Back to Lacan in a Turtleneck

I thought about taking up tobacco smoking in pipes as a really nasty introduction to writing about Lacan, but this special effect was beyond
even my resolute epic-defending spirit.

Anyway, I did find a turtleneck thing and I really think I will don the cultural thing and speak ex turtlenecki quite soon.

Anyway, lo, I went unto the modest library of the local agriculture and mining school (don't try this "lo, I went unto" at home; I warn you I am Christian in Name only and the things I do that don't offend God would keep a good person in hell for a few years). And I said unto myself: where is the Lacan? Well he is in the library of Congress BFs ( perhaps why BF skinner became so psychological)!

Sure enough in the books about Lacan, there are many unposted letters, notes, subway schedules, directions to addresses and even notations of assignations gone awry (the floor in the stacks was literally covered with bits of undelivered correspondence and sad dribs and drabs of written despair -- I carefully put it all back in the books into which it had vanished over the last few years): never believe for a moment the letter always arrives! Very odd. I have found many odd things in books but the amount of left-behind correspondence in the Lacan books was....well...pretty darned symptomatic.

People have seemingly been very industrious in getting the peri-Lacanian oeuvre assembled, though the article I've always wanted to see (about the sandy Lacanian boy obsesssed with unicorns at the beach, circa 1964: "Phillipe, j'ai soif") is still nowhere to be found....no indeed...nowadays things are just plain pop culture and Slavoj Z^inverted iz^invertedEK's Enjoy your Symptom looks marvelous. Must read it soon.

Tobacco!

ColoradoGuy said:

I'm not sure that's tobacco in that pipe of yours.

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I keep specifying tobacco. And I haven't even smoked any pipes at all (if you believe my accounts of my whos-a-writer and Lacanian activities)...

I don't know how I could have specified tobacco more often.

Are we Post-Oedipal online?

ColoradoGuy said:

Okay, okay -- tobacco. I was just wondering.

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I have the turtleneck on and:

In Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory vol III (ed. Slavo Zizek)..The last article (by Jerry Aline Fleiger): "Is Oedipus Online?" refutes the ideas of Braudillard and others who have suggested that the online world or the virtual worlds that are online have no signs in them of any unconscious processes; the simulacrum conflates the Lacanian categories of the Symbolic the imaginary and the Real.

Or maybe not, the ideas of Braudrillard and others are merely declared to be "paranoid" and then the author redefines paranoia. A bad article, but then how good were online virtual worlds in 1997? Apparently they weren't up to full Freudian standards.

Braudrillard

ColoradoGuy said:

Yes, many think Braudillard is silly. Certainly many of his pronouncements are over the top. On the other hand, I do find his ideas interesting. I have heard his notions about simulacra compared to Taco Bell: these missionoid-style buildings everywhere stand in for an original Taco Bell building that exists nowhere. So the simulacrum represents a thing that does not exist and never has existed.

Historial romance writers often do much the same thing: they present a simulacrum of life in a world that never existed. Hey, maybe we should do a thread about that.

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I haven't read much Braudrillard. He doesn't seem particularly silly to me, but then I'm only gradually revisiting the field of culture studies and I may be in for a rude shock.

Lacan and his interpreters seem even less lucid than I remember. Maybe the only definitely good thing to say is that, since he is in some way based on Levi-Strauss, maybe he is more of a structuralist than a post-structuralist. Certainly that was one of the classic pomo takes on Lacan.

Just Stumbled across Zizek

Susan B said:

Just watched the film "Zizek!" (Mostly because of the Slovenian angle, I'll confess). Pretty wild, both funny and hard to follow. Included some film clips of Lacan....

Susan

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All of the sudden he is turning up everywhere amongst the reading of my acquiantances. He is fun to read for a while, but I've found him somewhat confusing on the topic of explaining what Lacan was saying.

I've had better luck with Bruce Fink as an elucidator of Lacan. Not as much of a impresario, but perhaps more coherent overall. For example The Lacanian Subject, Princeton, 1995. He seems to get Lacan's idea of the Real under control, which is a pleasant surprise.

Braudrillard is apparently dead

ColoradoGuy said:

Yes, many think Braudillard is silly.

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Alas! He seems to have died recently. Apparently, elucidating the Matrix movies was too much for him.

Why worry?

ColoradoGuy said:

Perhaps it is only of simulacrum of death.

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He's just in a bathtub nailed to a giant thing like everybody else in the Matrix.