Astral Codex Ten

Snav

4 min read

Snav

Article

Snav is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 20, 2022 and January 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Snav (writes Snav’s Digest ) tries t”; “Snav (writes Snav’s Digest ) tries to explain the psychoanalytic perspective”; “To which Snav responded”. It most often appears alongside Lacan, FeepingCreature, Freud.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 20, 2022
  • Last seen: January 17, 2025

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.

Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
— Snav (writes Snav’s Digest) tries to explain the psychoanalytic perspective:
Inline links: Snav, Snav’s Digest
To which Snav responded:
Inline links: Snav
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
It’s impossible to get object a; if you get the thing that you were using as object a before, you won’t enjoy it, and you’ll just come up with a new object a (formally, “object a” is the slot that desired things occupy, not the things themselves). The pursuit of some object a is a necessary condition for having an intact psyche, so you always have to be striving after something.
Inline links: is the slot that desired things occupy
And Snav brought up this this series of papers trying to link Lacan to free energy. I can’t really understand it - I don’t know what I was expecting from a paper trying to link one famously incomprehensible thing to another famously incomprehensible thing. Parts of it seem to almost make sense; Lacan often says that various quantities in his system are what is left after other quantities have been interpreted through the logical-symbolic order, which sounds suspiciously like prediction error. The papers try to argue that Fristonian free energy = Lacanian jouissance, a word usually thought of as equivalent to libido or pleasure or excessive pleasure or painful pleasure or something like that. I don’t feel able to have an opinion at this point.
Inline links: brought up, this series of papers, another famously incomprehensible thing
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
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
46: Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes. Brian Potter of Construction Physics disagrees with Tom Wolfe’s thesis (reviewed by me here) that modern architecture looks bare and boring primarily because artistic tastemakers promoted it as a style; Potter says that while something like this may have happened somewhat, the role of architects was secondary to the role of real estate developers, who were trying to cut costs. Modern skyscrapers cut costs both by directly being cheaper to build (eg save money on ornamentation) and because the walls are thinner (meaning more interior rentable space). Then the usual incentives of organizations to do what everyone else is doing and not rock the boat made stragglers go along. I appreciate Brian's extremely knowledgeable perspective. I also appreciate that he doesn't deny the modern architecture part of the story, since I think it's necessary - otherwise, you would expect very expensive "prestige" buildings like museums/opera houses/cathedrals to keep ornamentation, which isn't what happened. My remaining question for him is how much money is involved - would an ornamented skyscraper cost more like 2% more or more like 20% more? Also, Snav replies to the same post.
Inline links: Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes, here, replies to