Normal people: The world is a sphere! 🤓 Conspiracy Theorists: The world is flat! 🧐 Lacan: The world is a donut cut into a mobius strip which wraps around itself inside of itself! 🤯
Owen, thanks for referencing my topology videos. Your interest in set theory complements mine in projective geometry, but following Joan Copjec I cite Desargues as Lacan's topology main theory source, as does Lacan in Seminar XIII and elsewhere. This is not rubber-sheet topology, which lends itself well to set- and graph-theory, and your viewers might want to think about self-intersection and non-orientation as the key qualities of Lacan's topologies. In other parts of this otherwise helpful web site, you cite Euler's treatment of the Königsburg Bridge Problem as the origin of Lacan's topology, but Lacan nowhere mentions this; and the Bridge problem is the basis of graph theory, not topology. I do admire your explanation of the torus and its relation to the Möbius cut. Your readers will have a lot to think about here! But, in general I would caution about blurring the distinction between "immersed" (3-d) forms, which we can visualize, and the actual 2-d topological counterparts. You can't actually see a 2-d torus (there's no where to stand outside and look at it). I always have to warn my audience that I am still learning about topology; I'm not a mathematician (more of a maths dummy) so I have to use ethnological/cultural examples, where topology takes on the forms of the uncanny to be effective. I advise viewers to go back to the sources (Seminars IX, XIII, and XIV) to realize that Lacan was a profoundly "visualizer" and that to understand him properly we have to learn how to think this way, not in terms of "pictures" but in terms of the impossible-Real spaces first theorized by Pappus, Desargues, and Pascal, later by Gauss, Plücker, Riemann, Klein, Möbius, etc. So much work to do! Thank you for your efforts and beautiful graphics and narration; you have high production values as they say in show-biz.
I'm sorry Donald, but you do confuse people with your statements. As you yourself mentioned, you should get a deeper understanding of maths before tackling these subjects. It's not true that "you can't see a 2D Torus because there's nowhere to stand outside and look at it", that's like saying it's impossible to see a square because there's nowhere to stand outside and look at it. Either you express yourself badly or you have a wrong understanding of the dimensionality of surfaces. For a start, you should differentiate between the dimensionality of the object you're describing and the dimensionality of the space it lives in. For example, the perimeter of a rectangle is a one-dimensional object living in a two-dimensional space. The Torus surface is a 2D object living in a 3D space. Immersions and embeddings have nothing to do with this. Immersions and embeddings come into play when you REPRESENT an object of a certain dimensionality in a space with a different dimensionality. You study the most fascinating topics, I love your channel, but you really should put your maths together if you don't want all your work to be completely useless. Thanks for the attention.
Videos on these subjects would become too long. Just check the one on the graphs of desire: if it was done like you propose, it would have lasted four hours.
So in the first instance, the psychotic struggles to establish any reference points in spacetime due to a reliance on the imaginary. In the second instance, the symbolic solves this issue at the expense of creating a singularity which then acts as a black hole, essentially acting as a barrier to spacetime and sucking its pseudo-objects onto a flat surface which then serves to obscure the true nature of spacetime in which it appears to appear (but from which it is radically other). From the imaginary perspective of being inside the torus, and inhabiting language, one then tries to fabricate a meaningful reality which necessarily means forgetting the reason for this structural act in the first place. Therefore I would suggest that the proper consideration here is not the shape of the torus but rather the fact that is it transparent, and that this alignment I-S-R, the imaginary seeing the symbolic against the backdrop of the (repressed) real, is what gives rise to uncanny eruptions in the symbolic itself, e.g. the ghost of Hamlet's dead father. The nature of the Real thus animates the dead signifier in a way that disturbs the functioning of the ego which fails to recognise this as an effect of the subject, the illusion of depth dissolves when the nature of the subject is revealed to be nothing other than the hole in the middle of the symbolic order. There is no actual outside here. The signifiers appear to have a conditioning effect on other signifiers but have no impact on the unconditioned Real because in reality there is nothing for them to have a conditioning effect on - prior to signification, no such distinction could've been made.
