Tag: Lacan

  • Choose life: some notes on Lacan’s death drive

    I found this lecture from the excellent Derek Hook extremely helpful for understanding how Lacan reconceived the classical Freudian sense of the death drive, which it should be noted was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein. I’m interested in this topic for a number of reasons, not least of all the compulsive elements of digital agency […]

  • Jouissance: Enjoying in the margins

  • The Psychoanalytics of Temporising

    In my recent work, I’ve been writing a lot about ‘temporising’, a concept I borrowed from Margaret Archer’s work in the hope of developing it further. In the reflexivity sense, temporising involves trying to find a solution to a present dilemma through the exercise of temporal agency. I spoke earlier did this week at a […]

  • In defence of Jacques Lacan (sort of)

    Last week I wrote a sightly irritated post speculating about the psychopathology of Jacques Lacan. This persuasive comment by someone I had been unfairly and unnecessarily rude to on Twitter merited reproduction in its own right. I’ve underlined a few sections which I thought were particularly interesting. The comment nicely captures exactly what had intrigued me about […]

  • The Psychopathology of Jacques Lacan or, Why Can’t Theorists Just Say What They Mean!??

    I was quite taken recently with comments Chomsky made about Lacan. I originally came to Lacan through Žižek, as the intriguing way in which Slavoj deftly weaved Lacanian ideas into discussions of film piqued my curiosity. So I bought Žižek’s book about Lacan. Five years on I cannot for the life of me remember anything about this […]

  • Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

    A couple of weeks ago Open Culture posted a great video featuring an interview with Chomsky being rather scathing about Žižek and Lacan. Today they’ve posted another one where Chomsky discusses the political implications of post-structuralist thought in equally scathing fashion. I was amused by the abuse that was directed at the @soc_imagination account after tweeting […]

  • The Empty ‘Posturing’ of Žižek and Lacan?

    This interview (via Open Culture) will perhaps divide opinion. It follows on quite nicely from John Searle’s comments about Foucault, Bourdieu and continental obscurantism which I found recently. Before I express a view, let me offer a preamble: I own and have read a lot of Žižek books, though the ratio between my owning and my reading of […]