The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialect of Desire, Part 1

recording and progress I'm told. So we are recording this. Appreciate your all support of that. Let's start at the beginning of this essay. Where else to begin. What I would like to know is, where did your pen pencil highlighter first hit the page? Where in the beginning and the reading of this, did you say, whoa, there might be something there. Or where did you put a question mark? Or one of my favorite symbols that I often use is just an X. Which basically means it's wrong. The essay begins on page 671. I first highlighted on the first page on the basis of relationship to knowledge. And then the ambiguity of such a relationship. Brilliant. Thanks, Mark. Let's start there. The fundamental stake of this essay. Is about subverting the subject of knowledge. Now what does that mean? Well, the cons up to here is he thinks that for a long time. The Western tradition in particular has privileged consciousness. It was all about knowledge. About thinking in service to being the great representative of this. It would be the card in the modern tradition. I think therefore I am. The idea that the goal of being a human was to arrive at some sort of wholeness. Here oftentimes equated with consciousness or self consciousness. You can read this also in the book. I mentioned. Pagels phenomenology is spirit. There would be this pursuit of self consciousness awareness. It presumes the unity of human subjectivity. The coherence of human being. This tradition that LeCon summarizes with knowledge is precisely the tradition that this essay aims to subvert as indicated in the title. And LeCon says this is exactly what we learn from Freud. Not the unity of the human subject, but its discontinuity. There's a big difference between the field of knowledge, which is what you're conscious of. And the field of truth. Which does not point to consciousness in this tradition. The field of truth is the field of the unconscious. The truth according to LeCon emerges in the field of the error. Where you're conscious waking fluid eloquent self stumbles on a phrase. Can't quite remember what the date was. Hezotates for those of you that do more somatic work. It's the point at which maybe the subject starts to kind of ring their hands or pops their knuckle. And that's some sort of a bodily intrusion on their waking conscious speech. In other words, it's not in the field of knowledge that the truth of who you are or who your analyst and is emerges. It's in the field of ignorance. It appears in analytic experience as a kind of ignorance. It appears when somebody shows up and has a fluid narrative about what they're all about. Anybody who has been on a dating app and meant some fools that way. You know that person that shows up and gives you their spiel. And you're like, damn, how many times you've given that spiel. That's too well put together. That doesn't feel like it's for me. And it sure as hell doesn't feel like it's a reflection of you. And what you want me to see you. What else is the profile on hinge. But an opportunity to tell everybody else how you want them to see you. Let me fill you with knowledge regarding me. Let me help you become cognizant of me. Of my ego. That is not the field of truth. The field of truth. Is stumbled upon. In the first date. By the belch that escapes. Mid sentence. It's the fart that you hope they won't smell when they arrive. But that you figure you better get out while you can. That is the truth. That's really what's inside you. Well, now it's not inside you. Now the air has come out from either end. But that's what was inside you. What LeCon is here doing. So I'm glad Mark points us to this issue of knowledge. As he wants to suggest that whatever it is that psychoanalysis deals with. Whatever it is that it tries to help the analyst and come to terms with. It has nothing to do with knowledge. And everything instead to do with truth. Knowledge on the side of consciousness. Truth on the side of the unconscious. This is what we learn from Freud. Now the next move is an important one here. It doesn't mean that you are one or the other. The human subject is this continuous mashup of the two elements. A knowing self. And a truthful one. Knowledge and truth continually mashing up in strange ways. This is what the human subject looks like. Some sort of a bizarre interlocking of these elements. That's the discontinuity here represented. By the knuckled. Chad. It's not a smooth line. It's a break. It's a rupture. It's a fracturing that keeps coming together. The best way to think. Is spatially here. Freud fundamentally thought spatially. The unconscious was an other place. It was always somewhere else. It was a very strange place. I think of these two hands. Tectonically. Come on Californians. Think tectonically. These are plate tectonics that are happening here. Analysis simply knows how to work. The ridges. It's topographic. Fundamentally, it's topology. The graph of desire is a map. A road map. It describes a certain topology. A landscape. And everybody right now. Everybody on this call is somewhere on that landscape. Every patient that you work with is somewhere on that landscape. And so do you. That's what's at stake here. This landscape of discontinuity. Where consciousness and the unconscious meet. This was what we learned from Freud. This is what Lecon is taking from Freud at this stage in his career. It's the great insight. You are never just where you say you are. You're always somewhere else as well. And the problem with the cards I think therefore I am. As Freud would show us. Is that it's precisely where you don't think you're thinking that you're having all your biggest thoughts. It's when you least expect it. That truth rises up and grabs you by the back of your neck. It's in the dream. It's in the slip. It's in the stammer. That's where you know. Someone is on the verge of truth. And that stammering. That resistance is the ego saying. And that's why I think it's the ego saying. Please, let's not talk about my my my my mom. Please, let's not talk about that that that that that time. The stutter in the stammer. It's in the error that you hear the ego, finding an outer limit. A limit and opening. To a garden. It doesn't want to be secret. It's a great discovery. And according to luck, it was the third. Great revolution in the history of Western thought. If you look at the opening pages of this essay. You see the name Copernicus popping up a couple of times. What do you make of this Copernicus character? What's he got to do with it? What is the name of this book? Why Copernican leap? Copernican step. You see on page 674. And on 674, there's also Darwin mentioned. What's this about? It's the move from the. Center of the galaxy being the sun versus the earth. Yes, yes, yes. So Copernicus. He's the center of the galaxy. And what we learned through heliocentrism, right? Is that the sun is the center of the galaxy. In other words, we are displaced. Our planet is displaced. This world does galaxy. The universe doesn't revolve around our planet. Quite the opposite. We are de-centred. If you need a word to write down here, it's de-centred. Or if you want a really excellent word that captures this even better. Eck centric from the Greek. Eck meaning out the same origin of the word exit exit out from the Greek. Eck centric something outside the center. Copernicus showed us that our planet wasn't the special planet. It brings us to Darwin. What sort of eccentric work did Darwin do? That's what we were. That's a different. That's going to say for a move like the. Human condition for nature from being. Central. Nature, I suppose. That's right. That's right. What Darwin shows us. Is that we are subject to the same laws as every other living organism. I'm a planet. In other words, our species is not the special species. There's not human history. And then outside it surrounding it to be tamed by it natural history. What else