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downfall of humanity cont. from chat

Expanded summaries — mechanisms and examples

Neuropsychoanalysis

Mechanism: affective/motivational brain systems (seeking, rage, fear, attachment) interact with cortical regulation; trauma, chronic stress, or poor caregiving dysregulate these systems so primitive drives dominate conscious control and social reasoning.

Examples: early attachment failure producing reactive aggression or dissociation; chronic stress altering reward circuitry leading to addiction and impulsive harm.

Short takeaway: hungry, frightened, or traumatised brains misread goals and harm others/self.

Classical psychoanalysis (Freud & object relations)

Mechanism: instincts and wishes (libido/aggression) are repressed by the ego and superego; the return of the repressed (through symptoms, repetition compulsion, projection) generates destructive individual and cultural patterns. Object-relations variants stress internalized relational models—early bad objects lead to persecutory structures.

Examples: repeating abusive relationship patterns; collective scapegoating as projection of disavowed impulses.

Short takeaway: repression and internal conflict repeat personal and social harm.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Mechanism: subject formed in the Symbolic (language/Other) experiences fundamental lack; desire is structured around missing objects (objet petit a) and jouissance (excess enjoyment) which escapes full representation. Alienation, misrecognition, and the pursuit of impossible wholeness lead to ideological attachment and destructive drives.

Examples: political mass formations around an imagined fullness; ideology that promises fulfillment via exclusion or violence.

Short takeaway: language-structured desire and alienation produce recurrent social pathologies.

Neuroscience (evolutionary/decision-making perspective)

Mechanism: brains evolved for small-group life; fast reward/avoidance systems and heuristic decision-making conflict with large-scale, slow-payoff collective problems (climate, inequality). Technologies and markets exploit reward pathways (dopamine), producing addiction, polarization, and short-termism.

Examples: social media exploiting salience systems; discounting of future harms leading to environmental degradation.

Short takeaway: evolutionary mismatch + exploited reward systems drive large-scale harm.

Social/cultural synthesis (power, institutions)

Mechanism: institutional arrangements (economic, political, colonial) capitalize on psychological vulnerabilities—channeling fear, desire, and aggression into structures of domination, resource extraction, and inequality. Structural harms then feedback to worsen individual psychopathology.

Examples: authoritarian propaganda mobilizing fear and projection; capitalist incentives encouraging ecological extraction.

Short takeaway: systems of power amplify and institutionalize destructive human tendencies.

according to neuropsychoanalysts, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, lacanians... what was the downfall of humanity

GPT-5 mini

This is a big, contested question; different schools point to different root “downfalls.” Briefly, across the traditions you named:

Neuropsychoanalysts: the domination of unconscious drives (especially affective/emotional circuitry) by maladaptive environment and learning — meaning neurobiological affect systems hijacked by trauma, chronic stress, or social environments that produce pathology and destructive behaviour.

Classical psychoanalysts (Freudian tradition): repression of instinctual drives and the vicissitudes of the unconscious (intra-psychic conflict between id, ego, superego), producing neuroses, repetitive destructive patterns, and cultural symptoms.

Lacanians: the split/alienation produced by language and the Symbolic order — desire structured by lack (the objet petit a) and misrecognition in the Other, which produces alienation, jouissance-driven excess, and various social pathologies tied to symbolic structures.

Neuroscientists (broadly): evolutionarily ancient brain systems (reward, fear, social threat) interacting with fast-changing environments and technologies, producing mismatches (e.g., hyperactivation of reward pathways, reduced social cohesion, maladaptive decision-making) that drive addiction, conflict, and ecological harm.

Social/cultural theorists influenced by these fields: systems of domination (power, inequality, institutions) that exploit psychological and neural vulnerabilities, creating large-scale harm (war, ecological collapse, oppression).

