#lacan — Public Fediverse posts

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

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

"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 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

...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

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

« 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.

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)…

What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way

I’m a huge fan of WordPress’s new rewind feature which shows what you were posting about on this day in previous years. It turns out that on 18th June 2025 I was posting about this extract from Bruce Fink’s book on Seminar XI:

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

I’d forgotten what a starkly beautiful expression that was: “What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way“. If, as Ruti puts it, the melancholic subject is lost in “the labyrinth of its melancholy investments” Φ signifies the moment of suddenly realising that you’re alone in the labyrinth and walking, falteringly, out of the door and wondering what comes next as your eyes adjust to the sun and your lungs breath in the fresh air.

(I realise the proper Lacanian position would be something more like Φ making the labyrinth navigable, so it’s no longer a prison, but I like the image so much I’m not going to correct it 😊 I also think it captures something phenomenological of these kinds of transitions which structural approaches tend to miss)

There cannot be #AI literacy, because there are no letters within #AI. Only code. Read "The instance of the letter in the unconscious" by #Lacan and you will see what I mean! Do not read the wikipedia-article on this text, it is misleading and has itself copied parts from elsewhere.

There cannot be #AI literacy, because there are no letters within #AI. Only code. Read "The instance of the letter in the unconscious" by #Lacan and you will see what I mean! Do not read the wikipedia-article on this text, it is misleading and has itself copied parts from elsewhere.

Nerding out on a Sunday. I am preparing for my MA-course on #theory in #anthropology, covering #semiotics #structuralism and #Lacan #psychoanalysis 😍

Is There a Universal Enjoyment? —Todd McGowan

https://quokk.au/c/zizek/p/964833/is-there-a-universal-enjoyment-todd-mcgowan

Is There a Universal Enjoyment? —Todd McGowan

https://quokk.au/c/zizek/p/964833/is-there-a-universal-enjoyment-todd-mcgowan

Morgen Abend in Berlin, wer Interesse hat, hingehen! #Lacan #Psychoanalyse Anmeldung: www.nls-initiative-berlin.com/anmeldung

Is there a psychoanalytical concept for how one frustration can be a synecdoche for frustration as such?

I came across a reference to the abjet petit a and immediately had a flash of what it might mean For Lacan the objet petit a is the object cause of our desire, it is the slither of the sublime which invests a concrete object with a sense of wondrous desirability. The sense of a deeper primordial loss from the trauma of socialisation lurks in the background of our psychic machinery, leading us to invest a flicker of what we feel was lost into the objects we now encounter in the present.

When I encountered the abjet petit a term, I hoped it described a parallel experience of frustration. There are times when a particular frustration takes on an outsized significance beyond what it is actually stopping us doing or impeding. A particular annoyance exists as a synecdoche for annoyance as such: this one thing we can’t control, this one thing which frustrates us, condenses the weight of all the things we can’t control, all the things which frustrate us. This one event becomes a spot where you feel the sheer traumatic weight of the world’s fundamental intransigence. What realists think of as the recalcitrance of reality (the causal criterion of existence) sometimes manifests itself as an affront to us which is deeply painful. If objet petit a is about desire, abjet petit a I hoped would be about castration: the trauma of recognising our limits.

Unfortunately this is not what Lacan meant. It seems to just be a late spin on the original concept which is slightly more inflected towards the Real. Is there an existing concept for what I’m describing here? I feel that there should be. Now back to being inexplicably pissed off with the cyclists riding on the pavement on my way to work.

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

Qui, sur Mastodon, a lu et étudié sérieusement la théorie psychanalytique de Jacques Lacan ?

Ma connaissance dans ce domaine reste assez rudimentaire, mais mon mentor français à l’université, il y a vingt-cinq ans, appliquait la pensée lacanienne aux textes, au cinéma et presque à tout. J’étais fasciné.

J’aimerais beaucoup approfondir ma propre compréhension de Lacan, s’il y a ici quelqu’un qui voudrait et pourrait m’y aider.

Merci d’avance.

