> We were having a good discussion, and then all of a sudden he said, "Well,
it'll all be over in twelve years." In other words, all the signs of crisis
are really just setting the stage for the return of Jesus in the year 2000.
Right then I knew I was never going to be friends with this guy, because we
were living in different worlds.
I'm reminded of ani difanco, "and i don't blame it all on you... but i don't want to be your friend..." This is precisely what I'm talking about. Religion makes it obvious, but these differences include politics and so on.
> But there's only one self-existent world, and this world that we all share is
not just made of "carbon and junk." It has a shared mental content as well as
a shared material content.
Ok, what is this world? Who's got dibs on the commonality? If no *one* has it, which *group* has it... if no *one* group... which *groups* ... and so on and so on. It is nice to say that we share a common world, but if you can't lean into it and say "That's it! and everyone else is wrong" then what's the point? Lacan is sensitive to this, which is why he calls this "Real" - a kind of breaking point for any commonality (the assumption of which is part of our Imaginary significations).
> Cliches are like mental gravity. Unless you exert some creativity, you'll
get sucked in every time to the most overused way of expressing something. You
get my drift? We're not simply expressing our uniqueness all the time. There
are certain ways we think and talk and relate to each other, and this shared
reality is purely mental.
No, I don't go for this shared mentality. The imaginary is *absolutely* unique for the subject. We share pieces of the symbolic... although this is usually fragmented in the Benjaminian sense. Castoriadis talks about the social imaginary... the institution of which we share (like, if 30 people are on a bus, they share being on the bus). This makes some sense to me... but each of the 30 will likely have a different reading of the situation. Think about this: three people talking, then two walk away and talk about the conversation between each of them and the third. No two "interpretations" of the conversation are the same...
> This Bergsonian interpretation allows us to escape Cartesian dualism without
trying to reduce either side to the other.
Lacan is, basically, inverted Cartesianism.
> The mind is just as much a part of nature as the earth. The artificial,
human world is also part mental, part material. The process by which we "name"
and "imagine" is governed by habits which evolved long ago and which are shared
equally by all of us.
Don't you think this gives in to a problematic naturalism? There is a certain logic to it, obviously, but the naturalistic aspect seems to me to downplay the social-historical as mediating its reception (mediating meaning subordination and alientation).
> It's just that this process produces different results in different people.
If by processes you mean the symbolic, I'd likely agree.
> We all speak *essentially* the same language. The sameness (grammar) is
real. The differences (words) are abstract. Both are mental, but one is part
of the terrain of mentality, whereas the other is merely an abstract product.
A cliche is part of the terrain, though the meaning of the words in the cliche
is abstract.
Well, I just disagree with this. I have enough doubts about the possibility of mutual understanding... this essentially the same language sounds too transpersonal.
> Sound like Buddhism. Is there any way out of this cycle of suffering?
It's not Buddhism. I had a rare opportunity to talk to three Buddhist scholars (apply for teaching positions) about this: all three denied that Lacanian psychoanalysis resembles Buddhism, it all rests on a category mistake. Unfortunately, I'm not a Buddhist scholar (although I'm not unfamiliar with Buddhism) ... but the gist was, Lacan's focus is on cognitive and psychical development - and this is not Buddhism (which involves worldview, technique and so on). The same goes for Adorno's negative dialectics.
ken