Synthesis (short): many see humanity’s “downfall” as not a single cause but an interaction of (1) deep biological drives and vulnerabilities, (2) unconscious/psychic structures shaped by repression and language, and (3) socio-cultural/institutional systems that amplify maladaptive tendencies — together producing violence, alienation, and ecological crisis.

it's a a pleasure that it's too pleasurable that it becomes traumatic it's sort of that excess excitation of the drive um Beyond homeostasis very importantly it's beyond the logic of um sort of homeostatic regulation uh the drive Jouissance it's um that Surplus

-Dall l Aglio

you're sitting alone headphones on scrolling past the day's leftovers then that song drops one chord and the walls dissolve suddenly you're weightless somewhere brighter cleaner whole that leap you just felt that's the fundamental fantasy you know catching you hear the scientist clatter in behind you dopamine auditory cortex limbic reward sure professor map every neuron if you like but you can't chart the tremor that ran down my spine the way that note soldered all my broken edges for four perfect bars that tremor is everything fantasy isn't a cheap daydream it's the hidden projector that splices meaning onto the mess we call reality an invisible screen where our jagged lives look almost seamless we lean on it because the raw reel unfiltered unstitched is too bright too loud too much psychoanalysis doesn't march in to smash the screen it asks you to walk through it to study the gears the smoke the mirrors not to live without fantasy but to stop letting it drag you by the throat and who can manage that not the polished hero but what Lacan calls the ideal subject the one who finally admits "I'm a patchwork a collage of movie quotes half-remembered lullabies and borrowed bravado." Owning that lack cracks the spell you see the seams you feel the draft rushing in from the void you've spent years wallpapering over it stings sure but here's the secret the void is where freedom sits waiting once you stop stuffing it with makebelieve you can start dancing around it riffing off it even laughing at it you don't plug the hole you play it like jazz psychoanalysis won't promise bliss or neat endings it hands you a flashlight and points to the basement where the reels are spinning and in that worring dark you glimpse something wilder than closure the power to enjoy the glitch the missed note the failure itself so next time the song lifts you out of your chair write it feel every second of that stolen perfection then as the last cord dies stay awake watch the fantasy fade watch the room return stay with the lack stay with the ache that's where the real begins and where you finally learn to speak in your own voice

theyellowbuck

#the real #the symbolic #the imaginary

Can you kind of talk about these two concepts the notion that we are pre-born into a world of meaning and then also we humans are very much these groundless beings yeah so actually when writing in these terms in the book I'm kind of translating something very conceptual from that I take from Lacan when I say that the human being is groundless I could also say the human being is confronted with the Real and what is the real the real is the unpredictable [a huge bug landing on your forearm while playing guitar] the real is that which is imposed onto me is that which disturbs my existence and more specifically you could say that when we look at Lacan's later work and I'm looking next to me because I was working in this seminar in Lacan’s seminar encore seminar 20 there he introduces the idea that there is no Rapport sexual that there is no sexual rapport that's his key point and so what is the sexual Rapport- the fact that we are as human beings we are born with drives and the drive is something that is there in my organism it's something spontaneous but the thing is that my body is not teaching how to deal with the drive and so therefore for a human being the drive and the sexual drive was Freud's example to kind of think about it the drive is a problem for the human being and Lacan's formulation I think there is no sexual Rapport means that both in for me as an individual in how I live with my body and how I relate to the organism that I am with its impulses there is a fundamental problem there is not something of a rule when I relate to someone else to another human being who is also a being with Drive impulses there is no inherent connection between me and you like there is no internal connection between me and myself so I'm I'm something of an other for myself and the other is also an other for me and so this is for me the groundlessness and that's the starting point so the starting point from a Lacanian point of view indeed is the Real as that which is not defined and which opens both a possibility towards creativity because I don't have to that there is no strict rule so there is openness there is room for improvisation but it's also an element that can create despair in human beings because I actually do not know what to do with myself or with my life or with other people so I have no standard to which I can look that's the basic Point and I think that Lacan in his work radicalizes that when he progresses in his teaching and then his idea is that culture that language and that discourse which is for Lacan kind of the key to culture it's the thing that we have there is some rules in how we speak and interact with one another that's a way of dealing with the real so the real is intolerable in its Essence and so therefore we invented culture therefore we invented language as as a means to try to deal with that and early Lacan will then focus on the figure of the Father the father in early Lacan is the one who is the guarantee of culture like was from a Catholic background you have God and God is the father and you have the priest and the priest is the one who is like bringing the message of the Bible to people and in a paternalistic society the father is the Cornerstone of that so the father figure is the one who is transmitting the cultural norm to the individual but then later Lacan this becomes vaguer then it seems like Lacan is more focusing on culture as such and multiplicity at the level of culture but still the idea remains that all symbolic articulations that we have all rituals that we have all habits that we have in society in the groups that we live in these are actually tools that help us to live to deal to cope with that intolerable groundlessness which is actually fundamental to how we function