is the lesson of climate change, but that what else is the lesson of coronavirus, but that. In this era, which some people call the Anthropocene. In this era, we see the complete and utter breakdown that Darwin intuitive between natural history and human history. Humans do shit on this planet that impacts natural history nature. And nature in turn does stuff for real, y'all, that impacts human experience. There's no more of this lie that we can tell ourselves that we need to head up to the mountains and just get away from things. Get back in touch with nature, all this urban living. Oh my god, Los Angeles, the streets of San Francisco. No, that doesn't work anymore. That doesn't work anymore. This was Darwin's great insight to. There's not this world of natural history that has all the beasts that know a gathered. And then the special cabin at the back of the ship, where Noah and the white people hung out. That's not it either. What Darwin showed us is that our species is not the only species on earth and certainly not the central species. We are subject to the same damn laws. We burn just as well as the koala. So Copernicus shows us that our planet is an epicenter of a universe. Darwin shows us that our species is an epicenter of our planet. Which brings us to Freud, the third great revolution and the very starting place for the essay that we're working on this summer. We are not at the center of ourselves or the self conscious we. That's right. Human subjectivity is fundamentally eccentric. We are always outside ourselves. If you think about it, there's nothing new about this. The whole idea of expression being by oneself. What does it mean to be by yourself? It's a socratic expression. Socrates basically came up with this shit. He loved being by himself, which was different from being alone. Alone. Isolation is the condition of possibility for loneliness. But when you're by yourself, you're never alone. To be by yourself means to be beside yourself next to yourself with yourself. And thus able to engage in dialogue with yourself. This is what mindfulness fundamentally is about. Finding ways to put space between you and your shit. Where to have a conversation with in order to observe it. To get a little distance, a little perspective. Freud didn't know about this, but this is precisely what he was working on. The way that human being is eccentric is always beside itself. The problem is the very problem of the human condition is that we are so desperate. To avoid this truth, this eccentricity that is us. We're so eager and desperate to feel whole, to feel complete, to feel contained. That we fail to see what a handsome condition it is. To be by oneself. And you can see this now, especially. Part of the reason why social scientists are so keen on loneliness right now. Is they say, because we've forgotten how to be by ourselves. And one of the reasons why we have forgotten to be by ourselves is that we always have a cell phone in our pocket. And any chance and the opportunity any time when we are by ourselves, we reach for that phone, turn it on and search for others. The problem though is, is that when the opportunities to cultivate self awareness at the level of knowledge, no thyself, we're back in the field of knowledge, don't forget. Any time those fields are plowed under. Any time. We lose valuable opportunities to cultivate being by ourselves, such that when we actually find ourselves alone, we no longer know what to do. And now we experience profound loneliness. When the data connection runs out, when your phone turns out to be dead, note the last time you left your house and then realized you forgot your phone. And then you realize how many times you've got to go to your house the other night, I don't know what happened. I woke up in my bed. Phoneless. I didn't know where my phone was. Oh my god, where's my phone. What am I going to do? How do I even call my friend to ask him, hey man, you've got my phone. Who's got my phone. What do I even do? I was beside myself in the worst possible way. It took me an hour or two and a couple of pictures of coffee before I could put myself beside myself in the best possible way. Now I didn't tell him, go ahead and throw that phone in the trash. I said bring that shit over here as soon as possible. But nevertheless, it took a minute. It took a minute for me to be like, okay, this is one of those opportunities. Instead of feeling disconnected out of touch lonely. What have I missed? Oh my god, think about what could have happened in the past six hours. This was an opportunity for something else, something different. So Freud simply figures out a technique for helping people cultivate eccentricity. Because that's what analysis is about. It's not teaching people how to feel whole again. It's about learning how to accept and even love. Especially love the parts of you that are partial fragmented incomplete. I think the important thing to note here for technique at this point is what I said about the relationship between knowledge and truth. And the perspective of knowledge truth looks like ignorance. It's unknowing. And it's out of that cauldron of unknowing that the truth will bubble out. I want to pause for a minute and see if you all have questions. But good so far. It can always thumbs up. That helps a lot. So we know. All right, cool. Good, good, good. Now, go ahead. When you mentioned the page number, I also think I have a different copy, but it's clearly the same text. Could you mention the paragraph to see if that might help. I will. Yeah. So seven 97. If you have the French. Yeah. So there you see the Copernican step. Darwin is mentioned down below. You can see if you look at seven 98 here, I'm referencing the margin. It's tough because these pages are kind of close, but seven 98 I'm referring to the French. If you just look to the left, you can see truth as what is lacking in the realization of knowledge. Perfect. Thanks. I have a few more lines down. Truth is nothing but what knowledge can learn that it knows merely by putting its ignorance to work. And I want you to know that everything you're hearing from me. Is gleaned from this text. I'm not making this shit up. So if you ever need a page number, or if you ever need an example, just yo, McCormick, can you give us an example of this. I'm not making this a lot of things. So I appreciate you bringing that up. What I'm talking through right now is in the English in the upper right hand corner page 675. But if you're looking at the French margins, seven 98 and the French. Truth's relationship to knowledge. And let me reiterate this. which is the field of the ego, which is the field of awareness, or so we speak awareness. Truth always emerges from a field of ignorance. It looks like a kind of ignorance. The truth of who you are is not where you think you know you are. It is in kind of another wonky way to put this. It is always in what Lachan on page 675 of the English 798 of the French, which seems to be that we've probably should stick with the French since people have different additions. On page 798 of the French, it is this elsewhere. And I want to reiterate this again, this elsewhere. If you look at the, I mean, I really can't say what page all are on. I think most of you have the proper English translation, which I requested. Some of you have different ones are just going to have to work with this. If you're on page 675 in the complete English text that I asked you to get. If you look toward the bottom about six lines up the paragraph begins indeed a number of creeks. Yeah, I'm glad you all are finding this even those with different additions. Notice it is elsewhere, last sentence. It is elsewhere that the moment of truth must sound for this field of knowledge as for others. The sound of truth is also the sound of ignorance. I also want to let you know that if you need any help with any of these statements, which are extremely axiomatic, highly truncated, compensations. We can always