The Psychoses (was Re: ...muck...)

kelley oudies at flash.net
Mon Feb 7 06:33:49 PST 2000


oh fercryinoutloud! ken's drawing on lacanian theory. he used a term used within that tradition of theorizing that has *very* little to do with mental states of people and has to do with ethical reasoning. in real simple terms, as ken very patiently explained to yoshie (who didn't deserve a response at all so twisted was her reponse to ken!), he's talking about how people blindly conform to a moral absolute and do so because it is, ostensibly, grounded in some supreme being or process beyond human control.

e.g., the nazi doctors reputedly pursuing science for the sake of science, cutting out cancerous jews to save the body of the aryan race.

now, sure, you can complain that you don't like psychoanalytic theory and you can, like me, complain that it's a mistake to use words that have come to carry the cultural baggage that words like hysterical and psychotic do, but otherwise the *substance* of what ken was talking about isn't objectionable at all. we worry about the same phenomenon on this list regularly --people blindly obedient to the law, and not thinking for themselves. you, yourself, worrying that if the working class doesn't overcome its racism then there's no hope for a socialist movement. in the past yoshie has worried that people were moralizing about abortion as killing because they held some metaphysical or not quite dead religious beliefs despite their avowed claim to not believing in god.

but what happened here? a person who supposedly knows more about lacanian theory than anyone else on the list willfully and purposfully misread what was typed in order to make it sound as if ken was supporting a position that he simply did not and any reasonable reader could never ever have concluded that he held this position. it's just plain pathetic to subject people to that kind of treatment over and over again.. truly and absolutely pathetic. it's not the first time. it happens with stunning regularity and, as i said re the incident of a couple of weeks ago, it gets tiresome after awhile-- to say the least.

me, ken, and rob have a convo about habermas and what do we get -- quotes from stephen k white's anthology!!! a rilly rilly crappy anthology,btw. yoshie, did you know that white critiques habermas ethics because it doesn't give voice to trees and lilypads? and i'm sure if we had more time this semester we'd get treated to 3 or 4 posts a day of quotes! what is that behavior other than an attempt to disrupt a conversation, not by joining in and actually partaking of the conversation, but by hurling paper airplanes across the lunchroom?!

yoshie, do you even care that you actually might hurt someone's feelings? and yet we're supposed to care when yours are hurt?

enoy your symptom!

kelley



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list