I just got a comment on my blog, criticizing my polemic in the latest LBO for trying to tell black people that race doesn't matter. This bears little relation to anything I actually said, of course. This meconnaissance systematique de la realite, as the man said, is driving me batty. ........
*Meconnaissance systematique de la realite* is a bad-ass concept which, like so much of Lacan's work, helps explain the everyday styles of nonsense we inflict upon each other. For those who aren't familiar, here's a lively definition, taken from _An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis_ by Dylan Evans (Amazon link - <http://bit.ly/P47F6> ):
*Meconnaissance systematique de la realite*
Meconnaissance.
The French term meconnaissance corresponds roughly to the English words 'misunderstanding' and 'misrecognition'. However, the French term is usually left untranslated when translating Lacan into English in order to show its close relationship with the term connaissance (KNOWLEDGE). Thus, in the imaginary order, self-knowledge (me-connaissance) is synonymous with misunderstanding (meconnaissance), because the process by which EGO is formed in the mirror stage is at the same time the institution of alienation from the symbolic determination of being.
As well as being the structure of ordinary neurotic self-knowledge, meconnaissance is also the structure of paranoiac DELUSIONS, which are described in terms of a meconnaissance systematique de la realite (Lacan, 1951b: 12). This structural homology between the ordinary constitution of the ego and the paranoiac delusions is what leads Lacan to describe all knowledge (connaissance), in both neurosis and psychosis as 'paranoiac knowledge'.
Meconnaissance is to be distinguished from ignorance, which is one of the three passions (SEE AFFECT). Whereas ignorance is a passion for the absence of knowledge, meconnaissance is an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge (savoir) that the subject does possess somewhere.
<begin translated Lacan quote>
Misrecognition is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organisation of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached. Hence it cannot be conceived without correlate knowledge. ... There must surely be, behind his misrecogniton, a kind of knowledge of what there is to misrecognize.
(S1, 167)
<end translated Lacan quote>
Again, this applies both in the ordinary construction of the ego and in paranoia. In the former case, the ego is basically a misrecognition of the symbolic determinants of subjectivity (the discourse of the Other, the unconscious). In the latter case, paranoiac delusions always imply an obscure realisation of the truth; 'To misunderstand [meconnaitre] implies a recognition [reconnaisance], as is evident in systematic misunderstanding [meconnaisance systematique], where it must clearly be admitted that that which is denied is in some way recognised [reconnu]' (Ec, 165).
....
Sweet!
.d.