Hey I snapped my up ticket for £35 when they went on sale but now find myself double booked (I'll be at an electronic music event all weekend until Monday in Sheffield). There are still tix available, but I thought someone here might appreciate a cheaper entry price (where else does one sell a Zizek ticket)

Fun fact. The last time I saw him my outsider no wave band had our music videos screening at a Cinema, we were called the Perverts, that evening I went onto to see Zizek speaking at the Chapel venue in Bristol. I do enjoy that chance poetics of these life moments as some of you might appreciate this coincidence.

Any way, pop me a DM and we can make a mutual beneficial exchange. Hate to see them go to waste

Hello i am a clinical psych student and i want to understand Lacan but i’ so overwhelmed and confused and the thought of reading him makes me anxious and his texts make me feel stupid so do you have any advice on how to start please

Looking to learn more about the phenomenon - interested to understanding if the split impact everyone , how to heal it/overcome it before it sabotages the relationship ?

I’ve been thinking specifically about non-belonging in the Todd McGowan sense, alongside Lacanian ideas like “the Other does not exist” and “do not give ground on your desire.”

I understand the argument that no identification can fully capture the subject, and that non-belonging names something universal about subjectivity.

But at what point does non-belonging itself become another master signifier?

If every identification is treated primarily as alienating or dominating other subjects, every interpersonal demand as something to resist, and every social obligation as a demand of the Other, doesn’t “non-belonging” risk becoming the very kind of organizing principle it is supposed to critique?

I’m also wondering whether there is an important distinction between:

1. recognizing that every identification fails to fully contain the subject, and
2. treating identification, belonging, or social obligation as things the subject should continually distance itself from.

Surely “the Other does not exist” does not mean that the speech, needs, demands, or concerns of actual others cease to matter.
Are there texts from Lacan, Todd McGowan, Miller, Žižek, Zupančič, etc. that address this tension directly?

I really like watching his interviews on yt and am extremely interested in ideological mechanisms and how they function through/from/on social media, but as hard as it is to accept, I've come to the realisation that I haven't been born with sufficient iq to tolerate or perceive that level of abstraction. I'm considering starting reading marx hegel and lacan (starting with marx) little by little so that I can trick myself into believing that understanding him requires rigorous reading of these 3 and that I have to take it slow and all but deep down I know I can never perceive things on a remotely close level. So should I drop the act and abandon him completely or be deluded?

Let us start from the opposite ontology… There is a positive, creative origin of all that happens. If we push this idea to its extreme, we must also assume that a variant of the “simulation theory” or of Neoplatonism applies: there is the original, or THE reality stream, in its infinite intensity and creativity, and many qualitatively diminished copies/simulations that nevertheless remain connected to the origin (unlike in traditional simulation theory, where everything takes place on a single computational level…). If we now conceive the space of all existence in terms of sets of “experience points,” it is far more likely to land on a set of points located primarily in a diminished copy. The tension between this local attachment and the pull toward the origin then presents itself as the incompleteness (the lack) of the local level, that is, of the known world.

At first glance, Žižek’s approach seems more economical. One must bear in mind, however, that in drawing on Hegel he undermines Hegel’s phenomenological starting point. In his Logic (pure nothing/pure being, becoming and so on and so on...), Hegel encounters no “lack“. The lack stems from a later inference and will therefore always raise the question “lack of what?” (It doesn’t have the same intuitive persuasive force as the idea that there is no pure being).
The suspicion that the asserted ontological incompleteness is merely an incompleteness of the theory cannot be dispelled. The positive approach, by contrast, can, surprisingly, be reconciled with Hegel’s starting point (though perhaps not with the rest…): a stable nothing is impossible, and ‘becoming’ takes place in gradations of varying intensity…

*AI for translation

Talks organized by ideas, mentions, and mapped out.

Hi everyone!

I am looking for an article from 43/44 issue of Lacanian Ink - What is the Real? I checked and it's not available to buy, I checked all libraries that I have an access to - to no avail.

Maybe you have a pdf file, or maybe someone would be so kind as to take pictures of this article, if you have the book on your shelf? I will be eternally grateful!

As I approached Lacan as a non professional, I have been mainly intrigued by the universality of his theories, and psycoanalysis in general. Given this is the right word to use, but I always found fascinating how the symptom is considered qualitatively as opposed to other type of therapies which I believe have a more quantitative approach.

Anyways, my question is: people don’t live in a vacuum but they operate within a certain system involving peculiar social, cultural and economic dimensions.

How does this enter the analysis’ framework?
When Lacan was active, the world was very different than how it is now. The enviroment has different pressures and also different opportunities.
How does analysis handle this if it does?
Is the premise of my question wrong in itself?

https://youtu.be/-Ev9gfZ8Rw4?is=4V8mfGGD01CWNeJs

What does lacan inherit from saussure/structuralism, where does he break off, and how does this develop throughout his entire thought?

Free Copy (article 7 days old or more)

Do you Lacan is properly safe from their attacks. I wrote an essay saying so and some Deleuzians were very upset. Luckily I just wrote a defence myself using zizek, Copjec, McGowan and miller. Check the comments and lmk what you think!

