/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13885877]

Why doesn't /lit/ like Lacan?
I haven't seen one meaningful criticism of him on here yet.

[Anonymous No.13885950]

Philosophically he's offensive because he was a syncretic huckster who shifted his system and ideas around to absorb whatever was popular at the time, and he would speak vaguely enough about his underlying system that he could be infinitely evasive when answering basic questions like whether he thought he was furnishing an actual account of the mind (like Freud did). His own students report this, that he was maddeningly contradictory and even outright dishonest about even his most basic ideas. As he grew older he went outright mad and his followers desperately tried to keep up with it and weave coherent systems around it but the outright crazy stuff is mostly forgotten now.

On a personal level he's offensive because he was a sociopath who ran a cult. It was very definitely a cult. Several deprogrammed Lacanians have written exposés on the movement. In the intellectual atmosphere of the time, there was a lot of excitement about revolutionary methods in the social sciences (like structuralism, which Lacan affected being in conversation with) and in the post-war French "care of the self," to borrow a phrase, so it was easy to amass followers. (Kristin Ross has a good book on this post-war French neoliberalism.) Lacan would aggressively canvas for new followers, often reaching out to ambitious and innovative social scientists, psychologists, even lawyers, and then when they uprooted and moved to work with Lacan, he would switch off the nice guy routine and make them dependent on him financially and professionally, so he could parasitize their special knowledge. The insider descriptions of the inside of his movement are very cult-like, lots of "breaking down and building back up," samokritika (enforced by the infamously cult-prone psychoanalytic ritual of being analyzed before one can become an analyst, a tendency not limited to Lacan's movement of psychoanalysis), bizarre and contradictory instructions, lots of "trust in me; if you don't see the wisdom in what I'm demanding of you, it's your fault" type shit. And of course all the seedy things that go with this sort of cult, run by a sociopath: fucking around with people's wives, extorting money, etc.

Well before his death his star had faded. Even other French intellectuals, innately prone to this sort of guru worship, sensed bullshit and wrote him off as a dangerous quack. With his death, he left behind a sad dwindling cult. He was only revived when hack academics, far enough away from his movement and from the Parisian milieu that they could only form an idealized and simplified version of it ("Lacan is a structural psychoanalyst and a gnomic guru and romantic genius"), shorn of all its seedy aspects and pathetic decay, reduced his non-system to a jargony syncretism of Marxist alienation, the linguistic turn, and a psychoanalytic hermeneutic of suspicion. Other people who don't know who Lacan is go "there goes another jargony pomo scholar" without realizing he's even more fabricated than most.

[Anonymous No.13886010]

>>13885950
good post

[Anonymous No.13886031]

>>13885950
Good post

[Anonymous No.13886032]

>>13885877
I would never take heed of anything spouted by someone so ugly and offensive looking

[Anonymous No.13886044]

>>13885877
Too lazy to look up the quotes but look up Chomsky on post modernism and Chomsky on lacan

[Anonymous No.13886053]

>>13886032
Show face so I can be sure to take heed of this poster

[Anonymous No.13886064]

>>13885877
>>13886044
lmao

[Anonymous No.13886071]

>>13885877
>Why doesn't /lit/ like Lacan?
Ugly feet, small benis

[Anonymous No.13886080]

>>13885950
Bad post

[Anonymous No.13886101]

>>13886080
worse post

[Anonymous No.13886115]

>>13885877
People are buttblasted because he will be the Hegel of the 20th century and their >tfw no gf posts will sink into eternal oblivion.

[Anonymous No.13886125]

>>13885950
Ok post


>>13886101
Bringe bost

[Anonymous No.13886340]

>>13885877
Because it takes a lot of effort reading dense texts just to understand what he is saying. I doubt anyone who is criticizing him have read through both his lectures and ecrits regardless if it's correct or not

[Anonymous No.13886352]

>I wouldn’t want to encourage you to produce the sort of hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of. I’m just surprised that nobody’s pointed out that Ophelia is O Phallos.
>Indeed, the “something rotten” with which poor Hamlet is confronted is most closely connected with the position of the subject with regard to the phallus.
>Claudius’ real phallus is always somewhere in the picutre. What does Hamlet have to reproach his mother for, after all, if not for having filled herself with it?

