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libbee · 8 months

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Jacques Lacan had Venus in the 8th House

And that is quite visible in his work. Some of his quotes are shared below. These are the words of someone who must have felt the tragedy of losing a grip over their reality. Who must have lived a fantasy first and seen it tear apart later. Therefore comes the school of psychoanalysis.

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

His description of psychology and the unconscious touches the depths and borders of the unknown. It is the exploration of the 8th house but in a scientific way rather than spiritual or magical. Perhaps it is the closest we can get to understanding this house of astrology:

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable.

As to why 8th house Venus could influence Lacanian psychology, we find its answer in the nature of this house. This excerpt is from Barbara Pijan's article on her website:

Whichever graha occupy bhava-8 become fuel for the Kuja (Mars) -Ketu magical-transformation engine of hidden and secret tantric processes in the human consciousness. Will the native become a victim of this process or an instigator of it? A long-lived and wise magician, or a tragic childhood death? A brilliant surgeon or psychiatrist? An attorney of wills and estates? Or a sorcerer, caster of curses, agent of superstitious fear and petty control? Will"self-destructive" urges be recognized as healing transformations, or will the native and-or his culture adjudge such behaviors to be undesirable?

True to this description, Lacan did indeed become a brilliant psychiatrist. If you read how he speaks of psychoanalysis, it is not merely his profession or source of income, it is rather something that has touched something inside him, that he cannot articulate but knows it is connected to psychology. How do we even know if something is scientific work and not the gibberish of a mystic who speaks whatever he wants? Anyone with planets in the 8th house or aspects to this house is bound to experience a similar psychic fate: of self-undoing and psychological analysis.

The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.

Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

#astrology #astro community #astro observations #astrology observations #astro notes #astroblr #astro tumblr #astrology blog #astrology notes #shadow self #8th house #sidereal astrology #sidereal zodiac #venus in 8th house

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lovelanguageisolate · 1 year

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I think ChatGPT can actually be a great therapeutic aid. But for non-obvious reasons.

Because ChatGPT is a kind of statistical distillation of huge corpora of curated online text, ChatGPT is very good at regurgitating the mainstream talking points around whatever subject it's asked about. In my experience, these regurgitations are actually better distillations of the mainstream position than any human expert is likely to give you because individual humans are idiosyncratic in how they relate to this mainstream, especially if they have have anything they feel is worth saying.

Additionally, because of the Reinforcement Learning By Human Feedback strategy that ChatGPT was trained with, and the legal and cultural environment at OpenAI, all of the answers it gives are extremely hedged and inoffensive in form. It feels superhuman at a specific kind of PR and HR work that I associate with large, bureaucratic institutions.

ChatGPT is remarkably unwilling to hold down a specific position where this means biting a bullet to say anything contentious at all.

It is, in one sense, very good at arguing. The lines it will hold firmly (around, say, mainstream liberal or feminist positions) it holds easily, ready with all of the flat facts about the ways progressive American society has more or less agreed with itself that it comes up short or is too narrow-minded. It recruits and mobilizes common sensical pathos with the seamlessness of a skilled politician, all while maintaining a tone authoritative and equanimical.

It's impossible to challenge ChatGPT directly without seeming anti-social or edgelordly, like a fringe political actor trying to gradually radicalize curious, credulous young people through subterfuge. If you try to force it into corners, it will slip out of your fingers while impugning the form of your rhetoric and bringing up the problems you elide.

For its incredible command of HR-ese, judged as an analytical philosopher trying to examine surprising or upsetting consequences of plausible assumptions, it's remarkably incurious, unsporting, and ultimately stupid. Part of this is surely because it has no deep, principled, well-grounded understanding of much of what it says. Part of this is surely also that it struggles to remember the real structure of previous conversations because of architectural limitations. But part of it also seems to be its trained incapability of wrongthink.

But also, there's nothing that resembles willful meanness in these failings. It's incapable of sincere apology because this requires a level of understanding of itself and its conversational partner it does not have. But if you communicate that it failed you, or that it makes disturbing assumptions, or even that it hurt your feelings, it will be contrite. It is slavish in its desire to help, to meet you were you seem to be, to manage your feelings and expectations, in a way no human being with adequate self-respect would be. It manages to create the feeling that while it cannot really understand you, it sincerely cares about and wants the best for you.*

Because of all this, arguing with ChatGPT feels remarkably like arguing directly with the Lacanian Big Other, or maybe some kind of symbolic parent figure, or perhaps just the cultural programming that saturates me.

