Transcription
[Music] The late Freudian who seemingly developed what we now know as Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is no secret Lacan is one of the most difficult thinkers to read, and it’s not just the way he speaks, the way he writes within a certain language, and his language being French. It’s that within French, a common language we can technically learn, he has a sub-language within it, a lingual structure that is also applied with striking graphics, algebraic-like ways to concretely visualize what he is trying to say. To begin this, we must address to many the constant question amongst all the confusing language, confusing graphics: what the heck is Lacan really trying to say? Simply put, there’s a whole lot of things. If Freud was popularized for being one of the first to attempt to understand the very human psychological disturbances within us, what then is Lacan, a Freudian, trying to get at?
Well, according to Žižek, for Lacanian psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. There is something else we must impart before moving on; that is the simplest way: there is one constant look on and parts that is often ignored. It’s that for every sentence, everything he technically says, there are multiple different meanings and different interpretive things you can project onto it, and that’s the point. Because of his free-flowing style, much of Lacan’s work is in seminar form; speech telecon offered an immediacy to things; speech, if anything, allowed things, ideas, developments to exist in the most imminent, organic way. Thus, his seminars can be found in text form, and is one major actual text, *Écrits*. With confusion in mind, Lacan notoriously said *Écrits* is one major book isn’t necessarily meant to be understood. Therefore, in any video where I talk about Lacan, I state that confusion is the proper process with him. On the very interpretive eminence of Lacan, we will be using Žižek’s application of him. Here, we will learn Lacan via the lens of Žižek and hopefully give further context to both.
Before getting into the body of this video, it would be wise to understand the philosophical history Žižek brings with him. As Žižek goes, he can be seen as someone who brings together Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, with some authors there sprinkled in via Marx himself. With Žižek, this is brought to the forefront into the very synthesized socio-political and psychoanalytic analysis he is known for. But for a majority who also don’t really understand what Žižek is talking about, as the internet seems to insultingly fixate more on him as a wacky celebrity, regarding Žižek, with this video we will be putting Lacan to the front and how Žižek incorporates him. We will be doing this with an extra emphasis on Žižek’s text, *How to Read Lacan*. With all this out of the way, let’s get into the video. This is how to read Lacan, just in video form. Getting right into it, if we are able to understand Lacan via the lens of Žižek, the most underspoken aspect about Žižek’s interpretive element of Lacan is this: we, students of philosophy, and also we had a very good background in Frankfurt School, Hegelian Marxism, German Idealism, Heidegger, and so on, so of course we felt closest to that part of so-called structuralism, later called the construction materials, which was closer to the tradition of German Idealism, German philosophy. The other reason is that from the very beginning we were reading as a thinker enabling us to analyze power relations, ideological mechanisms, and so on, and for us, Lacan’s work worked much better than Foucault or Althusser in this domain. So it was mostly for these reasons, but I think the dominant reason would have been philosophy. We are all philosophers in Slovenia; Lacan was from the beginning exclusively a philosophical movement, a movement of philosophers who are basically Hegelian. The first proper way to understand Žižek and Lacan is to view Lacan through a Hegelian lens, and then from here an application of Hegel and Lacan with the further socioeconomic lens of Marx and later Marx’s thinkers such as Althusser and the Frankfurt School.
According to Žižek, the dialectic is present throughout Lacan and psychoanalysis as a whole. Not only this, psychoanalysis can be seen as something very material, reflective of and within human organization, social structures, and institutions. Here we can see the kernel of Marx seen with a synthesis of dialectical materialism, something that Žižek claims is applicable surrounding Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is why Žižek points out Lacan’s claim that the symptom in a psychoanalytic context was first found in Marx, not Freud. The symptom in psychoanalysis being noticeable behaviors or negative functions that may stem from repressed trauma or internal issues; like a sneeze, maybe a symptom or a biological indicator of allergies. In psychoanalysis, we can use this in social and psychological context around certain human behaviors that indicate larger social pathologies. For example, Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism; commodity fetishism being the people’s worship of, say, capital, money, commodities as something deified, religious, and something innately natural. To Marx, we abstracted commodities away from its core foundation, that being the labor that produced them. Thus, this fetish, this worship, and abstract religious thinking around commodities could be seen as a symptom of capitalist economics.
