#lacan — Public Fediverse posts

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Ich editiere #Lacan Vorträge und lese meinem Kind vor: „Der erste fehlende Andere, dem das Kind begegnet, ist die Mutter.“
Antwort: „Sicher“

Sherlock Holmes to Watson: Obs...

Ich editiere #Lacan Vorträge und lese meinem Kind vor: „Der erste fehlende Andere, dem das Kind begegnet, ist die Mutter.“
Antwort: „Sicher“

Sherlock Holmes to Watson: Obs...

What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?

I was watching Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and with the first sighting of Channing Tatum, I had a sudden desire to watch Roofman (2025) in which he stars. Not in the sense that I wanted to turn off Side Effects and immediately put on Roofman but more that it suddenly felt I should make sure this is the next film I watch. From past experience I know this feeling is a reliable indicator that I will genuinely enjoy watching Roofman if I watch it soon. I will be engaged with it. I will be open to becoming immersed in it. In real sense I desire the film.

What I found curious about this is that I made no effort to see Roofman at the cinema. It was trailed so widely that I noted it at the time, but it seemed a fairly unremarkable crime comedy film. From the reviews I suspect it’s an unusually good, though by no means remarkable, instance of a genre that I’m not particularly drawn to. If I didn’t desire Roofman previously then why do I suddenly want to watch it now?

I’m really not sure, but I think this phenomenology of cultural desire is extremely interesting. It’s a quotidian feature of a media saturated lifeworld yet I don’t recall ever coming across a direct attempt to theorise it (obviously loads of theorists touch on this indirectly). As with most things these days, my instinct is to come at it with a mix of Lacan and Bollas e.g. how the signifier of Channing Tatum quilted together a chain of associations which presented me with Roofman (a film I had literally not thought about since it was trailed at the cinema) while suddenly imbuing the film with a potent sense of watchability.

What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?

I was watching Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and with the first sighting of Channing Tatum, I had a sudden desire to watch Roofman (2025) in which he stars. Not in the sense that I wanted to turn off Side Effects and immediately put on Roofman but more that it suddenly felt I should make sure this is the next film I watch. From past experience I know this feeling is a reliable indicator that I will genuinely enjoy watching Roofman if I watch it soon. I will be engaged with it. I will be open to becoming immersed in it. In real sense I desire the film.

What I found curious about this is that I made no effort to see Roofman at the cinema. It was trailed so widely that I noted it at the time, but it seemed a fairly unremarkable crime comedy film. From the reviews I suspect it’s an unusually good, though by no means remarkable, instance of a genre that I’m not particularly drawn to. If I didn’t desire Roofman previously then why do I suddenly want to watch it now?

I’m really not sure, but I think this phenomenology of cultural desire is extremely interesting. It’s a quotidian feature of a media saturated lifeworld yet I don’t recall ever coming across a direct attempt to theorise it (obviously loads of theorists touch on this indirectly). As with most things these days, my instinct is to come at it with a mix of Lacan and Bollas e.g. how the signifier of Channing Tatum quilted together a chain of associations which presented me with Roofman (a film I had literally not thought about since it was trailed at the cinema) while suddenly imbuing the film with a potent sense of watchability.

What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?

I was watching Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and with the first sighting of Channing Tatum, I had a sudden desire to watch Roofman (2025) in which he stars. Not in the sense that I wanted to turn off Side Effects and immediately put on Roofman but more that it suddenly felt I should make sure this is the next film I watch. From past experience I know this feeling is a reliable indicator that I will genuinely enjoy watching Roofman if I watch it soon. I will be engaged with it. I will be open to becoming immersed in it. In real sense I desire the film.

What I found curious about this is that I made no effort to see Roofman at the cinema. It was trailed so widely that I noted it at the time, but it seemed a fairly unremarkable crime comedy film. From the reviews I suspect it’s an unusually good, though by no means remarkable, instance of a genre that I’m not particularly drawn to. If I didn’t desire Roofman previously then why do I suddenly want to watch it now?

I’m really not sure, but I think this phenomenology of cultural desire is extremely interesting. It’s a quotidian feature of a media saturated lifeworld yet I don’t recall ever coming across a direct attempt to theorise it (obviously loads of theorists touch on this indirectly). As with most things these days, my instinct is to come at it with a mix of Lacan and Bollas e.g. how the signifier of Channing Tatum quilted together a chain of associations which presented me with Roofman (a film I had literally not thought about since it was trailed at the cinema) while suddenly imbuing the film with a potent sense of watchability.