#Lacan #Psychanalyse #ThéorieCritique

#Introduction

I’m Chris, a writer and independent researcher from Minnesota. I’m a Prince obsessive, French cinema/literature lover, sci-fi person, and Lacanian wanderer.

I live with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy and use a wheelchair. I write about music, memory, disability, embodiment, film, literature, and the strange ways art helps us survive ourselves.

Glad to be back on Mastodon.

#WritersOfMastodon #Prince4Ever #FrenchCinema #FrenchLiterature #Disability #CerebralPalsy #Lacan

#Introduction

I’m Chris, a writer and independent researcher from Minnesota. I’m a Prince obsessive, French cinema/literature lover, sci-fi person, and Lacanian wanderer.

I live with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy and use a wheelchair. I write about music, memory, disability, embodiment, film, literature, and the strange ways art helps us survive ourselves.

Glad to be back on Mastodon.

#WritersOfMastodon #Prince4Ever #FrenchCinema #FrenchLiterature #Disability #CerebralPalsy #Lacan

Die folgende Arbeit entwickelt den borromäischen Knoten als Denkfigur für ein rotierendes Zusammenspiel von drei Registern in einer selbstreflexiven, dreiwertigen, paradoxen Logik mit drei involutiven Negationsoperatoren.

#psychology #lacan #polykontextualitat #polykontextural #logic #reflection #philosophy #ai #ki #paradox #Paradoxien #logik #semiotik #semiotic #semiotics #cybernetics #kybernetik #semioticsystem #cybernetic #kybernetiker #kybernethik

https://infosophia.eu/Borromaeische-Logik.pdf

Die folgende Arbeit entwickelt den borromäischen Knoten als Denkfigur für ein rotierendes Zusammenspiel von drei Registern in einer selbstreflexiven, dreiwertigen, paradoxen Logik mit drei involutiven Negationsoperatoren.

#psychology #lacan #polykontextualitat #polykontextural #logic #reflection #philosophy #ai #ki #paradox #Paradoxien #logik #semiotik #semiotic #semiotics #cybernetics #kybernetik #semioticsystem #cybernetic #kybernetiker #kybernethik

https://infosophia.eu/Borromaeische-Logik.pdf

Le même ya 3 mois avec Sandra #Lucbert pour une révision politique de la #psychanalyse - émancipée de l'héritage de #freud et #lacan - inspirée par #MélanieKlein et d'autres - et surtout qui retrouve son ancrage social, responsabilité face au #patriarcat au #capitalisme à la #CultureDuViol etc.

Pertinence extra ! Carrefour #TPTS

#psy #conscience #politique #pulsion

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=762yNDPZXsk

Le même ya 3 mois avec Sandra #Lucbert pour une révision politique de la #psychanalyse - émancipée de l'héritage de #freud et #lacan - inspirée par #MélanieKlein et d'autres - et surtout qui retrouve son ancrage social, responsabilité face au #patriarcat au #capitalisme à la #CultureDuViol etc.

Pertinence extra ! Carrefour #TPTS

#psy #conscience #politique #pulsion

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=762yNDPZXsk

The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living

I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost object which dimly echoes in the mundane objects which we desire.

In The Call of Character (2013) this is conceived of in terms of our sensitivity to the echo of the Thing. There are little slivers of the sublime we find in certain objects, which can give us direction in how we choose to live. What matters is cultivating a sensitivity to that echo, to better discern when we hear the call and when we do not. It’s only through doing so that we can be faithful to our own desire.

In The Creative Self (2025)* this is conceived of in terms of placing the glow into these objects. Lacan’s phrase about raising mundane object to the dignity of the Thing is taken quite literally at points, as if there is a choice about when and how we do this. It’s still acknowledged that we find objects with this sliver already embedded but Ruti says that “many forms of creativity are a matter of generating this glow” (loc 324). Particularly towards the end of her section, Ruti argues that we need to be discerning about which objects we raise in this way. We should be highly selective: “Not all objects should qualify; the objects in question should have something genuinely special about them” (loc 2105). I can see three different relations being posited here:

1. Discovering the echo of the Thing in a mundane object
2. Creating an object which is an echo of the Thing
3. Raising an object to the dignity of the Thing (regardless of where it has the echo)

