Astral Codex Ten

Lacan

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Lacan

Article

Lacan is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 16, 2022 and May 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while”; “friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan”; “Lacan’s justification for obscurantism”. It most often appears alongside Freud, Sadly, Porn, Lacanian.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: February 16, 2022
  • Last seen: May 10, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
Teach’s earlier work centers around Christopher Lasch’s idea of narcissism. Sadly, Porn adds a layer of Lacanian psychoanalysis (I wasn’t smart enough to recognize this myself; other people pointed it out). I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while. Partly because I never understood him in school. Partly because Slavoj Zizek is into him and everyone seems to think Zizek is smart. And partly because I recently realized that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which I also never understood, actually has useful insights (hint: compare Part III of this post with the theory of part objects) and for all I know Lacanian psychoanalysis might be the same way.
Inline links: this post
But also: I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan. They’re all exactly the same: highly-driven highly-charismatic people, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout. Teach fits this same mold. Does the personality type attract you to the theory? Does the theory produce the personality type? It’s a weird enough coincidence that it makes me want to learn more.
And: I have a running argument with one of these people. The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms.
— Nav_Panel explains the history of Lacan and why he’s so difficult:
Inline links: Nav_Panel
It's sort of complicated. First of all -- Lacan wasn't really "writing" (he did write, though, and it's famously inscrutable, I think he said that it wasn't meant to be read at all), he was delivering seminars verbally. The first 10 or so are all Freud reading groups, mostly analysts. They'd choose an essay or a book for close, careful study and then speak on it. He makes reference to this in earlier seminars, like "thanks so-and-so for the great [excerpted from the text] discussion of this week's material", before moving into his own discussion. I've done some of my own close readings of Freud, more casually, and there really is a lot there: read once to follow Freud's train of logic, and then read for the gaps in the text.
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
I know this is a weird way to start this book review. But I kept thinking about it while reading A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by Bruce Fink. Psychoanalysis - like AI alignment - is about how newly-created entities get desires, and what happens if the desire they get isn’t the one other people wanted them to have. Fink writes:
Inline links: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Fink writes “mother” as “mOther”, combining the word with the Lacanian idea of the Other. As far as I can tell - which is not very far, this is famously obscure and complicated - the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of. For an infant trying to make its mother like it, the mother is the Other. For a pious religious person, God is the Other. For the rest of us, some combination of our friends, the cool people we want to impress, and our internalized conception of the moral law is the Other.
Lacan thinks infants don’t have a distinction between sexual and non-sexual pleasure, so in the grand psychoanalytic tradition of being creepy, he thinks of the pleasure the infant gets from its mother as being sexual. Whether or not you go for this interpretation, certainly a grown adult who had the same relationship with his mother as an infant does - breastfeeding and all - would be considered sexually inappropriate. So at some point, when the child is a few years old, it has to separate from its mother.
Open Thread 222
May 01, 2022 · Original source
2: Comments of the week: Snav explains why he finds Lacan interesting and useful, and Hivewired tries the same thing over on her own blog.
Inline links: Snav explains why he finds Lacan interesting and useful, Hivewired tries the same thing over on her own blog
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Rao himself doesn’t claim this, but several people said I should read this book to understand Jacques Lacan (I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”). So I went into Gervais with a suspicion that the “business book” claim was, at the very least, incomplete.
Blue: financially savvy, bad at romance, natural leader, enjoys biking …then most people will find that they have some traits of each, but that’s just a natural result of the system being made up and useless. Maybe the problem is I’m using this as a psychological type system, but it’s actually supposed to be a business book after all? The namesake principle claims that overperforming Clueless get promoted to middle management, and underperforming Sociopaths get promoted to the top. This ought to be testable. Suppose we looked at a sales firm, or an investment bank, and correlated first-year sales/profits with promotions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that overperformers get promoted to the next level up - after all, the naive ordinary model says you get promoted for good work. Surely most people who underperform their first year won’t get promoted, but the Gervais partisan could say that yes, only a few very special underperformers are real Sociopaths. So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. I would naively predict the top echelons would be made of former normal-to-over-performers, so if someone found they were in fact underperformers that would be a big update for me in favor of all of this Gervais stuff. I can’t find a dataset that would tell me this, but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say. Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here. Finally, it just seems totally wrong to me that the highest-status and lowest-status members of groups/clubs/societies are legible, and everyone in the middle isn’t. I am thinking of some non-formal groups I belong to, and the highest- and lowest- status people are often as confusing as everyone else. The exceptions are formal organizations with presidents or whatever, but even there I couldn’t tell you who the lowest-status person is. VII. That last section might feel harsh, so I want to stress that I liked a lot of things about Gervais Principle. Gervais Principle feels like what psychoanalysis would be like if it weren’t so devoted to making itself incomprehensible. It explained its theories clearly and gave good examples of each. Even though it stuck to really traditional psychoanalytic ideas (the theory of people getting stuck at developmental stages is classic Freud - see eg anal-retentivity, oral fixation, etc) it vastly exceeded the source material in clarity, plausibility, and ability to avoid naming all of its concepts after barely-related bodily orifices. In particular, I feel like I better understand some of the ideas from Sadly, Porn. People’s desire to subject themselves to an order created by sociopaths. Everyone keeping a ledger of status transactions. Terror of acting openly, and how it breeds bureaucracy and excessive layers of management. It’s all in here. Lacan claimed there were three different personality structures: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert. Suggestive, but I can’t squeeze these into matching Rao’s triad. For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least. Likewise, Lacan says psychotics are incapable of using language normally, instead retreating to stock phrases - a suspiciously good match for Rao’s Clueless description. But Lacanian psychotics are most able to act and least dependent on other people’s approval, which is totally the opposite of Rao’s system. Clinical Introduction hints at a rare personality type who has passed beyond neurosis, and is able to have normal healthy self-motivated desires that are not just the desires of others. It doesn’t dwell on this type, because they rarely see psychoanalysts, but it sounds like a good match for Rao’s Sociopaths. That would mean we have to map all three main Lacanian types into Rao’s Clueless and Losers - but I have no idea how to do this faithfully. So I am less impressed by the typology itself than in the book’s ability to ask questions - or, more precisely, to make the reader ask questions. This is its “organizational literacy” - when confronting people or groups, you can ask things like: What narrative script is a person relying on in order to maintain their sense of specialness?
Inline links: anal-retentivity, oral fixation, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?s=w, Clinical Introduction