Okay, this is epic

[Anonymous No.13886384]

>>13885950
prost!
>>13886080
Toast
>>13886101
boast
>>13886125
coast.

[Anonymous No.13886406]

>>13885877
I took a semester long class on just him and his theories and was ready to kill myself by the end. I think I got a B in that class, but fucking hell, what a waste of time.
Other professors teaching the same class (Lit Theory) chose other theorists to focus on and I'm upset I got the shitty psychoanalysis class.

[Anonymous No.13886407]

>>13885950
not a meaningful criticism

[Anonymous No.13886427]

>>13886352
When Lacan said that the doorknob in The Purloined letter represented a penis, I closed the tab and never bothered again

[Anonymous No.13886434]

>>13886427
What does the penis represent?

[Anonymous No.13886437]

>>13885950
Any books on it being a cult? Or any similar academic cults?

[Anonymous No.13886504]

>>13886434
Nothing he said meant or represented anything. It's all made up trash

[Anonymous No.13887589]

>>13885877
He overvalues language (thinks the unconscious is structured like language). Basically one of those people who thinks thought or inspiration is impossible outside language. He also thinks "the Real" is at most a squiggly little afterthought or backwash and that it's only effect if it ever might register or poke through is to 'traumatize' you.

Like every French cunt he just gets way overboard and wants to make super outrageous and memorable grand statements which makes him just wrong and largely useless unless you are in the mood to larp along with his fake little fiction, but fuck that.

[Anonymous No.13887595]

>>13887589
Also, he's a tedious read.

[Anonymous No.13887614]

>>13885950
Bad post.

[Anonymous No.13887618]

>>13885950
Basically every one of these French post-structuralist-y theorists were sociopathic, careerist hucksters acting in bad faith who had creepy little cults around them. They were also literally all pedophiles, although that doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous No.13887623]

>>13885877
any (secondary) literature of Lacan which is more constructive than this book?

[Anonymous No.13887630]

>>13885950
What good ideas did he have?

[Anonymous No.13887798]

>>13887589
This is incorrect. I can tell--I don't need you to tell me otherwise; it's indisputably obvious--that you haven't read much of Lacan.

I'm not picking on you personally, but I can't respond to all these 'takedown posts' so I'll just piggyback on yours.

I fail to believe that anyone who understands his work--which would require a fairly extensive engagement with it--wouldn't find things in it interesting enough to absorb into one's worldview. All these Lacan is X-Y-Z handwaving summations are... I'd say inane but they're just saddening: the pretense and ego associated with dismissing an entire body of work (without even knowing it) is indicative of just how intellectually lost this board is (without even knowing it.)

I wouldn't say I'm a follower of Lacan by any means but it's obvious from the dozen or so things I've read from him he's thoughtful and interesting. And the notion of his irony getting painted as dishonesty is again just deflating--not for me, not for Lacan (for obvious reasons), but for you idiots.

You're all wasting your time thinking you're smarter than everyone else. It may help you get through the day---whatever your social challenges might be, and they're no doubt numerous--but it actually will work against this notion you have of yourselves as original and radical thinkers---the kind who think they know everything from internet summaries yet are themselves poised to shake the world. Try being something (readers, intellectuals...) rather than seeming like something, especially if you're going to base your arrogant attitudes toward the world on that something.

[Anonymous No.13887825]

>>13887798
I actually find a lot of it interesting, and useful as devices to grapple with certain dynamics I fuck with in aesthetics. Similarly I hate Foucault but I can't claim that bits of his thinking doesn't register a little bit in inadvertant shapes some of my thoughts might take here and there or how I might describe something. The influence is just way too pervasive and established, at least from the education I'm coming from, to be completely free of it.

Lacan's stuff with the gaze I have some use for. I suppose I should say that most of the theorists I have some use for. I have a strong bias towards aesthetics though so I'm going to prefer his gaze-y stuff but be a little strong in my criticism of his preference for language. Which is another bias I have that I realize I'm probably a little extreme with, but that I guess is just a product of the perspective I'm native to.