look back and you can read a whole essay by Lachan on any one of these topics, almost certainly, we're look back in the seminars and find like 18 lectures where he's just working through all this stuff. Bear in mind, what you're reading here is the tombstone. This is the grave stone, if you will. Not that writing doesn't have a life of its own. But that buried beneath it was somebody who ideally lived a very long one with lots of different experiences. So don't just read the tombstone. Let me help you learn about the life that preceded it if possible. So if you were going forward here, things really start to happen on page 676 of the English, 799 in the French. And this brings us from Freud to Lachan. Can I say I'm can ask a question just because we're hopping forward and this could be a sidebar for later, but at the top of 674, there's just a statement when we're making that transition that I had questions about. More about his ideology where he's like it is in other words, a strain of psychoanalysis that is sent by its allegiance to Freud cannot under circumstances pass itself off as a right of passage to some archetypal or in any sense, ineffable experience. To me, that sounds like Lachan is saying Freud by definition cannot be depth of psychology. That's what I took from that and I want to know how we feel about that. Yes, that's right. Do you ever wake up in the morning and just decide that you need to listen to appetite for destruction. Do you ever wake up in the morning and just recall the origin of guns and roses that notorious video where axle and the gang are stepping off the bus in some weird part of early 1980s LA. Yeah. He has no patience for quote depth psychology. He has no patience for young. He has even less patience for quote ego psychology, particularly the American tradition. And you know he has no patience for it because as you see in this passage, he doesn't even mention anybody by name. This is how it works with Lachan. If he mentions somebody by name, even if they're an opponent, it's because he considers them a worthy opponent. Traditions that he despises the most figures that he despises the most get lumped into these piles of intellectual excrement that he then summarizes with a sentence and then dismisses them. So what you can also see popping here in this particular essay. Now, we have just heard the riff against what you might call depth psychology. You also hear him also railing against ego psychology a lot in here. That was a common theme of his in the 50s. He thought the worst thing you could do for a patient was to make their ego stronger. That's the last thing you want is a strong ego. You want one that's strong enough to keep you, I don't know, waiting in line and not flipping out. You want an ego that's strong enough to help you wake up in the morning and make it to an 8 30 AM seminar. You want an ego that also allows you to make it to the seminar ideally after having brushed your teeth, had your breakfast, all this kind of stuff. You're ready for this. That's the ego's job. It's to keep your ass in line. It adheres to what Freud referred to as the reality principle. You definitely want one. This is one of the things that the psychotic lacks. Part of their struggle is that they have come unmoored from the reality principle. It's one of their great issues. The more fundamental question is, why does the psychotic lack an ego? Why does the psychotic come unmoored from the reality principle? What the psychotic fundamentally lacks is a place in the symbolic, which is how we get to Lecon here. Lecon's great intervention is to point out something of which Freud was ignorant. Not because Freud was a dummy, but because that of which Freud was ignorant had not yet been invented. And it's as simple as this. When Freud is working, there are no departments of linguistics. But psychoanalysis belonged in the same hallway as biology, physics, harder sciences. What he's working out, what he's thinking through the way that Freud is thinking according to Lecon is Freud is thinking about language. Freud is fundamentally thinking about things that would later become the topic of linguistics, but the problem is, and this was the great limitation to Freud, is that he couldn't just walk to the local university into the local society and office and say hello linguist. Tell me how language works. Repression is a symbolic activity. What's repressed is not the entire traumatic event. What's repressed is some part of it, a representative of that event. It's a symbol of that event. Repression is a fundamental experience. And what's repressed is a symbol of that event. So what we see on pages. 676 and 677 is Lecon saying, okay, we've talked about Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, now. What brings to the table is deep familiarity with the state of linguistics at the time of his writing. In this case, it was French structural linguistics, but he had read Sussur a lot of his work is coming out of Sussur a lot of the terminology he's working with is coming out of the basics of modern linguistic theory and practice. And that for Lecon is the great difference if Freud had just had access to a linguist. He would have said exactly what it is Lecon is here saying. When someone asked Lecon, they said, what is the meaning of your so called return to Freud. Lecon's answer, the meaning of the return to Freud is a return to Freud's meaning. What Lecon is basically saying is that all he is doing is re translating Freud. A top in the wake of linguistics. Bringing Freudian thought up to speed to the world to the intellectual world that now has access to language study. Now some of you know, I'm not a psychoanalyst. I'm not that kind of doctor. I'm a professor, I lecture all over, but my primary home is in a department of communication studies. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis particularly Lecanean psychoanalysis has found me here. The reason why this stuff makes sense is because I'm a communication scholar. And for Lecon, the centerpiece of analysis, which we all know all too well, is speech. Now you could say that post Lecon there would be a great turn towards embodiment, just journal analysis and things like this. That's in the mix as well, but Lecon's point is you are reading the popping of the knuckles as a signifier. You're reading it linguistically, the patients gestures their movements micro or otherwise. You are reading them as though they're a text. You are interpreting them, which is a fundamentally linguistic exercise. What do they mean? And that's what he's introducing here on page 676 and 67. The last full paragraph on 676, the paragraph starting with Freud. Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere. And the opposite of the sentence is in order to make sure that the word is correct. The answer to this sentence is the answer to the sentence of the sentence. This sentence is the answer to this sentence. And the answer to this sentence is the answer to this sentence. returns and let me just add that the repressed always returns from one place, the future. Lacan is the return of the Freudian repressed. He is only what Freud will have become in Freud's time. This is how Lacan thinks. If you want a tense to work with here, something to really chew on. Think the future anterior tense. The will have become. Vos Svor sol ich werden. Where it was I must become. The key conceptual move that Lacan makes at this point is around the will have become. I was only this in order to become that. This is the great horizon for psychoanalysis that Freud discovers. You are what you are today only in order to have been tomorrow. Because it's looking back with hindsight, retrospection that you can realize that that thing that happened to you back in that day is precisely what made you who you are today. And if you're cool with who you are today, you wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you for that trauma. Daddy, mommy, primary caregiver. It