[posted on facebook as an answer to a question, 5/21/24]
There's
a lot of worthless crap in Lacan (and the Lacanians). I think his
stuff is most interesting the further away it gets from Freud. (He's
more of a poet, or a priest, or an entertainer, than a scientist. But
that applies to Freud, too.)
But
anyway, here's a few things that I thought were worth thinking about,
all of them so brutally simplified as to be wildly inaccurate (I'm sure
Lacanians would hate this):
1.
The difference between "aim" and "goal". As Lacan sees it, the aim of
the drive is not to achieve the goal, but rather to perpetuate itself as
drive. You don't really want to solve your problems, you want to
maintain your problems. (i.e., maintain your desire, maintain your
longing, maintain your sense of incompleteness.)
2.
Lacan doesn't go the (Buddhist?) route of trying to achieve happiness
by having no desires. Unfulfilled desire is a necessary gap in
experience, which gives life meaning. The formula of Lacan's ethics is
"Do not give up on your desire".
3.
The "object" of desire (objet petit a) is a kind of stand in, which we
use to cover up the irreducible gap. Everybody has their own "objet
petit a" - a kind of "MacGuffin" (like the Maltese Falcon). It in itself
is empty - it has no intrinsic value, but only becomes meaningful in
the overall structure of the experience of the person, in its capacity
to block the person's awareness of the necessary gap - the person's
"fantasy". Objet petit a might be another person, or... whatever.
4.
The flip side of this is "jouissance" (literally, joy, or orgasm) - a
kind of pleasure so intense that it would be experienced as pain - and
which, in a sense, CAN'T be experienced, or at least not directly.
Jouissance is our point of access to the "Real" - the world beyond the
fantasy, the world without opposition, beyond all binary structure of
negation, without the necessary gap that gives life meaning. People are
therefore continually striving to *avoid* jouissance, only to
experience it, but in an indirect way. And this is how it "should" be,
so to speak.
5.
People have a variety of psychological strategies for maintaining their
lack. Some people are obsessive, obsessing over the object of their
desire. Some become a Don Juan, continually conquesting, only to lose
interest in the object once it is attained, and suddenly seeing the
object petit a in someone else. Some people are "melancholic," as it
were absorbing the object into themselves, repeating the traumatic lack
endlessly. And on and on and on. There are infinite variations. Each
one is an endless repetition.
6.
"There is no sexual relationship." because each person in the pair is
projecting their own fantasy on the other. As Lacan puts it, the
"subject, the human subject that is the essence of man, is not [...]
caught up in this imaginary capture." They forever elude each other.
7.
But this causes anxiety, the anxiety of the desiring gaze of the other
at you. You are left helplessly asking "Che Vuoi?" ("What do you want
[from me]"?) and you will never get a satisfying answer.
Kind
of a dark vision of things, but there it is. I didn't even get into
what I think is the most interesting part of Lacan, which is his
concepts of "tyche" and "automaton" which comes from his reading of
Aristotle. But it's complicated and I'm bored of typing.
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