Politics of Resentment - "Lacan and Affects"

welcome again to our second session of the politics of resentment i'm daniel tut very happy to have you all uh tonight we're going to have a talk uh really a kind of discussion uh on lacan and affects so we're going to begin with a presentation from rithika from murthy who is a grad student at brown and who is somebody that i saw i met at the lac conference um is sort of a an inspiring person of um politics as well very much involved with union organizing and has a real um passion for thinking about psychoanalysis politics and justice and things of that nature so i've asked her to be our discussion leader so i will be happy to turn the floor over to rithika and let me um do that right now there we go so i'm making you co-host which means you can now share your screen thank you daniel if i had known that you were going to give me such a affecting introduction i would have prepared myself but now i'm going to be struck speechless so thank you for saying those really nice things um i uh as daniel said my name is carrera murthy i'm a sixth year in the english department at brown university um it's really cool to be here with everyone uh i am a i came to la con in um in a master's program studying with anacornblue um in a class called sex society and other relations that do not exist the syllabus is online i recommend you check it out it changed my life obviously and um taught me how to sort of begin to triangulate uh marks and psychoanalysis and structuralism in a way that i feel like really animates my thinking and my work um yeah so and and uh you know joan koch is on my dissertation committee and so i've probably read the may 68 essay a thousand times i think i finally know what it's saying so now maybe i can tell you what it's what it's saying so um here we go i'm going to try to share my screen i have not done this a time so bear with me we want that desktop and we're gonna share it okay so can you see the powerpoint yes we can okay awesome all right um okay so this is just a little thing on the condom effect i'm going to try to keep within a certain time because i'd like to uh hear what everyone else has to say um and not uh take up the entire time so um you know the main ideas that what i wanted to cover today um were mainly about how and uh in what ways lacanian psychoanalysis has a particular understanding of the relationship between language and affect uh how lacan's return to freud elucidates not just the linguistic dimension of freud's thought but what affect has to do with it um you know sort of touch on colossal but um go more into john kochak's essay two approaches silicon's work that show his nuanced understanding of the question of affect and psychoanalysis and then sort of ask about the political potential of psychoanalysis um lying in its discovery of the impersonal dimension of psychic life so words words words in television jacqueline miller asks lacan the following question for the 20 years that you've been putting forward your phrase the unconscious is structured like a language what is said in opposition to you in various forms is those are merely words words words and what do you do anything and what do you do with anything that doesn't get mixed up with words what is psychic energy or affect or the drives so lacan playfully makes fun of molar for imitating too closely the stuffy objections of the the p-i-p-a-a-d uh which by the way stands for the professional insurance plan against analytic discourse in english um in french he uh he calls it the sancta which is the associate society mutual yes control the discourse or like the society the mutual society uh that assures against discourse or whatever um it's his nickname for the ipa the international psychoanalysis association so he goes on to argue that the misunderstanding of these three freudian phenomena energy affect and drives have led to a gross mischaracterization of freud's teaching so these things being disarticulated or separated from words words words is precisely the problem for lacan uh he answers malaria as he has answered others before him by pointing to freud's 1915 essay on depression uh some of you who are maybe encountering look on for the first time is just like i already said this it's in the repression essay and freud says it just like me which is i think such a funny uh recursion on you know genealogy in his case um and he also repeats that affect is displaced um both from the repression essay but also from uh letter 52 from freud to his friend wilhelm fleece on june 12 1896 and freud sort of begins to define repression there so this is his cool little diagram that i like um and you know he's sort of talking about repression as a failure of translation and he says the motive for it is always a release of unpleasure which would result from a translation as though the pleasure provokes a disturbance of thought right so i've bolded that phrase because i think that this idea gets really taken out by lacan um as what affect is in a lot of ways so he says later a hysterical attack is not a discharge but an action right so it's not some quantity that you can measure it's like an act and it retains the original character of every action which is like a means to reproducing pleasure um and then here he says attacks of giddiness and fits of weeping all these are aimed at some other person but most of all the prehistoric unforgettable other person who is never equaled by anyone later and he also says that these attacks never seem to occur as an intensified expression of emotion right they seem kind of random or out of nowhere they don't really match up in any way to what freud is trying to understand about the hysterics so here freud's definitions of hysterical attack are not simply a discharge of stimulus tension to put this in his own terms they're not just intensified uh expressions of emotion that correspond to some heightened state of subjective distress the affect of response shows a certain lapse within the representation to which it is supposedly attached so attacks of hysteria such as crying fits are framed almost as an attempted address like a conversation with someone that you can't have a conversation with right an unforgettable other these affective responses are not random series of symptoms they're a structure that is built specifically on the mediations of signifiers so as lacan says what an affect discharges is not adrenaline but thought i just loved that okay so lacan's own definition of affect um he says in seminar 10 uh the seminar anxiety he says i've tried on occasion to say what affect is not so it's clearly or in this characteristically um you know mode of implant negation he's like i will here's what it's not it is not being given in its immediacy nor is it the subject in raw form either it is in no respect protopathic so it has nothing to do with like the surface of the skin or like uh vessels and things like this um my occasional remarks on affect amount to nothing but that affect what i said about affect is that it isn't repressed freud says it just as i do it's unfastened it drifts about it can be found displaced maddened inverted or inverted or metabolized but it is not repressed what a repressed or the signifier isn't more it right so what becomes central here is the distinct relation between affect and ideas or the intellectual and the vietnam affect is never repressed as always to place displaced so here are some other things that lacan says about it he says it's unidentified he says it's broken off from its roots it eludes us it is not something to be quote numerically expressed or quantified but to be deciphered or interpreted um you know in other words affect becomes unrecognizable in its relation to the original signifier which might give it meaning to but to which it is nevertheless tied to take affect at its word so to speak or to acknowledge it as a sort of index of subjectivity is therefore a mistake because all affects except anxiety are fundamentally deceptive and john koch kind of goes into why that is it requires interpretation um affect therefore befalls a body whose essence it is said to dwell in language so this ostensible over reliance on language or this mention of a body dwelling in language is exactly what uh leads other psychoanal psychoanalysts such as jean-laplanche his student to levy the criticism that lacan's theory of the subject and privileging the signifier effectively excludes affect from consideration right so in other words by focusing too much on the ways in which the unconscious is structured like a language lechon neglect's lived experience in favor of linguistics uh la planche has this quote here but i'll basically summarize it to say that um you know for laplace affect is something that leukemian psychoanalysis either outright dismisses in favor of the signifier and representation or something that is like punctuated to the point of parity right it's always inverted and ironized and you know surrounded by 10 million commas that make it so that like it's not real or something like that um but as we'll see when we visit these other readings it's not that lecant dismisses affects in favor of signifiers is that he maintains that psychoanalysis must approach affect in and through its relation to the signifier and those are like different um so some of you may be familiar with contemporary affect theory others of you might not i'm going to save you the trouble and tell you that against lacan's contemporaneous critics and the more contemporary africa theorists i'm thinking here are people like sarah ahmed um you know we can see how lacan's return to freud directly contradicts the idea that affect is a felt intensity or a mute in expressibility so positing affect outside of language is a problem because it just creates an outside of thought repeating the sort of kantian move um in the analytic of the sublime which re-signifies the subject's perceptual failure uh as a sort of like indirect testimony about like the failure of human perception as such um so this is a problem uh you know delineates how lacan's earlier thought may have seen that way but how it may have seemed that way but of how he changed his mind and so has she actually there are chapters of read my desire to sort of play with this problem um so other theorists besides the ones we've read today sort of corroborate this non-antonomic schema between affect and thought bruce fink and leconte letter which everyone should read is not uh says that affect is not something beyond thought something that is somehow more real than thought is not something to be taken as more truthful or more unvarnished or more immediate access to the subject's reality in the analytics scene the analyst urges the analysis to move from falling back on preconceived representations of feeling to do the work of civilization which is freaking hard so for example fink tells us a patient may say that they realized on monday that they spent the weekend in a depressed state the latter being an intellectualization that's tacked onto the two or three days spent in bed depression for this patient becomes an immediate explanation for being lethargic or being leapy or being unable to eat fink explains that the analysis has already made progress when she says something like i was in a bit of a funk over the weekend and i think it might be because of x or because of y or because of z the latter formulation leaves room for the work of symbolization to be able to move forward to allow the analysis and to find ways to alter the meaning that she may give to any particular affect um so you know this clinical example that i just repeated gives credence to lacan's reminder that the affective is not um a special density which would somehow escape intellectual accounting it is not to be found in a mythical region beyond symbolic production which supposedly precedes discursive formulation so to understand it as such is not only is to not only reify affect as a site of pure knowledge but it's also to disavow uh what some atoms calls elsewhere the labor of the unconscious to ignore affect as a sort of produced knot of symbolization um that's produced by the problems uh inherent to representation and not outside of them so to quickly go over the