Talk to me about Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.

[#FF0000]

Now normally when I do threads like this I like to ask some questions about the topic to stir up discussion, but when it comes to these academic leftist weirdos I am completely in the dark. All I know is that they have some connection to the left, and to psychoanalysis.

So. In your own words: who are these guys? what are they about? what are their big ideas? their best/most important work? Do you like them? Hate them? Why?

And, go.

[Hiero]

Lacan was a psychoanlaysis, wrote about the mirror stage. Derrida was a cultural critici, wrote about 'çulture is text'. Foucault talked about power relations. Deleuze critique Lacan, he wrote about the rhizome.

[shinjuku dori]

Intellectual masturbation for the academic elite.

They will have same relation to proletarian revolution that banana does to sexual intercourse.

[Robocommie]

I highly recommend at least familiarizing yourself with Foucault, his work on power dynamics is hugely influential and in my opinion makes for a very good companion to Marxian analysis. His theories have their flaws but are still quite profound and interesting. Foucault's work on discourse is really cool to me, in that it looks at how power relations in society shape and determine what we commonly accept as true, and how power and knowledge are inter-related. A lot of leftists have a problem with Foucault because he's a part of post-modernism, but in my opinion modernist ideology is way past its prime and is responsible for a shitload of the various kinds of chauvinisms that plague the left today. One of the major downsides of post-modernism though is the relative thickness of jargon that gets employed; in fact some people have accused post-modernists of being intentionally opaque.

As for the rest, I'm not that interested in their work so I can't say for good or ill. I know Lacan has influenced Slavoj Zizek a lot, and Derrida was a hugely formative influence on the post-modernist critical theory crowd.

[#FF0000]

Yeah that's the limit of my knowledge of post-modernism: shit is hard to read.

What's some good stuff by Foucault? Are there any concepts in particular that someone should be familiar with in order to "get" his work or what?

[Scarlet Fever]

Lacan was a Freudian psychoanalyst whose theories included the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders as well as insights into desire, the structure of the unconscious, and the previously-mentioned mirror stage. Essentially a "return to Freud" with more philosophy and linguistics. Though unpopular in the US, Lacan's ideas continue to have vast influence, particularly in Europe and South America (about half of psychoanalysts internationally are of the Lacanian orientation).

Lacanian philosophers and Marxists like Althusser, Zizek, etc. see that as classical psychoanalysis provided insights into the proletarian psychology that Marxism missed--through for example the Freudo-Marxist Frankfurt School--Lacan helps us make sense of late capitalism and its effects on the (collective) psyche.

[Book O'Dead]

I like Erich Fromm.

[blake 3:17]

Yeah that's the limit of my knowledge of post-modernism: shit is hard to read.

What's some good stuff by Foucault? Are there any concepts in particular that someone should be familiar with in order to "get" his work or what?

Discipline & Punish is probably the most obviously politically relevant of his major works.

The overarching theme of his work is about the emergence of modernity and its new sciences.

[L.A.P.]

The thing about the obscurantism prevalent in Continental philosophy has more to do with the philosophers (especially Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze) being influenced by French poets and authors that had a very obscure and opaque style of writing than intellectual elitism. Just look at Zizek who is Slovenian, despite what people say Zizek is very concise in his writing style rather than obscure. The obscurantism is especially hard to read for us English speakers because we're not used to that style of writing in English literature.
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Lacan - he was a psychiatrist that mixed psychoanalysis with Hegelian & Marxist philosophy with structural linguistics. His whole thing is that our whole psyche and conscious/unconscious is structured by a series of symbols that attach themselves to different concepts (hence "the unconscious is structured like a language") through psychosocial development. This is how he understands the Oedipus complex, the mother and father are usually one of the first signifiers of certain concepts that will carry with with us through metaphoric-metonymic displacement.

His model of the psyche is probably what he's best known for:

Real - the actual materiality of existence (the world as just a chaotic series of events and the chaotic series of impulses that occur in a person or animal) that is outside the expressibility of language

Imaginary - the narcissistic realm of fantasy that is constituted after a baby sees an idealized image of itself (signified) in the mirror as opposed to their uncoordinated body (signifier)

Symbolic - social "reality" dominated by language which in turn is dominated by the power-structure of class society. This realm adds virtual meaning to things; God is an example of this. This is when you leave the Real which alienates the subject from their immediate unconscious impulses thus creating that constant sense of lack

Lacanians such as Barthes, Althusser, and Zizek thought his model of the psyche has implications on how dominant ideologies are constituted and structured

This isn't a full explanation so if you really want some great introductions that are easy to understand I can send some links.
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Derrida - postmodern philosopher who actually doesn't have much to his thought, it's just that his work is presented to be a lot more insightful than it actually is. In fact, Derrida's whole deconstruction thing is something Lacan and Foucault have already gone into but done a lot better (Lacan's Symbolic and Foucault's power-language)

Deconstruction can be summed up like this: all texts and language-systems are based on a series of binary oppositions (Lacan said the same thing for the Symbolic order) that create meaning in which one governs the other (signifier over signified, man over woman, writing over speech, activity over passivity). The job of deconstruction is to overturn these binary oppositions to decontruct the meaning of a text.