Stijn Vanheule- Psychosis, Madness, Lacan and Jung w/rahul sam

#psychosis

The annoying thing is the following. It is that the Other, the locus, for its part, as I told you, knows nothing. One can no longer hate God if he himself knows nothing; in particular nothing about what is happening. When one could hate him, one could believe he loved us, because he did not pay us back for it. It was not obvious, despite the fact that in certain cases, people put the whole packet into it! Anyway, since I am coming to the end of these discourses that I have the courage to pursue before you, I would like, since this is an idea that comes to me, and after all it is an idea also about which I have reflected a little bit, it is that that Christ, in short, whose misfortune is explained to us by an idea of saving men, I find rather that it was a matter of saving God, in giving once more a little presence, actuality to this hatred of God about which, of course, we are rather indecisive and with good reason. It is from this that I say that the imputation of the unconscious is an unbelievable act of charity! The subjects know, they know. But anyway all the same, they do not know all. At the level of this not-all, there is only the Other who does not know. It is the Other who makes the not-all, precisely in that he is the part of not knowing at all in this not-all.

Lacan

Often the the statement is that actually in psychosis we don't have a barred subject that desire is not present in psychosis but for me that's not a very interesting idea what I do believe is that at moments of psychotic revelation like for example in a hallucination or in an intuition that lies at the basis of a delusion then there are moments where something of the subject disappears or tends to disappear and then Lacan will say this one of his one liners about psychosis is that they have the cause in their pocket and with the cause he means the object petit a whilst in Neurosis the object a is outside of me for example in the presumed gaze when I'm alone in my house I already wonder how I'm how I'm looking as an neurotic and I'm wondering how I will be looking and when I leave the house and I go to a pub how will people what will people think of me well while nobody is there at the level of the fantasy The Gaze is already there so it's a presumed entity and my subjectivity is in relation to an externalized object a that subjectivity takes shape but the thing is says Lacan that in psychosis this object a is not a virtual reality it's a real reality in the sense that the Gaze is there Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy / Stijn Vanheule

Ni dominant is not that of just knowing but of just linking out of which emerges a new form of knowing at the end of the process of linking which sometimes can take a long time hence what I described as as haziness uncertainty the impression that sometimes INFJs can give of being a little slow with things and so forth linking though is something that you know the more I think about it is not uh just an intrapsychic phenomenon and by this I mean that yes it says something very deep about the structure and patterns of the NI world...the patterns of the NI world the objects of the NI world are structured through linkages often the linkages are isomorphically quite indirect and obscure i know these are the ways of the unconscious LACAN would say that there's a relationship of metonomy of metaphoricity between them which sometimes make it makes it hard to consciously explain why a particular pattern has been linked to another although there always is a response there's always an answer to this it's just not an easy one to unearth it's not an easy one to uncover but linking again the more I think about this this phenomenon is something that is much more basic not only to INFJ existence but to INFJ well-being so there is a normative dimension to this idea it is not just a descriptive idea it is not just an intellectual abstraction it has bearing on the way that we conduct our lives and the way that we can flourish

Renaud Contini

#infj #mbti infj

Three registers the Real the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the real well what I earlier discussed about the questions of existence or the dilemmas of existence that are connected to the drive register like our sexuality but also like being a parent being alive having a body in Lacan's line of reasoning it's precisely because there is it's just a biological impulse but without an inherent knowledge it is real and why is it real because we don't know how to deal with it it's perplexing in a certain sense that's the real and then the idea is that the human being uses the imaginary and the symbolic to kind of treat the real to try to do something with it and then the imaginary refers to the the register of images meaning like mental representations that we build about reality and often we then when we think about our Consciousness ...Consciousness means that we have like a cinematographic representation in our minds we could for example think about breakfast this morning and immediately see what we had been eating and maybe we see a little movie like thing we like putting the food in our mouth well that is the imaginary like this kind of filmic construction that we have in consciousness so that's one that's the second register and then the register of the symbolic is the register of language use and here we could say that the human being treats the real with words or as Lacan would say with signifiers and these signifiers function in like weblike structures and my idea is that we cover up reality with such a web like structure of signifiers and these signifiers these of course provoke meanings and ideas and that's how there is an interaction between the symbolic and the imaginary so but generally speaking the symbolic and the imaginary are our ways of dealing with the real and that's in Lacan's Theory like the universal idea any human subject is functioning that way and here what is then typical of psychosis then the idea is that there is something of a hole of something that is missing that is not functioning at the level of the symbolic so there is an impossibility to kind of create something of a narrative around certain dilemmas in life that you've been confronted with and that results in a very specific way of experiencing because if we traditionally link the symbolic to the imaginary and we kind of create representations and not just cinematographic images but like little scenarios about life then in a Freudian perspective we are doing secondary process thinking this secondary process thinking in Freud's line of reasoning well that's exactly kind creating logically coherent ideas about the world but what happens then if this is failing like is the case in psychosis well when we again switch to Freud would say like at that point you will see primary process thinking what is primary process thinking well that's the very associative way of dealing with the elements of mental life where it's no longer no longer about the The Logical coherence and the comprehensibility in terms of what I can share with someone else but like very associative way of connecting elements that have formal similarities like similar sounds or similar colors or similar letters or numbers that that return and Freud's idea was like this is dominant both in dreams and in psychosis

