Lacan Points Flashcards
“Lacan’s insistence on desires, language and symbols that mediate our identities to the point the subject itself becomes irrelevant brought forward the bases of meta-psychoanalysis”
Desires, language and symbols are the reasons behind an individuals behavior. (Link to P7 and P6 not wanting reasons to be wrong)
“Lacan’s powerful structuralism and his convincing arguments against the autonomy of subjects, “
Very strict on rule and order rather than individualism (Link to P10)
the unconscious is negated and superseded by consciousness, by the rational ego, in the sense that it is recognized as a powerful and potentially disruptive force, but one that must be limited and maintained under a certain control for anything else to exist and develop.
We have deeper desires that we may not even be aware of due to the rational ego bringing out what is more reasonable hence weird dreams. Sees the unconscious as a bad thing. (Link to P11)
“Lacan distinguishes between language, symbols, and signs, arguing that language is much more than simple speech: through speech, language expresses itself in the subject, and not the other way around. The subject is therefore reduced to a medium that allows the interplay between desires and symbols that always signify to other desires and symbols, phenomenologically embodied in accidental subjects. “
As humans characterize and label everything in life, the language is expressing the object rather than the object expressing the language. (Link to P5)
“According to Lacan, the real subject is the Other, the unconscious. The place of desires, many of which the subject is not even aware of,”
Link to L3 and P1 P5
“In Lacan’s words, “It is the world of words that creates the world of things. (…) Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man”. “
Man named man and thus language and speech created themselves. (Link to P6 man named things so he may spread what isn’t true)
As every society undergoes alienation and cannot fully comprehend itself, so does every individual; starting with the “mirror-stage”, when the infant is about six months old and can recognize his image in the mirror, he begins thinking and referring to himself as a body. His perception of himself becomes mediated through external objects, and the child is compelled to negate himself, to think of himself from outside, to be allowed to return to himself as himself. This individual alienation is further fathomed using language through speech and between or as symbols: one cannot speak himself entirely, thus one cannot comprehend himself entirely
Children experience de interpellation first at a very young age, distinguishing their own body from the universal world. They initially see a being and then not until later see the reflection as “I.” Link to P2 and P4
“I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking”.
Alienation occurs when thinking about philosophy goes down a rabbit hole. You know you aren’t actually experiencing the theories in your mind but you are there because of that mindset. Link to P3 L10
Still, Lacan insists that while the subject is nothing more than an empty place, crossed randomly by desires and signifiers that speak to him more than he will be ever able to speak to them – he nevertheless exists and resists as much as possible to the symbolic power of the signifiers and to his desires, to his phantasms that induce specific symptoms.
Lacan sees humans as a whole rather than Freud’s psychoanalysis and is representative by the signifiers in life that explains an individuals actions. (Link to P11 P10 and P9)
Through a supposed simple mental operation, the subject miraculously understands its place within actually existing necessity and thus realizes the freedom he craved for, even if only at a mental level, only through thinking
Simply through the concept of thinking, an individual will complete the mirror stage and start to acquire the basic knowledge of “man” in order to join society. Link to L8 L7