Like I said, there were plenty of other philosophers around that time that were saying the same thing but better. Zizek criticizes deconstruction, not because he disagrees with it, but because its analysis is devoid of any political or social content, which he believes is inseperable from the meaning of a text.
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Foucault - post-structuralist philosopher and social theorist whose early work (I'm currently reading The Archaeology of Knowledge) studied how certain time periods utilize concepts to retroactively percieve their past, and how the underlying concepts of academic disciplines change to completely new ones all having to do with power-knowledge. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault studies how society's concept of insanity changed along with changes in the power-structure of class society.

I can also send some links that make Foucault way easier to understand
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Deleuze - overall weird guy with the strangest methods of interpereting philosophical texts. I don't understand Deleuze at all, I tried reading A Thousand Plataeus and it was going on about some Wolf-Man and Freud. All I was thinking was "what the fuck?" My cousin's fiance, who is going to be a junior professor, managed to make some sense out of his most famous book with Guttari, Anti-Oedipus, saying its basic premise was about how the body is split into different zones put under power which kind of ties in with Foucault's biopower/biopolitics. I guess that kind of makes snese when looking at the issue of abortion where conservatives believe the impregnated uterus should be split into a zone that isn't under the control of the woman. But overall, I think Deleuze was whacked.




EDIT: this is an awful explanation of all these philosophers (except maybe the part about Lacan is okay). Don't take this post seriously

[Yuppie Grinder]

I'd just like to say that Mirror Stage doesn't exist.
I like Deleuze's critique of current mental health institutions as oppressive tools of social control. Foucault interests me but I hate his needlessly obscure writing style.

[o well this is ok I guess]

Intellectual masturbation for the academic elite.

They will have same relation to proletarian revolution that banana does to sexual intercourse. You'd be surprised what you can do with a banana, bro....


Foucault interests me but I hate his needlessly obscure writing style.
I don't get why people say this. Foucault is relatively straightforward compared to his contemporaries.

[Yuppie Grinder]

I don't get why people say this. Foucault is relatively straightforward compared to his contemporaries.

When Deleuze is your contemporary that's not saying much.

[#FF0000]

I'd just like to say that Mirror Stage doesn't exist.

yeah so what does this mean for Lacan's ideas in general? Is all of his stuff sort of based on the Mirror Stage existing or what?

[black magick hustla]

Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I've met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible --- he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven't met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones --- the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I've dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish. When I proceed as I do in other areas where I do not understand, I run into the problems mentioned in connection with (1) and (2) above. So that's who I'm referring to, and why I don't proceed very far. I can list a lot more names if it's not obvious

i can't take seriously anyone who is purposely opaque. to hume's bonfire

[shinjuku dori]

How does one become a "psychoanalyst"? Who pays the rent and bills of these people? Their parents?

I want to be professional gibberish writer too. Please pay me.

[#FF0000]

Those aren't particularly helpful posts, dogg. Cut it out.

[L.A.P.]

i can't take seriously anyone who is purposely opaque. to hume's bonfire

It's okay, it's not like I can take a guy who thinks there is a physical language-acquisition device in our brains and another who thinks objects don't exist but only properties seriously. Fuck Noam Chomsky and David Hume.

[black magick hustla]

It's okay, it's not like I can take a guy who thinks there is a physical language-acquisition device in our brains and another who thinks objects don't exist but only properties seriously. Fuck Noam Chomsky and David Hume.

idk, i disagree with chomsky in a lot of things but not in this particular instance. nor i think its crazy to think that humans have some hardwired properties (you know like any animal). and that is not what hume said at all. i'll take hume's healthy skepticism on theorization over the delirious ramblings of a man that theorized himself to the point that he can write this,

"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1"

perhaps lacan would have done better if he had studied hume seriously

[black magick hustla]

How does one become a "psychoanalyst"? Who pays the rent and bills of these people? Their parents?

I want to be professional gibberish writer too. Please pay me.

go to ecole normaile superioure and befriend the other charlatans of the paris delirant mafia, and they might peddle you a job

[black magick hustla]

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~plotnits/PDFs/ap%20lacan%20and%20math%20Plotnitsky[1].pdf

a lacanian partisan tries to defend those wild statements, the funny thing is that he ends up sounding even more opaque

[Hiero]

The problem people have with trying to understand certainworks, is that you understand through context.

If you are to pick up any of these works and start reading, it is going to be particularly hard. Alot of these writers are engaged in high theory and some are not interested in contextualising their work.Rather you need to have a reason to go to one of this authors, I find it pointless to pick up a book on social theory and read it for the sake of it (thought I come from anthropology, which always engages social theory with ethnography).

For instance, if you are studying governmentality, say neo-liberal welfare, then you can turn to Foucault. You would read for instance Discipline and Punish to learn about survilance and self-survilance, the docile body, knowledge and power etc. Because you would be studying how governments intervene in people's lifes and morally correct them through the welfare model (and people here are mostly working class and underclass). Some modernist just doesn't deal with that sort of subject, alot don't deal with these intricacies that are played out in the relationships of insitutions and individuals. In that research program Foucault makes a hell lot of sense rather than if you picked him up to just read him for the sake of it.



Deconstruction can be summed up like this: all texts and language-systems are based on a series of binary oppositions (Lacan said the same thing for the Symbolic order) that create meaning in which one governs the other (signifier over signified, man over woman, writing over speech, activity over passivity). The job of deconstruction is to overturn these binary oppositions to decontruct the meaning of a text. That is very much similar to Levi-Straus work on myths (who like Lacan was working with Sausurre's linguistics), up to overturning binary oppositions. Levi-Straus just leaves mytheme as binaries.