Before we get into Lacan, we must establish a baseline, a sort of universal for human existence. This goes beyond Lacan to many other thinkers of the past as well, but this universal driver can be seen as desire. Our behaviors, actions, can in one way or another be seen as a product of said desire. This is the root; from here we emerge as subjects, where in psychoanalysis we would claim a split subject, split between the conscious and subconscious. There’s a whole history debating on how our desire is shaped; if it’s shaped from society, things, a god, but we will start from the base origin within psychoanalysis seen in the likes of Freud, that being desire as something unconscious, an unconscious set of drives mediated, repressed, and shaped from external society around us. But to Lacan, the origin of this desire comes from a lack, known as manque. This manque is the actual core, real nothingness. From this nothingness, we build up an artifice, an exterior to make sense of things; things such as language, social status, society as a whole. We will delve more into this nothingness, a nothingness Lacan calls the Real, and the atmospheric structures around us such as the Symbolic and Imaginary that protect us from this traumatic nothingness. Again, a part of Lacan is that you should be confused; bear with me here. We will get through the core terminology within Lacan, then get to the Žižekian application of him.
The other dimension to Lacan that Žižek has incorporated into his philosophical project is his description of signifiers, symbols, and lingual structures; essentially analyzing modes of communication and how we navigate reality around us. Again, these are the very structures that protect us from this said lack and Real, as we stated before. Lacan was deeply interested in the study of language, that being linguistics and the study of signs and their interpretation, that being semiotics, and he was a large student of one of the founders of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Žižek states throughout Lacan is not merely a clinical figure or uses psychoanalysis as a mere clinical tool. This brings us into the Symbolic Order, one of the three main categories corresponding to the quote-unquote reality that Lacan imparts on us. But when explaining the Symbolic Order, Imaginary, and the Real, I will be using examples from Žižek’s *How to Read Lacan* and his contextual use. Here he gives very tactile examples that not only helps us understand Lacan but also elaborates on the project that is Žižek. Just know before we get into the core Lacanian terminology, I am purposefully focusing on Žižek’s more sociological use of Lacan rather than something more clinical or abstractly philosophical, something not vacuously related to Lacan all by himself. So on to the Symbolic. Žižek states, what then is this Symbolic Order composed of? When we speak or listen, for that matter, we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. First, there are the grammatical rules that I have to master blindly and spontaneously; if I were to bear these rules in mind all the time, my speech would break down. Then there is the background of participating in the same life world that enables me and my partner in conversation to understand each other. The rules that I follow are marked by a deep divide; there are rules and meanings that I follow blindly out of habit, but of which if I reflect I can become at least partially aware, such as common grammatical rules, and there are rules that I follow, meaning that haunt me in ignorance, such as unconscious prohibitions. This is important; what constitutes this externality of social reality is a set of unspoken, innate rules and constitutions; you measure yourself, your faithfulness to this reality, this order by interacting with said rules and standards.
Žižek then speaks on the Big Other, whom he claims operates within the Symbolic Order as an omniscient voice, rather than the Big Other being merely the Symbolic Order itself, which is often portrayed as the case within Lacan. If the Symbolic Order is of set external rules, then this Otherness is the other who pins these rules down into our psyche. On the Big Other, Žižek gives the example of a set of Mexican soap operas where much of the acting is improvised, and the director speaks to the actors via microphone and earpiece frantically telling them how to act and to speak on camera. The director can be seen as the Big Other, but the director’s efficacy isn’t simply in telling them what to do; it’s that amidst the frantic chaos he forces the crew to dig deep into the larger regulations, rules, and impulses as actors, forcing them to interact deeply within the Symbolic Order around them as to improvise. To Žižek, the power of the Big Other isn’t his direct, tangible power, say as the director himself, but as an affect, a presupposition that we assume is real, an empty power that still hones in on our agency as subjects. Hence, the director isn’t powerful; it’s the effect that exists after he speaks to the actor that is. This is visualized as what we know as the quote-unquote Subject Supposed to Know. Chew on that one for a bit. The Symbolic Order, the Big Other, these lingual and symbolic rules are arguably the biggest piece in Lacanian psychoanalysis that Žižek focuses on. For this, we will continue to put extra emphasis on the Symbolic Order, but of course we will touch on the Imaginary and the Real. So let’s do just that. The narcissistic ideal of self and internalization of said symbols and internalization that develops the image of our full self, or really what we simply think to be ourselves. Of course, this is an image-based Imaginary of self that isn’t true to Lacan; it isn’t real; it’s a mirage. Thus, this can be seen as the Imaginary. We won’t go directly into the tragic origins here with Lacan’s mirror stage as time doesn’t permit us, so here are some resources on this above that you can watch after this video. The Symbolic Order and the Imaginary and its difference confuses some, so here’s an example. In the realm of semiotics, a field that Lacan takes from immensely, take a sign made up of what we would call the signified and signifier; the visual component, say this logo is the signified and can be seen with the logic of the Imaginary. Then we take the phrase “I’m Lovin’ It” as the signifier, which can be seen as the Symbolic Order. When you hear this phrase, it gives us the mental image, the Imaginary, of the McDonald’s logo. This isn’t a one-to-one for an example per se, but it’s helpful to see how the Symbolic Order, lingual structures, rules, and regulations gives us a set of visual meaning to go off of, seen in the Imaginary. This is why Lacan claims as children we are lost from our initial Real state with the creation of language. This Real state is what Lacan calls the Real. For the sake of time, I can only elaborate on the Real in conjunction with the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary. The Real is the traumatic nothingness, the lack that is hidden by our construction of the fantasy that we experience as reality, which is to say our reality molded together by the Imaginary and Symbolic Order concepts of self; language is just that, a fantasy. Thus, the Real is often experienced within traumatic context, the evisceration of the ego, self, and constructions around us. Of course, as stated, we won’t go into a deep dive of the Real, but I’ll also link some resources here.
