Psychoanalysis & Ethnography Speaking Body 002

A new episode of the Speaking Body Podcast, about how psychoanalysis shares a similar ethic with science & ethnography. open.substack.com/pub/speaking...

Psychoanalysis rejects the authority that comes from knowing and adopts a position of not knowing. More from this episode at speakingbody.substack.com

I’ve never used a ham radio, but I have used a CB radio, and boy are those useful!

In the future, will the people who seriously engage with and make use of RSS look like people who still seriously use CB and HAM radios today?

I don’t ask this to disparage the use of RSS! I’m one those serious RSS users. I ask because I’m concerned this useful technology will become less used.

Modern life is good actually Perfection is impossible to achieve, but we might as well keep aiming for it.

open.substack.com/pub/walkingt...

I’m considering moving Speaking Body .vom from Ghost (Pro) to Substack, because it will save me some money and give me access the the audience. Does anyone who sees this really dislike Substack? If you do, what do you dislike about it?

The cost is that people are less connected to a shared symbolic order as a shared (i.e., anchoring) reference point. What is interesting to consider is the question: Is the increase in freedom worth the cost of losing the stabilizing effects of a common paternal reference point?

Yes, people can do more things now than they could in an era when the paternal metaphor was stronger and a singular Name-of-the-Father was a stronger semblance. However, to see this as only a gain in freedom seems to me to miss something very important: there is a cost to this.

This weekend, I was talking with people about the decline of the paternal metaphor and the pluralization of the Names-of-the-Father as a phenomenon. I'd summarize the effects of this as (1) an increase in personal freedoms at the cost of (2) less anchoring to a shared stable symbolic order.

Thinking about what psychoanalysis might make space for…

The fragile decision to act while knowing you are inconsistent.

- To write while knowing you are vain.
- To love while knowing you will disappoint.
- To speak while knowing you will be misread.

… it’s easy to be mad if we think someone has decided to to be sympathetic when there are non-symptomatic options available.

What Saunders novel has me think is this: What happens if we see the other’s symptom as something that is inevitable?

I.e. the symptom is an inevitability not a choice.

Reading the new George Saunders novel Vigil, has me think about something:

When people encounter symptoms and symptomatic enactments in others, it can be easy to get frustrated because of the assumption that the symptomatic others “choosing” to act in a sympathetic way…

I'm relaunching my podcast under a new Name: Speaking Body. More at speakingbody.substack.com.

These were a great success!

Sunday morning reading. #Lacan

I'm testing out the Croissant app, to see if it would work for posting/cross-posting to both Bluesky & Mastodon. I like that they offer a one-time payment for lifetime access.

Desire is what keeps you from “going too far.” Jouissance is what happens when you do.

#Lacan #jouissance #desire #psychoanalysis

Too much pleasure can actually kill desire.

This is what I’m thinking as I re-read the first two chapters of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:

The way Lacan uses the term “moral” is tied to what would be socially acceptable or endorsed. This is opposed to ethics which Lacan links to a singular & idiosyncratic desire.

From @craigmod.com’s Things Become Other things event at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston yesterday, which was a very fun event.

No problem! Thanks to you for making it. (And for making the mixtapes, the posts, the photos.)

To put it another way: recent is the very present experience of satisfaction that comes from the drive.

So, the drive takes the energy (libido), and rather than that energy getting discharged (like a stroke of lightning) the desire/lack (object a) transforms it into something that is recirculated (a circuit, orbit).

Jouissance is how the drive circulating is experienced by the body, how it feels.

Jouissance is the experience or effect that this mechanism produces, which is felt in the body.

The drive is a phenomenon of libido discharge when it gets caught I’m within the gravitational pull of loss and lack (object a).

I thought of the drive as a process — a circuit and as an orbit— of repetitive movement around that which is desired but can’t ever be got.

Recently, I had a conversation with somebody who is interested in psychoanalysis and Lacan where I was asked if I could explain the destination between the drive and jouissance

Here is my attempt to describe how I think about that destination…

A very important passage that illustrates how Lacan’s thinking in truth changed over the course of his teaching.

It’s also great writing! Here is an example of the style of the prose describing the feeling Tara has when she can’t figure out why she going through the endless November 18th:

There are other interesting kinds of non-standard-time-loop things and stuff that you discover as you read.

If you like time travel stories / thought experiments, give this a try!

Here is the gist: the protagonist Tara Selter is stuck repeating November 18th again and again.

But, she starts the next November 18th where she went to sleep on the last one. So it’s a little different from other time-loop stories where the person always starts in the same place.