[Anonymous No.13887838]

>>13887825
And I'll add that while I criticized French writers for being a bit overly rhetorical and extreme in their positions, I'm obviously going to have my own biases and strong rhetorical positions I know very well I'm taking. I don't think I'm smarter than everyone, but I've found myself situated in my own time, approaching things from certain angles, and thus have I guess my own imperative just as these pricks did in their day, and everyone should. Not that I think it's just about taking an extreme, stark take for the hell of it; I respect that I am in total ignorance and should endeavor to realize my blindspots, but at the same time, I do have my own work that I do that necessitates that I have to take certain positions at times and draw lines here and there.

[Anonymous No.13887858]

>>13887589
First of all Lacans understanding of language is very broad and not what americans normally think of langauge of words and concepts. For Lacan language consists of chains of signification and the unconscious is an ongoing activity of trying to put meaning onto the world.

Second of all in no way Lacan diminishes the real. His authorship is one long progression from an emphasis on the imaginary, then to the symbolic and lastly to the real. He constantly revised his concepts and in the end emphasised the real.

I'm a psychfag and I spent 3 years trying to understand Lacan. The most meaningful criticsm on him is that when reading him one have simply no way to verify if what he's writing is true or not. Also after all these years i'm not simply sure myself of what he actually says and have great difficulty explaining my friends and family about his theories and i'm by no means an idiot. The scientifical methodological advancement in his writings are indeed obscure. Theres no structure or clear thought progression in his writings.

[Anonymous No.13888902]

>>13887798
>I fail to believe that anyone who understands his work--which would require a fairly extensive engagement with it--wouldn't find things in it interesting enough to absorb into one's worldview.

This is exactly what Lacanians do, an inversion of what Lacan did to his own milieu. There is nothing new in Lacan. It's a re-arranging of post-war French philosophical commonplaces. When one begins to "get" Lacan is exactly when one begins to "get" anything originating from that milieu in general, because it's all shuffling around the same small set of ideas. That doesn't even mean they're bad ideas, but it does mean that systems built on them are fundamentally unoriginal.

If such a system isn't adding anything new at the level of the Grundbegriff, it has to find its justification elsewhere. The justification sought by most Foucauldians and so on is pragmatist: "It helps me think about such-and-such social issue," "it helps us be more mindful of these structures by designating them heuristically," etc. What were Lacan's pragmatic effects? A bunch of broken lives, humiliated people, wasted careers. He didn't even attract devotees because of some special charisma. He attracted people who were looking to become devotees in the first place, and needed someone willing to perform the abusive guru role.

Lacan didn't even leave behind a system like Hegel, of (however successfully) at least earnestly built-up concepts. Hegel was successful because his developments of his contemporaries' ideas and his attempt to weld them all into a system stand on their own, whatever you think of them or him in the final analysis. Lacan left behind a boring medley of psychoanalysis, ideology theory, and linguistic phil. The most "succesful" Lacanians are not Lacanian in the sense of thinking like Lacan, they are simply taking the mushy bag of concepts one can glean from Lacan's scattered writings, drying it out, and artificially articulating it as a system.

At least if they treated his system like a real philosophical anthropology on the order of Hegel or with the balls of Freud, they would be interesting. Instead they take the easy way out and just act like it's an ideal social-theoretical framework, and the next cutting-edge in Marxist critique. 95% of the academics are total dilettantes, deploying a caricature of the "mirror stage" idea with less sophistication than the average Wikipedia-reading shitposter. The remaining 5% are Zizek types, a small cottage-industry of more slightly sophisticated exploiters of the jargon. Heideggerians and even Derrideans are/were everywhere in the academy because Heidegger like Hegel left behind something like a systematic network of well-developed basic ideas. Lacanians can't afford to spread out like this, because there is nothing substantiating them that isn't borrowed from elsewhere, the emperor has no clothes. They are are forced to tighten up into a solipsistic little walled garden and perform obscurantism even harder.

[Anonymous No.13888910]

>>13885877
In order to mount a meaningful criticism, his work would first need to have something meaningful to criticize.