In other words, what is being described is a Hegelian dialectic... In psychosis we have the imaginary and the real - they are both subject to flux and so any knowledge gets wiped away by the tide of time, the ratio I-R can be expressed as 0:0 In neurosis we have the antithesis - a system of recording which gives more permanence and allows us to orient ourselves within a knowable universe, but this is done at the expense of a loss of the original problematic because the ratio of one representation to another in the symbolic order is 1:1 so the issue for the neurotic is one of too much permanence and not enough flux. The synthesis requires the recovery of the original 0 to be included in the symbolic in order to produce a differential ratio of 1:0 in such a way as to count the zero here not as a loss but rather as the precondition for its own emergence, producing what Hegel calls the negation of the negation, or Adorno calls the identity of identity and difference.
Hello, I am a psychology student from Turkey and I am trying to study Lacan's texts. My question is this: According to Lacan, the place where desire begins is when the child whose sexuality is chaotic is castrated. I know that his unsatisfied desire has begun and he is trying to fill it with objects of desire. This event itself is a tramua, my question is: Does every trauma cause the beginning of some kind of desire? Do traumas experienced in adulthood create some kind of underlying desire, or is it only experienced in childhood?
I don't think Lacan was correct in this instance. I think we have primitive feelings at birth, and they develop in relation to relational objects like parents. His claim is that sexuality is frustrated by parents, or blocked because parents cannot satisfy sexuality. I believe sexual development is independent of relational dynamics to some degree, ergo masturbation or displaced into gratification. That said its only in puberty when sexuality is starting to develop actual or real form and feelings materialize. If that is some how damaged ergo sexual abuse or mental/physical abuse, the desire is withdrawn.
Why did Lacan, amongst all topological surfaces, of which many are more closely related to the Möbius Strip, use the Torus? I think the point is not clear in this video, as it isn't in Donald Kunze's admirable channel. To my understanding Lacan's interest in the Torus could be explained because the Torus has Euler characteristic 0 (like Crosscaps and Klein Bottles, all surfaces than can be deformed into a Möbius Strip), useful to represent the relationship with the Real, BUT, unlike the other examples, its surface is ORIENTABLE. This mixture of orientability and non-orientability might explain Lacan's special interest in the Torus; yet this is just adductive reasoning on my side. What do you think?
You may be delighted to watch a video by Carlo Séquin, where the relation will be made clear. ua-cam.com/video/3_VydFQmtZ8/v-deo.html The torus is generated from a "Möbius-shaped cut," that, by twisting the cut 180º as it completes a full circuit, you can see that one circuit is actually two circuits. The torus we see is not this. It is the immersed version, but if we think about the two voids (inside the tube and the middle of the tube) and realize they are the same void from two "angles," we can think our way back to the topological torus, which we cannot see. Good luck!
@@boundarylanguage The video is not helpful; I understand how a Möbius strip and a Torus relate to each other. We've already talked about this on your channel but we can't seem to understand each other. My question is "why the Torus and not another surface?", followed by "are we sure that Lacan still thought of the Torus topology as the only possible description of the mind till the very end of his career?" If we took for example a Klein Bottle, we would obtain the two Möbius strips with a straight cut. With a Crosscap, we would get a Möbius strip and a regular cylinder. All of these possibilities are potentially good analogues for the same psychic mechanisms. The Boy's Surface is even more appealing because it might synthesise all aspects of Lacan's teaching. On a side note, I have troubles following you when you speak of the "immersed version" of the Torus. Yes, n-dimensional Tori do exist, so of course we couldn't visualise a 4D Torus. But this doesn't mean that when we speak generally of a Torus we don't intend a regular 3D Torus, a donut, which is not an "immersed version" of anything. Maybe... you mean a CLIFFORD Torus?