made me who I am today. I was that in order to become this. Thank you. By those by that measure, the chain of signification is also a map for existence. Same with language, same with existence. Yes, it is. Because Jack and Jill at a very young age were exposed to whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Until you know what they were exposed to at a very young age, you know anything about Jack and Jill. It's only at the end of the sentence. When we learn what they were exposed to, that we can look back with hindsight and understand the meaning. So here could be the sentence unfolding. Jack and Jill at a very young age were exposed to then you've got this blank at the end. Once the blank has been answered, then you retrospectively loop back around and have some understanding of Jack and Jill. If you don't see this as the very origin of the graph of desire, you're missing the basic structural move here. Language as speech unfolds in a linear fashion across time. Word after word after word. Jack and Jill at a very young age. It's musical, baby. Melodies don't unfold all at once. They unfold one note at a time. That's how speech unfolds too. In a diacronic horizontal fashion represented here. Meaning making though. Meaning making does not unfold in the same temporal dynamic that speech a fine does. So what I'm going to do is write this a little bit better. Time, speech, signifier to signifier. It unfolds in a linear diacronic movement. Jack and Jill at a very young age were exposed to that's how speech works. When you see that capital S, the signifier of the lack in the other. When you see, for instance, on page 681 805 in the French, this little graph one, this is what I'm unfolding for you. The arrow that is moving from left to right is the arrow of speech of language use. It's unfolding in time. And then there's this arrow. The one that starts at the end and loops back in the opposite direction. This one. It goes back in time. That's the arrow here represented with a little diamond or I'm sorry, a triangle at the bottom. The delta and the split subject at the end. We're going to come to that. Don't worry, we're going to talk it all through. Right now I just want you to see the lines. Just the lines. Because this is one of the cons great insights into how speech and meaning work. If speech unfolds diacronically across time. Meaning occurs retroactively. Meaning is retroactive. The synchronic or meaning making part of language use moves backwards in time. So you can think of films, for instance, where you watch the whole damn movie. It's very amazing. Oh my gosh, what's going on here? You never know what's going to happen. And then all of a sudden you get to the end of the movie and spoiler alert. They were dead the whole time. That's the reason nobody could see them. Man, he was already dead. He was a ghost. Right? It's at the end of the movie looking back at all the different vignettes that you can finally understand all the weird things that didn't make sense to you at the time. Now you get it. It's at the end. The owl of Manurva only takes flight at dusk. Think about the owl here. The brilliance of the owl is not that the owl can turn its head around and look backwards. That's not what I'm talking about. Owls take flight at dusk. It's at the end of the day that Manurva, the goddess of wisdom, chose herself. She doesn't open her eyes until the end of the day. So also in the stoic tradition, we learn that this is where wisdom begins. It's at the end of your life, at the end of your day looking back that you can finally understand what the hell that was all about. And you say things like, if I had only known then what I know now, youth wasted on the yellow. The trick though, in this tradition that Martin Heidegger, one of LeCon's friends at this time, actually about this time Heidegger had written LeCon off. Didn't want to talk to him anymore and said that in fact that the great psychoanalyst could use a psychoanalyst of his own. Heidegger thought LeCon was getting kind of crazy at this point. But one of the things that LeCon learned from Heidegger, conversations hanging out together whatever was that being towards death is the fundamental horizon of psychoanalysis. If you want to know what to do today, if you want to know what kind of life is worth living, don't ask your present self. Imagine yourself 40 years from now on your deathbed. Looking back and ask yourself this, is the dilemma in which you now find yourself, a dilemma that you will remember as a self-defining issue 40 years from now? If you're on your deathbed, looking back, are you going to remember the struggle that you're undergoing right now as a definitional struggle? If the answer is yes, you better fight like hell. If the answer is no, you better let that shit roll off your back. Being towards death says, imagine yourself on the verge of disappearance, on your deathbed, where the life you're living now, wait for it, will have been. And looking back from that moment, from that future moment, a moment in which the present you now are living will have passed. This is the point at which you can ask yourself, what did it all mean? Was it important? Did it matter? People on their deathbed, you know, they say they're like, I wish I would have tried more foods. I wish I would have traveled more. Really common one? I wish I would have spent more time with family. I wish I would have healed this relationship. I wish I hadn't waited so long to do that. People have regrets when they're at the end of their life. The way you can avoid them is by imagining yourself at the end of your life today, right now. Some of you have parents whom you know when they die are going to have a lot of regrets and their regrets are going to have a lot to do with you. And they're going to say, shit like I wish I would have dot dot dot dot, something to do with you. Some of you have already had this moment with your parents. The goal is to prevent yourself from getting to that point by doing the imaginative work of being towards death today. That is all that is at stake here. This is why the goddess of wisdom is symbolized by an owl. It's at the end of the day that wisdom takes flight, that you have any sense of what has happened. And Lacan's point is, yo, this is exactly how sentence is work. It's not until the end of the sentence when you realize that Jack and Jill at a very young age were exposed to a foreign language that you realize how great they had it. Now that's not the only thing that said Jack and Jill could have been exposed to at a very young age. And you would then find them in your office perhaps because they weren't just exposed to a foreign language. They were also exposed to a foreign language by Pito Uncle Leonard who taught them not just about that foreign tongue, but how to use their own. If you are not ready to hear this kind of stuff, you're not ready to be the analyst Lacan wants you to become. You need to hear at the level of a basic sentence, some of the most horrific shit that human beings undergo in their waking lives. So horrific that they can't even be awake through the experience. I'm not trying to shock you here. I'm not trying to scandalize you. I'm trying to keep a 100 with you. What we have here in this other arrow is a retroactive retrospective field of meaning. This is how every sentence unfolds. Now there are things to note here. I bet I could make up a sentence and you all could pretty readily guess the words appearing in that sentence before they even occur. There's also an element of anticipation. We are so versed in language use that we can almost guess what word or even what kind of word would come after let's say the article and if you hear me say and you can rest assured that it's probably going to be a word with a vowel at the start of it that comes next. So just as meaning making has this retrospective backwards facing aspect being in speech has a future facing aspect an anticipatory aspect. That's