Reading Lacan's Écrits (1 & 2)
Extended reflections on Lacan's writings with Dr. Samuel McCormick
Special announcement: on Saturday February 24th and Sunday February 25th, Philosophy Portal will be hosting its fourth conference focused on Lacan’s Écrits: Writing For (a) First Cause. To see the schedule for the weekend and to register, visit the conference home page.
Over the past months, I had the pleasure of hosting
of Lectures on Lacan at Philosophy Portal to discuss Lacan’s Écrits. Our first discussion aimed to prepare both myself and the students of the Philosophy Portal course on Lacan’s Écrits, and our second discussion functioned as (the start of) a reflection on the text from the perspective of having taught the classic analytic text.Dr. Samuel McCormick is — apart from being a warm and lovely man — an award-winning teacher and scholar. He lectures widely on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and works as a Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. He has also published two books, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals (2011), and The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk (2020). You can find his online work at Lectures on Lacan, which offers the liminal web clear and coherent readings of Lacan’s work that are accessible to a non-specialised audience.
Our first conversation:
Our second conversation:
Throughout the first conversation we discuss:
We should pay attention to Lacan’s style of writing itself, and read the Écrits as more of a poetic intervention, as opposed to another dry academic text.
To understand Lacan we have to be stubborn, not smart. There is a “stick-with-it-ness” over brain power that is necessary. Too often “Yung Lacanians” burn hot but have “no sides” to their “skillet” and so they never “cook properly”.
Lacan is especially interested in working towards the distinction between knowledge and truth in relation to the field of the impossible. In short, knowledge opens up to truth via the field of the impossible, where discourse is abolished.
In truth, we are thinking our most profound thoughts when we think we are not thinking (i.e. dreaming/day-dreaming, slips, jokes, etc.).
Psychoanalysis is a challenge for the pleasure-seeking animal, focused on the limit where pleasure turns into pain in its very excess, and where the paradoxical renunciation of excess pleasure (jouissance) opens us towards a surplus of enjoyment (a weird joy from deprivation of pleasure). To put it simply: we can “get off” on preventing ourselves from actualising jouissance (i.e. eating too much, excessive masturbation, etc.).
This structure between pleasure-pain opens up specifically for beings-in-language because of the way language is intimately tied to prohibition/prohibitive logics, i.e. a violent “no” which limit the excess of pleasure and maintains a fidelity and relationship to constraint.
Analysis has come to recognise the importance of the impotent/uncoordinated body as our universal starting condition for “being-in-language” (we are born on the “verge of death”); thus a successful Lacanian analysis involves reconciling with impotence and limitations (castration), where we can also learn to love (the love of weakness, giving what we do not have, etc.).
Our fundamental fantasies revolve around the opposite of our starting condition, i.e. they are images of omnipotence and immortality, of being a Being or being with a Being that would resolve our impotence and finite being.
Ethics of Being-Towards-Death opens unexpected links between Lacanian analysis and Heideggerian philosophy; we can use the “death bed vision” to simulate a retroactive look at our present life that “will have been lived” (opening enormous clarity about obstacles/challenges we are currently working through).
Psychoanalysis can also help with childhood development, and also help us become better parents (fathers/mothers). We have to recognise that we are all in some sense children that need help, and the opposite to becoming a “beautiful soul” that denounces the world in a projection of one’s own impotence, is to become better able to “being with oneself” in/as lacking (where we find a strange enjoyment that cannot be positivised). This also opens a “science of spirit” that privileges “gappiness” over “happiness”, “difference” over “identity”.
Throughout the second conversation we discuss:
The dilemma of truth for knowledge is that the truth can only ever be partially said; truth can only ever say “there is this other part of me, a part that I cannot say”; in other words: “words fail, as I tell you how much I love you”. We can also think about this as love and faith defying complete expression.
As suggested in the first discussion, to love weakness is to love castration. Moreover, when you organise theorists together who embody the love of weakness/castration, the recognition that all of our knowledge is necessarily limited, there can be an amazing confluence of synergies and connections.
The best way to understand Lacan is to approach it both theoretically and analytically, i.e. an emphasis on the both-and of philosophy and clinic as opposed to either-or; also: what makes Lacanian analysis and philosophy so interesting in comparison to other 20th century philosophers is that most other 20th century philosophers do not have “clinical-analytic experience”, they do not have a “practice” to compliment the theory.
The “Mystical Father” of the “Primal Hoard” is the vision of a “non-castrated Father” which we can think of as an “un-castrated Daddy Dick” that freely and frictionlessly walks through the field of desire, inseminating all women. This image has an actual-concrete impact and influence on contemporary dating and mating dynamics.
Moving through analysis is moving through death, and specifically the death of this image of the “Mystical Father” of the “Primal Hoard”. This is encountered in the desire to “Kill the Father” that the unconscious thinks will “get all the women”. After this negation what is affirmed is the “prohibition itself”, i.e. “the sons will not sleep with all the women”.
We cannot continue to uphold philosophical or theological images of wholeness or completeness of the human being; the human being is not whole or complete but fundamentally divided and incomplete, limited in our knowledge of truth, and thus limited in our communication (we are necessarily imperfect communicators).
We have to focus less on precise/factual function of information and focus more on the communal/relational function of information, i.e. the fact that we are doing it together. When you are a parent to children you quickly realise that it is more about doing things together (ritual truth-based information) rather than factual transmission of information (functional knowledge-based information). This distinction is important to understand Lacan’s relation to first-order cybernetics (specifically: Shannon information, computer/technical revolution).
All social media is an algorithmic fetish that will never capture the subject as the scoring/scarring of the living organism by the symbolic order itself; what AI wants and can never get is a living organismic body. We should be using social media to bring human organisms together in real time in real space, in new ways.
The generation growing up with social media is increasingly having sexual issues, which makes them similar to classical neurotics. To be sexual is to be with an other, another body. The precondition for being with other bodies is patience of the concept, the slow cook of the concept, where truth can emerge.
For more on Dr. McCormick’s work:
Dr. McCormick will also be presenting at the fourth Philosophy Portal conference focused on Lacan’s Écrits: Writing For (a) First Cause, on the weekend of February Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th. His presentation is titled “Love of Truth in Lacan’s Later Thought”. To register, visit the conference home page.