[Anonymous No.13888913]

>>13888902
>I actually find a lot of it interesting, and useful as devices
That's because you're a shitty thinker. Because you read this garbage during your young naive "what does this all mean?" phase, you associate the garbage itself with the gradual enlightenment and clarification you experienced as you gradually got your bearings. You've needlessly associated the concrete, messy content with the abstract universals (general ideas) underlying it and enabling it. Ultimately this is because you've only raised your abstract understanding of the universal content of the texts just to the level that you can unconsciously or semi-consciously wield them, and participate in the performative dance of reading and writing for other middling crit theory dilettantes, and you've gotten distracted by this dance because it has its charms, and stalled at that level forever. You never reached truly universal understanding and made a permanent, self-conscious possession for yourself of the ideas you ultimately work with.

You are every social theory professor or graduate student in every shitty second-rate comp lit department in the world, using "devices" from your "toolkit" of critical theory to "grapple" with texts and phenomena, but never thinking or writing philosophically. If Zizek is the shadow of a philosopher, you're the shadow of Zizek. Instead of writing philosophy and getting at the universal, in one good book that actually engages dialectically with the fundamental concepts of the era, you write 639 books because your vague demi-understanding of the concepts just barely allows you to go "hey... I think I can write some stupid Lacan shit about this children's cartoon......" Of course you can, because the concepts that underlie Lacan are the concepts of the epoch, just as much as the concepts underlying the cartoon are. But instead of realizing this, you just write the 639 books anyway, one after another, and some Foucauldian does the same with Foucault, and etc., etc., until we all have billions of vaguely similar books on vaguely similar topics deploying vaguely similar po-mo theoretical frameworks, diluted to the point that the average idiot American female graduate student can use them and brag about them on Twitter while shaving her head and painting her lips purple (another thing that should tip you off to their dilution and second-rate, second-order status), and nobody even remembers that we were supposed to be doing philosophy, not sitting around grad school or psychoanalytic seminars sipping Starbucks for 8 years vaguely assimilating crit-theory "devices" to put in our "toolkit" so we can enter the raffle to get tenure and wax profound about tampon commericals to a captive audience of another generation of graduate students who will then vaguely assimilate from us how to repeat the process and wax profound to another generation of Starbucks sipping cattle, and so on until time ends.

[Anonymous No.13888919]

>>13888913
>I'm a psychfag and I spent 3 years trying to understand Lacan.
You should read Bourdieu's book on academic discourse. What you did was spend three years learning to perform Lacanian. Any time your Lacanian jargon makes contact with reality or "seems to make sense," it's because it's a second-order derivation of an actual concept, which you've now contributed to burying under whole artificial languages worth of pointless jargon and turned into a lifelong initiatic rite to learn.

I am caricaturing you for the sake of argument so maybe much of what I said doesn't even apply to you. Who knows.

[Anonymous No.13888944]

>>13885950

first post best post

Fuck that french charlatan, I hate how he is so popular now because of sniffman

[Anonymous No.13888984]

>>13887798
Nick?

[Anonymous No.13889690]

bump because there's some interesting conversation here
>>13888910
is that a lil Ibsen apu?

[Anonymous No.13891302]

>>13886064
Daaaamn. Noam Chomsky be a retard!!!

[Anonymous No.13891407]

>>13885950
actually good post.
Although I have no idea whether any of it is true but because I don't like Lacan it fulfills the function of confirming all my biases. Thank you

[Anonymous No.13891416]

>>13885950
This is an epic cope.

[Anonymous No.13891800]

>>13885950
The French are so fucking stupid when it comes to philosophy, of course some motivated hack could make the field into his personal piggy bank.

[Anonymous No.13891804]

>>13886053
In order for him to take heed of your demand you would have to post a picture of yourself first.

[Anonymous No.13891811]

>>13886064
Love Chomsky.

[Anonymous No.13891872]

>>13887858
>The most meaningful criticsm on him is that when reading him one have simply no way to verify if what he's writing is true or not.
And you don't think this sounds like a successful con? Like the guy came up with a system so vague and obscure that it's impossible for him to be wrong (or right) because no one's really sure how to prove it.

[Anonymous No.13891900]

Deleuze is the antidote to this insufferable phallogocentric faggot.

tl;dr signs don't merely dominate the signified, there's a complex back and forth. At the limit, it's impossible to say where one begins and the other ends.