the word LaConn uses here. Language use is also founded on anticipation. If meaning making occurs retrospectively language use doesn't just unfold unfold in time. It also is chomping at the bit of the future. As a listener and as a speaker we're always anticipating what comes what's the word what comes after what comes next. Everybody knows it that's the point. Yet another way in which human experience is eccentric. You're never just here. Which is why we don't translate doesign as being here even though da in German means here as well. You're always there being there. You're in the future. You're in the past but very rarely are you ever effectively present. In fact I would say the best way to be present is to be in the future. Looking back time is not as linear as we think and LaConn says only in psychoanalysis do we see that put to the use of humanity's improvement. There was a question out there what's up. So at that fundamental level can we say that regret is on the same axis of desire. Yes. When regret is a signifier of lack at the end of someone's life. Yes. Yes. There's a difference between living a life of lack and feeling like you never have what you want. This wheel of desire as we've often time referred to it as. We are constantly flitting from one object to the next. You've got the new car. Very exciting. Wakes you up in the morning. New shirt that you can't wait to try on. Pretty soon you got a whole closet full of new shirts that have now turned to shit. That's the great amazing thing about desire. It's objects always pass very quickly from the field of want and splendor to the field of disgust and experiment. Once you have it you simply cannot desire it anymore. That's not how desire works. You can't want something that you feel like you already have. Which is why at the end of a relationship you'll hear somebody say you're going to miss me when I'm gone. Or you don't even know how good you have it right now. And then people get like oh fuck maybe I don't know how good I have it right now. Maybe I don't because I think I have it. Now I lost my desire. I lost going to say yes, pull me you're right. We get into the field of desire and usually live that life out as one of regret. You die in a state of regret which is not so different from living on the wheel of desire. What do you have at this point? Yeah. Does what you're kind of getting at right now come in him rewriting like the Sussarian thing. It's like in the circle of signified oversignifier to then having this signifier be on top. They're like greater than? Yes. What he's doing is inverting the classic Sussarian model. Let me show you very quickly what that would look like. So in Sussur, you have this as the model. The little withered italicized S is meaning over the big S capitalized which is word or signified over signifier. And Lecon interpret that as saying that Sussur is telling us that the meaning is more important than the word. And Lecon says, now man, that's not the truth. He says the truth is it's the signifier over the signified that captures the truth of this. And if you see this little bar right here, this is in the Sussurian model of the sign. That is precisely the bar that Lecon reappropriates to make graph one and those porous on the lines. This is that bar. And one way to read it is Lecon saying that meaning is always slipping beneath the unfolding of signifiers. Why is it slipping? And always just a little bit ahead because words only unfold one at a time. And as they unfold, you learn a little bit more and a little bit more until the meaning is settled. Along the way though, the meaning changes. Jack, if you just have that, you've got okay, well, it's probably going to be a sentence about some male. And okay, there's going to be something else, someone else. Jill, aha, now Jack and Jill, well, that shifts the meaning incredibly because you know little nursery rhymes about Jack and Jill, don't you? Jack and Jill went up the hill to have a little fun, right? You know the nursery rhymes and you also know their diversions. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water. Now man, Jack and Jill went up the hill to have a little fun. Jack got mad, you know, see him saying, you've got all the narratives around Jack and Jill. But I'm not talking about narratives. Jack and Jill at a very young, you can almost guess age is coming up. Oh, okay, so well, well, okay, something's going on with Jack and Jill. Anytime psychologists here at a very young age, you're like, aha, tell me more about that. We're exposed to oh Lord, here we go. Here we go. Take me to the primal scene. Show me your trauma. Show me your trauma so I can have something to talk with my own analyst about this afternoon. At a very young age, we're exposed to Lecon's point is that the signifiers are on top because it's their unfolding that is determining the meaning with every new word the meaning starts to shift or develop. So that's partly what he's getting at when he has this reversal, this inversion of the Caesarian model that you all just asked about. The great example of this comes in an essay where Lecon does something very simple. He takes two identical doors, side by side and presumes asking the audience to presume that they are restrooms. Here it is. Now you don't know what happens behind those doors until the signifier is placed above them. Now you know the meaning of those doors. The identical doors without the signifier don't mean anything. And it is no coincidence that he chooses this example, right? Because more often than not, the signifiers that tell you the meaning of what occurs behind those doors appear above. Lecon's point is that it's the signifier that determines the meaning. In other words, that the signifier, the word as speech, is the determining element. And let me tell you, Freud was very curious what you dreamt about. What Freud didn't realize though, even though he does say as much in several places, is that the fundamental topic of psychoanalysis is not what you dreamt last night. It's how you tell me about it. It's what you say about the dream. That is the object of inquiry. It's at the level of speech. Spoken discourse. Not what you dreamt about. The more important thing is how you tell the story. It's a trap, a great slippery slope and analysis to think that the object of analysis is what the analyst and dreamt the night before. That is incorrect. The object of analysis is their speech about that dream with this great addition addressed to you. What is it about their relationship to you that makes them want to tell you about that particular dream in that particular way? Now, Freud has this in many great places. In some of his earliest work on hypnosis, he talks about the magic of words. The magic of words. He was aware that it was at the level of word play that the great interventions would occur. But he didn't have linguistics under his belt. And so he didn't really know what it meant for words to play. Lecane does. And that's what he's bringing to the table is this turn towards language. Here's the thing. If the human subject is eccentric, de-centered, conscious and unconscious, it's language that affects that de-centering. It's because we are language using animals that we live eccentric lives. It's language, Lecane says. Language is the difference. Language. If language is what separates us if you will from animals, then I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Where we're headed from here is towards Juissants enjoyment. If language is what separates us from animals, Juissants is what separates us from machines. It's our ability to use speech that makes us a very weird animal. Weird because we are never entirely present to ourselves. We're always de-centered, interrupted by ourselves. Ignorant of ourselves. But it's our ability to enjoy, which is also a function of language use we'll see that separates us from machines. And I would dare say always will. That's why machines are