It’s 3 which troubles me. If it’s a question of which objects should qualify it implies that our raising an object to the dignity of the Thing is a voluntaristic action. We choose what to elevate in a concrete way, with the corollary that sometimes our choices are mistaken. I don’t understand what this choice entails though: the examples Ruti cites draws heavily on Marion Milner’s creative practice which I read as much more to do with 1 i.e. cultivating qualities of attention which enable us to discover the echo/glow in the mundane objects of the world. What 3 shares with 2 is a subtle voluntarism which I think sits uneasily with the psychoanalytical logic of the argument. I also don’t think it fits Ruti’s own account of her personal experience of creativity which has much more in keeping with the receptive unconscious rather than a purposeful practice of sublimation.

I see why Ruti wants to do this, I think. It provides a critical vantage point in which something like existential authenticity can be a bulwark against the siren song of consumer capitalism. The problem is that I don’t think it works. I think the psychoanalytical logic is betrayed by the political uses to which it is put. This is not to say that I don’t think psychoanalysis has political implications. Clearly it does. But I don’t think it can be used to provide the foundation for a critical theory. Or at least not as neatly as Ruti is trying to do.

As you can tell from the last few days of blogging, this point is bugging me. I want to emphasise that I love Ruti’s work. This has been a revelation to me. But the reason why I never found critical theory deploying psychoanalysis intellectually satisfying in the past remains the case here, albeit in a more subdued way.

*This is written with Gail Newman but they seem to have written their sections individually.

Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

Following from yesterday’s more extensive blog post, I was a bit taken aback by Mari Ruti’s statement here in The Creative Self loc 314:

We can be guided to the Thing’s glow by people—artists, creators, and inventors of various kinds—who possess a stronger than average capacity to either extract it from an already existing object or to install it in an object that they create from scratch. Lacan’s example of the latter phenomenon is the manner in which Cézanne paints apples. Lacan claims that an apple painted by Cézanne is never merely a simple depiction of an apple but, rather, contains an aura of a mysteriousness that viewers respond to. While Cézanne’s apples do not give us the “Thing-in-itself,” they grant us a little taste of the Thing’s sublimity.

Are the words ‘extract’ and ‘install’ uncharacteristically poor choice from this usually careful writer? Or does Ruti intend the active connotation these words carry? To me they suggest an agent deliberately seeking to bring about an outcome through their engagement with the object, as opposed to this outcome being a byproduct of the interaction. It’s the difference between “the Thing’s glow” emerging as a consequence of a creative process and someone setting out to “make something sublime”.

I’m possibly overdrawing the distinction to make the point but I feel slightly allergic to the idea we could characterise this in such an active register. Creativity to me involves a form of surrender, centering what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious, rather than ‘extraction’ and ‘installation’. Furthermore, these two phrases sit oddly with each other, given that the former identifies a residue in the object whereas the latter puts it there in the first place. In Ruti’s defence she’s talking about the capacity of a person to do this rather than suggesting that’s the intention of the process. But I do think there’s an underlying assumption of activity in her conceptual architecture here which I fundamentally don’t agree with. For example from loc 342:

Although there may be something about the object itself that makes it a good candidate for serving as a vessel for the objet a, it is we, ourselves, who unconsciously place the objet a within this object. Yet the fact that we are the architects of our own desire does not decrease the relevant object’s ability to draw us in with an inexplicable, irresistible force. We may even come to value it so highly that our desire for it feels nonnegotiable. In other words, due to the hidden link between the Thing and the objet a—the fact that the objet a contains a smidgeon of the Thing’s aura and therefore always in the final analysis refers back to the Thing—our desire for an object that seems to contain the objet a can become so strong that we are willing to sacrifice a great deal for it.

Do we unconsciously place the objet a within the object? I’m not sure that’s the case. I think in any given moment we are constituted as a being for whom the objet a is already within the object. To talk about unconsciously placing it there suggests that we are doing that, almost as a form of projection, it’s simply that we don’t know that we are doing it. Whereas I took Lacan to be saying something more unsettling: that I am someone who cannot help but be drawn in and that the question is simply how I relate to that power exercised upon me. To talk about ‘unconscious placing’ misconstrues a structural relation as a psychodynamic one.

