"Forced Choices" (was Re: The substance of the self)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 09:29:18 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>wrote:
>
>> How have we come to live in the world in which we are forced to make "free
>choices"?  That's the question of history.  What is to be done to abolish the
>world of "forced choices"?  That's the question of politics.  Lacanians
>are not
>interested in either question, however.
>
>I am a Lacanian, and I'm interested in history, therefore your assertion is
>false.
>
>In any event, despite explicity falsehood of your claim, as Lacanians have
>pressed, again and again and again, that people are still ethically
>responsible
>for "forced choices" - if you have 7 cans of soup on the shelf, all with the
>same contents, one is still responsible for which can one picks off the
>shelf.
>The "choice" was forced... but this does not abnegate responsibility - if
>anything it pisses you off so that you'll work to make sure next time at
>least
>the some of the ingredients are different.  The idea of the "forced
>choice" is
>an observation of this responsibility - in other words - we come into the
>awareness that we didn't have a "free choice" rather that our choice was
>predetermined before "we" arrived.  Naturally, following from this insight,
>which is neither profound nor novel, we must shift our attention to how we
>got
>robbed in the first place.  The categorical imperative of psychoanalysis is
>this: don't give up on your desire!  The explicit aim of analysis is to
>target
>the Real (ie. of which, i will safely assume, HISTORY is a part).
>
>ken

Where is history & politics in the above?  It appears that you assume that
humans have always lived in the world of "compulsory free choices" (as
Carrol puts it) and that there is no way out of it.  The same old, the same
old....

Yoshie