horrific, right? Because they do not know enjoyment. That's why they're scary, but also like the best parent. The best father, the best primary caregiver is a dead one. You don't want a police officer who enjoys arresting people. That's not what you want. The law insofar as it is enforced, whether by a judge, jury, or executioner as the police so often become, should be done impassively, robotically without enjoyment. All too often, the enjoyment of the law giver displaces the legitimacy of the law. That's a bit far afield, but it gives us a moment to pause and check in. Let's see where you're at before we take any next steps. You may be speak a little bit more to machines don't experience jury sounds with the virtual age and AI coming on up. Yeah, well, I should say not yeah, but no. Thank you for asking, but no. Sure. There's a pretty good called the Freudian machine, I believe it's called. That might be a good place to start. I'll check it out. Yeah. How are you? If you can't find it, and I'll help you get the site, or at least point you to the author or something like that. When you're discussing the signifiers, I'm feeling curious again about the nonverbal aspects you discuss and any thoughts and what LeCon might think about our use of telehealth. Yeah. I don't know, or key texts to think about. Yeah, around the use of telehealth, it's very unfortunate, but I have to say this. I asked a friend of mine of practicing Locanian, I'm up in San Francisco, hang out with this guy. He's kind of on the road. He's like, yeah, I'm going to embrace this and he's in Mexico right now, but he still sees patients. And I said, how interesting, man, you're missing so many of the nonverbal codes that usually shore up your practice. And he said, ah, yes, but in fact, I have the key code, which is the voice. I learned, in fact, that he doesn't even use zoom. There is no screen. He's now treating patients exclusively by phone, listening only to the greatest medium of humanity, which is the voice. It's just at the level of the voice. And he says, it's great to be a Locanian in the world of telehealth. Because the great medium that you need more than any other is the voice. But I would also add this as a communication scholar, we know that most of what humans communicate occurs nonverbal. There are all these different nonverbal channels from the clothes you wear to how you sit, to how close you are to others, different types of handshakes. Man, the literature on handshakes is just ridiculous. Haptics, touch, proxemics, nearness, acule 6, the study of eye movements. The list goes on and on. Locan would say, all of these nonverbal codes are still operating linguistically. And in the analytic terminology that he would use at this point, he would say that they are all operating symptomatically. The signifier is a symptom. And symptoms at this stage in his career, he's going to say, mirror signification. The symptom is a partial representative of an underlying clinical structure or issue. And it's by tracing the symptoms that you can understand what's going on with the subject. Locan says the basic logic of the symptom is linguistic. A symptom is a signal. A symptom is a signifier. So that can be anything. It can be the verbal tick that occurs in speech. It can be the eye that blinks a little bit when Uncle Leonard's name comes up. It can be a repeated playing with one's hair. Hands are really great to study what's going on with people. But Locan would say that what you're seeing there is just another register of language of language use. Another register of symptomatology that you can study. So what I think he would say, Amy, is that telehealth is unfortunate because it flattens and subtracts a lot of the nonverbal stuff that you usually would have access to when meeting an analyst and in person in your office. It also makes analysis almost too easy. Psychoanalysis in the Lecadian tradition believes that something must always be paid. Does it have to be a pound of flesh? No. But there must be some skin in the game. So what if you only pay five dollars a session? You still got to pay something. Going to an office, showing up, bracketing that time in your day, is a sacrifice that for the Lecadian tradition is very important. And so when it's so easy to connect, we're reminded that some of the sacrifice goes away. And my friend said the same thing. He said, man, you know, it's unfortunate because my job is so much easier now. I can still do my work because I have the primary medium of the voice. But things just got easy. And he says, and guess what? It just got a lot easier for my patients too, which is one of the ways that my job just got harder. It's easier to do analysis when all you have to do is click on your screen. He also says though, he's had more breakthroughs because now somebody is in the comfort of their own home, staring at the picture of their mom, who did that to them all those years ago. More at ease, more willing to open up. Different things happen in the field of Lecadian psychoanalysis. You don't have to tell the truth. Your lies are just as indicative as your confession. You don't have to show up at the appointment. Your absence is just as significant, sometimes even more so than your presence. The great part about this linguistic turn and analytic theory and technique that Lecans introduces is that there is no way for the analyst to escape. There is nothing insignificant. There are things without meaning. The symptom, not the symptom, in seminar 23 in the 70s, it will be the symptom, something that is utterly significant but totally without meaning. Right now, though, Lecans deeply committed to the signifier of symptoms, whether that's a hand gesture or a word or utterance or like. That's time for one more question. Thank you. You bet. Who was Lecans analyst? Lowenstein, I think his name was. They did not get on well. Good. I have a question in me. Well, topic. I'm curious what specifically Lecans despised about young. I don't know. But if I had to guess, I'd realize I don't, but why not? I think part of what Lecans struggled with was also perhaps what Freud struggled with. No matter how rigid some of these terms seem, everything is particular to the patient. Everything is unique and specific to their own lived experience. So Freud had pretty robust theories of obsessional neurosis. But the rat man was not you. The idea was that each case would present new opportunities for re-theorization. In other words, that any sort of turn towards archetypal analysis was destined to fail. At least that's how I would read it. Now, let me tell you, I only understand Lecans. That's why people hire me to do this stuff. Not because I understand young or any of that stuff. It's like I've been reading Lecans in a ziplock bag and lecturing from that bag for the past few years. It will be up to you all with experience in young, with experience in the depth tradition, with experience with archetypal analysis. To judge whether every dream in which your teeth fall out is truly in fact a dream of your own individual death, which by the way is yours and yours alone. Freud's point is that living is like dying. It's very peculiar to you. We all do it, and in that sense it's archetypal, if you will. But yours is yours and mine is mine. Nobody can take a bath for you today, and nobody can die for you tomorrow. And I think that is kind of the guiding element for Lecans and for Freud, but especially for Lecans. In fact, if you want to put this schematically, we sure can. There are only three things that you have to have in order to be human. First, you have to have a body. Done have to look like mine. Done have to look like yours. Done have to have legs, but you have to have a scrap of flesh of some kind. You have to have a body. That's the first element, embodiment. That's where all of this starts. The second element is the one where analysis does the most conceptual work. Human bodies, unlike horse bodies, for instance, need copious