Brothers, sisters, freinds:Should a gorgous and intelligent young woman who fancies herself a sort of house party philosopher bother with reading lacan? I have an interest in the interplay of the self and the other in a sort of satres no exit sense and it seems like he might touch on that. Plus It seems like his writings about the mirror phase could be interesting from a trans perspective. What are your thoughts?Also general philosophy thread, what do you all think of camille paglia?
>>45132718whether or not you read something is incredibly inconsequential to not only me but also you
Read de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics before you fuck around with Lacan
>>45132732Well this is really more of a polite invitation to chat about something we might both be interested in, but i hope you have a nice day⟡+⋆∘˚⊹ ࿔⟡+⋆∘˚⊹ ࿔𐔌՞. .՞𐦯⟡+⋆∘˚⊹ ࿔⟡+⋆∘˚⊹ ࿔⟡+⋆∘˚⊹ ࿔
>>45132741im worried thats just gonna be too idealist for my taste, but is treading into lacan treadinf fully into idealisim allready?
>>45132754its psychology nigga, its fundamentally dealing with perceptual phenomena. if you want materialism you want neuropsychology, not french letters.
>>45132718Lacan is impenetrable. It's better to read books about Lacans philosophy than anything written by Lacan.
>>45132796I knowwwww but lacan seems connected to ideas of the self and other explored by satre (no exit vibes) which fascinate me, so i suppise i have no choice
>>45132718paglia has made the trans experience significantly more legible to me idk, seems like she prefigured some more recent phenomena like transwomen identifying as angels & demons and gender transition as a process of image making indistinguishable from art. some of her opinions are based (defense of pornography and perversion is solid) and some just feel like edgy shitposting (feminists are worse than pedophiles? rly?). lacan makes cool charts but i'm too stupid to understand i should try reading again sometime>Should a gorgous and intelligent young woman who fancies herself a sort of house party philosopherur cute but pls stop saying stuff like this
>>45132718the most annoying people you will ever meet read french theory
>>45132857Regarding paglia youre absolutely right about the edgelord angle. Reading sexual persona is just trying to sort gems from ragebait about how women would never build society because their pee dosent go forward.Also why do i have to stop saying stuff like that? I was hoping to be frank about the low class/bong hit dorm room nature of my intelectual bent but id like to understand ur objection
I strongly identify with the themes in Sartre’s philosophy as a person with intense social anxiety. L’enfer, c’est les autres.
>>45132845its gonna go completely over your head unless you have a solid grasp on semiotics. you aren't going to get existentialist-phenomenology esque discourse on the nature of the self - you're going to get pedantic discourse on signs and language circuits. just go read heidegger.
>>45132924Ulgh thats actually what im looking for FINE i will try it.... but i will go easy on myself and read rhe zizek on lacan stuff to ease in
>>45132882>women would never build society because their pee dosent go forwardi mean they can barely hold tools what with all their sagging fat and dripping wombs>understand ur objectioni have no real criticism i think u just nailed my insecurities so well it activated my gag reflex
WOAW you guys seem really smart and stuff. Do you have any recommendations for where to start with all this high brow literature ? It’s probably way out of my league but it all sounds really interesting and I like old guys and wanna be able to nod along when(if) some boy explains this to me.
>>45132943i mean just read de saussure first, thats lacan light. zizek is just pesudo communist babble.
>>45133042Read Wittgenstein in order to understand that philosophy is a waste of time.
Have you guys heard of Zapffe? He’s underrated (outside his native Norway) imo. Currently reading his magnum opus, On the Tragic. It’s amazing, but also kinda depressing.Also underrated in the Anglophone world is Leopardi.
>>45132866French people (or at least Parisiens) themselves are really fucking annoying, so it makes sense that those who read their work should also be annoying
>House party philosopherDear God Why>Bother with lacanNot my favorite but he was important to continental philosophy and the development of semiotics in particular, so you should probably have some familiarity. plus others are into him so if you do like him then you'll maybe make a friend.>Personal opinionI hate lacan, I think he was a windbag, Wittig was right about him. Everything that lacan has discovered in the subconscious he put there himself. Still not yet familiar with deleuze's takedown but I'm excited to finally read it, my dead best friend liked it a lot.
first step to reading lacan is duping yourself into believing there's something *in* lacan, and that reading it is going to grant you some kind of wisdom or make you happier
Lacan was a charlatan, don’t bother.
>>45133042Nietzsche
You know freud, hegel? Read those too, Lacan got Hegel from Kojeve, his reading of Hegel is standard in that regard. His reading of Freud is unique to himself, he basically gives up the biomechanical aspects and takes Freud's aim of prodding the unconscious via transference and free association as his north star. Good starting points for Lacan are his écrits, or "writings" in english. Good secondary literature on that is Lacan and Language: A reader's guide to the Écrits by Muller and Richardson.Out of those écrits, I especially recommend Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, it contains a general defense and explanation of psychoanalytic practice as Lacan understood it. It's only about 15 pages long, but more direct and covers a lot more ground than he usually does in that amount of wood pulp. Another important "writing" is The Subversion of the Subject, this one deals with the "structuralist" aspects of Lacanian teaching more and goes over that stupid graph you see in his early seminars a lot. It's a map to how he defines the subject in general, and understanding it is helpful in many ways. Finally there is the "rome discourse", The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in which he stakes out his professional stance in relation to his contemporaries, defends his rereading if freud, and again summarizes much of what he rants about in the seminars at greater length. I like him a lot but as you already know all of this freudian stuff has been "discredited" by all the good and learned men of the world, not to mention firebrand feminists constantly usurping the Father and his phallus. Reading any of it won't be winning you any friends at queer house parties I can tell you that much. It's rewarding if you appreciate classical education, or have a serious interest in subjectivity as an object of inquiry.