>>13885950
Accurate but kind of surface-level. Lacan is a huckster, most of his output is incoherent, yes, but the central core of his ideology is worth refuting

[Anonymous No.13891909]

>>13888919
>You should read Bourdieu's book on academic discourse.
An empirical work, but not the best of Bourdieu or the class of thought. This is a book that you can complete in a single sitting for the wrong reasons -- it has hardly much to offer you. The book consists of a set of empirical studies and was written much before Bourdieu's other works, but was introduced to English readers much later than his better works.

The book shows how the education system rewards certain kinds of articulations which subscribe to its jargon and rejects points of view differently articulated (either in terms of the language of articulation or the content of articulation).

The insights of the books are a pre-cursor to Bourdieu's educational masterpiece 'Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture', which exposed the mechanisms of power that operate in determining educational oppurtunities and rewards.

This particular book, however, pales in comaprison to the writer's later work and the monumental work of Basil Bernstein (Class, Codes and Control, 3 vols.) who preceded Bourdieu and inspired him.

The biggest weakness of the book perhaps is that it is empiricism in the way the French do it, rather than the way Germans or Anglo-Saxons do it. It is more journalistic than based on rigor of method. The questionnaires administered are lop-sided. Statistical quality control is almost absent.

This is not to deny that it offers insights of value. But it is preferable to seek the insights in Bourdieu's more mature works, rather than spend the same amount of time over this half-way house of poor empiricism and weakly articulated theory.

[Anonymous No.13891936]

>another Lacan thread hystericises /lit/
How does he do it, boys?

[Anonymous No.13891966]

>>13891900
Lacanian faggot here. Yes. Even I must admit I love Deleuze. Logic of Sense is incredible.

[Anonymous No.13892026]

>>13891966
They're incompatible

[Anonymous No.13892063]

>>13892026
There's books on Lacan and Deleuze out. Even Hegel and Deleuze. Nothing personnel kid

[Anonymous No.13892095]

>>13892063
There's books on Lacan and Deleuze? So what? They're incompatible. Deleuze casually disassembles Lacan in Anti-Oedipus.

>Hegel and Deleuze
now that's just embarrassing

[Anonymous No.13892262]

>>13886032
He's good looking by any standard

[Anonymous No.13892283]

>>13888944
Sniffman is based tho

[Anonymous No.13892305]

>>13891900
Why do you expect any sufficient refutation when it is an ideology?

[Anonymous No.13892314]

>>13885877
lol! toasting in another epic sunhock thread! archive quick!

[Anonymous No.13892444]

>>13891966
Lacan himself has praised “Logic of Sense” in the 16th seminar

[Anonymous No.13892468]

>>13892095
Deleuze often talks positively about Lacan in “Anti-Oedipus” if you read it carefully. For example, he praises him for paving the road to the understanding of desire as a self-producing phenomenon which isn’t dependent on lack. There are other reasons why it is simplistic to view “Anti-Oedipus” as an “anti-Lacan” book, but I’m currently too lazy to go into such details.

[Anonymous No.13892530]

>>13885950
Considering that Lacan claimed that the big Other does not exist (5th seminar), that there is no metalanguage (12th seminar), that the desire of the analyst is the desire for absolute difference (11th seminar), that the discourse of the analyst is opposed to the discourse of the master (17th seminar), it’s hard to view his works as supportive of dogmatism

[Anonymous No.13892969]

Because no one who criticizes him has actually engaged in his work

[Anonymous No.13892980]

>>13891804
His post is self unheeding, it would initially have to be posted with a accompanied picture of his face.

[Anonymous No.13893132]

>>13888919
Me (the psychfag) and that other guy is not the same dude.

[Anonymous No.13893141]

>>13885877
Freud is a fraud, but Lacan is lacking.

[Anonymous No.13893201]

>>13885877
>I haven't seen one meaningful criticism of him on here yet.
>>13892969
> Because no one who criticizes him has actually engaged in his work

[Anonymous No.13893323]

>>13885950
good post ,

[Anonymous No.13893344]

>>13885950
/thread

we can lay Lacan to rest now. Any future references to him posted in the future should be shown this as so not to waste anymore time