amounts of care from others in order to survive. You can take a baby one month, two month, three months, six months, and you can put it in the corner of a room. And you can leave for one minute, two minute, six minutes, six months, and come back. That baby will be in the exact same place. It can't go anywhere. It can't go to the fridge and get food. It's not on its feet, three minutes after it's born. Human bodies are born prematurely. It's one of the trade-offs. In order to escape the host organism, the parasite with its enlarged skull needs to be born at least three months before it would have been ready, which is why the first three months post-birth are usually referred to as the fourth trimester. Human babies, human bodies need copious amounts of care if they're going to survive. Everybody in this call right now, everybody who I'm looking at right now is here because you received, I'll say it, good enough care. Don't get me wrong, your primary care giver is fucked you up. Different than they fucked me up. Now I didn't know them because I'm talking about my primary care giver's. And when it's your turn, if it's your turn, ever to be your turn, you'll fuck them up too. Even with all your fancy techniques, especially because you have a lot of fancy techniques. That's how and why you're going to fuck them up because you're so good at un-fucking people. The origin of the word fuck is a difficult one. Nobody really knows. I think it comes from the Latin term for to hit. To fuck is to hit. The third and final element that you have to have in order to be human is you got to die. Body into which you were born. The body that was lucky enough, I guess I'll have to say that lucky enough to receive good enough care from others, from others. Also has to perish. And with those three elements, you have the origin of lachanian psychoanalysis. Now I can't say how that speaks to young. I can't say that I've read all of that and Freud. But I can tell you that these are the three pistons. Ontological pistons, we can call them, on toast having to do with human being. Ontological pistons of lachanian psychoanalysis. It begins with the assumption that everybody has a body. All of those bodies were at some level and for a sustained period sustained by other people. They received care. And all of those bodies must eventually die. Embodyment, care from others, and death. I don't know what else to say about it, but I think that's about as our archetypal as lachan is going to go. And I'm happy to hear that some of you disagree respectfully or not. Because much of what lachan is doing is a provocation. This is why he had hundreds and hundreds of people in his lecture halls. It was about disagreement. That's what he cultivated. So in order to disagree, then we first have to understand what's meant. And that's what I'm here to help you with. Are we ready to move forward? You can already tell that I don't like taking breaks. If you need a break, you can take a break. Before a seminar of this sort, one of these epic ones, I just insert a catheter. I'm good to go people. So that's not funny, man. That's not funny. Catheter is a real man. That's not funny. Sam, I'm out of catheters. Can we take a break? You can take a break, but I'm not taking a break, Dan. Well, we will not be taking breaks. There is too short of time. And ain't that the truth of it? The problem with the truth, if it has any problems, is that there's never enough time to say it. There's no chance we're going to get through this whole essay. But by God, we're going to try. So let's start on page 677 in the English or 800 if you're using the French pagination. The key question that opens this essay on page 677 800 in the French is here. One sentence, one paragraph, once the structure of language is recognized in the unconscious, what sort of subject can we conceive of for it? Now, I don't know that we are in a position where we have recognized the structure of the unconscious as the structure of language. All I've told you so far is that repression, the basic mechanism that carves out the space known as the unconscious is a symbolic enterprise, a linguistic enterprise. And what gets repressed are signifiers. I can elaborate on that a little bit, but I don't want us to get too lost in the technicalities. Let me be very brief. The car crash. Blood, guts. You lost half your crew, half your family. The dog is dead too. The ambulance shows up. You're barely conscious. They peel your ass out of the car. What a horrible, horrible event. You haven't thought about it in a long time. You don't think about it much at all. Every now and again, you see a picture. You feel something. Something brings it all back. What Lacan would say is that what gets repressed is not the entire primal scene, the blood, the guts, the gore, the car. It will be some representative of that experience. It will be the feel of the fabric of the shirt that you were wearing at the time. It'll be that feeling of how the fabric soaked in your own blood was matted to your skin. It'll be some part of the whole event that functions representatively, like a signifier of that event. If we were to start charting this out, we could draw it something like this. You're traveling along in your everyday life. All of a sudden, here's the car crash. Holy shit, what a traumatic event, what a rupture. You do learn to get on with your life. Life continues as best it can. But part of that allowance has to do with the fact that you have repressed much of that experience, even if only because you can't spend every day thinking about the loss as you sustained during that accident. What gets repressed here represented as X is something that then sticks with you throughout the rest of this experience known as life. If it is the feel of the fabric as it was matted to your skin, that velvet shirt. Suddenly, you're walking along, you see an amazing goodwill store, the best one in town. I know where mine is in the city. I always go to this store and you go in and you're thumbing around, moving through the fabrics, and suddenly your hand touches a velvet shirt. And what do you do? You recoil. I'm not saying you piss your pants and forget who you are for 30 minutes. But you have an adverse response, a feeling of disgust. That is called the return of the repressed. What occurs in that moment is the X that has been traveling along with you. All those years now finds a Y and is back for another chance. Now in this moment, you have an opportunity to continue browsing in search of that shirt that's going to make your day keep your desire of flight. Or you can use this opportunity to be like, damn, that was weird. Why did I recoil in abjection when I touched that shirt? That's a moment, an opportunity for you. Listen up now. To look back from the moment where you touched the shirt and had the return of the repressed, you can now retrospectively look back and say, oh shit, I know why velvet disgusts me. I know why I don't like that. This retrospective meaning making is the exact same experience that happens when a sentence occurs. Here what I'm charting for you is repression, the creation of this dotted line known as the unconscious, and then the return of the repressed when the signifier X meets another signifier. A representative of the representative of the primal scene of your trauma. And in that moment, you get an opportunity. The way we describe the seizing of that opportunity is also linguistic. This is a chance for you to come to terms with. That's what it means. That was the talking here. The coming two terms with the finding of new signifiers. New signifiers here represented with the letter Z to help you better understand the primal scene that sent you on this circuit. Lacan's point is that you're now three signifiers removed from the very event that shores up your existence. The whole and your being just got a new name and this is if you're lucky. So what you can see here is the way that the repressed part of this event