Mark Jones wrote:
> This is a provocation, Carrol. I have no intention of discussing Zizek/Lacan
> on this list, and just told Doug so.
Good idea -- but the post, while in some part intended as a provocation, was not directed at you but at those who seem to have been driven by the exigencies of combat to believe that in order to defend psychology they must defend every crackpot who ever spoke in the name of Freud.
Actually, incidentally, the books and articles one needs to read to understand Lacan/Zizek/etc are A.O. Lovejoy's early work, the early criticism of Ransom, Brooks, & Leavis, I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism, his and Ogden's *Meaning of Meaning*, the philosophical works of A.J. Ayers, the works of Charles Morris (the semiotician), Korzybski's *Science and Sanity* and a selection of the books it spawned. This is because Lacan & Zizek are only interesting as exemplifications of how "new paradigms" get (temporarily) established within a radically individualized culture.
>From *within* such a culture one would look for the psychological
sources of the desire to be "up with the latest." That would be
superficial, however, since psychological states seem to be only
manifestations of social and cultural necessities. So the interesting
question is what about modern Euro-centered culture (from, say,
1660 on) *must* periodically generate new paradigms. Perhaps
the reading of Freud that you and Nestor favor could be somehow
incorporated in such an analysis. And then again this cultural
pattern may only become intelligible from an antiquarian backward
look from a culture which has escaped the pattern.
Carrol