On Mon, 16 Oct 2000 10:20:23 -0400 Ted Winslow <winslow at yorku.ca> wrote:
> > Because breathing happens whether I consciously think about it or not. Desires
> > alone don't make the body go, the drives do.
> This assumes there is a "conscious self" able to know how the unconscious
knows and hence able to know that "the unconscious knows things in a way that
the conscious self does not". This conscious self is able to know things in
the way the unconscious does, isn't it?
Yes but the status of conscious knowledge is not the same as unconscious knowledge, it is more fragile(?). Cns knowledge is more like, "I think I know" and the Uncs is "I know!" The "I think I know" illustrates the gap between thinking and knowing to the tune of "where I think I do not know and where I know I do not think."
> Who speaks "psychobabble"?
I refer, of course, to Lacan and other psychoanalysts. But since Lacan & co. have fallen on hard times, especially on this list, I have resorted to using the term psychobabble instead of psychoanalysis, but to clarify that nothing I say is to be taken seriously.
> If the answer to this question is "unconscious and multiple speakers within
the self", the speaker of psychobabble is not a self able to ground what it
says in evidence.
Well, that's because the subject is split. Subjectivity grounds itself tautologically - "I am what I am." But this loop is sundered, there is a remainder. "I am what I am" (Popeye) is "No Thing" if we maintain the empty phrase rigorously. The remainder, what "I am is not" is the substance of the self. Subjectivity, in this sense, is No Thing (Hegel's self-relating negativity) while the self is substance (the self is an other) constituted by bits of language, dreams, and so on.
ken