solaire which you know i'm hoping to learn from others on this because i'm not a huge expert on her uh she sort of emphasizes the relationship between affect and the body as the key to conceptualizing this often misunderstood area of lacan's intervention so she's kind of asking here after passes through the body and disturbs its functioning okay we're on the same page as that but does it come to the body or from the body which is the affecting party and which is the affected party we tend to believe that the affected party is the subject but isn't it rather the living body that succumbs to the effect of language this affects having repercussions on the whole range of the subject satisfactions and dissatisfactions so this bold opening i found this very um it was very taken by this all already triangulates the clinical predicament that we just saw and think a lump in the throat or a trembling of the voice uh is usually read as a direct and subjective experience of human emotion so you're grieving or you're afraid it's you know it's already the connections already made for you instead solar urges us to understand that this bodily intensity uh leads to a kind of mismatch between the embodied subject and the speaking subject an indication of the gap between what is understood to be felt and what is said or unsaid so the body is corporized in a signifying way she later says um you know and the affected party is the bodily individual in his flesh so solaire um sort of begins with the basics including the fundamental formulation of the canadian theory that the unconscious is structured like a language but she insists that lacan diverges from freud um in his emphasis on linguistics and symbiotics as central to freudian theory although she acknowledges that freud's model of the psychic apparatus grasps at the efficacy of language um she does say that there is not the slightest hint of a linguistic cause of trauma in freud's work so you know in order to sort of hammer home the the the point here which is that um you know we want to trouble this divergence between freud and la khan because lacan himself always characterized his intervention as a return to freud um in the function and field of speech and language and psychoanalysis he grounds his theory and for its own discovery of the unconscious and it's inelectable ties to language so you can see in the quote here which i won't read to save some time that it's all about you know the field of effects and in man's nature of his relations to the symbolic order um and the most radical instances of symbolization and being so at its core we can understand the khan's return to freud as a rethinking of his work in terms of freud's attachment to language a re-reading that elucidates the paraproxies jokes and dreams that make up the linguistic fundament of freud's revolutionary treatment the talking cure right i mean this is really what um what freight invented so uh as anacornblue argues lacan does not simply inject language or tack it on to freud's thinking but emphasizes this linguistic cast of freudian thought which allows psychoanalysis to shine as the discourse that productively triangulates the psychic the social and the symbolic so the quote below lukan's notion of the symbolic order names language but also the relationship for which language is at the base laws institutions norms traditions in approaching the psyche is crucially activated by the symbolic order lacan de-romanticizes the dynamics for its studies rather than charting individual eruptive erratic flows of instincts and desires lacan charts the syntaxes of social connection in every individual case so to return to soleil perhaps we can then reread her stresses on the operativity of language in this sense lacan's insights that language operates on the living being and that the subject is an effective language draws out the particularly social aspects of language and psychic life so in entering into language she says involves exiting from what is natural okay so to turn to so to turn to uh john koch's essay may 68 the emotional month um i feel that uh maybe i'm biased that it is one of it is the most polluted she is the most polluted account of lacan that sort of exists out there and maybe some of you disagree but uh she begins with um the khan's response to the revolutionary student uprisings of may 68 so where other professors joined the picket lines or demanded reforms lacan urged them to have shame in response to their protestations at the university make room for their experience um he was you know it was like your feelings basically he told them uh you demand a new master you will get one what a frontery kotek says right indeed in fact the accusation that lecon's structuralism was too heavy on the signifier we've already seen has been levied against him by both students and other academics on his own students so in response to these demands that structures don't march in the streets lacan drew feet on his structures and made them march perhaps daniel will show us later how this works in the turning of the discourses so this wasn't just a metaphor affect is to be found in the movement in the signifying structures not located in any one element uh but in their displacement between them so it isn't as we've already seen that affect is simply out of phase with representation or opposed to it instead affect is displaced but the question as john kobach asks is in relation to what so af the crucial insight of uh koch's essay i feel is that affect and representation are not separated by a division that antagonizes them instead affect appears as a marginal difference as representations own out of phaseness with itself affect estranges it shows an extra individual dimension of the subject affect is thought in motion so the signifier if lacan's concept of affect is really all words and signifiers as people accuse him his critics failed to recognize the signifier which he deemed most relevant to affect from freud's essay on repression um i'm going to butcher the german foreign the signifier is the signifier of primary repression of the signifier's own otherness to itself it's the lack upon which thought is founded in other words so what is incredible about this mode of thinking is that we're able and encouraged to approach all kinds of impasses and possibilities of signification what lacan would call the real elements of experience that lead us to the cracks or inconsistencies uh within representation itself so anxiety if affect is the movement of thought then anxiety is its arrest lacan says in seminar 10 and elsewhere that anxiety is not without object and as kojek points out this rhetorical formulation of validities allows for an understatement which neatly figure figures the objects in existence and excess object is a kind of impossible object and i'll read the quote um here it is impossible to assume it or to disown it it is what we are in our most intimate core that which singularizes us that which cannot be vulgarized and yet also that which we cannot recognize we do not comprehend or choose it but neither can we get rid of it since it is not in the order of objects but rather of the not without object it cannot be objectified placed before us and confronted so i know that um so anxiety is the experience of an encounter with this part of ourselves that is the most intimate to us that we can't recognize so i know that there's a lot of text on this slide but the important part of this is that if anxiety the uncomfortable encounter with our estimate unknown ability is the central affect around which every social arrangement is organized as lacan says it is also one that shows us that we are not who we think we are uh and that we can't know ourselves kopjek argues that capitalism transforms this anxiety um into guilt uh wielding our own inalienable remainder against us and demanding that we enjoy on its own terms assuming an unpayable debt towards a version of ourselves that we place endlessly in the future um you know because anxiety is uncomfortable so of course we want to get rid of it right so this frames the self um this you know capitalist version of subjectivity that i think we're going to talk about more frames the self in terms of property and possession it's some you know essence of yourself that you can that you can access and um you know it makes us think that we can flee the discomfort of anxiety by blocking the disturbing enigma of shui songs and it presents us with a counter fidgety song that makes us feel that the ungraspable juice that is a part of us can be accessed and known and realized so against this psychoanalysis calls on us to be ashamed to not give into this control and regimentation of our results in a political economic system that seeks to monetize and value every piece of reality shame shields us with a flight into being by taking refuge in the unknowable and impersonal distance from ourselves and our world this forces us to recognize that our affects should maybe not lead us into certainty uh and mirroring with the world but with estrangement or at least a distance from what we think we feel and why um and so what does this mean for the relationship between lacanian psychoanalysis and politics i'll sort of end with this quote from alenka zupanczyk in an interview with the larb where she says basically the valorization of affectivity as a kind of intuition or inner knowledge is heavily relied upon as an opposition to social change so what she means by this i think is that maybe the current way that affect is understood as mute inexpressibility or as uh inner substance uh refuses to acknowledge what signifiers may be collectively out of reach when affective response is a sort of central uh relied upon aspect of life um in that it elevates lived experience over a social organization so with that being said some questions that i came up with and of course um i'm not in the position of the masters so i don't think i'll be answering many questions hopefully we can think through them together um i i wanted to ask how lucom's theory of affect sort of related to the politics of resentment um you know what kind of affect resentment might be uh what is the value of akan's theory the subject in relation to his subsequent critique of capitalism as well as the university uh which you know in my experience is basically emerging very much into the same discourse these days and uh does lecon's theory of the subject sort of offer a political potential for solidarity and if so uh what is it so that's that excellent yes our policy for folks that haven't been with us is for um it's uh exceedingly democratic so you can jump in there's no no hand raising um but please that was a wonderful um overview especially of the koch jack essay which i found masterful and i also really appreciated it because you saw some of the divergence between solaire i didn't include the uh chapter on shame from solaire but if you read it you'll see some nice divergences there right because i think kopech is focusing on a particular period of lacon that she um that's not the lacan of the parlet of the late look on of the speaking body uh so i think there's some theoretical differences there um other thoughts please jump in i wondered if you could say more about anxiety without not without object because this is obviously the big contrast for luck on and heidegger right um so how do you understand that rithika perhaps i could kick us off with with that question yeah um i think that you know if anxiety is not without object and if that uh we're meant to understand that that object is object right that the kind of way that one might be able to conceptualize that i'm pretty sure it's either that michelle rada and i have discussed it in these terms or it's in the essay or it's in some psychoanalysis thing that i've read in the past it's like something on the back of your head you know something that's pushing you and driving you uh that you can't see but that everyone else might read or understand you in terms of ever be able to recognize about that you you that you can't yourself understand right so that doesn't mean that there isn't anything there it just might mean that it's an object that sort of like constantly um presents itself as a new supposed nuisance and a and a