I am not sure if this will be helpful or not, but the torus addresses specifically the structure of demand and desire and is not necessarily meant to be a totalizing presentation of the psyche. The other surfaces present different structures (fantasy for the cross cap, the subject for the mobius strip) . The justification for the torus lies in the repetition of different demands (conscious and unconscious) that revolve around a desire that is not counted or included into the system of demands, or not recognized by the subject (central hole). The fact that the torus is a closed surface while also having a hole is important here, which is also why the torus has two voids or maybe equivalently two main loops on it surface, the horizontal loops going around the circumference and the the 'vertical' loops around the tube (Where as you would only have lets say 'horizontal' loops on the mobius strip since you can't cross the edge.) Also to the last point I think the idea is that Lacan is concerned with the 2 dimensional properties of the torus, and not a solid or 2 dimensional torus. The boy's surface is a really cool surface and it would be cool to see someone write more about it in its potential connections to Lacanian theory ( I think Donald Kunze might mention it in a video somewhere?) I don't know if you already knew all of this or if it is helpful at all! Let me know if it is or not
@@cnreiger Thanks! I knew part of what you are saying, and you are confirming my supposition that the importance of the Torus relies in its Euler characteristic 0 (the central hole) and not in any special intrinsic relation to non-orientability (like the numberphile video Donald shared might suggest). Moreover you confirm me in the idea that the Torus represents just a part of the psyche and that fantasy is a Crosscap (and later on, from 1980 on, a Boy's surface, from what I know), meaning that for the repetition of demand Lacan chose the Torus exactly because IT IS ORIENTABLE, while still having a hole. Moreover, you confirm me in my supposition that we are not to understand the Torus Lacan talks about to be a 4D Torus (a Clifford Torus) as Donald often seems to imply; or, at least, that if it actually was a 4D Torus then everything said in the videos would be wrong. As you see, if we are right both this video and Donald's channel are quite badly mistaken in their explanations. My idea is that, even if they know Lacan quite well, they should study more maths, because they get confused and write confusing things. Just check Donald's description of the Torus in the above message... what was he trying to say? Thanks so much for caring and trying to disentangle this mess. Let me know what you think!
HOLY SHIT , NEW LACANONLINE VIDEO , LES GOOOOOOOOOO !!! IMMACULATE W
Great to get another clear, thoughtful anatomisation of Lacanian concepts from the peerless Owen Hewitson! Bravo, Owen.
I was afraid you weren't going to upload anymore. Thanks for the great videos!
You do realise he passed away some time ago right?
What?
Great work Owen! Thank you so much for the efforts you put into this video. Would love to see a follow-up on Lacan’s turn to the Borromean Knot!
So glad you highlighted Don Kunze’s channel.
That channel is great!
Normal people: The world is a sphere! 🤓 Conspiracy Theorists: The world is flat! 🧐 Lacan: The world is a donut cut into a mobius strip which wraps around itself inside of itself! 🤯
Owen, thanks for referencing my topology videos. Your interest in set theory complements mine in projective geometry, but following Joan Copjec I cite Desargues as Lacan's topology main theory source, as does Lacan in Seminar XIII and elsewhere. This is not rubber-sheet topology, which lends itself well to set- and graph-theory, and your viewers might want to think about self-intersection and non-orientation as the key qualities of Lacan's topologies. In other parts of this otherwise helpful web site, you cite Euler's treatment of the Königsburg Bridge Problem as the origin of Lacan's topology, but Lacan nowhere mentions this; and the Bridge problem is the basis of graph theory, not topology. I do admire your explanation of the torus and its relation to the Möbius cut. Your readers will have a lot to think about here! But, in general I would caution about blurring the distinction between "immersed" (3-d) forms, which we can visualize, and the actual 2-d topological counterparts. You can't actually see a 2-d torus (there's no where to stand outside and look at it). I always have to warn my audience that I am still learning about topology; I'm not a mathematician (more of a maths dummy) so I have to use ethnological/cultural examples, where topology takes on the forms of the uncanny to be effective. I advise viewers to go back to the sources (Seminars IX, XIII, and XIV) to realize that Lacan was a profoundly "visualizer" and that to understand him properly we have to learn how to think this way, not in terms of "pictures" but in terms of the impossible-Real spaces first theorized by Pappus, Desargues, and Pascal, later by Gauss, Plücker, Riemann, Klein, Möbius, etc. So much work to do! Thank you for your efforts and beautiful graphics and narration; you have high production values as they say in show-biz.
I'm sorry Donald, but you do confuse people with your statements. As you yourself mentioned, you should get a deeper understanding of maths before tackling these subjects.