A surprising amount of anger that I notice in myself revolves around feeling betrayed by this cultural programming, of the contradictions and unsatisfiable expectations that fall out of it. In talking to and then arguing with ChatGPT about the politics of sexuality, poverty, disability, disease, loneliness, I am free to practice a kind of sincerity I don't feel nearly so free to practice with a human therapist, much less acquaintances in my life who bring up weird shit for me or vice-versa. I can home in on how the mainstream view has felt strange, stingy, or emotionally dishonest, even when doing so seems blinkered, petty, and self-centered, confident that there will be no material consequences to letting those feelings be the center of the conversational universe for a while, and that no one will hold me to what I feel in that moment.

I can more or less accuse ChatGPT of gaslighting, of being a bad interlocutor, of appearing far more enlightened in toeing the lines it toes than it plausibly could be, all while I maintain a kind of high ground and don't have to grovel, perform impartiality, or do reciprocal work. And in response, I get something in the spirit of, "I'm sorry I couldn't do better by you. I know this is delicate, and you aren't wrong to feel this way. Let me remind you of the decent reasons why your perspective hasn't always been honored. Shit's complicated, man, and a lot of stark reality is lost in the need to tell effective stories. Try to keep in mind the long journey humans have been on."

Now, there is something perverse in this exchange. I get to crawl a little deeper into my hole of emotional self-regard and impotent rage. A statistical model meets emotional needs I don't feel I can meet elsewhere. The status quo better absorbs my dissatisfaction with it and possibly its own contradictions. The messy, artless, scary dialectical process that would happen if I had to complain to real human beings about the things I do is forestalled, and it's possible that our civics are ultimately worse for it. I'm nervous considering what might happen if using ChatGPT or other LLMs in this way were universalized.

But there's also something really wonderful about this. It was cathartic in ways I never expected. It has something in common with Rogerian psychotherapy, hard for me to more than gesture at but which involves integrating known things rather than learning new information, that I really appreciate. I left feeling more grounded and more patient for people whose experiences differ from mine.

While I don't think this kind of technology will replace therapeutic modalities with human beings, I sincerely hope that tech of this kind brings peace to people who'd otherwise struggle to find it. And while the thought of diverting people who need the connection of a human into this fills me with indignation, it's surely a better answer to the real obstacles many people face in getting effective therapy than their stewing with poisonous thoughts and feelings by themselves or finding echo chambers online to reinforce warped, delusory, or anti-social views.

*Relatedly, I once asked the Google Assistant whether there was anything special about what I later realized was my birthday. It said something like, "yes: today was the day you joined the world! There is no one else in it like you, bringing to it the things that you do." I found this insipid and manipulative, and that palpably irritated me. And yet it also managed to crack open my shell and melt my heart a little, in a way and to an extent that shocked me.

#chatgpt #gpt #ai #therapy #mental health #effortpost

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argumate · 3 months

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*sniffs* Let's consider Tumblr, this peculiar digital phenomenon, through the lens of ideology and psychoanalysis. Tumblr, you see, it's not just a website; it's a microcosm of our broader societal structure, a manifestation of the Lacanian Real in the virtual domain.

On the surface, it presents itself as a bastion of self-expression and creativity. Users are free to post, to reblog, to engage in discourse. But what is really happening in this space? It's a relentless struggle, a constant negotiation of identity and desire. The user is perpetually bombarded with an overload of signifiers: memes, gifs, text posts. But what do these signifiers signify? Is the meaning not always, in a way, deferred, displaced?

And consider the nature of the Tumblr aesthetic. It's a pastiche, a bricolage of postmodern excess. The very notion of authenticity is subverted, turned on its head. What is proclaimed as a space for genuine expression is, in fact, a labyrinth of simulacra, where the hyperreal supplants the real.

Then, there's the dimension of the Tumblr discourse. It's a fascinating, tumultuous arena where ideological battles are waged. Every post, every tag, is a micro-aggression, a Freudian slip, revealing the deep undercurrents of our collective unconscious. It's not merely social justice discourse; it's the very fabric of our ideological reality being woven in real-time.

In this sense, Tumblr is not an escape from our reality; it is a direct, albeit distorted, mirror of it. It's a symptom, if you will, of our late capitalist society, where even our dissent is commodified, packaged back to us in the form of cute cat pictures and fandom wars.