What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?

I was watching Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and with the first sighting of Channing Tatum, I had a sudden desire to watch Roofman (2025) in which he stars. Not in the sense that I wanted to turn off Side Effects and immediately put on Roofman but more that it suddenly felt I should make sure this is the next film I watch. From past experience I know this feeling is a reliable indicator that I will genuinely enjoy watching Roofman if I watch it soon. I will be engaged with it. I will be open to becoming immersed in it. In real sense I desire the film.

What I found curious about this is that I made no effort to see Roofman at the cinema. It was trailed so widely that I noted it at the time, but it seemed a fairly unremarkable crime comedy film. From the reviews I suspect it’s an unusually good, though by no means remarkable, instance of a genre that I’m not particularly drawn to. If I didn’t desire Roofman previously then why do I suddenly want to watch it now?

I’m really not sure, but I think this phenomenology of cultural desire is extremely interesting. It’s a quotidian feature of a media saturated lifeworld yet I don’t recall ever coming across a direct attempt to theorise it (obviously loads of theorists touch on this indirectly). As with most things these days, my instinct is to come at it with a mix of Lacan and Bollas e.g. how the signifier of Channing Tatum quilted together a chain of associations which presented me with Roofman (a film I had literally not thought about since it was trailed at the cinema) while suddenly imbuing the film with a potent sense of watchability.

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvNyKfGcdNw

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvNyKfGcdNw

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvNyKfGcdNw

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvNyKfGcdNw

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

#Freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #psychotherapy #philosophy #trump #MAGA #Lacan https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

#Freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #psychotherapy #philosophy #trump #MAGA #Lacan https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

#Freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #psychotherapy #philosophy #trump #MAGA #Lacan https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

#Freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #psychotherapy #philosophy #trump #MAGA #Lacan https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

#Freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #psychotherapy #philosophy #trump #MAGA #Lacan https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

"Hysteria: unsatisfied desire
Phobia: anticipated desire
Obsession: impossible desire"

Lacan, Seminar XIV

Photo: Morten Lasskogen

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #bookstodon #photography

"Hysteria: unsatisfied desire
Phobia: anticipated desire
Obsession: impossible desire"

Lacan, Seminar XIV

Photo: Morten Lasskogen

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #bookstodon #photography

"Hysteria: unsatisfied desire
Phobia: anticipated desire
Obsession: impossible desire"

Lacan, Seminar XIV

Photo: Morten Lasskogen

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #bookstodon #photography

"Hysteria: unsatisfied desire
Phobia: anticipated desire
Obsession: impossible desire"

Lacan, Seminar XIV

Photo: Morten Lasskogen

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #bookstodon #photography

"Hysteria: unsatisfied desire
Phobia: anticipated desire
Obsession: impossible desire"

Lacan, Seminar XIV

Photo: Morten Lasskogen

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #bookstodon #photography

The paradox of desire:
If it is true that "the goal of desire is nothing other than the return in a circuit" (Lacan, Seminar XI), then repeated failure prevents the circuit from closing, perpetuating the desire.

Photo: George Digalakis

#Lacan #Psychoanalysis #BlackandWhite

The paradox of desire:
If it is true that "the goal of desire is nothing other than the return in a circuit" (Lacan, Seminar XI), then repeated failure prevents the circuit from closing, perpetuating the desire.

Photo: George Digalakis

#Lacan #Psychoanalysis #BlackandWhite

The paradox of desire:
If it is true that "the goal of desire is nothing other than the return in a circuit" (Lacan, Seminar XI), then repeated failure prevents the circuit from closing, perpetuating the desire.

Photo: George Digalakis

#Lacan #Psychoanalysis #BlackandWhite

The paradox of desire:
If it is true that "the goal of desire is nothing other than the return in a circuit" (Lacan, Seminar XI), then repeated failure prevents the circuit from closing, perpetuating the desire.

Photo: George Digalakis

#Lacan #Psychoanalysis #BlackandWhite

The paradox of desire:
If it is true that "the goal of desire is nothing other than the return in a circuit" (Lacan, Seminar XI), then repeated failure prevents the circuit from closing, perpetuating the desire.

