> 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"?
Isn't it? Very few people argue, today at least, that subjectivity in the midst of social complexity, can be transparent. As such, our relations are sustained by imaginary fields. Your world and my world are experienced quite differently. Why? Because we sustain them differently, or they are sustained for us differently. What one thinks about oneself and who one is are two different things, no? So I don't quite understand why this is a problem.
> 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.
I'd say that activism and critique limited to "knowledge-based" truth claims is pretty pathetic. Yes, necessary, but also impossible. It is simply impossible to stand outside of history to judge "yes" or "no" with regards to things like justice, compassion and so on. We pass judgement from where we stand, and from what we see. We don't need to pretend this is knowledge as a justification for our actions. As for "enjoy your symptom!" this is just a fancy way of saying, don't give up on your politics. In other words, if you think that there is a universal set of human rights - then press for it - engage it, don't give up and say, "it's too difficult for me, i'll let others do it." What is also implied here is the idea that one shouldn't assume that one is in possession of the truth - in other words, *enjoy* your symptom, don't suffer for it (since absolute knowledge and suffering seem to go together - ie. "I'm doing this for the Other [nation, God, neighbour] which has truth and knowledge." In short, take responsibility for what you're about to do.
> 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.
I think he does, he just does it differently. What Adorno calls identity thinking is the constitutive element of subjectivity. It is necessary and violent. This is almost identical, in theoretical status, to Lacan's approach - the subject is constituted by the imaginary ("identity") - this is necessary and violent but, as with Adorno, something seeps in (non-identity, or, Lacan's Real). The critique of the imaginary, and the identical, is quite similar in this respect. So I don't really see Lacan and Adorno moving in different directions here...
> 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.
Well, Adorno wrote a nice book, Against Epistemology, which, again, isn't all that different from Lacan's framework. Did Adorno think knowledge possible? Yes, but only in the negative - and with Lacan, the lack. Emphatic remembering is derived from the ruins of contemporary society... and for Lacan, from symptoms. Two metaphors pointing to a rather similar idea.
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