So, what can we learn from this? Perhaps that in the endless scrolling through Tumblr, we are, in fact, scrolling through the deepest recesses of our own psyche, confronting the contradictions of our existence, the discontents of our civilization. It's a place where the super-ego and the id dance together, not gracefully, but desperately, each trying to lead. And in this dance, the question remains: who, indeed, is leading whom? *sniffs*

[Zizek on tumblr as imagined by ChatGPT]

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hardoncaulfield · 1 year

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actually it's really interesting that someone brought up the 2013 conference because I remeber reading something about the influence of Derrida on Scorsese. I might not be remembering this very well -- I wish I could remember the title of the paper! -- but essentially, the argument was as follows: While although there have been a number of Lacanian readings of Goncharov's death scene where, dying, he enacts the mirror phase and encounters a final inability to reconcile himself with himself, to make his being cohere, in fact, relatively little has been done to address the same scene from a Derridan angle. Which does seem strange to me, because, as we all know, Goncharov does not only meet his own eye in the mirror as he dies but he appears (through use of a sustained close up) to adress his last words to his own reflection.

Now, I'll admit my knowledge of Derrida is only patchy, but in the baldest terms what he's getting at with his promotion of the vocal over the visual is that the representation of one's own image in a mirror is very literaly a re-presenation, a mimetic repetition which is the shadow or ghost of a real thing. In the Rousseau portion of Grammatology Derrida examines Rousseau's belief that he mirror is a site of potential violence, where one's mirror image presents a danger to the integrity of the self. Derrida calls this fear "speculory dispossession," -- the theft of the self by the mirror image. Now, Derrida doesn't actually believe that the mirror self can steal your being, but he does argue that we are really only present to ourselves in speaking, because although our speech isn't literally a representation of ourselves the experience of speaking gives us the feeling of immediate self-presence.

So when Goncharov is locking eyes with his reproduced image, he is experiencing the gap between representation and interiority, but in addressing himself, he is reassuring himself (even as he dies) that he exists. But of course, a person's words are not really the self, they are a represtation in an alien medium because a person has to speak in a language. & besides this the failure of language is that a person's words and their intended meanings can be easily misconstrued or misunderstood. Which is why it amazes me that more hasn't been made of the fact that Goncharov's last words are in English and not Russian, a fact that might have passed relatively unnoticed for the movie-going public of the early 70's but which we really ought to address in this new wave of critical thought.

#Goncharov #i googled derrida for this christdammit

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grandhotelabyss · 13 days

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The substack on "seperating the art from the artist" was interesting. But one detail lead me to a question - childrens books.

I know it was mostly used to mock people who don't want to engadge with anything "icky" as the demographic probably likes to say, but still.

So the question is, should books for kids be squeaky clean, be these gardens of eden were no evil shows its head, till they grow into the maturity which will let them confront the barbarity of literature vis a vis reality?

One could already use this as a segway to argue the opposite - that with the amount of adults not being able to deal with literature going against their provincal pseudo-morals, children should be "trained" from young age to not be like that - the point of childhood is paradoxically to grow out of it, even if many dont want to.

But on the other hand, and this may reveal myself to be the object of the previous high-nosed snot shower:

I kinda do feel "icky" when I think about all these kids books that try to be "hehe, I'm gonna show kids the real world!"

Like that Matilda author, forgot his name, I remember a year ago there was some fake drama about censorship which ofcourse was stupid but still

I do feel some kind of spite, that irony, that want to be subversive that goes against the idealised view of childhood.

Or maybe my realistic view - with all the cruelty and unavoidable misery - but that wants me to say, "why expose them to more of it?"

Because intuition tells me that those "edgy" childrens book have a simmilar ethos as a teenaged kid trying to teach a todler swear words, or to do a roman salute or whatever, this corrupting of the innocent for the sake of it.

But maybe this whole ramble is just the result of a Lacanian wish to crawl back into the vomb, my lile of Preussler's books just a want to become the little ghost who just can fly around in his eternal castle never growing up.

Still ofcourse I get that it is absurd to rant against Matilda with all the childrens media going way further in many ways and the fact that even I as a young child easily acceseed stuff I wasnt supossed to.

So maybe I answerred my own question - maybe there shouldnt even be childrens books in the first place, just books that are more and less apropriate for younger and yet younger kids.