[L.A.P.]

That is very much similar to Levi-Straus work on myths (who like Lacan was working with Sausurre's linguistics), up to overturning binary oppositions. Levi-Straus just leaves mytheme as binaries.

Well Derrida, after all, was influenced by Levi-Strauss. The methods used by "nonsense" philosophers like Lacan are the same methods used by the father of modern anthropology who, in The Savage Mind, proved that third world people ultimately have the same minds as "civilized" Westerners putting that bourgeois ideology to rest.

[black magick hustla]

The problem people have with trying to understand certainworks, is that you understand through context.


I don't really respect this. I can pick up a psychology scientific journal and probably understand reasonably most of the papers. The other day I read a paper in Nature about the enviroment and how it is about to have a catastrophic change, and it was in many ways very technical and I got the gist. I've heard that argument before, but I've known people involved in those disciplines and there is a lot of self-indulgence, the whole "context" argument is pretty cheap.

[mew]

I don't know if this is really helpful, but you might want to find books published by Semiotext(e)... They're all about American authors who write (fiction and non-fiction) books that incorporate and make French theory accessible.

[Halleluhwah]

tbh the best thing about these guys is that they make as many really awful puns as Marx, but they're often (esp. Deleuze) much dirtier.

[Yuppie Grinder]

How does one become a "psychoanalyst"? Who pays the rent and bills of these people? Their parents?

I want to be professional gibberish writer too. Please pay me.

Psychologists can make a lot of money actually.

yeah so what does this mean for Lacan's ideas in general? Is all of his stuff sort of based on the Mirror Stage existing or what?

No, his stuff is for sure worth reading.

[Luís Henrique]

these academic leftist weirdos

They are certainly academics, and perhaps weirdos, but... are they leftists?

Luís Henrique

[o well this is ok I guess]

and another who thinks objects don't exist but only properties seriously Where does he say this

[L.A.P.]

Where does he say this

It's called the bundle theory. Hume thought he could prove this theory by saying if you take away all the properties of an object then it would cease to exist, and dared you to try to imagine an object without properties. A typical Lacanian reply to this would be that properties are divisions of a full object in the Symbolic order, rather than properties as metaphysical entities that collectively manifest into an object.


Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1

The phallus, not the biological penis, is a signifier for what the baby perceives the mother-figure to be lacking (castration complex) and once the father-figure establishes themselves as the authority figure (Oedipus complex) then it signifies a lack of something for the child.

[o well this is ok I guess]

It's called the bundle theory. Hume thought he could prove this theory by saying if you take away all the properties of an object then it would cease to exist, and dared you to try to imagine an object without properties. A typical Lacanian reply to this would be that properties are divisions of a full object in the Symbolic order, rather than properties as metaphysical entities that collectively manifest into an object.



The phallus, not the biological penis, is a signifier for what the baby perceives the mother-figure to be lacking (castration complex) and once the father-figure establishes themselves as the authority figure (Oedipus complex) then it signifies a lack of something for the child. Yes but I'm asking where exactly he says such. I'm not doubting that he did, I simply want to know where. I sometimes miss things in books, so it's somewhat helpful to know the important parts before they happen.

[L.A.P.]

I'm not sure, I think it's on A Treatise of Human Nature.


are they leftists?

All of them were influenced by Marx had were associated with the Left

Foucault had many fights with the police, him and Lacan immediately joined that university set up by the students in '68. Deleuze had some political content in Difference and Repetition and one of Derrida's last work was Specters of Marx.

[scarletghoul]

Of all those mentioned by the OP, Lacan is the best because he's the most dialectical. His work is basically a hegelian reading of freud. In fact he once called himself a dialectical materialist (maybe half-jokingly), because signifiers are communicated in matter.

Derrida I havn't been able to read much because he is quite boring, and the whole deconstruction thing seems a bit pointless but meh i cant talk if i havnt read him properly can i. Foucault was cool. Deleuze is strange and fun but highly metaphysical. worht reading if you are bored with marxism

Other good french postwar philosophers include levinas (his ethics, unfortunately at the center of his work, is awful, but he is otherwise enlightening), sartre (obviously), and most of all Badiou, who overthrows postmodernism with his mathematical refounding of dialectical materialism !


Symbolic - social "reality" dominated by language which in turn is dominated by the power-structure of class society.Language isn't dominated by the class power structure; Stalin of all people actually did a pretty good job countering this view in his intervention on linguistics. of course there is significant influence, but language is far less an outgrowth of power relations than,say, politics. The Symbolic Order in a sense is a product of all these things, but it also constitutes them.


I don't understand Deleuze at all, I tried reading A Thousand Plataeus and it was going on about some Wolf-Man and Freud. All I was thinking was "what the fuck?"
:lol: the Wolf Man is the name given to one of Freud's case studies.

[L.A.P.]

Language isn't dominated by the class power structure; Stalin of all people actually did a pretty good job countering this view in his intervention on linguistics. of course there is significant influence, but language is far less an outgrowth of power relations than,say, politics. The Symbolic Order in a sense is a product of all these things, but it also constitutes them.

You're correct, the relationship between language and power-relations is far more complicated than what I initially wrote on my last post.



:lol: the Wolf Man is the name given to one of Freud's case studies.

Fuck, that makes sense. But still his style of writing didn't make that apparent at all.