thing that singularizes you right so i really love um uh jones example of the uh charlie chaplin uh film where he swallows the whistle and then you know he keeps uh opening his mouth to speak and the whistle comes out so that it's this kind of like toy that doesn't work quite properly or something and an organ that isn't supposed to be there i think that there's like a lot of different ways to conceptualize it but the way that i have always thought of it is uh anxiety being not without object means that there is something that is pushing you towards uh you know this kind of like borderless enigma of anxiety and you don't quite know what it is i can't remember i think uh the poet mueller may called anxiety the lamp bearer the lamp bearer so the nice motif of the way in which uh in a revolutionary sequence or even within the subjective life of an individual anxiety is the the prelude to an announcement which will come for which the subject has an unconscious knowledge of the object that they're giving birth to right and so i've always i'll embed you will do a lot with anxiety in the dialect between terror and anxiety in the french revolutionary sequence and other revolutionary sequences right um and i think lacroix gives us a different set of subjective tools away from this kind of mystical heideggerian notion of the forgetting of being right um so it's a it's a different it's a different way to theorize anxiety which may be more productive i feel but daniel could you explain how it's different because i'm i didn't grasp exactly how it's different oh the uh the the thesis of um of freud and i think even of heidegger was that um anxiety is without object right which is why for freudian beyond the pleasure principle the the soldiers who are most traumatized um are the ones who are the least prepared and so anxiety is like this state of non-possession right um but because of the formalization of lakon's theory of the object he's going to give it a different formal definition of the object so it's not exactly an object it's the consistency of the object is kind of a strange metaphysical consistency which we can talk about a little bit later but i think that's the general contrast in the ethics seminar is where you find the the conversation on heidegger's face and lacan will articulate his distinction um on on the presence of the object within heidegger's phenomenology of the vase that would be their best sort of resource i think to to locate that question um but yeah other other thoughts to jump in before we move to uh i have a question um and it's related to um this sort of not without object framing um and i was interested in two places one in the question around i think racism that comes up in the television seminar or in the transcript and i think it's in this this it is in this that kopchak also talks about this as a kind of the marker of racialization right or history it's definitely in um another chapter of hers in [Music] imagine there's no woman where she has this reading of freud talking about the condition of being jewish as um not a kind of positive identification but the kind of remainder or what's left right and i think in in conversation with ritaka's um explanation of it as the thing that's behind your head or the thing that you can't see as the racial marker is this history that you can't see but that still defines you in a particular way and i'm so this is just a sort of open question as the way that i formulated it does that sound correct um is this sort of racial difference the placeholder of this kind of objective which is this sort of historic opening this opening on to a kind of history that isn't necessarily one's own well i have like a preliminary offering to that unless you want to jump in daniel or anyone no no no please please yeah so the way that i understand this and i could be totally wrong is on the bottom of page uh 105 where she does talk about the anti-semitism um lemmy knows his discussion of this and so the the phrase that um that sticks with me is that um the anti-semite thus reduces the jew to just one pull of the oscillation between the certainty and inhibiting indecisiveness that constitutes anxiety the painful irresolvable tension occasion by the certainty that one is called and the impossibility of knowing what one is called to so to me racism is actually the disavowal that a subject might contain an object another subject might also be driven by object right it's the refusal to even acknowledge that the other subject has a desire that they might also not have access to um that is how you are also you know it is the double misrecognition of one's own desire and the disavowal of desire in the other in in to my mind and that passage uh yeah the reduction of a of um you know of racial difference to just you know sort of uh the other the other as an uncomplicated sort of legible compulsion or whatever i think is the way that i understand that i don't know if that helped yeah yeah i think that's helpful i and i see that she's much clearer here on i think that's great in terms of summarizing the way that we can see racism as a sort of denial of another's objective but i was more trying to see it from the side of the subject's relationship to abje patia as um a kind of emergence of an immemorial past that one may not know right a tied to a sense of one's inherited history or being born into an identity that one doesn't choose but that still shapes one's reasons is that and so anxiety is this encounter with one's racial difference occasionally yeah sure i think that you one could definitely like put it in those terms i'm struggling with like anxiety being the encounter with not only the version of what you think your race is or something in the present but also what it is uh in a past that precedes you that you have no access to right so it's kind of simultaneity of that thing um i don't want to quip history is what hurts but i think that it's always taken on a new meaning um after understanding sort of lacan's approach to affect and stuff like that so yeah i find that super compelling um i would just also want to uh mention um i did an event on afro-pessimism with frank wilderson recently and we also had a session with sheldon george i don't know if anyone is uh familiar with his right but the the question regarding object ah and juice is very much uh in line with uh sheldon's approach and you could see uh i i i could give the link later we have um the discussion with sheldon and derek hook from a couple of weeks ago he's actually giving sheldon george's giving a talk on zoom tomorrow if you're interested i can share a link in the chat he's does a great job because i actually think the question lack on received in television doesn't encompass the breadth and depth of what your question was because already he was making a comment that racism in the era of globalization and the acceleration of capitalism is actually going to intensify uh as a result of a paradoxical insight he offered a proposed segregation and a segregation of communities of jewish sons and so it's this diminishment of the field of the other and the diminishment of the efficacy of otherness that actually uh lacan predicted i think quite nicely um that racism would would elevate and uh that was sort of in the early stages of elevated into a new form it's not to say that racism was absent it's a new form a more intensified form and then he says in television that intensification has to do with the subjects relation to surplus enjoyment right so but george on the other hand does give a comprehensive account so i think george sheldon george would be your go-to i think and phenom i mean there's others but i had a question about just in general the this this interaction i guess between the object a and uh history because um in its form itself it would seem like the object a is something like i don't know like synchronic or even a temporal to a certain extent but it does to me make at least an intuitive sense that it could become something of a container for a historical antagonism or something like that but i was wondering if anybody maybe had some insight into that interaction directly i mean isn't this in um other parts of imagine there's no woman basically where cop chuck is talking about the like the function of the object oz when it's elevated to the dignity of the thing is that it kind of can compress the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions almost into one another and so that as long as one is oriented like has elevated that object then it can kind of it it's what makes it it's what makes it the case that um you know it it um that that that the two dimensions are more difficult to disentangle from one another and like and and that also kind of yeah that's kind of it's been a while since i've read that book and it was really really hard book um but but a really amazing book um and i think that the sort of um the the sort of one of the tasks in there is is that's set out is how do you kind of find find a kind of way of being able to elevate objects to the status of the dignity of the thing in a way that um you know enables like a grounding or a holding environment um you know in which subjects kind of operate or exist i mean and and don't forget tomeshik makes the argument that uh it's only in capitalism that the object is invented it's a beautiful idea if you think about it [Music] so there are a number of periodizations that we could pull from so not only is marx the inventor of surplus enjoyment he is the hysteric who made the masters discourse of capitalism aware of its dependence on a certain form of surplus enjoyment but it's also the up the logic of the objects only truly operative um in a fully refined capitalist discourse so that's that's tomeshik's view we can talk to him about it um it's a fairly um singular view in the lithuanian field but it's interesting right yeah that's i mean that's really amazing i need to read that book okay this has been great other thoughts before we move we're about 7 45 maybe i should pull up my because my uh talk is really in um support of everything that rithika has been articulating can you all see this okay you okay i just wanted oh yeah i just wanted to add um a reference for people if they're if you're i one of the texts that has been the most helpful for me uh for thinking about the relationship between anxiety and capitalism especially with lacan's uh distinction from heidegger on that question um is todd mcgowan's uh enjoying what we don't have there's a chapter in there called sustaining anxiety uh where he very in his extremely like lucid way um argues uh for this sort of leukemian version of anxiety as an overwhelming presence rather than an absence of like is not without an object being it could be like the push from behind of the object patia but also like an object that's so smothering like so in your field of vision that you can't objectify it um so anyway i just wanted to point people if they're interested in that um um i can put it on the slack also i have a pdf of i can put like a little pdf of this chapter it's todd mcgowan's um enjoying what we don't have the political project of psychoanalysis and there's a chapter i write the whole book is incredible but there's a chapter in there called sustaining anxiety um where mcgowan is arguing for this you know what rithika is talking about with anxiety being um this particular kind of affect that has that capitalism turns into guilt right and that the project of psychoanalysis is in a way like returning to that anxiety and you know maybe making us ashamed for having um uh distorted it but yeah so there's a good that's just a it's a really nice um little he just gives such a nice account of the like the lacan heidegger distinction wonderful michelle do you recall if he relates that to shame at all in the books to shame i i don't know i don't remember but i can i can take a look i have a nice pdf of it so i can um upload uh this chapter i don't think i don't know if i can upload the whole book i don't think uh i should do that but i'll do the chapter in the intro if that's helpful okay thanks and thanks for the rithika for the comment too um i just one last thought um with this the heidegger wakan difference on the object um when