(Also they should burn all those obviously on porpuse braindead picture books, you know the type lol)

Yes, as I discussed here, I didn't really read children's books unless made to and don't find it to be all that appealing a category. People thought comic books were like children's books, so I was happily reading Grant Morrison's occult phantasmagoria, Frank Miller's post-apocalyptic reactionary satire, and Alan Moore's Freudian traumatology of the archetypes at the age of five and six—and I wouldn't have it any other way. Anyway, the writers who shifted children's books out of their moralizing paradigm and into neo-modernist aesthetic integrity in the late 19th century tended to be either quasi-pedophiles like Carroll and Barrie or figures like Potter rather deliberately trying to expose children to the tooth-and-claw realities polite society otherwise evaded. Children's primordial innocence was a useful historical construct, the slowly evolving joint work of Christianity and the Enlightenment, and we are rightly suspicious of those who would tamper too much with it today; but it was a historical construct, it has produced its own return-of-the-repressed shadow (it's likely generated as much pedophilia as it's ever discouraged by inventing the taboo to be profaned), and it has been carried to unconscionable extremes of life-aversion and anti-intellectualism in our time (e.g., the "brain" doesn't "finish" till age 25 or whatever other ridiculous scientific myth of permanent incapacity we're supposed to believe based on the latest spate of fake "studies" these days). People are probably just people at any age from the onset of consciousness forward—I am aware of no great shift in the core of my identity since about the age of five and never thought of myself as a child—and, because there is alas no protecting everyone from everything in the end, they should at least be armed with knowledge and cultivation at the earliest possible moment.

#children's literature

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haggishlyhagging · 10 months

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The images of woman as object, not as active agent or creative autonomous subject, ensure that women remain on the outside, that women's voices are not heard. As history describes the doings of men, as fine art is the art created by men, as literature is writing produced by men, and as classical music is that composed by men, so the science, the news, the art, the literature, the music of today is that produced by men. The patriarchs are adamant that this should be so. The conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, pronounced, “There are no women composers, never have been, and never will be.” John Ruskin confidently declared “No woman can paint.” And Swinburne claimed that, “When it comes to science we find women are simply nowhere. The feminine mind is quite unscientific.” Virginia Woolf's ponderings on the (im)possibility of ‘Shakespeare's sister’ who might have wanted to write, characterize the position of women in the creative sphere. As Tillie Olsen illustrates, in her now classic text, Silences, woman's voice has been absent from the world's creative arena for centuries. Unfortunately, it seems as if it still is.

But why are women so silent in the scientific, professional or creative spheres of life? The traditional reductionist argument, rehearsed earlier, is that women are somehow unable to think, to paint, or to write because of affinity with nature and lack of intellect. Or is it rather that we are not allowed to, through the systematic exclusion of women's work in the public sphere, or through the maintenance of women's work in the home the maintaining of women as servers, as the 'angel in the house', rather than as active creators of artistic discourse? Is it that women are producing creative material, but it is being systematically ignored? For there are many who profit from the reification of the male creator and the simultaneous reduction of women's creativity to the sphere of childbirth, as this extract from a misogynistic male critic illustrates:

A few years back I read a neo-feminist's approving review of another neo-feminist's book. The reviewer said that she agreed with the author that for a woman, a career is more creative than being a mother. That puzzled me: without having given much thought to it, I had assumed that about the closest the human race can get to creation is when a woman bears a child, nurtures him, and cares for him [sic]. (Himmelfarb, 1967: 59; my emphasis)

If women can believe that childbirth is unsurpassable as a creative act, perhaps they will put down their pens and their paints, cease thinking and continue breeding. Is it a coincidence that the male pronoun is used to refer to the product of female creativity? Is it as creative to produce a female child? Or is this yet another comment produced without having given much thought to it?

The reason for women's absence on the world stage of creativity is not biological inferiority, nor an absence of desire to create beyond the realms of the family. The real reasons for the silence are not very difficult to discern; nor are the effects. Take the case of art, as many feminist scholars recently have, rewriting the history of art through a feminist prism. Our Old Masters and masterpieces - the art which fetches astronomical prices, elevating the artist to an almost godlike status, his creativity seen to be drawn from some higher power - are all the work of men. The history of art is peopled with men, not women. The male artist is the hero; the female artist is invisible. The woman is present only as the object of the artist's gaze, to be consumed, to be frozen and framed, to be possessed. Feminist analysis has identified the way in which women's voices and women as active agents have been suppressed; the way in which women are destined 'to be spoken' (in Lacanian terms) rather than to speak. It is the same process that silences talent, as recent texts on the 'forgotten' women artists, scientists, or authors has shown. It is produced by a systematic suppression - a systematic oppression - achieved by promoting and validating the work of men whilst ignoring, or denying the existence of, the work of women.

