I'd written:
>> So yes, reification is a forgetting. It would seem
>> to fall to those who'd combat it to remember -- and
>> what's exaggeration but an emphatic expression of
>> what's forgotten?
To which you replied:
> Which is what I call the symptom...
And this is Lacan's term, yes? Although I'm loathe to revive the "psychology is/is not ideology" thread, doesn't Lacan posit an opaque subjectivity, i.e, that knowledge (of self in particular) is "imaginary"? It seems to me that such a position renders critique and activism bootless, and the injunction to "Enjoy your symptom!" nothing but a condescending sop that cam license whatever activity the hapless analysand wants to engage in. It seems to me that Adorno's criticisms of Freud in "This side of the pleasure principle" in _MM_ apply with even more force to such a position: the antithesis of self and society is rendered static, and he does not concede the role of capitalist society in what are called symptoms.
Perhaps this is unfair to Lacan, but I'm hard pressed to see the utility of a thinker who consigns knowledge to an "imaginary" status for critique and activism. Adorno may have taken large pieces of Freud as given, but he didn't let him off the hook for what he saw in analytic theory and practice as debilitating for the critique of capitalism. -- Curtiss __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com