copiak brings up the notion of i've never heard the word before so i'm probably saying wrong of me totes like the rhetorical device of the tote or litot where like uh you're negating the thing partially in order to um say it in even more of a positive way so uh so she seems to be saying that that not without um an object is like the most present of an object as well i'm just remembering in the sixth seminar i think um what khan defines the masculine subject as the one not without the phallus i'm wondering if it would be if if there's a probably the same way or if copia does that anywhere i don't recall but that's very funny um i don't i don't remember her talking about that at all but i would be interested if someone else knew that okay um so fair warning um there are there are some uh formalization ahead uh in the in the uh in what i have for you um this is my diagram here but i think that it helps articulate the place of affect and one way to understand this first off is the production of the subject and the production of the subject is as you probably know um an effect of the split here right so the lack that comes to reside within a subject's uh attempt to represent in relationship to another subject produces an excess but it produces sort of two forms of excess what lack on we'll call the object small a one is on the side of a repressive nature which sort of retained within desire within the field of the metonymy of of signifier relations so at the level of a kind of distinction that a lot of leukemians will make between a subject of of speech or a subject of the signifier a subject which is determined as the effects of speech um so there's two logics of the object and we should also note that in the anxiety seminar black on will refer to the object a as an affect right on the one hand on the other hand he'll also refer to object in its instantiation on the body has taken a non-repressive uh mode however uh its expression for the subject as in uh something that exists on the body let's say is fundamentally ambivalent and the ambivalence is actually tied into the fact of its non-repressive nature so you can see the uh distinction there between affects emotions and feelings so part of this is a lot of research i've done um on a lacanian disciple by the name of andre greene who wrote a book called the fabric of affect in psychoanalytic discourse he was a disciple of lacon but like the planche but even more strongly broke from lacan on his feeling that affect is not treated adequately in leukemia and discourse so and rithika had already mentioned that right so it is true that affects lead to emotions and feelings but you can distinguish feelings as a kind of conscious residue and emotions as morally more linked to a repressed a repressive a residue of a repressive apparatus but the main uh event um is occurring through the centrality of the s1 so uh we're going to learn in a moment sort of what the hell an s1 is a master signifier in relationship to an s2 which is an effect of the knowledge that's left over from the master signifier right and so we'll we'll sort of uh look at this on on this kind of grand historical scale of the four discourses or rather of the five of the four discourses and the one which is not a discourse um but we'll also look at it from within a kind of um uh more localized subjective level this this diagram here is much more of a kind of subjective uh formulation we could also even if we wanted to sort of add the notion of repetition here and a further development of surplus enjoyment right which creates sort of pockets um off of this more primary process of um production right so the issue of surplus enjoyment is linked into the very core structure of the repetition compulsion which freud develops but as you know it's mapped onto a logic of uh speech right so it what that means is that um uh speech uh produces a type of um kind of abject uh enjoyment which cannot uh similar to the condition of the body in infancy where it's a kind of um terrain of a multiplicity of pleasure zones the object in speech produces a kind of multiplicity which cannot necessarily be reformalized back into the psyche right but it's then organized by the field of enjoyment and that repression is tied to sort of a repetition so this hopefully helps us understand that uh the excess point of the relationship uh in language produces a kind of two forms of the object and the where the place that lack on really i think develops this the most is actually in the anxiety seminar by the way which i think is probably the place where affect is talked about most rigorously or most uh comprehensively right so why is it that in television you note now i'm talking about the notion of ambivalence that affects are fundamentally ambivalent why is hate love combined right why do they not have a kind of autonomy right and um part of that actually is tied to the fact that they are uh not of a repressive nature in other words um there's a nice uh example of affect in general for psychoanalysis which uh cendor forensi had discovered uh which was that um he realized that uh a dream where the subject wakes themselves up through laughing is not to be read as an expression of a particularly happy experience in the dream it's a defense mechanism to in in forensies case uh a moment which in the dream the subject was facing death right so it's the affect um because of its ambivalence was able to sort of uh work outside of this event and bring the subject back into right so um it's it's a highly complex uh uh thing but i think it's interesting the fact that it is not necessarily linked to a repressive uh right which that so i wish to argue that this is sort of what allows for lack on to say crazy things in a kind of sphenosis way where he'll say um depression is a moral failure why the hell would he say depression is a moral failure it's because the emphasis for the speaking being must be on the resolution of their good speech right as opposed to what rithika mentioned below or before this kind of notion that the the truth of my emotional composition um is the sight for the resolution of my ills or my symptoms you see um so he's trying to sort of um bring us to an emphasis here and not here in fact as we will see in the theory of the discourses and what rithika even mentioned apropos kopjek's notion of the emotional month of may lack on moved to an outlaw university at vincennes which would be paris 8 where all of these young students were extremely disturbed by the fact that the 68 this is in 1969 the 68 dream did not materialize so the notion of an affective surge an overload was very much present which is why you can see the videos on youtube of the anarchists uh taking over right his seminar room right and one can imagine walking around the the campus with these uh four mattheems he does not have the capitalist discourse matthew that's not invented until 1973. uh and sort of uh feeling that he's calling these subjects animals he says you do not walk on two feet you walk on four [Laughter] you see the nice connection to four so uh all of this business of the s1 and the s2 what the is this right so let us find out the origin of all discourse is founded in what lacroix calls the masters discourse okay so i these are my own summaries here it actually um took me a lot of pain to try and make them sensible to myself so i pray that they are sensible to you um so what is this idea of speech like why the hell does this guy care so much about speech right okay so if we i want to read this out loud in case nobody somebody's not reading this uh right now on the screen so the master's discourse is structured and i'm going to say a few things about its preconditions in a moment the idea is is that signifiers of language accidentally make a slip into our ordinary speech and they disturb uh that reality and there's many examples we could uh show of that kind of imposition of of a kind of um of two forms of language in essence right that there's a deeper form uh what of language what lacroix will call la long right which is a speech of pure enjoyment kind of like the baby's babel and then there is the speech of discourse right and there's a kind of disjunction between the two right and so there's a more primal way that we latch on to our speech that's located in the kind of babble of baby talk which is one interesting side note that lacon will say that in the um refinement of the capitalist discourse it becomes more and more permitted for subjects to speak like babies um so you see this is s1 here we can actually make the movement you follow the arrows it's actually pretty easy here what's discovered is an accident now the reason that it's an accident is important it's because this structure uh is premised so here's your little cheat sheet by the way these four agent other truth product we need to keep uh central in our in our thinking as we review these uh but the reason that the s-1 is um split is because of what it's because of the labor of the slave so the master's discourse is actually something which has its foundation in ancient greece with lysergis who was a military commander who took the military apparatus and made it cohere across the spartan society so he's sort of performed in the spartan greek cosmos the success of the military command apparatus across all levels of of the social okay that's he's the founder of of according to lacon of the masters discourse right um so it's the founding discourse okay now um the split there is a kind of um split you could also think of as a split of representation right from something more primary and the effect of that is the effect of the famous divided subject so this point here the effect of the s1 s2 is here going to affect and here going to enjoyment a process of division right and that is the primary process of the subject subject is an effect of the split between s1 and s2 okay so uh however lacron will add this year in his other side what's called the other side of psychoanalysis the 69 seminar the idea that a discourse is a self-contained production right so the a uh is a site of what is produced in the exchange of the master and the slave right and um what is produced is an excess of enjoyment through the slaves labor and a kind of and this is important is that if you notice that the arrows here here here here what does that show you it shows that it's a kind of um both incomplete but also um rebounds back to the s1 right the position which i'll remind you here is the position of the agent okay so what that means is that the stability of the master's command to this is what honor is this is what sacrifice is can be maintained in a kind of relative efficacy right um so uh however um [Music] lacan will further state just as as a reminder when we when we got here and i put this notion of surplus enjoyment here that is entropy right so the notion of a kind of excess uh production that would be the precondition for uh the discourse he calls entropy and this is where actually bernard stegler does a lot of work and others on a kind of analysis what he calls neg entropy right and there's a whole scientific literature on entropy that's worth examining as a leukemia and i think it's necessary actually but the notion is is that there's a continuous articulation like the master's discourse is efficacious so what is the challenge to the master's discourse the and this will kind of dovetail in a weird way with our my presentation last time it is socrates socrates is the founder of the hysterics discourse uh if we were to summarize what the hysterics discourse is the agent is divided first and foremost so here at the end of the master's discourse was the divided subject the slave is here so now this switches to the top so it is a it's a slave who is now in possession of a symptom they've produced a symptom from this monstrous exchange right so the the hysterics discourse is the assault on the master's discourse yeah they come as already uh aware let's say of the of the um this what is it called dysphoria that we experience today with the digital life the hysteric is already a dysphoric subject right uh this is why in a beautiful way la khan will say that um the proletariat are hysterics right there's so the the heritage discourse is extremely