Photo: George Digalakis

#Lacan #Psychoanalysis #BlackandWhite

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun in part because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race. A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal even if that capacity can only accumulate through iterated engagements with the signifier over time. It’s not a nostalgic phenomenon because it’s very much present tense. The past fun is in a sense present now even if it’s force relies entirely on the past engagements.

It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offered in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make me laugh, which can in turn cheer me up if I’m feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional wonderings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on me in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this is just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race.

A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal. It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offer in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make you laugh, which can in turn cheer you up if you’re feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional feelings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on you in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun in part because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race. A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal even if that capacity can only accumulate through iterated engagements with the signifier over time. It’s not a nostalgic phenomenon because it’s very much present tense. The past fun is in a sense present now even if it’s force relies entirely on the past engagements.

It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offered in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make me laugh, which can in turn cheer me up if I’m feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional wonderings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on me in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this is just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun in part because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race. A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal even if that capacity can only accumulate through iterated engagements with the signifier over time. It’s not a nostalgic phenomenon because it’s very much present tense. The past fun is in a sense present now even if it’s force relies entirely on the past engagements.

It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offered in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make me laugh, which can in turn cheer me up if I’m feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional wonderings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on me in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this is just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun in part because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race. A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal even if that capacity can only accumulate through iterated engagements with the signifier over time. It’s not a nostalgic phenomenon because it’s very much present tense. The past fun is in a sense present now even if it’s force relies entirely on the past engagements.

It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offered in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make me laugh, which can in turn cheer me up if I’m feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional wonderings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on me in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this is just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc

Olivia Laing on recovery

These beautiful passages from The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking immediately made me think of Lacan:

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

Pg 291

I mean we all carry something inside us that ca be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage, by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though, the only thing to do is to take a hold of yourself, to gather up the broken parts. That’s when recovery begins. That’s when the second life – the good one – starts.

Pg 297

Particularly these passages from Bruce Fink:

By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can be sublimated or sublated in a sense, transmogrified with the coming to the fore of the phallic signifier, the Phallus with a capital P, symbolized by the matheme Φ. This is a forward-looking, as opposed to a backward-looking project. Rather than regressing to childhood to repair all the “damage” that was done, there is a push toward the recognition that what was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way (there is no point whining “If only things had been different….”); and a push toward the symbolization of something that can move things forward.

Bruce Fink, Lacan on Desire, loc 2379

Olivia Laing on recovery

These beautiful passages from The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking immediately made me think of Lacan:

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

Pg 291

I mean we all carry something inside us that ca be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage, by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though, the only thing to do is to take a hold of yourself, to gather up the broken parts. That’s when recovery begins. That’s when the second life – the good one – starts.

Pg 297

Particularly these passages from Bruce Fink:

By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can be sublimated or sublated in a sense, transmogrified with the coming to the fore of the phallic signifier, the Phallus with a capital P, symbolized by the matheme Φ. This is a forward-looking, as opposed to a backward-looking project. Rather than regressing to childhood to repair all the “damage” that was done, there is a push toward the recognition that what was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way (there is no point whining “If only things had been different….”); and a push toward the symbolization of something that can move things forward.

Bruce Fink, Lacan on Desire, loc 2379

Olivia Laing on recovery

These beautiful passages from The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking immediately made me think of Lacan:

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

Pg 291

I mean we all carry something inside us that ca be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage, by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though, the only thing to do is to take a hold of yourself, to gather up the broken parts. That’s when recovery begins. That’s when the second life – the good one – starts.

Pg 297

Particularly these passages from Bruce Fink:

By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can be sublimated or sublated in a sense, transmogrified with the coming to the fore of the phallic signifier, the Phallus with a capital P, symbolized by the matheme Φ. This is a forward-looking, as opposed to a backward-looking project. Rather than regressing to childhood to repair all the “damage” that was done, there is a push toward the recognition that what was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way (there is no point whining “If only things had been different….”); and a push toward the symbolization of something that can move things forward.

Bruce Fink, Lacan on Desire, loc 2379

...life only returns there along paths
that are always the same,
and which it has once traced out.

Lacan, Seminar XVII

Foto Filipe Correia

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #photography #AK

...life only returns there along paths
that are always the same,
and which it has once traced out.

