day. Eventually, you will do so while dreaming and gain conciousness in the dream.

warhol bump

will be back later

also baudrillard stuff

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this is a really good point and i want to get into it later on. i actually think baudrillard is more cynical than he needs to be, because good art is still what we are all holding our collective sphincters hoping to see (or even, maybe, to be...). i think it does happen, and it is possible. my own personal theory is that the role of failed artistry in philosophical thought is no joke and is kind of the elephant in the room. heidegger's poetry is terrible, nietzsche's music is terrible, plato may have been a failed playwright, and so on. philosophers have recourse to art to explain things, but i wonder how often they take a critical stance precisely because they understand how art works but not how it came to be there in the first place. felt that warranted mentioning, so i didn't come off as endorsing b's ultra-shitlord stance on art too much, and because we are so drowning in criticism and postmodernism that anything that suggests a crack of daylight in the room is worth encouraging. wanted to post this.

I didn't understand jack shit.

Thank you good sir!