important discourse anyways so a divided subject questions what riddles their body to an agent of power so we can think the analyst we can think uh political figure as s1 in the process so you see the arrow here and then here and then goes down the s2 is knowledge so they produce a new knowledge and that new knowledge then becomes taken up in a kind of form of desire because the a here this is very important is the site of truth the a is the site of truth and the a stands for uh enjoyment right so uh there's a new enjoyment that is developed uh in the discourse of the hysteric okay um and i i use this notion of engine i think is a nice idea right is that it's a counter engine to this machine right and you can think of this in a classic uh uh mode i mean i was thinking of mad max as a nice example of the discourse of the hysterical especially because of the gender themes of that particular film i don't know if you like that film but um so this is the discourse of the hysteric now we have the most brutal discourse of them all for whom lachanze says charlemagne was the founder in an interesting way it's called the discourse of the university we can summarize this one by starting from the position of the s2 so the s2 is a subject uh not in possession of it's kind of a represented subject a subject already of representation of an effect from a prior s1 they are see they are questioning the field of discourse they are questioning the field of knowledge and it's an address to a sort of uh uh how does my desire get fulfilled as an intellectual right the subject is delivered a no a kind of a lack a deprivation a deprivation of what a deprivation of the s-1 which would be the notion of distinction academic distinction is foreclosed uh it's foreclosed for many some have some don't but the issue is is that um the perpetuation of the university discourse is the perpetuation of a sense in which there is a deprivation of the singularity of the s-1 and that deprivation is the affect of shame so in truth it is the university discourse which is the real uh origin in some ways of the formalization of shame as a dominant affect because in the master's discourse is not exactly the case that the slave is experiencing shame because of the way in which its circulation is efficacious right you can have shame but for lack on the issue of the master's discourse is an issue of a kind of humanity has a nostalgia for it because in in a paradoxical sense uh this discourse allows for contingency why is that paradoxical because the notion of good luck the notion of um becoming of of of knowing uh in an aristotelian sense the the proper place is is uh is coherent right is a coherency when you get uh to the university discourse that coherency is not is is present but the labor of its production is preconditioned on this right on the on the divided subject right so uh this is a a very interesting fact it's also interesting to to to make the observation that when we speak of the notion of totalitarianism of certain bureaucratic forms of totalitarianism they abide by this logic of the of the discourse of the university right famously malair uh made an insight that stalinism is not to be understood vis-a-vis the discourse of the master but is to be understood as the discourse of the university right in fact uh it's not true that stalin had a stability of the s1 if you had a stability of the s1 you wouldn't need the pogroms because the s1 is a sign that makes people work it's not to be understood as something like i'm imposing this code on you and you are duped no uh you are actually experiencing a type of liberty here in a paradoxical way much more so than you are here okay then we have freud's invention of the discourse of the analyst and my summary of this would be the analyst listens to the speech of the analyst and who is divided obviously they've come to psychoanalysis they are they have a question of their desire the position the analyst puts themselves in is from the standpoint of knowledge of of the non-rapport of discourse so the the idea that the master's discourse can circulate well okay maybe but no it can't it has points of rupture of impossibility uh all of that goes to show that the truth the position of truth here and the position of truth here for lack on is said not all the media the kind of half said right so there is no total discourse in the same sense there is no total language right so as such the analyst is placing themselves here with that knowledge with the knowledge of the incommensurability of enjoyment with the knowledge of the non-existence of the sexual relation right and they are addressing a divided subject in the analysts and who is um producing something singular from this a new s1 which is why what's interesting here is that the s1 that is produced here is already of the agency of the master what's beautiful about psychoanalysis is that the s1 is produced in essence by the slave so you could say that psychoanalysis is the grand redeemer of the failure of the godfather's discourse here right so then uh importantly psychoanalysis is not just an individual practice you also have something called the pass so what is produced is a new representation of the new s1 that was produced in the in the uh on the couch yeah so this s2 goes back up and it starts all again so it's a kind of right kind of harmonious thing right everybody with me so far please jump in okay oh actually because i'm wondering because i feel like i've seen the discourses set up before where there's the ponceon is even placed between the lower two levels like where it's in the masters discourse you have like the maximum fantasy there with uh esbard paulson object small a um and so i'm wondering where a little bit if uh i'm confused with this idea where at least for a couple of it seems like you have it like a flow of production with a product goes right into them the truth like where there's like a relation between like the lower right and the lower left and where there's really i don't see much of an arrow there and then especially with the analyst discourse as well isn't isn't the point of the bar on the left side isn't that something like the bar of repression as well so like when the analyst is making their intervention to the analysis and it's not it's not predicated upon the s2 of knowledge uh like in the way that you can't like calculate an intervention that's absolutely right that's right here oh these lines are not mine no i'm not i'm not deviating from like on here no uh i'm not deviating from like on whatsoever um so so uh but that's a very good point we're gonna see the real problem in a moment so this is a slight review we can see everything in uh uh relation to one another now um the discourse of the capitalist is something else entirely it's something that la khan himself we could say uh was ashamed of uh uh and we'll we'll turn to that in a moment but i just want you to un be comfortable with these sorts of terms barred subject symptom right so the uh the hysteric uh is coming from the position of a kind of symptomal right they've already um started their agency the agency of the hysterics discourse has already uh fully sort of realized the symptom of what the master's discourse was the effect of right um a importantly refers both to desire but also to surplus enjoyment and then this relationship between s1 and s2 hopefully you had some clarity on that when we when we went here right so uh furthermore we can note the following points which is that one of the most important ideas of the four discourses is that they provide a solution to a particular impasse here are the solutions right so the first obviously is that the master the master's discourse has an efficacious law right the outcome of which some retain this mastery and the proper name is lysurgis as i said before the hysteric is is um producing a subject of the symptom this is why i actually really like all of this new work on complaint i know sarah ahmed and um many others have been really interested in how contemporary politics maybe despite its affective uh dimensions also has a kind of strange liberatory potential through complaint it's very much a hysterics thing the other notion is the hysteric is making the master impotent right and you can see how right because what's produced here is a knowledge which is rivaling this but the problem is that um [Music] it's not it's not fully eradicating this it's not fully eradicating this right so and then um the issue of the university is a kind of um um an absence of singularity is what i would say right and that is the kind of condition of of shame and why shame is such an important affect which we'll talk about more as well um then of course the discourse of the analyst is a kind of new desire the invention of a new desire let's call it right now importantly this little uh number five problem starter here you see what it says absence of social link so what the hell is the discourse of the capitalist so here's how i would frame it for you we start off similar to the hysteric interestingly um with a kind of division with a kind of um a position of um what do i want i am right there's a kind of um well well we know the secret because here it lies the answer so we have a divided subject who addresses the s1 so here we're not you note this very important there's no arrow here yeah addresses the s1 down here what is the s1 the s1 i think we can call the market right so the notion is a kind of plea for completion or for a resolution of the symptom or ill the market then provides a commodity s2 as a kind of stand in right and it can provide provide those um add infinitum right we know that very well right and this process produces surplus that's the outcome so now our final movement is back home to home base with an ear resolution with an air resolution for the subject you see this process lacon refers to as a game of roulette the other thing we should note here is that this is what's called a klein group in math mathematics which is that the four relations only have relations of two they don't they're not they don't circulate they don't circulate the other thing we have to note here is that la khan will say that the problem with this discourse why he hates it so much is that it promises to upend the coherence of all of these so if these four like the students walk on four feet the capitalist discourse may be keeping them on four feet but losing the coherence of the interrelation between them right and therefore the capitalist discourse becomes a kind of a demand for surplus enjoyment put back onto the subject for which the field of the s1 is not adequately satisfied because the subject does not get to touch its own castration the castration is foreclosed um oh sorry let me use my pen so we know in psychosis that this is the condition of the psychotic subject the castration is foreclosed so um this is it this is the uh the discourse to end all discourses right um and i said the note here the arrow pointing upward on the left i'm sorry the arrow pointing should be downward on the left makes the position of the truth unattainable in the classic discourse changes now into an arrow pointing downwards i'm sorry that is correct so you see the difference between the master's discourse so in a certain sense what does that mean what does that mean that means that um all of the other four discourses are premised on a form of the not all of a castration of a point of impossibility which allows for uh the hysteric to challenge the master right which allows for lacan to speak to the students of the university and help the the illness of their symptom as university students which he could only uniquely do because he's operating within the discourse of the analyst which is why in television when he's asked um what do you think about capitalism and sexuality he says something very short to summarize he basically says i consider myself a self-made man through the aid of the discourse of the analyst very interesting comment um you see because the problem with the capitalist discourse is it it it totally severs the necessity of the discourse of the analyst and i think we will see why that is kind of uh the case uh in a moment and please jump in at any point if there's any uh questions you said one