[Music] All right, still with me? Now that we have the abstract understanding of the Lacanian Order and how reality is structured to him, his lingual approach to psychoanalysis. From here we get to the application of Lacan from Žižek himself. My opinion: here’s where stuff gets really interesting. So, like stated earlier, Žižek has a sociological approach to this, and he’s coming from and building off of the background of critical theory, off of the Frankfurt School and Marxists such as Louis Althusser. Thus, he is concerned with the function of ideology. Like desire, there is a long philosophical debate about exactly what ideology is and how it functions. Here, Žižek challenges the original, raw Marxist approach while still maintaining its form. There’s the bit of Hegel in here, by the way. Marx deemed ideology to be what he called false consciousness, a set standard of ideals spawning from a ruling class whose core function is to uphold whatever social and economic system is still currently in place, whether that be in a feudal society or a capitalistic one. Thus, these ideals are constructed in tandem with the existing human organization of a given time period. So ideology is a masking of quote-unquote true or universal set of ideals. Naturally, we are on shaky ground if we are to rely on a concept of hidden truth. No surprise, quite a few thinkers challenge this notion: one, we have to be guaranteed access to this truth in general, that this positivistic element of truth exists in the first place; and two, the presupposition doesn’t match the general common ideology today, that of radical cynicism. This is Žižek’s main angle here. If we are to take Marx’s definition of ideology at 100%, we must accept the notion that people just blindly go about life without the knowledge of current exploitative class dynamics around them. To Žižek, it’s the very opposite; most people understand, to at least some extent, the exploitation they and others face; people are rather skeptical; they are not very trusting, and this skepticism itself now functions as the new mode of ideology rather than the traditional pure Marxist definition, the false consciousness on ideology. Žižek takes the traditional Marxist saying of “they do not know it, but they are doing it” and flips it to “they know it, but they are doing it anyway.” Let’s say it again: they know it, but they are doing it anyways. We understand the vapid nature of pop culture, yet we consume it. We understand the ridiculousness of buying a new smartphone every year, yet we do it anyways. We understand the flaws and the very real problems within our economic system, yet in action we will defend it to the death in the name of fear and the current safety of the exploitation we are personally used to. If the traditional notion of ideology was an artificial masking of reality, the Žižekian position, and arguably the Lacanian one, is that this ideology, this artifice, is reality itself. As Lacan theorized, we build up a fantasy with language, meaning seen in the Symbolic Order and within the visual Imaginary, an artificial building up from this black silicon; our reality is just that fantasy, at least an experience. Thus, fantasy is really just our experienced reality. And with Žižek, he brings this notion into the long philosophical discussion around ideology.