There’s a latent volunteerism here which changes how we relate to the receptive unconscious. If we are ‘placing’ then it carries the promise we might learn to place differently, as opposed to remaining with what emerges through the structured relation to the world and changing through our engagement with what emerges. It’s staying with what happens to you rather than locating yourself as the source of what happens. It also changes the relation to the question I’m preoccupied by: why do I feel the Thing’s glow in this object and not another? If it’s unconscious placement the question becomes abut the psychodynamic pattern of my projection of the sublime onto the world. If it’s a consequence of the structural relation, the question becomes about how I was constituted as a being who feels the call of the Thing where I do. The latter question is significantly broader in the scope than the former and that matters.

I find this uncomfortable because ‘unconscious placement’ is easier to incorporate into a biographical frame. What in my past disposes me to unconsciously place the glow in this way? In contrast the structural frame becomes far more diffuse even as it lends itself more clearly to empirical objects: what is the call I feel in relation to the glow of thing? How do I relate to that call? How does it lead me to act? How might I act differently? What are the resources which might support such different responses?

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

"Il convient de remarquer que si un homme qui se croit un roi est fou, un roi qui se croit un roi ne l'est pas moins."

"It is worth noting that if a man who believes himself to be a king is mad, a king who believes himself to be a king is no less so."

--Jacques Lacan,
"Propos sur la causalité psychique,"
1946

#Lacan
#JacquesLacan
#existentialism
#DonaldTrump

"Il convient de remarquer que si un homme qui se croit un roi est fou, un roi qui se croit un roi ne l'est pas moins."

"It is worth noting that if a man who believes himself to be a king is mad, a king who believes himself to be a king is no less so."

--Jacques Lacan,
"Propos sur la causalité psychique,"
1946

#Lacan
#JacquesLacan
#existentialism
#DonaldTrump

Who we are arises from how we have been hurt

From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 18:

Likewise, there is perhaps nothing that contributes to the uniqueness of our character more than our suffering. In so many ways, who we are arises from how we have been hurt. This does not mean that we cannot find our way past our injuries or that they determine our future. But it does suggest that our sense of authenticity cannot be divorced from the hardships and disappointments we have endured.

From pg 21:

It may, for example, turn out that something that causes us suffering will eventually grow into a nugget of wisdom that guides us to a valuable course adjustment. And a breakdown that leaves us gasping for air can eventually lead to an important breakthrough that reconfigures our lives for the better. This is why Nietzsche believes that we should choose to love our fate—that instead of struggling against the constraints of our situation, we should actively welcome these constraints because they are the foundation of our ability to elaborate our character.

This is exactly what I found so powerful in Hans Loewald’s notion of transforming ghosts into ancestors. There’s a particular mode through which we metabolise suffering, the deep and profound ontological injuries which mean we can’t continue as we were, which makes a particular mode of growth possible. From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201:

The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting what he called the “blood of recognition” in the relationship with the therapist. He asserted that the ghosts must be led out of the unconscious, reawakened through the intensity of the therapeutic relationship, and then laid to rest, relegated to history, thus allowing the person more flexibility and intensity in present relations.

There are things we can be lost within which these wounds, or rather the process of moving through them, can lead us out of. We don’t become someone who wasn’t hurt in this way but rather become someone who can live well despite being hurt in that way. In Lacanian terms we see a reconfiguration of the relationship to our own enjoyment, as we reclaim it through a movement of traversing a (now shattered) fantasy. But Mari Ruti expresses it so much more beautifully and concretely than any of the Lacanians do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29rCU1H1oo0&list=RDGMEMBhrNM15bN0pM50WECpic-AVMRa8gSw7Djvo&index=2

I keep having dreams of things I need to do
And waking up but not following through
But it feels like I haven't slept at all
When I wake to a silence and she's facing the wall
Posters of Dylan and of Hemingway
An antique compass for a sailor's escape
She says, "You just can't live this way"
And I close my eyes and I never say
I'm still having dreams

The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.

