Ecrits
Presents an English translation of Jacques Lacan's most famous work, with translations of all the papers featured in the original French edition.
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What Hacker News says
- I prefer independent blogs and websites from anyone who appears to interesting.
It doesn't matter to me what the subject.
Its frustrating plowing through hundredss of duplicate aggregated news links, and at my age, very draining.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand the need for people to share news links that have already been duplicated by every single news organisation on the planet.
A Guardian headline for instance, will be in the Independent, Euronews, Reuters, WSJ, NYT, and every newspaper in the entire world.
Most people I am sure, read or watch the news, either online or on TV. We don't need the duplicated links.
I have recently read Ecrits by Jacques Lacan, at no time did I think. OOh! I better upload a link for those wonderful people on HN to read it, just because I enjoyed it. How narcissistic and smug of me to even think that.
I personally have had enough of this and block all news from HN with Ublock origin
If I want to read BBC news, which I dont, I will open their webpage and read it.
here I block the BBC news so that it does not show on HN
news.ycombinator.##.g:has(a[href="bbc."])
news.ycombinator.##a[href="bbc."]:upward(1)
less shit to scroll through.
- Jacques Lacan Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English 895 pages
I am re-reading this as I have only recently bought it again after lending it to a student a few years ago.
Not for the faint hearted.
A most controversial psychoanalyst and disparaging about fellow psychoanalysts.
Psychoanalysts do not say that they know in so many words, but they imply that they do. We do know a bit about it, but let's keep quiet about that. Let's keep it between ourselves. We enter this field of knowledge by way of a unique experience that consists, quite simply, in being psychoanalyzed. After that, you can talk. Being able to talk does not mean that you do talk. You could. You could if you wanted to, and you would want to if you were talking to people like us, people who are in the know, but what's the point? And so, we remain silent with those who do know and those who don't know, because those who don't know cannot know.
- Generally, don't start with the "ecrits" (writings), they are hermetic and you really have to have some head start on this. From the seminars, Livre XI, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de le psychoanalyse (1964) may be a start, as it – in parts – aligns itself with the cybernetic research of the day. However, do not expect too much from a single reading or a single of the seminars.
(Mind that this is trying to talk about what's beyond/below language, necessarily using language just the same, which is – at least according to (the early) Wittgenstein – somewhat an impossibility. You can only show these things, so it takes several approaches from several directions. But there is actually something like a concise corpus of theory eventually emerging from this. Moreover, this – being transcripts of seminars – addresses an audience that is already familiar with Freud, in order to reframe this. – This is also one of the major issues with Lacan and his reception: it takes some serious investment to get into this, and this also used to have some worth on the academic markets. On the other hand, this (academic) value became indeed inflated and eventually devalued, to the point of those, who never bothered to invest, happily triumphing. Think the Great North-American Video Game Crash. But this really shouldn't be the end to what may be one of the major approaches towards what language actually means to us. The expectation that everything can be addressed directly and without prerequisites, regardless of the complexity, may actually not be met. On the other hand, there will be also never be a single "master", who is always right and without failure, bearing always the most distilled emanation of truth in their very word. – I'm also not arguing that everybody is now to become a scholar of Lacan. Rather, we may have an informed expert discussion, what may gained from this from a current perspective. E.g., if Lacan actually had something to say about an impulse-like directional vector emerging from attention (as a form of selectional focus on a semantic field), is there something to be learned from this, or, to be aware of?)
- I think, much of the reception of Lacan is specific to the language, language as in translation. E.g., mind that the early US reception is somewhat unfortunate due to the translation. On the other hand, the German edition tends to be a bit pompous, probably in order to establish the text in the context of the German academic discourse of the time. (Especially the Ecrits are about unreadable at times.) The Seminars, however, are, at least in the original, colloquial, slowly spoken, trying to find appropriate words for where there are none. And he's developing a methodology of his own, for sure. He even tried to express them conclusively in mathematical formulars and diagrams ("mathemes" – yes, we may have to put an emphasis on "tried"). If you have a look at Seminar II (Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychoanalyse, 1954-1955), you even may observe that he entertained relationship with the cybernetic community, there are also traits of Rosenblut, contemporary mathematics… And, not to the least, some of Lacan's concepts seem to have shown up in FMRI findings of the last years.
Edit: If we entertain for a moment Marx's thought of history being the natural history of mankind, we may assume that this natural history sediments into technological artifacts, for short, technology, machines. If we also assume some value for the concept of the moi, we may conclude that we put some of a resemblance to our own into these machines. There's a mutual inheritance in the description. And machines, which are are also kind of sediments of algorithms or symbolic forms in their own, adhere – at least to some degree – to the same preconditions. (This, BTW, is a great way of looking at 2001, A Space Odyssey.) There's something to be learned from exploring either of them. However, we may have to find appropriate methodology for each of them, according to the specific scope. Since the venture of describing the preconditions of the human psyche equals the endeavor of describing a scope from within this very scope, we also encounter Boges' paradox of the map at 1:1 scale, which doesn't do for a description. What to do about it? Necessarily, we'd have to resort to some analogies, but, at the same time, we'd have to invalidate them, in order to not fall prey to ontology. What's left? Probably a system which is built more on resonance than on conclusive description, entertained by the mutual relations and suspense of the various concepts, which, at the same time, provides proper meaning to these concepts. Some sort of a bootstrapping process. We try to talk about meaning and its constraints by the very process of making meaning. Which, BTW, is totally conclusive with post-structuralist epistemology, as long it is internally conclusive. (Mind that this is for the most in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the linguistic turn. – And it's a generation of French academics who were, at least to some extent, formed by the confrontation with Hegel and Heidegger, and by the example of Lévi-Strauss.)