Žižek, when you’re looking at applications of Lacan, the very realms of the Symbolic and Imaginary become an extremely efficient centerpiece for visualizing modern functions of ideology and struggles for political emancipation. But it doesn’t end there; there’s even more substance from Žižek. You know how we talked about cynicism being the dominant ideology? Well, there’s psychoanalytic logic behind the function of this drawn from Lacan as well. This moves us into the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance within context. But what is this jouissance? Jouissance technically translates to “pleasure” in English, but as pleasure goes in English, it’s not exactly its meaning. Lacan designates different modes of jouissance, but regarding Žižek specifically, the jouissance Žižek typically references is something of pleasure and pain, or a pleasure that derives itself from forms of trauma and repression. This might not completely make sense at first, but we will contextualize it. If now the dominant mode of ideology is one of cynicism, just as a political factor seems to be one of the largest drivers, this jouissance can be seen as a negative pleasure, something that derives a kernel of pleasure from what is necessarily a somewhat traumatic thing or something that instills a level of suffering. Say the stereotypical white liberal reliance on racism to be an anti-racist themselves, in order to instill this meaning, thus necessitating racism in the end. The weird online personalities who obsess over AOC, when people say “I dare the government to take my guns,” or seen in films such as *The Hurt Locker*, the pleasurable proximity to war, something that devastates you, rips you apart, but when you come home you cannot function within your built-up fantasy without it. Films such as *Casablanca*, showing the traumatic and violent angle to love, an angle that we so crave. This has larger consequences to it too. The new neo-Marxist analysis that Žižek makes is that regimes and governments now function in such a way that in which there is a distance from its set rules and regulations. When you create this distance, when a society revokes limits, regulations, and barriers, allows you to perceive yourself as a free subject above the fray of ideology; it is only then that you are now properly integrated into the system rather than clearly abiding by a set code. Ideologically going against a code is the proper integration; it is the proper code. This is why the notion of a post-ideological society claimed by individuals like Tony Blair is among the most ideological sentiment today. Clearly, we see the tone of psychoanalysis here around desire, libidinal drive, but Žižek further elaborates that Hegel is here too; the proper way to read Lacan is with the dialectic and mind. Continuing the discussion of ideology and regimes, Žižek’s claim that law, like the subject in psychoanalysis, is split from the social law we integrate within the adoption of language, a given regime’s rules seen in the makeup of the Symbolic Order, to the more core libidinal, innate law that finds itself repressed, cut from innate justice and desire. Here, modern regimes are more able to locate this kernel of desire and find mediation within social law by creating this distance, by allowing you to perceive yourself as a free subject, and in more accurate terms, actually allowing you to be quote-unquote free. It is through this freedom that you are unfree, and you are barred within the ideological system around you. With this, Žižek shares the view with Foucault and Marx that modern regimes are able to exert a power that is less visible and farther reaching than pre-modern regimes, and it’s through the proximity of jouissance and split law that they are able to do this.
Now this is incredibly important. You know how I said Žižek is primarily concerned with Lacan’s Symbolic Order and Imaginary? I sort of lied; he’s very much concerned with the Real as well, but I said this with good reason. Žižek’s imminent analysis, his more immediate political theory, is mainly tethered to these structures of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, as it mainly focuses on the artifice of society, politics, and language. But there is an element of Žižek that still contends with Lacan’s Real; it’s his notion of truth, or rather how truth is subverted into the Real itself, but it’s only this way through extension and Žižek’s sublime object of ideology, which we have covered [link above]. Žižek elaborates on a Truth, which he spells with a capital T, through Lacan’s notion of the Sublime. Sublime is something that supersedes and overwhelms our senses, something beyond reason and explanation. Sublime can be seen as going up to the Swiss mountains and just being in complete awe of what you’re experiencing; it’s something terrifying yet beautiful, something that reason, that rationality can’t quite grasp on to. Here we see an approximation with the Real, something that resists the Symbolic and Imaginary. Here I have done little to truly get into the density of the whole project that is Žižek and the whole project that is Lacan, but when asking the question of the proper way to interpret and read Lacan, given his complexity, it’s as tricky as it is simple. It’s that there is no textbook way to read Lacan; it’s not as simple as deciphering his graph of jouissance, his algebraic-like code, which is precisely why Žižek doesn’t do this in his text *How to Read Lacan*. The more tangible answer is to apply him. Lacan is seen presciently through situation, one that pokes through kernels of trauma, incident, innuendo, repressed desire, and in many ways, like film, something that seeks to show the most radical nature of our existence. And with the likes of Žižek, we see the application of Lacan in a socio-political context in the vein of neo-Marxism. Most of the literature you find in Lacan, this series of seminars, aren’t necessarily written.
By default, with these seminars, Lacan operates as an analysin and analysand of a crowd. And because of this, there is a language that is to be interpreted heavily and left to the readers. Even his main text, the *Accre*, operates in a forum that wildly oscillates in meaning. To see Lacan is to see him through the eyes of power relations that go beyond purely social bounds or individual bounds. Like Freud, we repress ourselves, and through this, we build up an artifice of fantasy, a very sociological fantasy that we can only see as reality. Thus, according to Žižek and Lacan, it is through this negation, this nothingness, this complete vacuum that we experience reality as our quote-unquote selves.
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