How To Read Lacan

by Slavoj Žižek

the Other is the topic of a low-grade joke about a poor peasant who, having suffered a shipwreck, finds himself marooned on an island with, say, Cindy Crawford. After having sex with him, she asks how it was; his answer is, great, but he still has one small request to complete his satisfaction – could she dress herself up as his best friend, put on trousers and paint a moustache on her face? He reassures her that he is not a secret pervert, as she will see once she has granted the request. When she does, he approaches her, gives her a dig in the ribs, and tells her with the leer of male complicity: ‘You know what happened to me? I just had sex with Cindy Crawford!’

Human communication is characterized by an irreducible reflexivity: every act of communication simultaneously symbolizes the fact of communication.

human speech never merely transmits a message, it always also self-reflectively asserts the basic symbolic pact between the communicating subjects.

There is a memorable scene in Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Freedom in which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper: ‘Where is that place, you know?’ and sneak away to a small room in the back. As a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is thus tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a ‘food for thought’:

Gold.

‘Culture’ is the name for all those things we practise without really believing in them,

It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent a discovery, even traumatic: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me that causes love.

Lacan’s definition of love – ‘Love is giving something one doesn’t have …’ – has to be supplemented with ‘… to someone who doesn’t want it.’

So it was not the intrusion from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – in so far as ‘dreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was as follows: when the smoke disturbed his sleep, the father quickly constructed a dream that incorporated the disturbing element (smoke–fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.

Finally, The Interpretation of Dreams proved useful. This is also some banger anlysis.

Who doesn’t remember the nightmarish situation from dreams: the more I run, the more I stay rooted to the spot? This paradox can be neatly solved by the difference between the object and the cause of desire: no matter how close I get to the object of desire, its cause remains at a distance, elusive. Furthermore, the general theory of relativity solves the antinomy between the relativity of every movement with regard to the observer and the absolute velocity of light – which moves at a constant speed independently of the point of observation – with the notion of curved space.

jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty.

‘You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!’ Every child who is not stupid (which is to say most children) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit Grandma, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, instructing him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

For decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and is allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. ‘My dear fellow,’ says his doctor, ‘you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.’ ‘Of course I know that,’ replies the patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’

when religious authors condemn atheism, they all too often construct a vision of the ‘godless universe’ which is a projection of the repressed underside of religion itself.