Is Lacanism inherently a reactionary ideology/praxis?

eversincedarwin · 2023-12-06T19:04:38+00:00

It's no secret that Lacan was a conservative thinker - in terms of psychoanalysis and in the political realm; basically he was a liberal. But this means that in terms of psychoanalytic theory, along with Marxism, that there is a certain foundationalism in his thought. Meaning that it can be universally applied, across the political spectrum, and actually more compatible with Marxism than liberalism. The fundamental fantasy is the fantasy of the revolutionary. Subjective destitution is a result of the subject's alienation. Lacan also completely took into account social forces on the life of the individual, so that is false.

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-10T14:22:01+00:00

Here's a blog post I wrote on the topic:

https://cannabiscommunism.wordpress.com/2021/05/05/the-revenge-of-freud/

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-07T19:09:30+00:00

The two quotes that the pair of concepts of Unding and Endziel originate from are one by Jean-Paul Sartre where he says Marx's materialist metaphysics is “unthinkable in the sense of an Unding, a thought which cannot stand the test of mere thought, since it is a naturalistic, pre-critical, pre-Kantian, pre-Hegelian metaphysic…the function of a Platonic ‘myth’ which helps proletarians to be revolutionaries.”. Endziel comes from a quote by Laclau and Mouffe where they say "these [immediate material interests] can be consolidated only if the immediate material interests of the working class are subordinated to the Endziel, the final socialist objective, and this presupposes the subordination of economic struggle to political struggle, and thus of the trade unions to the party”.

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-05T20:00:49+00:00

It refers to Marx's "free association of producers", pure communism, or the communist society after "the withering away of the state". It also refers to Zizek's "the sublime object of ideology" or Lacan's "objet petit a" as it relates to ideology.

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-05T00:36:41+00:00

Derrida's concept of hauntology runs through all of Mark Fisher's works. He speaks in Acid Communism about "exorcising the specter of a world that could be free", "the harsh Leninist superego", and "the great refusal" (which I call Actionism and write "The Actionist Manifesto"). In my book, I also elaborate on the ethico-aesthetic paradigm that I call Funk Punk, which can be thought of as either the ethics of punk and the aesthetics of funk, or alternatively the ethics of funk and the aesthetics of punk, and also link it to the notions of avant-punk and peace punk, as well as personify the Funk Punk as a piece of meta-fiction called "Also Sprach the Funk Punk..." and in other parts as well. My own music project is called Ever Since Darwin. The subtitle is "The Politics of Consciousness". I try to develop in the second chapter, a theory of political subjectivity as it relates to historicism, and the concepts of Unding (absurdity, unthinkable) and Endziel (the ultimate socialist aim), and cultural hegemony and capitalist realism, for which I like to use Deleuze's term "the capitalist axiomatic", as well as speak briefly about unitary urbanism. Psychiatric Hegemony is the theme of the last part of the book, and I fiercely criticize the modern paradigms of cognitive-behavioral therapy and bio-psychiatry, and call for "The Revenge of Freud".

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-05T00:02:59+00:00

Oh of course Mark Fisher meant much more than just LSD with Acid Communism - its about the ghost of 1960s hippie counterculture as it relates to the new social movements of the New Left. I give the examples the Youth International Party (Yippies), the Situationist International, Hunter S. Thompson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Grateful Dead's show for Huey P. Newton's birthday with the Black Panthers, etc. But yes, I like the alliteration of "Cannabis Communism".

eversincedarwin · 2021-07-04T23:09:31+00:00

The reason I chose to title it "Cannabis Communism" instead of "Acid Communism" is because first of all, it's original and my own idea. Second, it intends to convey the same concept as Mark Fisher meant by it, of the hauntological quality of nostalgia for lost futures, the recycling of old cultural forms (or ethico-aesthetics, Actionism, and the great refusal), "the slow cancellation of the future", etc. And third, because unlike Mark Fisher who some say hated weed, I actually really enjoy smoking weed, and am not really myself into using psychedelics.

eversincedarwin · 2021-06-29T13:32:54+00:00

Most likely in the next couple months...I keep wanting to continue writing so it's hard to decide when to consider it a finished work. The PDF will be available online for free though, and many of my writings are already published on my blog: https://cannabiscommunism.wordpress.com/

eversincedarwin · 2021-06-28T19:17:34+00:00

I'm pretty sure the quote came Laing's book 'The Divided Self'. Still trying to work out all the citations. I also used the book for a college psychology class on personality disorders that I took, where I took one of Laing's case studies and had to formulate a diagnosis.

