Lacan, Gender / Zizek, Strategy (was Re: Taste Buds &Biology)

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Mon Oct 4 19:34:23 PDT 1999



> Doesn't psychoanalysis (or any psychology that tries to be independent
> of politics and neurology) presuppose such a self or ego? Such a psychology
> can pile up empirical data and/or rules-of-thumb, but it can't actually
> *explain* anything, as opposed to naming or describing things *to be
> explained*.
> Carrol

Karl Marx, from "Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication," in _Rheinische Zeitung, May 19. 1842: 'It is well known that a certain psychology explains the whole as being made up of small causes and, from the correct view that everything for which a human being fights is of interest to him [sic!], proceeds to the incorrect view that there exists only "small" interests, only interests in stereotyped egotism. It is known, moreover, that this kind of psychology and anthropology is found particularly in cities, where it is regarded as a mark of intellectual subtlety to see through the world and to find, sitting behind the passage of the cloud of ideas and facts, only very petty, envious, intriguing puppets who pull the strings. But it is also known that if one looks too deeply into the glass, one falls on *one's one head* [emphasis KM], and so also the anthropology and worldly knowledge of these clever people is chiefly a mystifying knock on the head.'

Re. Lacan & Gender...didn't Luce Irigaray question phallus alone as guarantor of meaning, asking (without naivete and absent irony) why there cannot be 'vagina' envy and charging Lacan with reinforcing Freud's phallocentrism at the level of language... Michael Hoover



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list