"How do we listen in anthropology?" I am putting my reputation as a legal anthropologist on the line here in going to talk about #Lacan for the first time to an #anthropology audience! Come listen to me Monday 18.5. @[email protected] Oettingenstr. 67, 4.15pm! www.en.ethnologie.uni-muenchen.de/download/dat...

"How do we listen in anthropology?" I am putting my reputation as a legal anthropologist on the line here in going to talk about #Lacan for the first time to an #anthropology audience! Come listen to me Monday 18.5. @[email protected] Oettingenstr. 67, 4.15pm! www.en.ethnologie.uni-muenchen.de/download/dat...

Heidegger on Lacan: “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”

From Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan loc 1152:

For his part, Heidegger never even attempted to work through Lacan’s theory. When Lacan sent him a copy of his Écrits in 1966, Heidegger claimed in response, “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist.”16 Like many of Lacan’s readers, Heidegger couldn’t make head nor tail of the written essays because he did not have the transcripts of the much more intelligible seminars to consult.

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

Even if I consider #LeviStrauss to be the only structuralist & many others would consider #Foucault, #Lacan and #Barthes post-structuralists, we can maybe all agree on the fact that how Henry has portrayed the four men here (in 1967) is brilliant and captures their characters very well #anthropology

Even if I consider #LeviStrauss to be the only structuralist & many others would consider #Foucault, #Lacan and #Barthes post-structuralists, we can maybe all agree on the fact that how Henry has portrayed the four men here (in 1967) is brilliant and captures their characters very well #anthropology

First interpretation of #Palantir 🧵 1. One neuters and defangs animals. To become “pacified” is seen as weak = unnatural. 2. This is about men being afraid of / actively foreclosing (their own) castration. Acc to #Lacan, however, castration is key in becoming a subject in the symbolic order = human.

First interpretation of #Palantir 🧵 1. One neuters and defangs animals. To become “pacified” is seen as weak = unnatural. 2. This is about men being afraid of / actively foreclosing (their own) castration. Acc to #Lacan, however, castration is key in becoming a subject in the symbolic order = human.

Ma récente réflexion sur le concept d'aliénation en #psychanalyse m'a permis de constater que le schéma L de Jacques #lacan sur #wikipedia différait de l'original. J'ai profité de mon dimanche pour proposer une version corrigée du schéma sur #wikimedia en version svg. Apparemment, #mastodon n'accepte pas ce format de graphique pourtant intéressant.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sch%C3%A9ma_L.svg

Ma récente réflexion sur le concept d'aliénation en #psychanalyse m'a permis de constater que le schéma L de Jacques #lacan sur #wikipedia différait de l'original. J'ai profité de mon dimanche pour proposer une version corrigée du schéma sur #wikimedia en version svg. Apparemment, #mastodon n'accepte pas ce format de graphique pourtant intéressant.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sch%C3%A9ma_L.svg

"Truth is the sister of jouissance", said #Lacan (in Miller, « La vie et la vérité », Préliminaire 11, 1999). I feel that more people should know about this coupling that is so evident in Trump's behaviour. Truth, here, is meant as 'naked truth' that is not meant for humans (and even Gods!) to see.

Today is the day I begin reading THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY by Slavoj Žižek.

May any existing gods have mercy on my soul.

😆

#SlavojZizek
#Zizek
#agency
#Hegel
#Lacan
#Marx
#philosophy
#reading
#ILoveBooks

"Les psychanalystes sont les savants d'un savoir dont ils ne peuvent s'entretenir" JAM #Lacan #psychoanalysis

#AI offers replaceable loss that no longer makes a hole in the real. You are nobody‘s lack and that, of course, is a cop-out of life as such … #Lacan www.nlscongress2025.amp-nls.org/blogposts/zo...

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3oezhi4yroqopcpgvjmrzmjx/post/3mi6og7tzm22e

"In the #Lacan /ian orientation an analysis is not a therapy, it is a technique to produce a de-Otherization of the speaking being, and to awaken from the disease that the unconscious is." Véronique Voruz. The end of analysis #psychoanalysis