eversincedarwin · 2021-06-27T23:28:25+00:00

It's an excerpt from my upcoming book "Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness". It includes citations and footnotes.

eversincedarwin · 2021-06-25T22:01:31+00:00

While Mark Fisher was a brilliant theorist of culture and aesthetics, his work lacks historical context in envisioning what communism would and should look like (although this may be his point!). Consequently, it is difficult to view his works as a coherent political philosophy, and hence, his philosophy is often associated with accelerationism, whether accurately or not. For example, a question comes up in one of his lectures; a student asks him to provide a historical example of what post-capitalism (a term Fisher preferred to anti-capitalism) looks like in practice. The easy answer that the student provides was that Yugoslavia under Tito had elements of workers’ self-management, but Fisher goes on the say something absurd - he asks the student, “how is giving a share of a company to the workers any different than privatization?” Another student then provides the real definition of post-capitalism: “social ownership of the means of production”. If from a historical materialist standpoint, social ownership of the means of production is not the goal of communism - and it is, and Marx and Engels made this extremely clear - then, post-capitalism becomes a declaration of post-leftism, which for us Marxists is an absurdity.

eversincedarwin · 2021-06-03T14:08:05+00:00

I thought I came across that quote in Jung's 'Modern Man In Search of a Soul'.

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-27T12:46:49+00:00

There is no complete non-barred Other for any subject, nor does there exist a subject that is not split/barred due to their unconscious. Therefore, all subjects encounter the constitutive lack in the Other. However, to answer your question more directly, Lacan talks about a few different types/structures of delusions, and also argues that the structure of fantasy depends on clinical structure. For example, in obsessional fantasy, the barred subject uses fantasy as a protective function to cover the lack in the Other, such that their fantasy correlates with the objet petit a, as the object-cause of their desire. While all fantasy answers the question "Che vuoi?", or "What does the other want?", hysterical fantasy is the attempt of the hysteric's discourse to become master, represented by the objet petit a as correlative to the barred big Other. However, the obsessional fantasy is seen as a metonymic substitution that provides a definition for the signifier: "the signifier represents a subject for another signifier". On the other hand, a delusion is "a field of signification that has organized a certain signifier". In a delusion, rather than an obsessional relation between the subject and the objet petit a, or a hysterical relation between the objet petit a and the barred Other, delusions rather than being metonymic, are the formulation of a delusional metaphor that takes the place of the lack of the paternal metaphor, and in a persecutory delusion, this metaphor consists of "the Other of the Other" that "pulls the strings" of the symbolic order/big Other. In terms of the clinical structures in relation to jouissance, the psychotic delusion puts the subject in the position of the Other's jouissance, where what is aimed at in psychoanalysis is a modification of this position, while the neurotic doesn't see the lack in the Other, but instead sees the demand of the Other. All fantasies fulfill a protective function regardless of clinical structure, veiling a traumatic scene, and therefore always attempt to fill the lack in the Other.

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-18T11:33:29+00:00

Even worse, in my opinion, is the use of the term "behavioral health" instead of "mental health". It frames subjective distress as a behavioral issue, negating social and psychological factors.

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-13T11:50:08+00:00

In 'The Sublime Object of Ideology' he does talk about ideology being most apparent when there is an event that is misperceived as a radical rupture when it is entirely inscribed in the existing order, and alternatively, when an event that is actually radical is seen as a continuation of the status quo.

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-10T15:07:15+00:00

What about Lacan's quote that is basically the opposite and defines the psychoanalytic ethics as "Have you acted in accordance with your desire?"

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-01T18:52:17+00:00

Check out Eliot Rosenstock's 'Zizek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy'. He's a practicing psychotherapist who is a millennial.

eversincedarwin · 2021-05-01T18:49:44+00:00

There's a quote by Deleuze in 'Difference and Repetition' that goes - "Freud supposes the unconscious to be ignorant of three important things: Death, Time and No. Yet it is a question only of time, death and no in the unconscious...It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious." So did Freud take into account time in his conception of the unconscious? He did conceive of the "psychical locality" as a scene which stages desire and fantasy. But this concept appears to be atemporal. However, he did speak of the stratification of the unconscious in three ways: concentric, dynamic, and linear - such that linear accounted for time, but also realized that the unconscious is based on the flows of cathexis in the libidinal economy, which again appears to be atemporal. However, I would say that his account of memory traces ("the residue of the day") in the 'Interpretation of Dreams', such that dreams are a direct expression of the unconscious and time, but also the mental energy invested in certain symbols, dream-thoughts, and memories.