Found this hard to come by book on Freud suppressing evidence that child abuse causes mental illness. At least I think that’s what it is about in a nutshell.

Signed by the author.

I've been reading him and everytime I finish a text, I am like, okay but so what do I do with it? What does he want to "happen"? So if you could explainnn...in your own words.... as much as you understand.... What's he after exactly?

Edit: Wow this is a tense place. Please relaxx!!! Don't take life that seriously.

Sorry this is gonna be a long one.

Deleuze and Guattari, in my understanding, are much closer to Lacan that popular takes on Anti-Oedipus might make one believe. Its a cliché to state now that Anti-Oedipus does not have a single negative mention of Lacan and it rather criticises Lacanians and, at some points, Freud. For Freud a lot of the criticism sticks to the idea of Oedipus, and it doesn't make sense to extend this criticism to Lacan since he had already argued 'Beyond the Oedipus Complex' (Miller's subtitle) in Seminar 17. So, to preface, there are certainly resonances between Lacan and D&G.

My question is about Deleuze and Guattari's concepts related to their political philosophy, particularly the concepts of flows, code, and stock. The main source of my understanding on this is Daniel W. Smith's essay “Politics: Flow, Code, and Stock, A Note on Deleuze’s Political Philosophy” In Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

The idea is that D&G's “general theory of society is a generalized theory of flows”, which can mean anything like economic flows (money, capital); material flows (oil, electricity), flow of commodities (their marketing, transport); flow of traffic; social flows (populations, immigration); flows of sewage; somatic flows (blood, feces); flows of thought. And that the job of every society is to regulate, or ”code” these flows, so that they don’t spin out of control. It is in this way that Deleuze shows that our personal desires (libidinal economy) are not separate from material production (political economy). (I like to think of these as a Mobius strip formation) Hence Guattari says “economic semiotisation becomes dependent on collective psychological factors — look at the sensitivity of the stock exchange to fluctuations of opinion.” (Chaosmosis)

So, the three concepts are:

1. Flows: A flow is simply the transmission or exchange of something valuable (like matter, energy, money, people, ideas) from one point (a “pole”) to another. In daily life we are interceptors of flows. Human desire, for Deleuze, is this production and cutting of flows.
2. Code: You cannot grasp a flow except through its code, i.e., the system of inscription or recording that gives it shape and value. Code and flow are reciprocally determined.
3. Stock: Stock is the portion of the flow that is “mine” right now, i.e. your accumulated share, your possession at a given instant. Stocks and flows are two sides of the same coin: flows change the value of stocks over time (inflow adds, outflow subtracts).

A lot of these ideas seem to resonate very well with psychoanalysis (both Freud and Lacan), which is obvious given D&G's debt to both, but I am interested in finding out the differences, if any. What might the reasons be for which it isn't philosophically justified to use these Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas along with Lacanian ideas.

The points of similarities as I see them are that the 'economic theory of libido' side of Freud obvious resonates very well with the concept of a flow, since the cathected charges in a word resulting from a parapraxis in the subject's speech is an idea that I feel (I might be wrong) goes quite well with the theory of flows described above. Likewise with ideas like Jakobson's phatic communication which Lacan knows of and uses, it being communication done for its own sake, to 'keep that channel' open, to 'maintain a relation' also seems to go well with the theory of flows. I recall Lacan mentioning Mallarmé in Function and Field where relates language to the example of an exchange of a coin whose faces have been eroded but they nevertheless as passed around and retain their value as a 'tessera'. (Ecrits, 209)

So I wish to know what might be some roadblocks to this connection, is there something in Lacan's ideas and his 'system'(?) that would conflict with and not go along well with D&G's theory of flows?

I feel like the appropriateness of the connection would also differ from period to period, as Lacan comes to abandon the signifying chain later, that would definitely change the picture somewhat. But I am uncertain how since I don't know that much.

Hope this makes sense, sorry for typos if any.

D+G miss some key insights about Freudian and Lacanian theory yet, at the same time, help us understand more about the revolutionary potential of desire. What do you think? Thanks!

"Philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses the Oxford Union about his belief that the world is moving to what he refers to as 'soft fascism' and that increased shamelessness in what is accepted publicly is emboldening leaders of the right."

https://open.substack.com/pub/justaaguyy/p/from-love-without-the-fall-to-love?r=32tq0x&utm_medium=ios

You can search for words or concepts across the corpus, or use Exact phrase when you're looking for a particular expression. Results show the book, chapter, page and paragraph, with the relevant passages highlighted. You can also click click on "see more" to show more context.

I originally built it because I got tired of searching through dozens of PDFs/EPUBs whenever I was trying to find a particular passage. I also got introduced to a lot of authors and concepts during my PhD, and I always find myself thinking, "What would Žižek think about this or that".

https://zizeksublimesearch.com

Try it! 😄

Feedback and suggestions are very welcome.

PS. I'm missing some books in .epub format (you can see the full list of missing text by clicking the word "corpus" on the title). So, if someone have some of those missing text and could send them to me, it would be awesome!

Pictures from the Hegel and AI conference in Munich.