through four was based on what did you say again there was a commonality between one through four each one has a point of impossibility through castration which is the notion that truth is not total right and it's also the notion that um uh there's a kind of there's a kind of sacrificial uh aspect of each one right so the agent is producing something in a discourse which has an efficacy for it but it's not fully adequate right got it the discourse of the capitalist actually has a profound inadequation for the for the subject right the division is only met through uh the the demand for enjoyment because however however if you read leukemian psychoanalysts they'll actually say some very interesting things about treating psychotics in in our current time which is that if this relationship between s1 and s2 which is the promise of the market and s2 its fulfillment through commodities can be successful then you can kind of cure psychosis that way so that can work but all of that's premised on the notion that the market has a kind of harmony right and then we're interested to the question of neoliberalism and its power and enforcement to maintain that so-called harmony right so um this really this movement here can work in some cases right and we'll see like for example when we get to um neurosis and perversion and psychosis they take a different form in response to this situation here okay so um daniel if the capitalist discourse has as you said um it's it it forecloses castration right what's the is there a point of pressure that allows for anything to be spoken against it or um like does if it if it colonizes all other forces how does it then how how does the the contradiction that for example marx talks about come through is it not within that discourse is it is there a different discourse that is produced by the capitalist discourse that allows for something to be displaced or no yeah i mean in in television la khan says something very annoying which is one must become a saint uh yeah but i didn't get that part exactly yeah but but why the india is sort of around here right like if if all of the logic of the field of the other that's developed in the lacanian apparatus is no longer operative here right this notion of um s1 and s2 is exterior to the autonomy of the subject the subject is sort of not an agency of that action it's outside of them right so they're deprived of what we can simply call the division that would happen through language which is why a lot of the issue of psychosocial uh mental health uh still is issues of language autism is huge psychosis is an issue of foreclosure which has to do with language as well right so if you tell a very psychotic patient to jump off a bridge they take the language literally right so um i think you see the point which is but but but to become a saint which i think is a very bad answer to the the problem here and there's other people that have probably provided better answers than that lechon was being kind of um flamboyant um which is why when he develops his later notion of the sin tome it's a um it's a play on saint tom saint thomas aquinas the sin tone is the only way to exit the capitalist discourse because to become a saint is to affirm something to affirm the castration now when i say that affirm the castration and accept the field of the other and all of that here you get a lot of interesting debates on the lacanian theoretical community um i'm thinking of the um the gen who is the person who gave the keynote at the last lac conference remind me lee edelman yeah so like yeah yeah so why does people like lee edelman and others say that the lacanian theoretical apparatus needs to be completely rethought i think in some sense it has to do with their their notion that le con still like for example todd mcgowan says that he and frank you can jump in here too he hates the four discourses he doesn't want anything to do with them right so i think that there are some certain um theoretical commitments to things like castration um that a lot of contemporary lacanians problematize in some sense but i i invite others to sort of jump in you know as regards todd mcgowan's uh lack of sympathies toward the discourses um i think and actually i don't know but something that that makes me wonder what's going on with the capitalist discourse maybe um just from a advantage of skepticism is the idea that it's foreclosing castration and i know that lacan says that but uh i i've todd does right that uh it's a foreclosure of the unconscious in capitalism and i just wonder is that maybe a more accurate development sure of the concept because i look at castration and it seems to actually be the sunny queen on of the subjects uh i guess attachment to the commodity right or the way the subject uh embraces their dissatisfaction right the dissatisfaction that accumulation demands of the subject so that but that's my issue i think with the capitalist discourse is just well you know it it does for the neurotic so you know if we affirm that freud's classic neurotic subject is the kind of paramount subject still right despite despite the the the predominance of late capitalism and this kind of injunction to enjoy and that you know zizekian sort of shift and super egoic and so on um if you'll you'll see here in my in my uh this is the way in which perversion neurosis and psychosis confront the the impasse of the of the discourse of the capitalist so i can just read this out um so as i said before um the problem for lacon was that this is a new masters discourse it's a new masters discourse and we should note by the way that in the early 2000s and mid-2000s there's a lot of good philosophy around the notion of mastery which i can for some reason a lot of folks have kind of left behind but around this notion of the human animal and mastery which i found deeply penetrating like the new materialists were into this that you was into this g-shack and so on and obviously we know from zizek's work on the centrality of perversion i want to point out why perversion is so important for him here you see this similarity you may have caught the issue in perversion is this and there is a kind of a to s back here to this to this this is why the discourse of the capitalist is a perverse discourse so um uh the the issue with the pervert by the way this is very important this is why like it's very hard to deal with perverts it is their their objective is not to necessarily put violence on the other but it is to remind the other that the s1 here is gone right let's remind everybody continuously that um it doesn't work you know what i'm saying so i think we get a sense of those kinds of people right and we also see the way in which also in a in a flip reversal of that the discourse of the analyst also has a touch of that notion because you go from a as a starting point the position of the analyst to the divided subject but in the capitalist discourse it's obviously much more terrorizing because it's coming up back at you like this right which is you know the the monstrous demand to enjoy and so on and so on right so i thought maybe i could read my um nine problems and maybe others can develop others other problems so let me just just read these real quick so number one i think that um in the capitalist discourse the necessary impasse of the non-rapport this is a big issue is no longer an issue and this really helps us understand things like um the transsexual movement for example so think about it this way like if the discourse of capitalism um uh forecloses castration and doesn't perceive the impasse of sexuality to be an issue like i sort of solved that in the way that it relates the s1 to the s2 the issue is is that surplus suicides is what the subject receives so it's this kind of um overwhelm overwhelming thing right so number two uh the affect of the capitalist discourse i think is still a shame largely although not exclusively right but i still think actually and i don't know if kopech and solaire would agree with this but i think that the notion for for many is that the absence of the s-1 or rather the instrumentalization of the s-1 on the market still produces a kind of um uh depression the notion here is encapsulated in fight club where before he joins fight club he realizes that all of the um s1 back up to the market didn't satisfy him remember when he's in the bathtub and he calls his father and he says i bought a home i graduated from college i had children but i'm still unsatisfied you see the point good night that was eva love you okay so you see that's point two point three um we've already kind of went over this but frank to your uh point ignorance of non-rapport and of the unconscious is still very much operative here and then again with psychosis you know the article i posted in slack makes a beautiful point and i hope i don't know if wilfred is on wilfred is a um lacanian psychoanalyst who is uh just written a book on the treatment of schizophrenia from uh a location lens so i'd very much like his thoughts on that um number six uh what i'm calling praxis okay now here we're referring to a few things that lacon says on marx i'll just read what i've written if we have a generalized proletarianization of subjectivity because now here's a nice point for lack on a proletariat is someone who's deprived of discourse entirely okay so uh in the capitalist discourse precisely because it is a klein group and precisely because of its lack of relation back to these other four right stiegler says the same thing we have the proletarianization of the aesthetic for stiegler yeah so however for lakan the idea is the two-ness because the lack of sexual relation is not just to be understood as sexuality it's also in class the notion of a lack of the two is an issue having to do with the commensurability of sharing joisons across subjectivity it's kind of the the cornerstone of why lacon it's not exactly um uh in favor of inter-subjective dialogue it's not a habermasian right has to do with the non-rapport right so that's number six and i will just remind you in uncore the seminar lechon makes a beautiful critique of what we on the left call worldview marxism from michael heinrich's notion in his introduction to the reading of capital where he says that the era of marxist thought of worldview marxism where the proletariat could instantiate its distinction from bourgeois society as a distinct worldview of valtteri has come to an end so it's coming to an end its disillusion was also uh prophesized in some sense by the rise of the capitalist discourse which is a new way of treating that because there was a time in which proletarian subjectivity could be hysteric they can't exactly be hysteric now because the hysteric is is worldview marxism right it is a classic master slave issue the notion of world view marxism necessitates a kind of subtraction and solidarity amongst the proletarian and the creation you know lukach is the real philosopher of all of that right so but what i'm saying in encore is that la khan was aware because his seminar was filled with marxists right he was aware that that was declining that the proletarian solidarity is declining number seven the capitalist discourse poses a threat to psychoanalytic accounts of the subject the issue here is that this relation of a to divided subject creates effects of a special importance here more so why because all of this upper part becoming a saint insisting on the other speech and so on right the fields you know you know what i'm saying uh well in this condition you're overwhelmed with affect you're overwhelmed so this is actually why uh it's the body the speaking body of the late you see the point that the body becomes a lot more important for lacan right um so uh number eight we we have this notion of kind of a confusion nonetheless around affect and i i wish to ask how exactly do we handle this notion uh it would be an open question the fact that we cannot reduce populism to hatred or we cannot reduce racism to hatred if uh hatred is always fundamentally tied up into love right um so the the passions for lack on the affects are knowledge they have to do with knowledge right it's not some kind of inner truth of the subject of a kind of um no it's it's inextricably linked to the logic of the