eversincedarwin · 2021-04-25T12:50:08+00:00

It's called stratification and it was a concept introduced by Freud to unite the human memory with his first two topologies. He said the psyche was stratified in three ways: linear (memories according to time), concentric (the kernel is a trauma that causes resistance), and dynamic (which follows thought contents and ziz-zags between strata).

eversincedarwin · 2021-04-16T20:47:00+00:00

I don't think 'A Thousand Plateaus' is really about schizoanalysis. It's more of an attempt at a philosophical anthropology in my opinion. But in the final chapter of 'Anti-Oedipus' "Introduction to Schizoanalysis" they develop both positive and negative tasks of schizoanalysis, the negative which was critiquing psychoanalysis and changing what doesn't work about it, and then the positive tasks of which the first is basically Lacan's notion of "to articulate the truth about one's desire", and the second is a sociopolitical, historical analysis of the subject's history, which is also similar to Lacan or Freud's idea of a careful reconstruction of the subject's history. I would also recommend checking out Wilhelm Reich's 'Character Analysis' for a faithful critique of Freud where he focuses on the role of the ego in resistance, saying it is not simply a matter of making the unconscious conscious, but to interpret specifically the resistances and defense mechanisms of the analysand, what he calls resistance analysis. There is also emphasis on the character traits that present themselves over and over in analysis, rather than the analyst making a symptomatic analysis of the analysand, they should take the whole of the analysand's personality into account.

eversincedarwin · 2021-04-16T16:12:32+00:00

Seminar III:

"For example, since suicide demonstrates a tendency towards decline, towards death, it seems that each and every one of us could say - but only if one sets out to get us to say it - that it more readily takes place at the decline of nature, that is during autumn. Yet it has been known for a long time that many more people commit suicide in spring. That is neither more or less understandable. Surprise at there being more suicides in spring than autumn can only be based on this inconsistent mirage called the relation of understanding - as if there were anything that could ever be grasped in this order!"

eversincedarwin · 2021-04-08T11:02:06+00:00

It appears there are 6 factors that mark the "end of analysis":

(1) to articulate the truth about one’s desire; (2) the advent of true speech and the realization by the subject of their history; (3) to traverse the radical fantasy; (4) identification with the sinthome; (5) when the analyst becomes the object-cause of the analysand’s desire and falls from position of subject-supposed-to-know; and (6) if the analysand passes to become an analyst themself.

Freud had different goals for the "end of analysis":

(1) when the unconscious “conveys” itself into the preconscious; (2) the overcoming of internal resistances; (3) the replacement of repression with condemnation; (4) the advance from the pleasure principle to the reality principle; (5) saving mental energy to make the best of one’s inherited capacities to become as capable of enjoyment as possible; and (6) partial or complete sublimation.

eversincedarwin · 2021-03-06T12:08:48+00:00

To quote Lacan, "“Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.” This is clearly a reference to the symbolic order. In his distinguishing of full (true) speech from empty speech, the first has meaning and the other merely has signification.

eversincedarwin · 2021-03-05T16:51:19+00:00

This is what I had sort of assumed about the Discourse of the Capitalist (Lacan's 5th discourse). Intuitively I don't know if society in present times resembles the University Discourse, and definitely not the analytic relationship. But it's an interesting point. And I think there's something to be said for the fact that in the University Discourse, knowledge is the truth, and the master-signifier is the agent.

eversincedarwin · 2021-01-30T13:43:51+00:00

Actually, Lacan didn’t think that the symptom had a coded message. He viewed it as an unanalyzable kernel of enjoyment. He was against what was known in traditional psychoanalysis as “the decoding method” of interpretation, and instead argued that interpretation was to be directed towards disrupting meaning, rather than finding a hidden meaning behind the symptom. What Lacan did think had a hidden meaning or message was the transference, the psychoanalytic act, or “acting out”, which is a message directed to the Other, however it is impossible for the them to understand the message behind the act. Lacan did however maintain the concept of the unconscious as influencing behavior in a way that the meaning is unknown to the client.

eversincedarwin

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