There is something unbearable about the Lacanian teaching; something that makes you want to turn away and flee, or at the very least forget. It is not his opaque style, though that style performs the very thesis he wishes to articulate. At its heart, the core Lacanian teaching is that there is no cure for existence, that the horror and dissatisfaction we experience in existence is a structural feature of being a speaking-being rather than an accident that befalls some. Our introduction into language produces an ineluctable fissure within our being, generating a structural loss, forever fracturing jouissance, condemning us to be creatures of desire and drive. Desire becomes a hole that can never be filled, that pervades every aspect of our existence, and that haunts the entirety of our world and social relations. Everywhere we see cries raised to heaven, striving to treat desire, this fissure, as an accident that can be remedied whether through self-help, religion, love, or political struggle. Everywhere we come up with theories striving to account for what caused this fissure in our lives, this fragmentation of jouissance. All of politics can be read as so many theories of who stole the jouissance, of which group or institution is responsible for the shattering of jouissance. Yet while desire and jouissance, while the trauma of never ceasing drive, might be effects of the symbolic on our bodies, desire, jouissance, and drive are of the real: that which always returns to its place and which is impossible to eradicate. The question is how to continue on in these political struggles knowing full well that there is truth to the story of the Fall and that no technology, revolution, or new form of life or social arrangement can remedy this fissure that torments us?
April 15, 2016
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April 15, 2016 at 11:16 am
Reblogged this on Jacob Russell's Magic Names.
April 16, 2016 at 7:24 am
Woody Allen uses a proverbial Jewish observation in one of his later, less funny films. In this one Scarlett Johannsen has an affair with an ambitious tennis instructor, played by the same guy who was the soccer coach in Bend It Like Beckham. “Life is full of sorrows – it would have been better never to have been born – but who is so lucky? Not one in ten thousand”
It’s true, life is full of suffering. But some say there is a way – not a way out so much as a way through. The Buddha said, “Oh monks, work out your salvation with diligence.”
May 9, 2016 at 6:43 pm
Love this. I didn’t think I’d find something that sums up the restlessness reading lacan creates in me, but here it is. Bravo.