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy / Leon Brenner and Stijn Vanheule

#psychosis

I should say however what the sort of badly alienated INFJ does is to ignore at their own peril the fact that meaning is actually always relational that is to say that for INFJs as I'm sure it is for other people but for INFJs meaning is always happening on the margins of FE [extroverted feeling] type of interaction now that's not to say that NI [introverted intuition] is not involved ni is the most important factor but FE is just as essential because there is something relational in meaning and even the most seemingly abstract ramble of an INFJ to whom the particular Ni text wall for example or monologue is deeply meaningful is concealing within itself something relational so you need other people You need to have your own capacity for creating meanings reflected in the eyes of other people this is the INFJ way of life and there's no way of escaping that and the problem is that the more sometimes the more sort of insecure INFJs and often their life histories show that there's a lot of reasons to be insecure they get blinded to this fact and they think they can create meaning by themselves well in the case of compliant INFJs it's almost like they're afraid of their meaning-making ability which is reflected in their in their fear of showing their ni too much and these INFJs often will tend to express their frustration with the absence of meaning in their lives because that's always a theme in INFJ life by saying "Well it's the world that's not meaningful enough people are not bringing me enough meaning." And what they're really saying is I'm repressing my ability to create meanings and I'm projecting it outside with the solipsistic kinds of INFJs the the posture is diametrically opposite but for this very reason is closely connected it tends to be well the world is not meaningful right the world has shown that it is not meaningful i create my own meaning in my NI world the translation of this is I'm not creating meaning and I'm trying to justify not creating meaning okay because creating meaning in the NI world is is a doomed enterprise you don't create meaning in the NI world if you're if you're just in the NI world and you're not doing any kind of interaction you're not activating FE through interact in activating FE you're not activating SE [extroverted sensing] you're not feeding your NI vision your NI world view what you will end up with is a very monolithic architecture of your NI world it will solidify little by little and it will progressively look more and more predictable and run around itself by its own tail and stop being productive and in the process of it stopping to be productive it will lose what ability it had to create meaning and so you find meaninglessness both in excessively adaptive lives blame that you know a lack on the part of the outside world and you you get a lack a meaninglessness in the solipsistic life not blamed but covered concealed by an avowed and exaggerated attempt to keep investing NI and only NI to retrieve a meaning that is making itself more and more scarce so alienation from meaning I want to conclude with this is always alienation from the possibility of relationships never underestimate the extent to which meaning emerges in the in the margins of interaction with the other and seeing yourself in the eye of the other

