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Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration and political authority

This is a great discussion of symbolic castration. One of the most fascinating but also most obscure concepts in Lacan. They immediately get to the sociopolitical implications of symbolic castration in terms of the experience of authority: the search for political figures who seem like they really know what’s going, know what that should do about it and can be trusted to enact it. The hosts plausibly argue that staying with the symbolic castration of the Other is more traumatic than recognising it in ourselves. We can tolerate our own lack as long as we imagine there are authoritative others who are not similarly lacking.

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