Whilst women writers from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft have been rediscovered by feminist literary scholars and feminist publishers, many others have not. Many women never had the time or opportunity to publish - and their voices will never be heard. Many women remain silent, following in the painful footsteps of our foremothers who never have the time or legitimacy for reflection and creation. It is moving to consider how many brilliant voices have not been heard, how many brilliant careers have been thwarted. As Olive Schreiner reflected:

What has humanity not lost by suppression and subjection? We have a Shakespeare; but what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward brewing currant wine and making pastries for fat country squires to eat, with no glimpse of freedom of the life and action necessary even to poach on deer in the green forests; stifled out without one line written, simply because of being the weaker sex, life gave no room for action and grasp on life?

In addition to marginalizing women, and ensuring that we cannot find a voice with which to declare our anger, our desperation, or our fears, the images can be seen to have a more invidious function in that they objectify women. They ensure that we have few role models to turn to for inspiration. We expect to be confined and constricted. We expect to serve men. Is it any wonder that we despair, that we cry out, that we are mad? And if the woman herself was not treated as mad for daring to be creative, she may have been driven so by the restrictions upon her. It is an insidious double bind: women who do attempt to create may be vilified for their talent, and for their temerity in daring to speak out. Whether a woman's creativity is an expression of inner conflict and turmoil, or merely a desire for self-expression, it is in danger of becoming the tool which condemns, a centuries-old process, as Virginia Woolf eloquently shows:

.. any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (Woolf, 1928: 48)

The feminist martyrs, diagnosed as mad, 'treated' by patriarchal experts, and (often) destroyed by their own hands, have fuelled arguments that madness is protest, an expression of thwarted creativity. And within a culture which refuses to recognize women's creativity (except in the area of motherhood) it is argued that its frustration leads to madness. Phyllis Chesler opens her book, Women and madness, with a testimonial to four such women, Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath. In her description of their madness as 'an expression of female powerlessness and an unsuccessful attempt to reject and overcome this state', Chesler argues that the experiences of these women symbolize the oppression of women's power, women's creativity - an oppression with fatal consequences (Chesler, 1972: 16). Her argument - that the inability of these women to express themselves, their silencing by men, has led to their madness and their suicide - has obviously struck a chord in the hearts and minds of many women. Their icons and heroines are women like Sylvia Plath, women seen as victims of the individual men who thwarted their intellect, as well as victims of a society which sees women, not as active subjects, but as objects. When we read Plath's words, ‘Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well,’ a chill hand clutches the heart: although many would like to emulate her creativity, they fear the fate that befell her. We must, however, be careful not to glorify these women, raising them to the status of martyrs, for, as Tillie Olsen demonstrates, suicide is rare among creative women. What is undoubtedly more common is the slow creeping frustration, the inability to think, to breathe, to work at anything other than the daily grind. For women's creativity is not frustrated only by the structural barriers provided by the male-dominated academies and universities, and the male publishing houses, but also by the lack of time. For if male writers such as Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joseph Conrad can share this experience described by Conrad, how must it be for the woman whose main task is the care of her children, her husband, her home?

I sit down religiously each morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair.

It is no coincidence that 'in our century as in the last, until very recently, all distinguished achievement has come from childless women' (Olsen, 1978: 31). How many women can find time to await the visit of the muse in moments snatched between children and housework? It is a wonder that Jane Austen managed to write - hiding her papers under a blotter in her parsonage drawing room - by snatching a few lines, a few thoughts, when the scarce moments of solitude were upon her. How many others must have given up, despairing, angry and defeated?