functions as a signifier that then links up with another signifier that then gives you an opportunity to link with yet another signifier. Now, can the chain of signifiers only be additive and move in a linear fashion or can there be backward subtraction of signifiers? I would say the latter is more likely. You could think about this more like alphabet soup down there. All the letters are all swirling around and that's what can happen if you don't deal with your shit. If you do not take the retrospective meaning-making return to this event and you instead decide to just keep browsing. Notice what happens. You just continue your life. You're not going to think about it. Now you've got X and Y in the unconscious all looping around waiting for the next time you touch velvet. The repressed I said always returns from one place, the future. It's a future relative to the past event in which you suffered the trauma that in turn started the circuit of repression. Does that make sense so far? So, Jared, what you would have here eventually as you go forward because we can't all seize every opportunity to come to terms with our shit is you have a repeat offender if you will. That's the thing. In fact, you might even say that this repetition compulsion, right? This repetition compulsion is exactly what paves the way to your doorstep because to be a little technical about this. What happens when the patient to be is just going through their life, repeating the same mistakes, never coming to terms with it, never seizing on that retrospective opportunity to come to terms with their shit is a very strange phenomenon. It was one that LeCon draws on from Freud to say, what the hell is going on there? If we are so beat up, repressed, disturbed, why would we not seize on an opportunity to heal? Why would we instead will the repetition of this horrendous event? Why make the same mistake over and over again? You see, that's the difference between a lesson and a mistake. A lesson is a mistake that we learned from. But what we know about human beings is we tend to make the same mistakes. Why is your current partner very similar to your previous partner? Why are you always dating the same man? Why are you always dating the same humans? Why? The question of repetition is the great question for the neurotic. And the answer is simple. We learn to enjoy our symptoms. Now we don't know, we don't really know what to do with this. Not yet. But as we work through this essay, what you're going to find is that in everyday life, the great prohibition that shores up society is a prohibition against enjoyment. You can pursue pleasure, but not enjoyment. Juicence? No, man, you've got to draw the curtains, close the door, get under the sheets, turn off the lights, think of all the secrecy that goes into the experience of enjoyment at a general level. There are lots of ways to experience enjoyment, not just generally, but we know it predominantly through its generalized form. The prohibition against Julie Sons invites us to look for other more surreptitious ways to enjoy. And the neurotic fundamentally has learned to enjoy the symptomatic expressions of their own disorder. The obsessive enjoys flipping the light switch, double checking the lock. The hysteric enjoys never being treated well in a relationship. So see, we're not in the field of pleasure anymore. If you are obsessive, if you've ever treated someone who's obsessive, they'll come to you and they'll tell you how fucking uncomfortable it is to feel like they can't rest unless they've checked the locks on every fucking window. That's not a happy place to be. That's not pleasure. Le Con's point is exactly its juicence, its enjoyment, which doesn't mean pleasure, it doesn't mean it feels good, doesn't mean you like it. It means it gets you off. It causes a physical intensification. In that moment where the obsessive is double checking the locks, they feel alive. And that is the question of the obsessive. Am I dead or am I alive? Very well represented by Hamlet, to be or not to be. Well, god damn, when I'm checking these locks, I sure as hell feel something that affective intensification that comes from the flipping of the switch, the hysteric in the fight. I don't know if this is love, but I sure feel drawn to this person right now. I sure feel riled up by them. That's not pleasure. But that riled up state, when you just feel like you're ripping your hair out and you just can't even believe this person, you just like have to leave the house and take all that. That's juicence. My point is that in a world that prohibits productive juicence, the neurotic will find maladaptive, non-productive ways to get off nonetheless, predominantly at the level of their symptoms. So why would somebody skip the great opportunity that the return of the repressed allows and just instead continue with the alphabet soup because it provides them with a parallel field of enjoyment. It allows them to enjoy. And when they come to you, when they arrive at your doorstep, because I said this paves the way straight to your office, they come to you because there are usual ways of repeating start to wane in terms of the production of enjoyment. They are starting to not enjoy their symptoms. That's the great opening for analysis. When the enjoyment of one symptoms begins to fade, that's the opening into which you are supposed to step. They step into your office, but you step into their life and that moment. And that's when the work begins. That's when analysis begins. And your job is to help them see all this. I don't just mean part of this. I mean all of this. The primal scene or the traumatic event, how it got repressed, what part of it got repressed, how that keeps coming back to you, and crucially, how you keep avoiding coming to terms with that shit in order to continue enjoying your symptom. Sam, is this the top half of the complete graph for the very top of it? Yeah, it is not, but the reason it looks the same is that you're seeing the same diacronic horizontal line with a retroactive loop. So the structure of it is the same, but the terms are going to be different. The upper field of the graph of desire is a field of juicence. That's why I say the goal of analysis is to get the patient up there and help them figure out a way to stay up there. Because that's the way that they can supplant the maladaptive juicence of their symptoms with the juicence that is productive at the level of their drive, not driven by the symptomatic expression of their disorder, but something that traverses that disorder and gives them an opportunity to enjoy something else. And I'll tell you, it's simple. It's as simple as the first sip of coffee in the morning. That is juicence. And the drive is what allows you to be like, you know what? I don't know what the fuck this seminar is going to entail this morning, but damn, this coffee tastes good. And I curse because I want to capture some of this intense feeling that you have. You know the drink I'm talking about. It's that first sip and you take a drink and you go like this. And then you kind of furrow your brows and you hold the cup out and furrow and you look at that and you're like, God damn, that's good coffee. Are you look at that and you're like, Oh, man, who knew honey and lavender went with coffee? What? Man, you never had coffee till you had this. It's that first drink of beer. You drink it. And then you notice you have a cup of beer on your hand and you hold it up and you just look at it and you're like, I love you. This is proof that God loves me. Proof that God loves me is that first sip of beer. And that's what this feels like. That's what Julie Saunts in a productive sense feels like. It's the kind of satisfaction that comes from a very simple pleasure like sunshine on your skin. That's the feeling. It's the feeling not so much of the comfort but the feeling of aliveness. I'm alive. Silicite mushrooms, Julie Saunts. Acid. Too much Julie Saunts. You feel me? Okay.