signifier and then the other interesting thing that solaire and lacron will say in television is that you know and this may link to a question it was asked earlier boredom moroseness and depression are the uh predominant anti-social affects of the capitalist discourse right and they are affects around the absence of lack in the other so it's not that there's not others is that we rather have a really hard time uh pinpointing or confronting this notion of a lacking other right and so many of the kind of common affects as la khan says in television are uh boredom and moroseness and it's i feel like that's actually a very dated um a point to the 1970s so i'm not sure if i really agree with that but um anyways let me just stop we have like 20 minutes left i can just uh see what you all think at this point i i like your presentation it's very understandable i was just gonna throw out um an element that i was thinking about sort of biologically and i'm very far from a neuroscientist at all but essentially with that affect aspect um i've read a lot of stuff where sort of like the um the there's a word for it it's kind of like uh when we assess the environment we do so like really quickly and it's like an instant sort of um scan of the environment and it's to sort of weed out threat and then relaxes if there is no threat so there's an element there which i think um maybe evolutionarily has a an advantage certainly to to have more emotion and to be able to understand more emotion there are elements there of sort of this very basic repeating of this sort of changing the environment and how our perception is linked with that yeah and then i think too there are aspects like in our brains of like how the amygdala sort of makes sense of all those things and like there seem to be some differences between like republicans and democrats for that kind of aspect too so i just i think that we don't know how these things necessarily will go so like we can only look at the capitalist uh discourse from the perspective of like a university or a master's discourse and it seems like we're losing ground maybe but i'm not so sure i think maybe some of these things might eventually sort of give off different yeah sort of things and then we'll we'll have more to look at even yeah i mean i i think that's a great point i just want to make a couple uh comments about how you see number five here remember kind of my critique of wendy brown or you know whatever it was i don't really want to critique whitney brown because she's a brilliant theorist i i love her work but isn't it the case that she's basically saying civil society or the social needs to come precisely to to confront this issue absence of social link right that there is something about the sphere of democratic freedom which can kind of mitigate the absence there i think everyone recognizes that this logic produces that absence right so um that was one connection that i think i may we'll make from last time and then and then just to add a further twist of course that a kind of critical response to that would be that um even if you do try to make the attempt to add a kind of um mitigation there it's still caught uh within this and this it's in other words it's still subject to market instrumentalization and i think this is something that's interesting that if you look at for example horkheimer's critique of american pragmatism it's very clear that there is no beyond of market instrumentalization this is why for the frankfurt school its reason as such is instruments instrumentalized right so they're very radical in that way much more radical than brown i feel like right um i wonder what you all think about that you know like is there in a naive sense is there a solution to this problem because you know miller will have this whole notion of um ethical committees and as an incredible uh seminar which if you ever want to understand um some of the weird impasses on the marxist left from a lacanian point of view read his uh seminar on the big other does not exist and it's ethical committees and you'll see that a lot of of the challenge of organizing and solidarity is is actually still very much caught up in the overwhelming pressure that especially this movement uh creates so anyways i'll stop talking what is the uh the term that lacan has for the unconscious as it sort of oscillates and comes back to where it started to initially there's sort of this never-ending loop jim does anyone know what that's called oh uh yes he does give it different names doesn't he yeah um i don't know what the french term is for that uh swerve uh i know that he will use the uh uh the kleinemann the swerving and the swerve uh in uh four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis because i think that's kind of what we're up against in some ways here the roulette like a game of roulette i don't know if it's the roulette or if the i'm thinking of something else where he sort of describes sort of this never-ending journey that never finds itself sort of and it sort of is like a flipped what is that called it's like a like if you take a rubber band and you turn it once and you're walking on it you're never going to get the other side oh yeah yeah the movie is stripped yeah yeah so i think i think in some ways we we're we're stuck there yeah i mean it's interesting to think about the the turn to the bora boromian structure right so if the capitalist discourse like if if tomski is right that the late lacan is basically a response to the crisis of marxism and he realizes this notion of capitalist discourse and he realizes that the coherence of the relation between these four is no longer efficacious you can see why it kind of makes sense that he turns to the logic of the borough me and not which is a different theory of relations you know what i'm saying so yeah a different theory of how to constitute the inside outside estimate relation as well right yeah maybe maybe a new theory even also of castration right which is why i think we should take quite seriously when la khan turns to joyce and the sin tom he's doing it in the same way that joyce wrote finnegan's wake to keep the professors happy in the sense that look at look at the lakini and feel they've just been so they've had so much surplus enjoyment from like seminar 20 that that like they think that seminar 20 is an omen from the future that we have you know what i mean yeah and in some ways it is yeah in some ways it is right um there's this beautiful uh point that milner uh indicated to me which was that when lacon discovered in the late 70s early 80s that the communist [Music] experiments in china and russia were basically over he returned his teaching to a different dialectic uh entirely i love i love that kind of imminent reading right and he kind of turns to the the work of victor cousins who was a a state philosopher under the napoleonic regime a liberal philosopher who came up with the notion that there's a kind of um stability of society of the the good the true and the beautiful right and so like kind of in his late work sort of puts the question of of um of revolution aside which is why like i've said before that a lot of left-wing lacanians don't like the late black on in my opinion anyways daniel you said that the theory of knots is a different kind of relationality from the four um yeah but i can't answer the question i don't know well enough to answer it as well i mean i i don't know the theory of knocks well enough but i invite i know frank has done work in that so i don't really feel like confident to answer that question kyle but go on right it's tough yeah go ahead go ahead though you can ask it okay yeah yeah how how how do how is it different and how does it help or what maybe you could answer the the latter part i don't know i mean all i'm saying my in my my insight now after having worked on these a lot on these four discs the five discourses right is that there's clearly an inadequacy of them right they're extremely like zizek loves these things because of their coherence in my opinion they they give me vertigo because they're so clear like they're just so clear in my opinion right they just work yet they don't right and is it is it is it is it just the dominance of the capitalist discourse that produces that i don't know this is something actually that maybe we should turn to you know and and study more um so i'll just leave it like there and others you talk about how they don't work in in what way they don't work for you are you giving me the like the hysteric kind of question now i do have i'm gonna stop talking though because this is like i don't this is not all me here i just want to see what other people think um and kayam i think we should start a whole new working group on your question yeah well the hysteric question i just was that um can we have the slides oh yeah of course yeah yeah of course yeah i'm wondering just kind of hearing your presentation i'm i'm wondering if these things sort of can be overridden by capitalism like i think i think there is an element of that but but i'm not sure maybe the other discourses i think again could sort of change yeah and then um they might even become sort of more precious in some ways interesting and and so i and by them changing and sort of you know still existing and um i think um i think they won't necessarily become commodified right because you're gonna have sort of it's gonna become sort of more generally uh recognized and um it's gonna maybe i don't know again i think it's tricky to kind of predict but um you know something like this i think will continue um but i don't i don't see the the eroding of one entirely and the building up of the other entirely i don't see that happening yeah i mean if anyone was raised by a dictatorial father they know the masters discourse very well sure we live in the capitalist discourse as a kind of the other interesting thing about notion of um capitalism and its world composition something that i do know something about is alemba jews logics of worlds he says that again apropos that globalization is worldlessness right it's kind of so there's a kind of um you know if we take seriously this notion of the klein group as this kind of um set of relations which have no kind of correspondence to each other that don't form a recirculation right um yeah it gives us a nice answer to the unbehagan it's like we need to go back to read freud now right it's like the capitalist discourse shows us civilization and it's discontents you know what i mean yeah so i jumped in i wanted to god go ahead uh okay so yeah look i wanted i wanted to take you back to the four discourses and the interesting way in which you talked about what appeared to be a reiterative process of movement across or through a sequence and i just want i would like you to say a bit more about that reiterative process and also the extent to which at any one historical moment one of those discourses is predominant as it were sure um it's very ambiguous right um la khan is speaking in the other side of psychoanalysis to the students who are presumably under the hegemony of the university discourse and that's why he makes this point that the university discourse was actually um invented in uh with charlemagne yes but it was refined in the enlightenment and you know dietero and remo's nephew presents um a full-on um perverse assault on the legitimacy or the efficacy of the university discourse um you know the the basic notion of this story it's a beautiful story if you need who everybody here teaches right you know this notion of the s1 and it's kept in abeyance like the kind of higher purpose like you have somebody come into your classroom and they want they don't want just the knowledge they want the supplement from it how is this going to change my life you know this kind of demand you get from right wingers okay very good but what is it gonna do for me right um it's a debate uh of a so-called enlightened individual with the nephew who is a kind of um a pest who uh insists that the singularity is more important than the knowledge i have the s1 you're giving me the too uh yes i know i reveal the hollowness of your knowledge i actually through my enjoyment i have enough of the s1 and you know it's not necessary right i