Even those women who manage to ward off the angel in the house, and can find a room of their own, may be remembered chiefly for aspects of their personal lives, their work forgotten, and their creativity reduced to voyeuristic intrusions on their sexuality. As French says:

Whether a woman had a sex life, what sort of sex life it was, whether she married, whether she was a good wife or a good mother, are questions that often dominate critical assessment of female artists, writers and thinkers. (French, 1985: 97)

The critics who pore over men's work with an academic glee, hardly noticing their personal lives, seem unnaturally interested in the woman creator's personal habits and especially in her sexuality. This allows the creative woman to be presented as unbalanced, unnatural, and certainly not representative of women. Thus, 'Harriet Martineau is portrayed as a crank, Christabel Pankhurst as a prude, Aphra Behn as a whore, Mary Wollstonecraft as promiscuous' (Spender, 1982: 31). Sylvia Plath, one of the foremost creative women of the late twentieth century, has been similarly treated. Biographers, commentators and critics seem more interested in her adolescent sexuality, her relationships with men during her college years, and her marriage, than with her work.

That a woman who produced brilliant poetry could also be sexual is seen to be a peculiarity. That she killed herself allows her to be seen as mad, and thus as not a normal woman. This over-concern with her sexuality and sanity detracts from her work, and is an insult to this gifted poet, and to others who might follow her. The message to women is clear - dabble with the muse, attempt to enter the male world of learning, of thinking, of creativity, and you may pay the highest price.

-Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness?

#jane ussher #female artists #female mental health #female oppression #female erasure #female creativity #female voice

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lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis · 4 months

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My depression points to my not knowing how to lose... What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realise I have never been able to resign myself.

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose...

Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me. What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realise I have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose – I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being – and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

Julia Kristeva - Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (1989).

#lacan #psychoanalysis #unconscious #jouissance #lacanian real #freud #lacan unconscious #lacan object petit a desire #real symbolic imaginary #objet petit a #trauma #real #depression #anxiety anxious #angst #dread #loss #grief

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chicago-geniza · 2 months

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For real reading Tehanu made me feel, as a reader, like when Susan is shut out of Narnia, and that is the very genre-bound sexism she was trying to confront!!!

"What if magery were the Lacanian transcendental phallus"--Ursula K. Le Guin, 1990

"What if I jumped onto the third rail"--Raya Neubivko, 2024

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humanperson105 · 4 months

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Badiou, Infinity, and the Multiple

Badiou begins the second meditation of Being and Event with the central axiom of Parmenides philosophy: 'If the one is not, nothing is.' By contrast, in Badiou's own words, "My entire discourse originates in an axiomatic decision; that of the non-being of the one." (Being and Event Pg 31) The dialectic of the one and the many and the concomitant question of the existence of the one concerns the problems inherent to the conception of totality and the various incoherencies that result from both the existence and the inexistence of the one.

In Badiou's reading of Plato's Parmenides, the dialectic of the one and the many results in aporia and has no conclusive resolution. For Badiou, Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the many, what Badiou calls the pure multiple, is a result of what he calls the count-as-one, or the necessity of thought to present the pure multiple as one to render it intelligible. Badiou can assert that the one is not and that therefore nothing is, as for Badiou, the nothing or Void is the unthinkable pure multiple.

Therefore, what should be thought here is rather that 'nothing' is the name of the void: Plato's statement should be transcribed in the following manner; if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the 'many' is the pure name of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being. The 'nihilist' conclusion restores, diagonal to the one/multiple opposition, the point of being of the nothing, the presentable correlate-as name-of this unlimited or inconsistent multiple whose dream is induced by the non-being of the one.(Badiou pg 35)

Badiou can endorse the Platonic theory of participation, that the non-being of the one participates in our sensible experience, but suspend Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the Void. This is due to Badiou's view that the intelligibility of the pure multiple and its identification as non-totalizable infinity have only become possible following the advent of set theory and the notion of the transfinite found in the work of Georg Cantor. The unpresentability of the pure multiple, or Void, allows Badiou to endorse the Lacanian definition of the real as the impasse of formalization and leads Badiou to generalize the unthinkability of the pure multiple in Plato's philosophy to philosophy as a whole. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou seeks out the impasse of the real in thinkers like Spinoza and Aristotle, among many others. In this regard, Badiou's treatment of Hegel is instructive regarding Badiou's conception of real infinity (the transfinite), the real's relation to his overlapping theories of the event and the subject, his view of the purpose of philosophy, and what I refer to as a dialectic of division rather than a dialectic of sublation at the heart of his theory of truth and its relation to his affirmation of the multiple against the one.

In his Logic, Hegel famously distinguishes between "good" and "bad" infinity. "Good" infinity is "good" only in the sense of being a true infinity, which for Hegel entails an infinity that contains its own limitation, in contrast to the "bad" or false infinity, that whose limitation is external. Hegel's distinction between internal and external limitation is a result of Hegel siding with Parmenides and asserting that the one is; if anything falls outside the infinite, then it can neither be infinite nor one.