Renaud Contini

#INFJ

There's the good alienation and the bad alienation you know if I wanted to simplify things this is how I would put it the good alienation is what I called a dis-severed alienation an alienation that has overcome severance and the bad alienation is severed alienation an alienation that has not overcome severance good good alienation takes ownership of alienation and does not see this existential alienation as an impossible to cross screen between the person and the world instead the person accepts it wears their alienation on their sleeve so to speak and brings what's unique and insightful about their particular mode of being to the world and to other people the severed alienated INFJ struggles to do this and fundamentally it's all linking back to a sense of discomfort with their own alienation which translates in fact as a recentering of the self into itself it's a defensive process but it has the unintended unfortunate consequence of only reinforcing alienation in its bad variety now the way in which this bad alienation can also be understood is an alienation from meaning the INFJ is alienated from external reality by by definition shall we say but they're certainly not alienated from meaning in fact if you are familiar with the my latest book on the INFJ the infinite soul INFJ life in the modern world you know that I think the best description of INFJ talent of the INFJ gifts that really marks them out as INFjs is meaning making recovering the lost meaning of the disenchanted world the technological disenchanted world of modernity and postmodernity the world of cause and effects infjs are uniquely sensitive to the need to provide a re-enchantment of the world they're very good at creating new meanings they're very good at retrieving old dead meanings and bringing them back in the form in every case of symbol and metaphor okay but the bad alienation is in fact an an alienation from meaning too which you can understand is going to be a really difficult thing to manage because if the INFJ is alienated in the first place but also ends up being alienated from the what they are in some sense destined to become creators of meaning well this ends up being quite a hostile scary and nihilistic place for them indeed and this alienation from meaning can be understood uh through the process of you know an exaggerated sense of insecurity in the world an INFJ who's alienated is always going to be oriented to meaning they cannot help it and it's also a defense mechanism a good one

Renaud Contini

#INFJ #Hermann Hesse #mbti #the glass bead game

it comes from a discussion between Lacan and Henri Ey who was like a contemporary of Lacan a psychiatrist in in Paris who had more of an academic career they they were trained together and at a certain point they have been discussing the question of psychosis and Henri Ey was like a bit more at the side of like we have to be careful in giving diagnosis because it's limiting people's freedom because maybe it's stigmatizing and then Lacan's point was no no no we have to give the diagnosis of psychosis because it touches very specifically on the question of human Freedom so it's kind of a bit the the paradoxical Lacanian intervention in that field and when I take that quote it is in my view so interesting because it shows that for Lacan the human being is free to the extent that we are not determined purely at a biological level which is already an idea from Freud of course like the distinction between the Instinct and the drive the drive is something that puts us on the scene with a living body that has impulses that has a certain Jouissance but that Jouissance is not directed in the sense that we don't know exactly how to deal with it and at a certain point I referred to Nietzsche who said like the human being is a sick animal well in a certain sense we are all a bit have this same sickness in the sense that we are lacking something very fundamental already biologically and this is this is a challenge but it opens a domain of freedom because it opens the possibility of choice if I in my sexual behavior am not completely determined by my hormones then that means that there is an ethical thing at stake like I have to take a decision and when I have to take a decision there is some possibility of Freedom it's not that everything is possible but there is some freedom and that freedom is ethical and then I would say like okay this is a starting position then what is Neurosis what Neurosis is actually the choice for convention the Neurosis means that you adopt the law of your culture the law of your family the law of your group and you take it as your frame of reference to kind of frame these existential challenges these aspects of a non-existence I would say with the later Lacan we we deal with these question of the non-existence by making use of the law of culture and we try to translate it into something of an existence how to exist as a sexuated being as a parent and that's the neurotic solution and Neurosis of course we knows it results in division subjective division because there's doubt do I make the right choice or not but what is then psychosis well psychosis is the inability to make use of convention and simply because convention is not compelling convention is not appealing convention is not speaking to someone so it's not of a help it's not that convention is not known but it might be and that's the possibility of psychosis that it's just not saying something for you and if convention is not there as as a source of inspiration you're there in on your own and that then you're at the point of freedom and for me that's the exactly the point where lacaa is situating madness madness means that you don't have like the conventional way of making up reality at your your disposal which means that reality tends to go crazy which also means that you will have to invent and so at that point you're very free but it's very challenging as well it's anxiety-provoking and that's a contrast with the typical neurotic solution which is more conventional and which in a sense is stupid because you don't think you don't use your possibility of Freedom at that level so stupidity and being an idiot is in Lacan's later line of reasoning very typical of neurosis whilst like being more free but it comes with the cost of loneliness and of having to bear these very difficult questions yourself is is typical of psychosis -Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy Leon Brenner and Stijn Vanheule