Lacan, Seminar XVII

Foto Filipe Correia

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #photography #AK

...life only returns there along paths
that are always the same,
and which it has once traced out.

Lacan, Seminar XVII

Foto Filipe Correia

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #photography #AK

...life only returns there along paths
that are always the same,
and which it has once traced out.

Lacan, Seminar XVII

Foto Filipe Correia

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #photography #alekairos

...life only returns there along paths
that are always the same,
and which it has once traced out.

Lacan, Seminar XVII

Foto Filipe Correia

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #photography #AK

On Mentoring. A 🧵.

“He [Telemachus] sat down, and up stood Mentor” (2:225).

This is the first time in Homer’s epos The Odyssey that Mentor, Odysseus’s trusted companion, is mentioned. What was his task?

judithbeyer.com/2026/07/04/o...

#mentoring #academia #psychoanalysis #Lacan

On Mentoring

On Mentoring. A 🧵.

“He [Telemachus] sat down, and up stood Mentor” (2:225).

This is the first time in Homer’s epos The Odyssey that Mentor, Odysseus’s trusted companion, is mentioned. What was his task?

judithbeyer.com/2026/07/04/o...

#mentoring #academia #psychoanalysis #Lacan

On Mentoring

On Mentoring. A 🧵.

“He [Telemachus] sat down, and up stood Mentor” (2:225).

This is the first time in Homer’s epos The Odyssey that Mentor, Odysseus’s trusted companion, is mentioned. What was his task?

judithbeyer.com/2026/07/04/o...

#mentoring #academia #psychoanalysis #Lacan

On Mentoring

Anthropologists can learn from psychoanalysts. For example the clinical view on “ritual” is different as “rituals attach themselves to bad thoughts to prevent them from happening”. We tend to look at rituals as social events only, but they are also tied to each subject’s symbolic order. #Lacan

Anthropologists can learn from psychoanalysts. For example the clinical view on “ritual” is different as “rituals attach themselves to bad thoughts to prevent them from happening”. We tend to look at rituals as social events only, but they are also tied to each subject’s symbolic order. #Lacan

Anthropologists can learn from psychoanalysts. For example the clinical view on “ritual” is different as “rituals attach themselves to bad thoughts to prevent them from happening”. We tend to look at rituals as social events only, but they are also tied to each subject’s symbolic order. #Lacan

« Love is a contingent encounter between two exiles of the sexual relationship, which means between two symptoms. Everything that follows is the fiction that this was meant to be… It is not the couple that is ‘cured’ in an analysis. It remains a question, an x, for each One.” Wülfing on #Lacan 2026

« Love is a contingent encounter between two exiles of the sexual relationship, which means between two symptoms. Everything that follows is the fiction that this was meant to be… It is not the couple that is ‘cured’ in an analysis. It remains a question, an x, for each One.” Wülfing on #Lacan 2026

« Love is a contingent encounter between two exiles of the sexual relationship, which means between two symptoms. Everything that follows is the fiction that this was meant to be… It is not the couple that is ‘cured’ in an analysis. It remains a question, an x, for each One.” Wülfing on #Lacan 2026

 #Lacan |s school works via the Cartel in a 4+1 formation: No “working group“, no “collective consciousness“, no “leader“, no “follower“, but “scattered and mismatched“ ones-all-alone, ready to put their desire to work by talking & listening to each other. The aim: transmission, not transference.

 #Lacan |s school works via the Cartel in a 4+1 formation: No “working group“, no “collective consciousness“, no “leader“, no “follower“, but “scattered and mismatched“ ones-all-alone, ready to put their desire to work by talking & listening to each other. The aim: transmission, not transference.

 #Lacan |s school works via the Cartel in a 4+1 formation: No “working group“, no “collective consciousness“, no “leader“, no “follower“, but “scattered and mismatched“ ones-all-alone, ready to put their desire to work by talking & listening to each other. The aim: transmission, not transference.

Wir arbeiten Theorien im Fach durch vom Kulturrelativismus als Reaktion gegen die Rassentheorien des 19. Jhdts, über Strukturalismus als Theorie über das Klassifizieren und die Zentralität der Sprache (inkl #Lacan), zu neueren Manifesten einer Anthropologie vom Menschwerden (Ingold gegen Latour)…