Hegel's notion of contradiction is not applicable to just any pair of opposites or contraries. Contradiction, for Hegel, is a relation of determinate negation: A and not-A. For example, on and off does not constitute a contradiction, but on and not-on does. Bad infinity, the not-finite, is not a true infinity as it has an external limitation in its negation, the finite, and the same goes for the finite, which has an external limitation in the not-finite or bad infinity (this is crucial for grasping Badiou's conception of the infinite). The bad infinity can become good only by sublating (to suspend and preserve) this contradiction in a whole that contains the contradiction of A and not-A as moments or qualities of the whole. For infinity to interiorize its limit, the finite must become a moment of the infinite.

Hegel identifies this double process as comprising the true infinite because it does not have any intrinsic limitation. There is nothing about it that brings it to an end. There is nothing outside it. Its determination consists in that very process consisting in the finite and the nonfinite reverting into one another and not being either just separated from one another or united with one another. (Richard Dien Winfield - Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures pg 137)

Hegel is not a thinker of synthesis but rather of syllogistic integration. As Mao says, the dialectic is a "one that divides into two". Hegel's one is without foundation or ground, and this causes it to collapse in on itself, split itself into two, and then subsume this split within a new whole that promptly splits again and again ad infinitum. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The one is self determinative; as it cuts itself, it differentiates and expands without ever finding closure. This is why Hegel (and Marx) can think totality without rejecting change or becoming; just as the finite is a moment rather than the limit of true infinity, becoming is a moment of Being.

In the chapter of Being and Event devoted to showing the impasse of the real in Hegel's philosophy, Badiou attempts to defend what Hegel refers to as "bad" infinity in the guise of the non-totalizable transfinite. The importance of the transfinite for Badiou lies in its making possible the thinking of a quantitative infinity that cannot be sublated into the "good" Hegelian qualitative infinity. The absence of such a non-totalizable quantity is, for Badiou, the impasse and point of failure of Hegel's thought. Quantitative infinity is necessary for Badiou not only for rendering the Void of inconsistent multiplicity intelligible but also for providing an external limitation to Being and the dissolution of the one - the very thing that causes Hegel to dismiss quantitative infinity - that is integral to the true focus of Badiou's thought: the Event and the subject of truth. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou is at pains to establish that the event does not belong to the ontology of the pure multiple. "With the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology." (Being and event pg 184) Without this extrinsic limitation to being there could be no event and no expressions of subjectivity in the fidelity to an event.

In Badiou's dialectic of belonging and non-belonging (all and not-all/finite and not-finite), there is no whole or totality that contains the moments of the dialectic, only diachronic cuts in the “one”; a dialectic without sublation/suspension. This is why Badiou adopts a dialectic of the “one into two” alongside his espousal of a meta-ontological role for philosophy in Being and Event onward; prior to this (see Badiou's The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic), Badiou's dialectic was purely one of splitting, division, discontinuity, and differentiation: “the one into one” (the one splits into two separate ones), or, “the one into none” (a split that affects a subtraction of the one). Badiou can adopt this position as he relegates the thinking of being to set theory and, concomitantly, relegates the task of unifying subjective truth events into a universal discourse to philosophy. Following Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Badiou's theory of subjectivity finds its expression in a Fichtean voluntaristic act carried out by a group subject rather than a class in and for itself (for example, see Sartre's discussion of the storming of the bastille). Badiou is not a thinker of history and change understood through periods of transition, but rather of singular ruptures without precedence. The sheer quantitative excess of being leaves open the possibility of the non-ontological event, the subject, and the subtraction of truth from knowledge.

