The Subject in Lacan (1 of 4): The subject is not
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- Опубліковано 14 лип 2024
- Lacan's notion of the subject is radically different from commonplace notions of subjectivity or individuality and also from the post-structural conceptualization of the social role of subject-positions. The Lacanian subject is not a permanent or constant entity; it is the subject as event which - like the unconscious itself - fades and resurfaces, proving not just elusive but discontinuous. We discuss how the subject is 'beyond objectification' (not fitting within the conceptual category of the object), how it is essentially linked to the aims of psychoanalysis (i.e. the realization of the subject) and how it is only in and as speech that the subject emerges.
“I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am, there where I do not think I am thinking.”
Derek, thank you so much for publishing your lectures!! Such invaluable resource
the barred subject being constituted by the mismatch between uttering & the uttered, kind of reminds me of "social pragmatics"
I'm autistic, and my relation to social pragmatics is often in stark relief to most of the people I've interacted with, and people have attempted to teach me to compensate for that. it's actually half of what autism is diagnosed upon (social pragmatics).
Enacted social pragmatics of communication, consisting of chains of compounding (and sometimes resolving) distortions, mediated by the need to communicate to other people, does seem to be the basis of subject, which strangely creates a "greater than the sum of its parts" allowing for simultaneous senses of autonomy & interconnectedness/social embeddedness.
Autistic ppl are expected to some degree (barring intellectual disability, which is a separate thing but can be co-morbid) to grapple very consciously with this already‐splitness-autonomy of the one doing the uttering, split from the social contingency/pragmatics of what is uttered.
Because we're expected to kind of reverse engineer our neurological preferences for social pragmatics, in order to mimic a kind of normativity that's contingent upon largely non-autistic social relations, the way we speak about our experiences (or write, for those of us with dyspraxia of speech) lays the splittedness of the subject bare in a way that the contradiction between assimilation through mimicry (which is linked to depression and anxiety in autistic ppl) and "unmasking one's autism" makes critically important bc of how the second option is better for an autistic person's sense of stability but largely inconveniences non-autistic ppl.
maybe because we shine a light on this splittedness, that's why so much money and resources are spent on autism spectrum research.
it also hurts a lot, like I'm a labrat simply by existing
I have only started getting into Lacan. Some thing that felt extremely non-intuitive in the beginning after watching multiple of Derek's videos was related to the whole "the unconscious is structured like a language" argument.
This was cleared a lot by watching Paul Fry's YaleCourses "Jacques Lacan in theory" youtube video, where he states that Lacan does not mean that the unconscious is structured like a human language (like English.) Instead Lacan means that it is structured like a semiotic system. So it can be any signals or signs, or images or thoughts of sounds, etc.
However, in this video Derek is speaking specifically of speech. I take it this is because, speech is a system that is used a lot in communication. That means that a social animal like a human, then starts to place itself in this system, because it is an integral part of the human social system and it is used constantly.
This reminds me of an article I read about five years ago about an american man, who was living alone in the woods. He was getting his food from breaking into cottages and so., but he had no conctact with humans for many years.
After he was finally caught by the police, the man explained that by living alone for a prolonged time he had lost some sense of "himself." This makes me think that perhaps, because he had stopped using speech or communication with others, this part of himself had started to disappear. I do not know if this is in any way related to this video or the topic in general. However, it is interesting to think how important we think speech(languages like English) are in who we feel we are, but perhaps this is only because we use it so much constantly.
Does my reasoning make any sense? Thank you! And thank you for the video, Derek!
I appreciate your analysis on this subject pertaining to Lacan.💯❤
What a marvelous clear explanation! Thank you!!!
The subject as beyond objectivation, a central theme of the early seminars, is very useful in thinking about the subject, and a central part of my interest in Lacan but I find it a bit hard to share with Lacan’s work on what we might call ‘radical objects’ - das Ding, objet a, the phallus, and finally S(Ø). In particular, in trying to explain objet a (in Hitchcock) to my dad the other day, I stumbled upon the definition of object a as the beyond of subjectivation
Very useful lecture, thank you so much for posting it
ab7:30!
My last comment might be a bit confusing lol as I’m up way past my bedtime: how do we fit objects like objet a into our emphasis on subject as beyond objects?
It’s not the object that constitutes the Lacanian subject, it’s the lack. The object cause of desire which inhabits the object.
Is this not the same "no thing/Self/subject" that's discussed continuously in the Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, Non-duality, Christian mysticism, Sufism, etc etc?
a surface-level understanding of any theory makes it easily prone to be subsumed into something we already know. this is just something we naturally do. But no, it is not.
What would Lacan have to say about this pandemic? The Covid-Real realm?
Why "the" subject? One seems continually to be objectifying just by discussing and interrogating "it". Why try to understand what kind of object "the subject" is if it is by definition not an object? Objects 'have' properties. The subject has no properties. The Lacanian understanding of the subject is like dividing by zero in mathematics -- standing erroneously on the logical slippage of the verbs to be and to have. Anything becomes plausible when spoken with sufficient emphasis and repetition, at vulnerable auditors, in fact the more meaningless the more plausible, since belief implies lack of knowledge.
The only actual lack here is a lack of a decent microphone...
Or a clear argument