#lacan — Public Fediverse posts

#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

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.

...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)…

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

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

@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

#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

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

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

"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...

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.

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