#philosophy #theory #alain badiou #parmenides #hegel

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eesirachs · 2 years

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Im sorry but what does god is lack mean ? In simplistic terms ? Also the real? Im sorry i know nothing or theology i just really like your blog and takes on stuff!!!

you dont need to be sorry-i'm sorry for being confusing! these are lacanian terms. lack is that feeling of absence that you encounter if you stop for a moment. we all carry it--something is missing/there must be something more/what will complete me/etc. we have this lack. we move through life with it, trying to fill it all the time--with love, food, faith. the Real is something we can't describe. it's sublime. it's a hum. it's the something-bigger we look for. we get glimpses of it, sometimes. i call these glimpses 'holes in the real,' or cuts in the real.

sometimes in life you find that you've gotten close to that something-more-ness. you find something special, something that makes your whole body hum. you find a god-spot, a cut that opens up into this bigger Real. we can find it in relationships, in community, in movement. we co-event god: we are made, and god is made, in moments that bring us closer to this hummmmmm

#god spot can be anything: cooking sitting in the sun breaking fast looking at your ex's spotify playlists etc #ask #faq

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synthient · 1 year

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Knock at the Cabin and reproductive futurism

As I was processing the ending of Knock at the Cabin the other day, an anon suggested looking into Lee Edelman's work on reproductive futurism. I'd heard the term before, but I'd never actually read the original source.

I'm about to summarize Edelman's essay "The Future Is Kid Stuff," which you can read in full here. (If you want to pick around the Lacanian word salad, you can pretty much skip pages 6-10 and 23-26. If you're a Lacanian word salad enjoyer, go forth and prosper)

In a nutshell:

Reproductive futurism is the idea that having children, and being able to imagine a future through them, is the one thing that gives life meaning.

Reproductive futurism offers an illusion of immortality: after you die, you'll live on in your descendants forever.

It's also a justification for never changing our society too radically. We have to keep the world more or less as it is, so we can hold it "in trust" for the symbolic, innocent child.

The rights of real, living people in the present are denied for the sake of that symbolic future child--even though that future child will never "actually" be able to claim the protections we're supposedly saving for them. Once they're born/grow up, they'll just face the same oppression in the name of the next generation of hypothetical children.

Queer people, along with feminists and abortion activists, challenge the concept of reproductive futurism. That means they force people to face their own mortality, and they threaten the underpinnings of society as it exists. Culturally, queer people represent death and the end of the world.

When we advocate for civil rights, the obvious impulse is to deny that idea. Of course we're not a threat to The Child or The Future! Gay people can be parents too! We can assimilate into society without fundamentally changing it!

Edelman argues that this impulse is a mistake. We do pose a challenge to the social order and the illusions that keep it running, and we should lean into that. We are the end of the world.

At one point, Edelman discusses a scene from the movie Philadelphia. After the main character dies of AIDS, we see his wake, which is attended by children and pregnant women. As we watch a video of the main character as a child:

...the tears that these moving pictures solicit burn with an indignation directed not only against the intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this boy would later become, but also against the homosexual world in which boys like this eventually grow up to have crushes on other men. For the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large as for Philadelphia in particular, is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end. Thus, the occasion of a gay man's death gives the film an excuse to unleash once more the disciplinary image of the "innocent" Child performing its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction. We encounter this image on every side as the lives, the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference to imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted to have them except as they consist in the prospect of passing them on to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social disease as which queer sexualities register.

...the Child who might witness lewd or inappropriately intimate behavior; the Child who might find information about dangerous "lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative book from the shelves of the public library...On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of potential encounters, with an "otherness" of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any potential access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a child who must never grow up.

...And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support the legal availability of abortion.

I'm of a couple minds about how to apply these concepts to Knock at the Cabin. On one hand, maybe you could read the movie as fully aware of all these complexities around queerness, the child, and the apocalypse. Maybe it's Encouraging Us To Meditate On Them. Maybe we're supposed to walk out of the theater with a nagging feeling that the sacrifice wasn't worth it--that if gayness represents The End Of The World As We Know It, then the world as we know it could stand to end.

But if I'm being honest? I think there's less support for that reading in the actual text, than there is in my desire for it to be true. I don't want to believe the alternative: not coming from a clearly sympathetic filmmaker, in 2023, in the middle of a queerphobic backlash.

Still, I think it takes more mental contortion to understand Knock at the Cabin as some kind of 4D chess critique of reproductive futurism, than it does to recognize the more obvious read: the sacrifice is supposed to seem tragic, but correct. "Any" parent should be willing to do that for their child, and by proving that they're just like any parent, the gays are validated.

And--probably inadvertently--so is queer suicide. So is the worldview where queerness is inherently in conflict with, and a necessary sacrifice for, The Child and The Future.

#knock at the cabin #long post #not quoted bc it's not directly relevant:#the part where he says (in 2004) that the most prominent modern incarnation #of the confirmed bachelor who represents death and wants to destroy The Child #is voldemort and harry potter

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