You quote someone saying the following:
>Science relies on the designations "true" and "false," but
>they take on meaning only witin a propositional or symbolic
>logic: they are values understandable within the field
>defined by that science and make no claims to independent
>validity.
I don't understand this. What does 'independently validated' mean such that the scientist would not claim it for the proposition that Lacan is French? Would giving 'Frenchness' a number suddenly mean only scientists could understand it?
>Psychoanalysis, by contrast, gives precedence to
>that which throws into question the self-confirming nature
>of its own axioms: the real, the impossible, that which
>does not work. That is the Truth taken responsibility for
>in psychoanalysis.
Does Lacan mean this proposition to constitute a claim to independent validity, or not? And, if not, does that make it a scientific proposition?
>Existing sciences do not take into account the split
>subject for whom "I am where I am not thinking" and "I
>think where I am not."
Does he imply a split between 'I' and 'me' here. Does he mean by this that 'I' cannot ever know 'me' (in which case, why bother with psychoanalysis), or that 'I' can know 'me' (in which case, how does he know the scientist is a split subject). Boy, am I ever a long way from where he's thinking ...
>Psychoanalytic theory and teaching adopt the hysteric's
>discourse.
Hysterical is too nice a word for this lot, I reckon.
>"The real is what does not depend on my idea of it." -
>Lacan, Seminar XXI, April 23.
I'll stick with Marx's take on the 'reality as sensuous human activity' theses on Feuerbach for now. At least there I have an idea of what it is I'm not quite understanding ...
>"You can't do whatever you want with it." - Lacan, Seminar
>XIII, January 5.
"If you can split subjects a priori, there's nothing you can't get away with," - Schaap, November 4
> ... the essence of all "communication" being "miscommunication"
Oh, I see - so Lacan is actually making a lot of sense, and saying some really important things, but, because his argument has to be read, and because the reading of it by another would consumate an act of miscommunication by definition, it would seem to that reader like a load of bollocks. Well, I'm in no position to falsify that one!
>Science with a captial S does not exist: "it is but a fantasy."
So Lacan is as happy with, or indifferent to, creationism and phrenology as he is with/to evolution and neurology? After all, on his account, fantasy is that practice that got us from the former to the latter.
>While therapists in our
>society are expected to interact with their patients in
>ways that are considered by dominant contemporary social,
>political, and psychological discourses to be for their own
>good, analyts act instead so as to further their
>analysands' Eros. That aim is constitutive of the praxis
>that is psychoanalysis.
Ain't having your eros furthered for your own good? And doesn't capital have the same role in determining that good as it does in any other? Or is Lacan, like the 'fantasists', positing a one-true, transcendental good as the psychoanalyst's object?
I TRULY-ROOLY don't get it, Ken.
Cheers, Rob.