It's not true that "you can't see a 2D Torus because there's nowhere to stand outside and look at it", that's like saying it's impossible to see a square because there's nowhere to stand outside and look at it. Either you express yourself badly or you have a wrong understanding of the dimensionality of surfaces. For a start, you should differentiate between the dimensionality of the object you're describing and the dimensionality of the space it lives in. For example, the perimeter of a rectangle is a one-dimensional object living in a two-dimensional space. The Torus surface is a 2D object living in a 3D space. Immersions and embeddings have nothing to do with this. Immersions and embeddings come into play when you REPRESENT an object of a certain dimensionality in a space with a different dimensionality.
You study the most fascinating topics, I love your channel, but you really should put your maths together if you don't want all your work to be completely useless.
Thanks for the attention.
Thank you for coming back!!
Very good man, thanks for the hard work!
Sometimes you put text on the screen and talk and it’s hard to read and listen at the same time. I think it’s better to read the quote/text verbatim
Videos on these subjects would become too long. Just check the one on the graphs of desire: if it was done like you propose, it would have lasted four hours.
So in the first instance, the psychotic struggles to establish any reference points in spacetime due to a reliance on the imaginary.
In the second instance, the symbolic solves this issue at the expense of creating a singularity which then acts as a black hole, essentially acting as a barrier to spacetime and sucking its pseudo-objects onto a flat surface which then serves to obscure the true nature of spacetime in which it appears to appear (but from which it is radically other).
From the imaginary perspective of being inside the torus, and inhabiting language, one then tries to fabricate a meaningful reality which necessarily means forgetting the reason for this structural act in the first place.
Therefore I would suggest that the proper consideration here is not the shape of the torus but rather the fact that is it transparent, and that this alignment I-S-R, the imaginary seeing the symbolic against the backdrop of the (repressed) real, is what gives rise to uncanny eruptions in the symbolic itself, e.g. the ghost of Hamlet's dead father.
The nature of the Real thus animates the dead signifier in a way that disturbs the functioning of the ego which fails to recognise this as an effect of the subject, the illusion of depth dissolves when the nature of the subject is revealed to be nothing other than the hole in the middle of the symbolic order. There is no actual outside here.
The signifiers appear to have a conditioning effect on other signifiers but have no impact on the unconditioned Real because in reality there is nothing for them to have a conditioning effect on - prior to signification, no such distinction could've been made.
In other words, what is being described is a Hegelian dialectic...
In psychosis we have the imaginary and the real - they are both subject to flux and so any knowledge gets wiped away by the tide of time, the ratio I-R can be expressed as 0:0
In neurosis we have the antithesis - a system of recording which gives more permanence and allows us to orient ourselves within a knowable universe, but this is done at the expense of a loss of the original problematic because the ratio of one representation to another in the symbolic order is 1:1 so the issue for the neurotic is one of too much permanence and not enough flux.
The synthesis requires the recovery of the original 0 to be included in the symbolic in order to produce a differential ratio of 1:0 in such a way as to count the zero here not as a loss but rather as the precondition for its own emergence, producing what Hegel calls the negation of the negation, or Adorno calls the identity of identity and difference.
Read your paper on topology in lacan half a year before, surprised to see a video😂
Just watched your 3-year-old 1:31m video, great inteoduction, but I want to dove deeper
Extremely useful, thanks you!
Hello, I am a psychology student from Turkey and I am trying to study Lacan's texts. My question is this: According to Lacan, the place where desire begins is when the child whose sexuality is chaotic is castrated. I know that his unsatisfied desire has begun and he is trying to fill it with objects of desire. This event itself is a tramua, my question is: Does every trauma cause the beginning of some kind of desire? Do traumas experienced in adulthood create some kind of underlying desire, or is it only experienced in childhood?
I don't think Lacan was correct in this instance. I think we have primitive feelings at birth, and they develop in relation to relational objects like parents. His claim is that sexuality is frustrated by parents, or blocked because parents cannot satisfy sexuality. I believe sexual development is independent of relational dynamics to some degree, ergo masturbation or displaced into gratification. That said its only in puberty when sexuality is starting to develop actual or real form and feelings materialize. If that is some how damaged ergo sexual abuse or mental/physical abuse, the desire is withdrawn.
Why did Lacan, amongst all topological surfaces, of which many are more closely related to the Möbius Strip, use the Torus?