love that point and this is also why hegel is the hysteric of the enlightenment because his form in the phenomenology is an affront to dietero's impasse in a very interesting way um luck on will this is why he will say um not read hegel he will say uh regale regale yourself in hegel which is a what is to regale it's the opposite of being in a state of shame so hegel is the one you turn to to confront shame yeah if the university discourse is a shame producing discourse hegel is your heart your way out of that for luck on um so uh on the issue of the periodization of the discourses uh it's a very good question i think lukan's very good if the founder founding moments but he's not created a concrete periodization right and althuser was one of the first originators of this notion of the discourses by the way right and and baju will take the four discourses and implement them as conditions of truth and he has a possible fifth one as the condition of philosophy which is sort of you know the mediator of the other four right love politics art and science so it's a it's a stealing lachanze formula right and each one has a composible relation in some sense to each other and each one has a unique affect right so for baju it's a very clear presentation of the of the discourse theory in some sense but it's more complex because he disregards discourse it's a whole other thing but anyways i don't know john i don't know if i'm answering your question too well um but nakan says they turn on quarter turns so there's a quarter turn from the masters to the hysteric there's a quarter turn from university but they're all tethered to the master right they all kind of quarter turn on the master right and each one is a kind of you could think about the master as a kind of assault from three points and and it's it's oscillating like this right the capitalist obviously being that which is outside of uh that quarter turn it's not it's not happening right so uh joan also says in a footnote that you know the khan only developed four of the turns so there are four more left and maybe in the future one of his disciples will do it you know well actually levy bryant the philosopher has written a nice essay called um sort of wild world of discourses where he has identified 36. so he actually takes ben's point that was made earlier and he says actually what uh zhizhak allows is um thinking uh new it's divisible by 4 36 right so it's thinking uh variations of possible scenarios in light of capitalism usurping the master's discourse if you think of slavoy's project and i know that many of you um may have mixed feelings about zizek but from his most densest theoretical level okay it is a problem between masters and capitalist discourse this is like i would say one of his main uh missions is to resolve this impasse you know and it's a very good i think very good mission to to do that right and he'll be the first to admit that he hasn't achieved it um this is why he was very interested in the opening of less than nothing to refer to a an untranslated text um by la drew and uh christian jambe called la ange the angel which was a very interesting mystical reading of lacan's four discourses in response to 68 as a way of kind of um providing a kind of maoist uh left-wing marxist reading of the four discourses parts of that i'll post on slack because parts of it is actually translated la anges um so uh yeah john i don't want to talk anymore so i hope that i answered your question okay yes thank you thank you i have a quick question if you might um offer a uh interpretation uh when we look at duluz he seems to really hone in on affect as being sort of a stabilizing factor eventually i don't know if you would uh uh comment on that do you have a take on how my this might reconcile with with a delusion sort of uh yeah yeah well in our in our group work here with anti-social affects one of the things i wanted to propose to you all was actually to have other speakers like next year after the holidays because yeah there's a kind of whole split and one of the figures who uh really brings this out is a disciple of felix kothari his name is maurizio lazarato he's an italian philosopher and he provides a kind of way of re-theorizing lacanian thought in distinction between like the thinkers who privilege logic of signifier versus the thinker thinkers who privilege um what guataria will call a signifying subjection right so the the whole uh issue with brian masumi and the kind of left-wing guatarian project is around this sort of um distinction that the laws of guttaria will make between signifier and sign in anti-oedipus there's a lot to be developed there because affect is placed in a very different way right and sort of the the means by which subjectivity um uh both frees itself but is also subjected is very much reliant on affect in a very different way than the kind of you know baju or on ca zhizhak lakanian left okay so there's a sort of steadfast commitment to a certain theory of language um which i believe that um the laws opens up an alternative okay i'll just say that that makes sense yeah i just um just wanted to think about anxiety and effort and the passions you mentioned and then thinking of bernardus alwaysel's new book compassion for ignorance which is obviously a big acanian theme and also thinking about resentment and populism and fake news and all of these things are sort of orbiting around one another thinking about yeah this just these themes i don't have a particular question or anything but it feels like something that could be addressed within this sort of orbit of topics and yeah i think just when you mentioned again that knowledge is is fuller khan one of the chief passions it feels like this epistemological type question of um fake news and this sort of um emphasis on that in in the american elections and the split between fox news and other outlets and and all of this feels very predicated on perhaps a sort of anxiety around knowledge um for different subjects and the ways that they sort of um i remember adam phillips once talked about um the way that anxious subjects um reach after certainty so they always want this certainty which they can never quite grab a hold of for themselves and sometimes it feels like this conspiratorial fake news type approach to dealing with facts has that aspect of sort of grasping certainty and or something like that so anyway it's not super coherent what i'm saying but it just sort of bubbled up at the end of this discussion i think yes thank you ben that's that's very helpful i mean i think the uh larger thesis of the diminishment of the field of the other is certainly a nice way to understand the proliferation of conspiracy theories right because there's a side of there's a sort of um a lack of instantiation of of of lack uh uh within the field of kind of civil speech right so there's a raul mancoya a san francisco-based lacanian will make a lot of nice distinctions around um how a civil society must be constituted um around this necessary uh self-negation process which is why he's a critique of identity politics and why i think actually why a lot of leukemians have um sometimes vulgar critiques of identity politics i find i feel that like a lot of lacanians kind of discard it with not fully understanding its its history and its trajectory and like aspects of it which are emancipatory right and i think that sarah ahmed's work on complaint um really points in that direction right like you can have a subjectivity um of a pure complaint which is not necessarily addressed in a kind of um signifying clarity right but still retains a kind of emancipatory dimension right and i think we saw this with black lives matter in some sense right which is that um we may not have produced some kind of policy effectuation but there's a kind of um libidinal uh shift subjective shift which we all sort of felt you know what i mean and it still is kind of um pregnant you know it's a pregnant um moment i feel on the left you know it's it's kind of a moment where we lack a lot but we also have a kind of momentum at a different level i feel like i don't know if others agree with that i'm kind of interested in sort of the nietzschean influence there of what he talked about with resentment and how that was sort of the foundation of religion and it seems like according to him that would have been sort of the creation of some of these discourses as well because you had the discourse then certainly of the master and what what presentamont created then would have been the discourse of the slave in some way and and religion as well so you you you do have this upswell of sort of like i think of it like a pendulum where it goes one way and then it goes the other way and then i don't know so i mean nietzsche nietzsche's problem with socrates was that he thought that socrates was creating a new race he called a new race of humans what he calls the theoretical human being that insisted on a fundamental optimism and a fundamentally different worldview and so for nietzsche's socrates was um an outlaw scandal because he was founding a new way for the definition of the human being as what as constituted through consciousness through through the social yeah that's that's this the great scandal of of socrates for nietzsche um not founded through uh the innocence of nature right which is why ultimately the ubermensch must actually possess a certain innocence at a certain refined level they must remove themselves from struggle because they are um they are stronger but in order to be aesthetic over men they must be sheltered from the same toils and degradations of the theoretical human being right so yeah like i think it's beautiful i want to write a paper actually on nietzsche and lacan on the aristocracy because it is the case for lacan and you saw this in the malaya essay on shame if you read it that the whole problem with the shame and all of that is that we haven't recovered psychically from the collapse of feudalism right the placement of the social order was like i said before paradoxically contingent for the individual under its under those conditions so uh la con kind of recognizes that as a dark truth and obviously so does nichia but nietzsche will take a political militant reactionary approach to create something completely different right interesting yeah well uh i wanna i wanna close and just thank you all and i hope you have a wonderful thanksgiving and i'm really excited for samo's talk and um i hope you all can make it on december third um you know it's i'm gonna lower like the cost to just like pretty much nothing so we can have more people come um [Music] and it should be really fun um [Music] yeah any other things before uh we give our lacanian scansion and i uh close uh the night first of all thank you rithika for a wonderful opening very much yeah thank you and daniel i would like to hear more of you from you are you going to be doing more of these presentations sure why not i mean sure i love doing these things well i mean it's uh it's pure joy for me really well i i love your style yeah no it's really really nice to have this kind of comradely there's no um credentials we are seeking here we're just seeking the love of the game you know it's a beautiful effort so um i wish you all the best and thank you all very very much oh just one thing i'm not on the slack thing i don't even know what that is um so apparently you guys send out texts over there and i would like to have access before we close i'm going to send you an invite right now have you ever done it before no slack okay um is that like an app sorry um yeah functional what's your email just say your email out loud please it's i'll write it down here just to make it easy okay okay very good but i do what i want to do is more of these kind of on this theme of anti-social affects because i know a lot of scholars that are doing great stuff on this so i think we could invite a kind of series of presentations um in the future so everybody have a good thanksgiving i'm gonna invite you now all the best thank you okay thank you daniel thank you

Channel: Daniel Tutt

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Id: cO971UF9GHk

Length: 125min 26sec (7526 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020