Emphatic remembering versus symptoms

[kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000 07:26:13 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:

> No, the other way around.  It's *because we are part of history* that we
can, and cannot but, make judgments.

It cuts both ways actually - because we're part of histry we can make 
judgments, and because we're part of history, such judgements (*as far as 
reason goes*) will always possess an element of uncertainty.  We had been 
talking about knowledge, which, I'm assuming, has something, at least 
historically, to do with objectivity.  So we're probably in agreement here.

> While Adorno is very close to Lacan (due to the futility of all
left-Hegelian thoughts), there is difference after all between them.

The futility of all left-Hegelian thoughts... does that include Marx?

> Adorno says: "what is vaguely put is poorly thought" (_Negative Dialectics_); 
there is no better criticism of Lacanians than this remark.

Well, according to Mladen Dolar, Lacan always says exactly what he means, 
almost on a literal level.  So the criticism that "what is vaguely put is 
poorly thought" has more to do with the lazy readers of Lacan than it does 
Lacan's actual work.  Lacan wrote and spoke in a way which required engagement. 
You can't simply open a text, read it, and then say, "I understood everything." 
He scoffed at this, and thought it bad practice.  The point is to encourage 
thinking, not write things so crystal clear that the conversation ends because 
everyone "got it."  There is no vagueness in Lacan - it is precise.

> Further, Adorno would have seen reification, the autarky of conceptual
> fetishism ("in the end, having ceased to be a concept of anything at all,
> it would be nothing" [_Negative Dialectics_]), &, worst of all, the jargon
> of authenticity in a claim like Ken's ("historical thoughts are true if
> they don't understand themselves").

That's amusing, because it was a paraphrase of Adorno's comment in Minima 
Moralia, "True thoughts are those that don't understand themselves."  He also 
adheres to this idea when talking about the holocaust --> the one who claims to 
understand the totality of the holocaust, is the dictator.  It is, literally, 
incomprehensible.

>  More importantly, unlike Lacan, Adorno was not in the business of 
eternalizing "the wrong state of things": "Regarding the concrete utopian 
possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things.  The 
right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a 
contradiction" (_Negative Dialectics_).  This concrete utopian possibility is 
what is entirely missing in Lacan.

Adorno is deploying an emphatic concept here: nowhere can we find a free 
person, but people should be free.  It's a contrast between the is and the 
ought.  The is is false, the ought is true - but they are joined at the hip: 
"human beings ought to be free!"

Lacan has a similar idea a work - the aim of psychoanalysis is to target the 
Real (ie. the nonidentical).  The targeting of the Real leads to 
subjectivization.  In other words - it leads to self-reflective subjectivity.  
Which is exactly what Horkheimer and Adorno argued for in Dialectic of 
Enlightenment.

> Instead of negation of negation (or, better yet, absenting the generative
mechanisms of objective ills, to depart from the Hegelian dialectic), Lacanians 
tarry with the negative, ad infinitum.  Bad infinity returns, and the 
re-enchantment of the concept puts Lacanians under its spell.

It isn't a bad infinity.  Once the block has been hit, and is revealed to be 
what it is, a piece of shit, then one moves on to something else.  If we take 
Lacan and the political seriously - all of Lacan's work struggles for the 
radicalization of democracy.

ken