[black magick hustla]

The phallus, not the biological penis, is a signifier for what the baby perceives the mother-figure to be lacking (castration complex) and once the father-figure establishes themselves as the authority figure (Oedipus complex) then it signifies a lack of something for the child.

Actually, the whole paragraph was about to prove square root of negative one is equal to phallus.

And what you mentioned about Hume, is different from saying "objects don't exist". He is making an empirical argument about the nature of theorization, including theorizing categories out of sensation. it is much deeper than stating "objects don't exist". When is meaningful to theorize the existence of an object? For example, the old debate of whether heat was a fluid or not, etc.

[L.A.P.]

Actually, the whole paragraph was about to prove square root of negative one is equal to phallus.

Lol, can't tell if you're kidding or not. Square root of negative one is supposed to be a symbol for the lack the phallus signifies, not the actual algebraic formula of the imaginary number.

[Luís Henrique]

All of them were influenced by Marx had were associated with the Left

Associated with the left by whom? By the same people who think Barack Obama is a dangerous Islamo-Bolshevik agent?

Or do you mean they had leftist sympathies when much younger?

I don't see these people taking part on any anti-capitalist or working class movement, nor even actually theorising anything except the absolute impossibility of challenging power and oppression without recreating power and oppression in newer forms.

Their criticisms of capitalism may be interesting and even useful, but do not seem to be conceived to help any emancipatory effort, which they seem to believe idle and useless.

Luís Henrique

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I don't really respect this. I can pick up a psychology scientific journal and probably understand reasonably most of the papers. The other day I read a paper in Nature about the enviroment and how it is about to have a catastrophic change, and it was in many ways very technical and I got the gist. I've heard that argument before, but I've known people involved in those disciplines and there is a lot of self-indulgence, the whole "context" argument is pretty cheap.
You're assuming that the technical terms and contexts of all disciplines are relative to the technical terms and contexts in the disciplines you've studied. It isn't the case, as the context and technical terms in linguistics, for example, are different to those in psychology or environmental studies. Maybe some disciplines are more accessible than others and have a context easier to grasp, I'm not sure, but to call the 'context' argument pretty cheap is pretty cheap in itself and has no real basis other than a lazy opinion.

For example, 'class-struggle' means nothing to someone without a context for the statement, based on definitions of class in the social sciences. Or surplus value, or other Marxist terms.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Lol, can't tell if you're kidding or not. Square root of negative one is supposed to be a symbol for the lack the phallus signifies, not the actual algebraic formula of the imaginary number.
Taking this literally is what people essentially do when they write works off as postmodern nonsense. Metaphor is lost on some people but is rich in continental works, I think anyway.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

a very good, but very biased, introduction to the problems of postmodern philosophy can be found in the book Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
Sokal is a scientist that succeeded in getting a parody published in a serious postmodern journal (Social Text). I find his commentary more important than virtually all of the philosophers he mentions.
I would argue that Foucault's ideas are among the most important of those mentioned in terms of politics, but his writing style is even more pretentious than Marxist theory and less rewarding.

[Marxaveli]

I highly recommend at least familiarizing yourself with Foucault, his work on power dynamics is hugely influential and in my opinion makes for a very good companion to Marxian analysis. His theories have their flaws but are still quite profound and interesting. Foucault's work on discourse is really cool to me, in that it looks at how power relations in society shape and determine what we commonly accept as true, and how power and knowledge are inter-related. A lot of leftists have a problem with Foucault because he's a part of post-modernism, but in my opinion modernist ideology is way past its prime and is responsible for a shitload of the various kinds of chauvinisms that plague the left today. One of the major downsides of post-modernism though is the relative thickness of jargon that gets employed; in fact some people have accused post-modernists of being intentionally opaque.

As for the rest, I'm not that interested in their work so I can't say for good or ill. I know Lacan has influenced Slavoj Zizek a lot, and Derrida was a hugely formative influence on the post-modernist critical theory crowd.

This. I did a paper on Foucault last year about his theory of truth and power influencing social discourse and language, and I think it has some merit to it - even if he wasn't a revolutionary socialist. His philosophy is that truth itself is not found, but is rather created, and is determined by power structures in society that have a massive impact on the social discourse of a particular society. I see a close relationship here to Gramsci's "Cultural Hegemony" concept. The fundamental of Foucaults philosophy is a big explanation on why America hasn't developed a true revolutionary party yet - our school system, politicians, media pundits and others have created a very 'anti-communist' discourse that in itself has become the so-called 'truth' in American culture. And as Lenin once said, A lie told long enough becomes the truth.

[white picket fence]

isn't commodity fetishism a psychoanalytic idea? When we think of ideology, disavowal, agency, identity we are talking about things in a speculative manner beyond psychology, sociology, etc, and sure psychoanalysis is like totally superfluous and useless scaffolding on the perilous climb to truth i mean you only have to try to read lacan or freud seriously to know this, but it does seem to poop out good and useful ideas.

zizek has alot of interesting things to say about desire and drive, identity, fetishism (in a general sense) and he does it from the discursive space of these dead french theorists and gets traction where he wouldn't anywhere else. there's alot of insight and provoking thought in zizek's interpretations of lacan but i wouldn't give much credit to the man lacan himself.