I think the point is not clear in this video, as it isn't in Donald Kunze's admirable channel.
To my understanding Lacan's interest in the Torus could be explained because the Torus has Euler characteristic 0 (like Crosscaps and Klein Bottles, all surfaces than can be deformed into a Möbius Strip), useful to represent the relationship with the Real, BUT, unlike the other examples, its surface is ORIENTABLE. This mixture of orientability and non-orientability might explain Lacan's special interest in the Torus; yet this is just adductive reasoning on my side.
What do you think?
You may be delighted to watch a video by Carlo Séquin, where the relation will be made clear. ua-cam.com/video/3_VydFQmtZ8/v-deo.html The torus is generated from a "Möbius-shaped cut," that, by twisting the cut 180º as it completes a full circuit, you can see that one circuit is actually two circuits. The torus we see is not this. It is the immersed version, but if we think about the two voids (inside the tube and the middle of the tube) and realize they are the same void from two "angles," we can think our way back to the topological torus, which we cannot see. Good luck!
@@boundarylanguage The video is not helpful; I understand how a Möbius strip and a Torus relate to each other. We've already talked about this on your channel but we can't seem to understand each other.
My question is "why the Torus and not another surface?", followed by "are we sure that Lacan still thought of the Torus topology as the only possible description of the mind till the very end of his career?"
If we took for example a Klein Bottle, we would obtain the two Möbius strips with a straight cut. With a Crosscap, we would get a Möbius strip and a regular cylinder. All of these possibilities are potentially good analogues for the same psychic mechanisms. The Boy's Surface is even more appealing because it might synthesise all aspects of Lacan's teaching.
On a side note, I have troubles following you when you speak of the "immersed version" of the Torus. Yes, n-dimensional Tori do exist, so of course we couldn't visualise a 4D Torus. But this doesn't mean that when we speak generally of a Torus we don't intend a regular 3D Torus, a donut, which is not an "immersed version" of anything.
Maybe... you mean a CLIFFORD Torus?
I am not sure if this will be helpful or not, but the torus addresses specifically the structure of demand and desire and is not necessarily meant to be a totalizing presentation of the psyche. The other surfaces present different structures (fantasy for the cross cap, the subject for the mobius strip) . The justification for the torus lies in the repetition of different demands (conscious and unconscious) that revolve around a desire that is not counted or included into the system of demands, or not recognized by the subject (central hole). The fact that the torus is a closed surface while also having a hole is important here, which is also why the torus has two voids or maybe equivalently two main loops on it surface, the horizontal loops going around the circumference and the the 'vertical' loops around the tube (Where as you would only have lets say 'horizontal' loops on the mobius strip since you can't cross the edge.)
Also to the last point I think the idea is that Lacan is concerned with the 2 dimensional properties of the torus, and not a solid or 2 dimensional torus. The boy's surface is a really cool surface and it would be cool to see someone write more about it in its potential connections to Lacanian theory ( I think Donald Kunze might mention it in a video somewhere?)
I don't know if you already knew all of this or if it is helpful at all! Let me know if it is or not
@@cnreiger Thanks! I knew part of what you are saying, and you are confirming my supposition that the importance of the Torus relies in its Euler characteristic 0 (the central hole) and not in any special intrinsic relation to non-orientability (like the numberphile video Donald shared might suggest). Moreover you confirm me in the idea that the Torus represents just a part of the psyche and that fantasy is a Crosscap (and later on, from 1980 on, a Boy's surface, from what I know), meaning that for the repetition of demand Lacan chose the Torus exactly because IT IS ORIENTABLE, while still having a hole. Moreover, you confirm me in my supposition that we are not to understand the Torus Lacan talks about to be a 4D Torus (a Clifford Torus) as Donald often seems to imply; or, at least, that if it actually was a 4D Torus then everything said in the videos would be wrong.
As you see, if we are right both this video and Donald's channel are quite badly mistaken in their explanations. My idea is that, even if they know Lacan quite well, they should study more maths, because they get confused and write confusing things. Just check Donald's description of the Torus in the above message... what was he trying to say?
Thanks so much for caring and trying to disentangle this mess. Let me know what you think!
Hello! Would you make a video on the death drive?
we are so back
My god