there is a clear link between trauma and psychosis and this is a link that has been neglected for many years because we all lived in that idea that was so dominant in Psychiatry that psychosis would be as such a disorder that would be like caused especially through biological mechanisms and therefore that it we have been neglecting collectively the impact of trauma but I do believe also starting from epidemiological research we know that the impact of trauma is such that it might produce psychotic experiences and my way of thinking about it is of course because trauma what is so traumatic about trauma it is because the unimaginable happens to you for example when you undergo rape something of the thing that you were trusting your epistemic trust in the world your belief that relations between people are organized in a certain way is that's the thing that is violated it's not only your body it's also your trust it's your story it's your assumptions about reality that are being challenged and therefore I do see the link with the possibility of having as a consequence psychotic experiences because something of a hole has been created in your symbolic Universe through trauma so therefore I think there is this inherent link and that link might also be present over Generations so if there is intergenerational trauma or maybe if your parents or your grandparents had a very bad past maybe they were refugees maybe they have had like very bad experiences that have been hurting them and that are something of a wound that is carried in a family that might at the later stage result in psychotic experiences by someone else in your family system so I think the trauma aspect is something very important to take in mind and then of course that other question about spirituality and religion of course here the link I see is when I talk about the groundlessness of existence this is the very point where of course the question of religion comes to the fore I think all religions are questions of how to deal with that and obviously we see that in in a scientific or in a scientifically organized Universe like we hope we are maybe as Western societies that this is something that is not being addressed but as human beings we are confronted with that question and that's the the question where we can wonder whether there's a link between our lives and maybe other lives or with the transcendental and these are all the questions that have been addressed in big religions like in Christianity in Buddhism many religions are dealing with that question so for me the question a psychosis is operating on is the same is very similar to the question a religion is operating on and therefore it's also very plausible that something of a spiritual religious experience is so common to The Psychotic experience and then at that point it's much more than just like a belief in a book but something that is being experienced really existentially from within and I think that it is to be respected that it's very important and that often it is maybe a point that can help someone to ground their own existence again starting from that experience although of course I will have to admit always as a therapist that I'm not with you in your spiritual experience it's your experience but maybe it can ground Your Existence and so to kind of respect it stimulate it and help people to kind of accept it and to think how they can organize their lives starting from that very experience

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy- A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families - Stijn Vanheule, PhD

by simply giving the master a quarter turn think of it as a nudge you produce the hysteric now this matters analytically because analyzands are tempted to play master I'm the consumer I'm paying for this fix me slave use your knowledge to create a cure you see I'm the patient you're the knowledgeable doctor S2 equals knowledge give me a cure tell me what my disorder is now you can see why so many therapists resort to the DSM because it always gives you a name for somebody's issue that you can then sell back to them as a commodity in analysis though what you want to do is give those Masters a nudge you want to give them a nudge in other words you want to Hysterize the master instead of having them speak from a position of authority you want to actually have them speak from the position of Truth which is Barred subjectivity this is why when dealing with neurotics you don't focus on the fluid aspects of their speech you focus on what Louis rightly noted as the little detritus you don't focus on the great things that they said about themselves you focus on the stammer in between you focus on impotence not where they are powerful but where they are weak that's one of the ways that you Hysterize the analyzand -How to Understand Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses (feat. Samuel McCormick)