[Generalist]

Just as literature does not stop with Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, so critique of capitalist subject (Lacan), critique of capitalist discourse (Derrida), critique of power relations (Foucault), and critique of Hegelian dialectics (Deleuze) did not stop with Marx. I am simplifying way too much just to encourage you to have an open attitude and read their works. It is not that important you fully understand them. Fully understanding seems impossible for any work (there is always more), and it is not important (we only pickup little tools to get through life). The desire to fully ... Nietzsche would say it is the religious impulse. We can't make a religion out of thinkers if we are truly freethinkers.

[markb287]

Now normally when I do threads like this I like to ask some questions about the topic to stir up discussion, but when it comes to these academic leftist weirdos I am completely in the dark. All I know is that they have some connection to the left, and to psychoanalysis.

So. In your own words: who are these guys? what are they about? what are their big ideas? their best/most important work? Do you like them? Hate them? Why?

And, go.

For Lacan, I can only speak obliquely because I haven't read too much of his work. Lacan's approach seems to me to promote a structuralist view of human experience. He believes that our experience of reality is structured much like a language and follows the same patterns and practices that any language does. In seeing the world like this, Lacan believes, we will have a much easier time understanding human interaction and instituting change.

For Foucault, his project is very simple: to identify all the subtle forms of oppressive power that occur in our society so as to help give us more power to resist them.

For Deleuze, his project is very similar to Foucault's: the idea is to give philosophers (as well as artists and revolutionaries) a new metaphysical interpretation of reality in order help us resist oppressive forms of thought and create for ourselves a more empowered way of living and thinking.

And for Derrida, his project is to open up traditional discourses and philosophies that restrict our thinking and living in order to introduce elements of play and possibility. His goal is to show us that within every tradition, every restriction, lies a potential for innovation, imagination, enjoyment, and affirmation.

The aim for each of these individuals is the same: to help us resist all forms of power (expressed primarily through discourse) that restrict our freedom to think and live enjoyably.

[markb287]

Deconstruction can be summed up like this: all texts and language-systems are based on a series of binary oppositions (Lacan said the same thing for the Symbolic order) that create meaning in which one governs the other (signifier over signified, man over woman, writing over speech, activity over passivity). The job of deconstruction is to overturn these binary oppositions to decontruct the meaning of a text.


I completely disagree. Deconstruction is not about overturning "binary oppositions." Derrida has said as much in many different essays, including his most famous one, "Structure, Sign, and Play."

Deconstruction is about showing how the act of interpretation is a living, historical process that at once is bound by the traditions, politics, and thoughts of the times and opens up towards a more powerful, life-affirming future.

Deconstruction, for Derrida, is not about determining the meaning of a text, but about bringing the text alive within our current socio-politico-economic context and addressing the text's philosophical, social, and/or political implications for this context.




Deleuze - overall weird guy with the strangest methods of interpereting philosophical texts. I don't understand Deleuze at all, I tried reading A Thousand Plataeus and it was going on about some Wolf-Man and Freud. All I was thinking was "what the fuck?" My cousin's fiance, who is going to be a junior professor, managed to make some sense out of his most famous book with Guttari, Anti-Oedipus, saying its basic premise was about how the body is split into different zones put under power which kind of ties in with Foucault's biopower/biopolitics. I guess that kind of makes snese when looking at the issue of abortion where conservatives believe the impregnated uterus should be split into a zone that isn't under the control of the woman. But overall, I think Deleuze was whacked.

Deleuze's works can be extremely difficult to read, for the precise reason that he's trying to resist traditional ways of reading.

However, if you want something easier to chew on, then it's best to look at his interviews and shorter essays, which are much more accessible and very insightful.

However, the main premise of the Anti-Oedipus isn't how the body is split into different zones. The main premise is actually relatively simple: to discuss and resolve social, political, and economic problems stemming from the discourse surrounding the concept of desire. Desire is such a basic concept for the history of not only philosophy, but society in general, and yet it is, for Deleuze, one of the most ill-conceived concepts within that history. His goal with the book is to overturn our most basic prejudices about the concept of desire, exploring different problems surrounding it.

Likewise, with A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri are attempting to overcome our most common prejudices surrounding the concept of subjectivity, dealing with a whole range of philosophical subjects. Their approach is to look at subjectivity as inherently schizophrenic, which is why the text is extremely difficult to read. Reading it, you feel lost in a kind of madness, which, they theorize, is how the mind actually works.

Again, neither Deleuze nor Derrida are trying to engage in psycho-babble or narcissistic rambling, but are aiming at dislodging long-held prejudices that they believe are pervasive throughout our traditions and discourses. Whether or not they do that, of course, is another question.

[L.A.P.]

Yeah, that's true about Derrida in a sense, deconstruction does involve that interpretation of a text is overdetermined by the set of symbolic differences (which still relies on the relationship between signifier and signified, and thus necessitates 'opposing' signifiers to stand against/deadlock - imply one another - to 'create' their meaning because the relation of a signifier to what it marks clearly lacks any 'concrete-meaning') of a certain episteme. And given that, the 'symbolic frame' in which one looks at a text does involve discursive exclusions and 'posited presuppositions', and that has a lot of political implications. So, the way American academia has misperceived deconstruction as overtly political has a lot of truth to it, but the way in which you speak of Derrida's project as if he blatantly wrote that he basically wanted to "liberate our minds from oppression" doesn't do him much justice.

Just look at the post before your reply to me, Foucault never explicitly wrote about how pervasive power was, that's ridiculous. I don't have time to type anything thorough out, but his project was analyzing the discursive rules and relations that formed a body of knowledge and how this was historically salient, which has a lot of political implications.

Instead of constantly going on about how they want to break people out of the frame in which they view things, how about seeing how their methods undermine the 'static' nature and show the inconsistencies of that frame.

[Akshay!]

I think Chomsky explains this best - /watch?v=OzrHwDOlTt8

(I can't post the complete link because of low post count.)

[The Douche]

Don't worry, this clip is better anyway:

-0dM6j7pzQA

[markb287]

Yeah, that's true about Derrida in a sense, deconstruction does involve that interpretation of a text is overdetermined by the set of symbolic differences (which still relies on the relationship between signifier and signified, and thus necessitates 'opposing' signifiers to stand against/deadlock - imply one another - to 'create' their meaning because the relation of a signifier to what it marks clearly lacks any 'concrete-meaning') of a certain episteme. And given that, the 'symbolic frame' in which one looks at a text does involve discursive exclusions and 'posited presuppositions', and that has a lot of political implications. So, the way American academia has misperceived deconstruction as overtly political has a lot of truth to it, but the way in which you speak of Derrida's project as if he blatantly wrote that he basically wanted to "liberate our minds from oppression" doesn't do him much justice.

Just look at the post before your reply to me, Foucault never explicitly wrote about how pervasive power was, that's ridiculous. I don't have time to type anything thorough out, but his project was analyzing the discursive rules and relations that formed a body of knowledge and how this was historically salient, which has a lot of political implications.

Instead of constantly going on about how they want to break people out of the frame in which they view things, how about seeing how their methods undermine the 'static' nature and show the inconsistencies of that frame.

I think we are doing two different kinds of analyses here. What I had described is what each of these individual's projects were. That is, what they were setting out to do. You, on the other hand, are focusing more on their methodology, which is fine, but is distinct from "project."

For example, you said:


Just look at the post before your reply to me, Foucault never explicitly wrote about how pervasive power was, that's ridiculous. I don't have time to type anything thorough out, but his project was analyzing the discursive rules and relations that formed a body of knowledge and how this was historically salient, which has a lot of political implications.

Methodologically speaking, yes, his procedure was to analyze the discursive rules and relations that formed a body of knowledge within a specific historical period. However, this wasn't his project. He does tell us rather explicitly what his project is. He does this, aptly enough, in his debate with Chomsky:



[O]ne of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it...It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.


Historical discursive analysis is Foucault's method; identifying for us violent or oppressive power relations in our society, as well arming us with the tools for recognizing them, "so that one can fight against them," is Foucault's project. I cannot simplify this more simply than by my statement on Foucault. So, given Foucault's actual response quoted here, I find it very difficult to agree with you on what his project is, although I do like your formulation of his methodology.

Secondly, you are certainly right that the idea that Derrida is trying to "liberate our minds from oppression" doesn't do him justice. However, that's not my idea of Derrida or his project. I never said or implied that Derrida is trying to liberate our minds from oppression.

Instead, what I said was that Derrida's project is to introduce elements of play and possibility into discourses that have traditionally been used to restrict thinking. More specifically, Derrida's goal is to show how discourse itself opens itself up to the play in meaning, and thus, to (re-)interpretation. Derrida says this explicitly in many of his essays, most forcibly in his essay "Structure, Sign, and Play," in which he describes "Nietzschean affirmation" ("the joyous affirmation of the play of the world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation" (p. 292, in Writing and Difference), as a positive (and primary) mode of interpretation under which we must do philosophy.

It seems to me that, looking at Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, that their project (which they've stated explicitly in many cases) is critical transformation of our current interpretations of philosophical, social, political, economic concepts. For each of these individuals, our current interpretations of many concepts restrict us from affirming them, that is, from producing a positive interpretation of them, and it is the critical task of philosophy to transform how we think these concepts in our own lives, practices, and institutions.

As I've said before, whether or not they all do this is something you must decide for yourself.

[black magick hustla]

Deleuze's works can be extremely difficult to read, for the precise reason that he's trying to resist traditional ways of reading.



lol. :rolleyes:

call me an "anti-intellectual" or whatever, but i find the explanation that this type of "hard" reading for the sake of being "hard" is more about academics protecting their precious commodity, than anything else imho. either that or they failed their writing 101 in their freshman year of college. i don't really respect this, at all. there are many ways of being thought provoking, literary, and funny without being purposely opaque

[TheEmancipator]

How does one become a "psychoanalyst"? Who pays the rent and bills of these people? Their parents?

I want to be professional gibberish writer too. Please pay me.

What you see here is the reason why the left is still unready to become a revolutionary force. Not because they're ignorant, but because they think they have to be ignorant to be so.


Deleuze is basically a Nietzschist, isn't he? He's also very anti-Hegelian as he believes that all events have no connection whatsoever to each other apart from time, so to make comparisons between events is a pointless exercise.

Same for his thought. Undoubtedly inspired by Montaigne, he believed that every individual had a completely different view of the world to others. He also thought conformism and convention meant a "mass" of humans had effectively become one of the same, and that therefore we should only listen to excluded people from society as they are the true humans. He actually committed suicide as rumor has it he realised his own thought was plagued.

Very interesting chap.

[blake 3:17]

He actually committed suicide as rumor has it he realised his own thought was plagued.

Won't waste my time to correct the various errors beyond this one -- he killed himself at age 70 when he was very ill.