now look very carefully at the bottom of the Master's discourse what do you see you see a broken formula for Fantasy the lacanian formula for fantasy is precisely what the master cannot see they cannot see that they are a castrated limited and constrained subject in search of some Surplus to pele [The word "plentiful" traces its roots back to the Proto-Indo-European word pele-, meaning "full." This root is also the origin of the words "plenary," "plenitude," and "replete.”] fill them in they don't see it that way the master is blind to the fantasy that structures his existence the hysteric is blind to a different kind of fantasy in the analytic discourse there is no connection between the part of truth that can be said and the part that cannot you've heard this from me before and in the University discourse these poor fucking students ever sundered from the very symptom of their existence … a good slave for the master is one who anticipates the Master's desire before the master says it think about this as a fantasy Newton is out there playing tennis and Jeeves just as the match ends walks up with a tray full of lemonade and Newton says to Jeeves oh my God aren't you the best Slave how did you know that it was lemonade that I would want at the end of this… this is one of the basic dilemmas of the master if they do their job right they will produce a relationship to the other where the other is anticipating the Master's desire to such an extent that the master never experiences lack you see that's exactly what the master can't bear is the fact that they are a lacking divided subject so it purports with the discourse of the master that the master would look for slaves who can anticipate their desire before the master even feels it because if the master feels desire that is very much like a split subject desirous subject the dilemma though is one that puts us right on the edge of clinical depression a good slave is one that prevents desire a master is one who wakes up in the morning and doesn't know what the fuck to do doesn't want to do anything and if you ask me this is the the basic definition of power in late modernity in the old days Juridical power was what you could make somebody do with the barrel of a gun it was about forcing action I think in our era being powerful means not having to act power means you can wake up in the morning and not do shit and still be rich at the end of the day notice too how this is the basic symptomatology of lower downwardly mobile classes and higher 1 percenters of the world if you're in the lower class you can wake up in the morning and not do shit and still be broke at the end of the day you're still in that same class when you're wealthy you can do the same goddamn thing you can wake up in the morning not do shit and still be rich at the end hence the fantasy of the middle class if I don't wake up and get to work I'll slide into the lower class but if I do maybe I can become a 1 percenter so you might see this as the basic middle class fantasy that has created these two realities for lower and upper class subjects the master is the one who fancies themselves the upper class subject ever looking for slaves who can produce cakes before the master even wants one and as a result can quell any experience of lack that's the weird part about the master the master wants nothing more than the cessation of his own desire and is ever in search of slaves Partners friends jobs neighbors who can do that work the Master's discourse is terrific in many ways it allows much to be taken apart the effect of it is a commodity for the Master's consumption but the cause of it the cause and condition of the Master's illusion of Oneness and Authority is division weakness castration in fact better than understanding slash $ as split subject I would read it as castration meaning division limitation and constraint the truth that the master cannot bear about themselves is that they are in fact constrained that they are in fact limited like the rest of us

How to Understand Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses (feat. Samuel McCormick)

In this Theory desire operates with arbitrary direction whatever it is you want the desire is going to function the same and it provides the same kind of pleasure to you not in the getting of it but in the quest to get it [ the chase right] that's what this theory is all about so down here you know this desire can never know that it came from an imperfect source so this is the discourse of control top- down control manager to worker boss of the company the startup the president to the country this kind of thing that's that one discourse of the universities where you are this is St John's perfectly St John's where knowledge is in the driver's seat it's the creating Force which makes sense like we would say the university is based on knowledge it's not based on ideology there's so many things about University discourse that are like the university has no political position the university has no ideology it has no angle it's just run by pure knowledge but knowledge is never pure is it? what we find on here in the position of Truth which is I don't know if I like the word truth the position of the Hidden this is the hidden the unexposed like a master is truly just someone else right with a funny hat or with the belief that they know the belief of that they have power or they've mastered the language and you think that they're like in charge over here knowledge is always ordered by something political there's a reason why certain kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of Majors exist and other ones don't look at University of West Virginia right that's a big story in the news what programs are they cutting and what are they keeping they're saying well we're a university we present knowledge but it was political what they chose to keep and what they chose not to they say it's in the service of knowledge and creating a good University but what is obvious to everyone is that they picked the ones that make money so the master term is capitalism or finances money and that's what's determining what gets to be counted as knowledge do you understand that I'll say it again the master term determines what knowledge is but we can't access this we don't know this all we're presented with is the university is a neutral site of discovery of knowledge and truth even St John says that right they say one of our values is truth we're going to expose and discover the truth and we're going to say it even if it hurts people and that's a really Noble kind of storybook idea that's it's like a great movie plot that's like Captain America kind of BS right we love those kind of movies well I don't but a lot of people do in fact billions and billions and billions of dollars have been spent just watching Iron Man run around and shoot people with lasers and and and be a good guy be a hero but there's some ideology there behind that knowledge what is it what is it storybook idea that knowledge that the knowledge of the truth just runs things there's always an angle so what does it what does it do well it posits itself it creates or pushes out it pushes towards desire so this might be you as the student it wants the university wants you to desire the knowledge so that's what it's creating is desire in you when you see a university ad think about this the university ad is like we're going to teach you how to have a good life notice they're not going to say we're going teach you how to think correctly we're going to teach you the truth none of that we're going to teach you out of a good life so you're going to want to desire that and then what is produced are normal people split subjects that's what's produced are people who are unsure they're cautious they're like I'm going to need to look into that they're not very like um politically frothing at the mouth University graduates they're good functionaries they know how to go take a job in a cubicle and work and make good money and and get a mortgage and a car and a family and all that so that's kind of what the university wants is a replication of society

Lecture 1- Lacan's Four Discourses and the possibility of dialogue professor Steve Llano

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