[markb287]

lol. :rolleyes:

call me an "anti-intellectual" or whatever, but i find the explanation that this type of "hard" reading for the sake of being "hard" is more about academics protecting their precious commodity, than anything else imho. either that or they failed their writing 101 in their freshman year of college. i don't really respect this, at all. there are many ways of being thought provoking, literary, and funny without being purposely opaque

The issue is that Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc., don't need to defend their writing style. The question is how can their writings be understood and for whom is their writing helpful. It's OK if their writing styles don't appeal to you. But they DO appeal to many people. And to people who do take the time to read and interpret them, they get something out of it.

The real issue is whether or not their ideas can enact a kind of revolutionary change. But that won't be covered in your criticism of their "writing style."

[markb287]

What you see here is the reason why the left is still unready to become a revolutionary force. Not because they're ignorant, but because they think they have to be ignorant to be so.


Deleuze is basically a Nietzschist, isn't he? He's also very anti-Hegelian as he believes that all events have no connection whatsoever to each other apart from time, so to make comparisons between events is a pointless exercise.

Same for his thought. Undoubtedly inspired by Montaigne, he believed that every individual had a completely different view of the world to others. He also thought conformism and convention meant a "mass" of humans had effectively become one of the same, and that therefore we should only listen to excluded people from society as they are the true humans. He actually committed suicide as rumor has it he realised his own thought was plagued.

Very interesting chap.

I'm really astounded. Do you have access to Deleuze's writings that I'm not aware of? I apologize: I've never in my life read anything about Deleuze believing that events are not connected to each other apart from time and that making comparisons between events are pointless.

I've also never read anything about listening to only excluded people from society. Deleuze read and wrote about lots of writers, directors, artists, etc. that are well-accepted in society.

But if you have PROOF that Deleuze supports any of this - please show me where.

[blake 3:17]

I'm really astounded. Do you have access to Deleuze's writings that I'm not aware of? I apologize: I've never in my life read anything about Deleuze believing that events are not connected to each other apart from time and that making comparisons between events are pointless.

I've also never read anything about listening to only excluded people from society. Deleuze read and wrote about lots of writers, directors, artists, etc. that are well-accepted in society.

But if you have PROOF that Deleuze supports any of this - please show me where.

It's just made up.

My favourite thing I read of Deleuze's this week: "Together, Felix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler." from his letter to Kuniichi Uno, published in Two Regimes of Madness.

[BTMFPHumanStrike]

lol. :rolleyes:

call me an "anti-intellectual" or whatever, but i find the explanation that this type of "hard" reading for the sake of being "hard" is more about academics protecting their precious commodity, than anything else imho. either that or they failed their writing 101 in their freshman year of college. i don't really respect this, at all. there are many ways of being thought provoking, literary, and funny without being purposely opaque
or they were drunk as shit when they were writing...

[MarxSchmarx]

Here is my abbreviated view of these writers:


Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

[black magick hustla]

The issue is that Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc., don't need to defend their writing style. The question is how can their writings be understood and for whom is their writing helpful. It's OK if their writing styles don't appeal to you. But they DO appeal to many people. And to people who do take the time to read and interpret them, they get something out of it.

um, it's not really about "appealing me". that is trivializing my point. people "get something" out of all sorts of chicanery - including self-help books, conspiracy theories, reiki energy vibes etc. left wing obscurantism is sociologically very similar to the sort of therapeutics you get from reading wiccan books. im claiming that lacan is a charlatan.




The real issue is whether or not their ideas can enact a kind of revolutionary change. But that won't be covered in your criticism of their "writing style."
um, does the kaballah can enact revolutionary change?

[Luís Henrique]

Style and content are completely separate issues.

There are authors who are able to speak about complex subjects in a clear, compelling style, as Marx or Freud.

There are authors who write about difficult issues, and come out with almost unreadable text - the first Wittgenstein, Sartre.

There are authors who use unreadable style to hide their utter superficiality - that is the accusation leveled against Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray, & company.

And of course, there authors whose clear, transparent style just plainly shows their plain superficiality, and those are legion.

So, the complexity or abstruseness of the text shouldn't be mistaken for depth of thought, no. But, in and of itself, it shouldn't also be taken as proof of irrelevancy either. It is easy, of course, to demonstrate that Dawkins is a charlatan, because it is easy to read him and see he doesn't know what he is talking about, outside his own field of biology; he is indeed a quite transparent charlatan. It is more difficult to demonstrate that Deleuze & Guattari are charlatans, because it is more difficult to read them; my gut feeling is that they are, but without actually reading and "deconstructing" them I would by no means make the move: merely stating that they are difficult to understand (which they obviously, and obviously intentionally, are) falls quite short from a successful indictment.

Luís Henrique

[markb287]

um, it's not really about "appealing me". that is trivializing my point. people "get something" out of all sorts of chicanery - including self-help books, conspiracy theories, reiki energy vibes etc. left wing obscurantism is sociologically very similar to the sort of therapeutics you get from reading wiccan books. im claiming that lacan is a charlatan.


Mentioning self-help books, conspiracy theories, reiki energy vibes, etc. doesn't prove anything other than the fact that you believe that all these things are "sorts of chicanery." But that doesn't mean that they are; that just means that you believe they are.

What I'm interested in is not questions of opinion, but questions of critical engagement. How are Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, etc. charlatans? Is it really because you can't understand their writings? Does your not understanding their writings automatically prove that they are charlatans?

[Luís Henrique]

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

How would you argue that Marx's Capital shouldn't be committed to the flames?

(And what the heck is "experimental reasoning", Mr. Hume?)

Luís Henrique

[blake 3:17]

Here is my abbreviated view of these writers:

Deleuze's first book is on Hume and throughout his writing engages with Hume. He was also a Marxist, and attacked in France as such, while attacked by Anglo-American Leftists for not being one.

It's nice to dismiss challenging ideas with clever quotes.

I do think Lacan was largely a charlatan, but an intriguing one. But never mind the later work, The Mirror Stage is absolutely pivotal and superior to most anything Sartre had to say.

I've lost interest in Foucault over time (I'm more interested in Bachelard), but Derrida is magnificent. I have an issue with his being primarily a negative project, but some of his particular writings about paper are of particular interest.

Anyways this discussion gets as thrilling as a "hip hop is stupid" or "nothing anybody can do will make anything better" high flyer.

[Art Vandelay]

I've wanted to read some Lacan lately, mostly cause he seems to be so polarizing. On what basis do people make the claim that he was a charlatan?

[markb287]

I've wanted to read some Lacan lately, mostly cause he seems to be so polarizing. On what basis do people make the claim that he was a charlatan?

Because his writing is so "difficult" to understand. And because other people have called him a charlatan so they think it's acceptable to use the word.

Lacan, to me, is a mix between Freud and Althusser. The gist behind Lacan is simply that the unconscious is structured like a language; that is, the unconscious creates meaning in the same way that language creates meaning: through certain associations and absent referents. The word "tree" does not simply refer to a tree (even if that's how you're using it), but to a number of associations: past memories (when you used to climb trees in your backyard), symbols (tree of life, fruit of the tree of good and evil, the evolutionary tree), anxieties ("That reminds me, I have to cut down that tree in the front yard"), or aesthetic possibilities ("I can't wait until the spring comes and the leaves come back on the tree"), etc.

For Lacan, the unconscious structures experience in the same way. Relations with one's self, with one's image of oneself, with authority, with others, and so on, all express a network of different associations. These associations may be expressed in seemingly un-associated ways. For example, a certain obsession with a woman may be associated with your relationship to your mother, or a certain theme in your dreams may be associated with your relationship to image of yourself.

For Lacan, this doesn't mean that the latter determines the former. He isn't strictly Freudian in this sense, where everything is determined in meaning by sex or aggression. Rather, for Lacan, these are simply associations that tell us something interesting about the features of a person's unconscious. Just as the word "tree" doesn't determine the meaning of the associations, but rather expresses something interesting about the personality of the subject for whom the associations are meaningful. For Lacan, we can analyze these associations to reveal a kind of personality or a kind of type and thus a kind of treatment. I'm grossly paraphrasing here, since I'm not really an avid Lacan reader and am not wholly interested in his work.

However, I do feel there is something interesting to be said about his work, past the idea that he is a charlatan. I appreciate his analysis of the three orders (imaginary, symbolic, and real) and you can definitely find correlations to our own experience.

[blake 3:17]

Lacan, to me, is a mix between Freud and Althusser.
...
However, I do feel there is something interesting to be said about his work, past the idea that he is a charlatan. I appreciate his analysis of the three orders (imaginary, symbolic, and real) and you can definitely find correlations to our own experience.

As a bit of a pedant, I'd point out that Althusser was inspired by Lacan, to return to Marx following the latter's return to Freud. To sum up quickly, they both wanted people to go back and read the original.

I was maybe quick to call him a charlatan. I do think the imaginary, symbolic, and real distinctions are extremely useful, if a little tricky.

For a number of the writers mentioned here, one of the real problems for English language readers has been what's available in English and a what kind of prices...

I find Winnicott of more interest and value, but that's because his work is relevant to mine. Anyways...

[MarxSchmarx]

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. How would you argue that Marx's Capital shouldn't be committed to the flames?

(And what the heck is "experimental reasoning", Mr. Hume?)

Luís Henrique

I can't speak for Hume himself but my interpretation is that observational evidence counts too. e.g., saying Jupiter has 67 moons and their trajectories are given by such-and-such-equations which we confirm with our telescopes is just as legit as, say, conducting an experiment mixing compounds in test tubes to show that
2HCl + 2Na -> 2NaCl + H2.

Marx's approach to economics and the development of capitalism need not be an "experiment" in the sense that he has controls and so on. Das Kapital does to be sure have a lot of "abstract" reasoning but these presume a social-scientific model that has been elaborated by later economists in mathematical terms (e.g., Nabuo Okishio). So Hume (I propose) would not hold this against him.

Having said that, as someone committed to a Marxian analysis, I freely admit Marx was incredibly, horribly wrong about a lot of things.



Here is my abbreviated view of these writers: Deleuze's first book is on Hume and throughout his writing engages with Hume. He was also a Marxist, and attacked in France as such, while attacked by Anglo-American Leftists for not being one.

It's nice to dismiss challenging ideas with clever quotes.


What challenging ideas do you have in mind?

I hasten to add that having not read Deleuze on Hume, and I do not know how Deleuze may have reconciled his writings with Hume's. Perhaps you have some insight on this?


I've wanted to read some Lacan lately, mostly cause he seems to be so polarizing. On what basis do people make the claim that he was a charlatan?

If you can find it, you should read his essay on the existential quantifier. I do not know if it is online; I read a photocopy of a book I believe it was several years ago and have been disinclined to read Lacan ever since.