Speaker 1: Okay, we often though, we throw out these other words
Speaker 1: like big other. It's become part of our parlance, and
Speaker 1: I don't know if we're using it strictly or not.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say we use it incorrectly, but
Speaker 1: it's not not perhaps as strict as the context might demand.
Speaker 1: But if we're going to cover psychoanalysis, why now? What's
Speaker 1: the benefit? LACAN is always relevant insofar as someone or
Speaker 1: someone around you is doing things worth analyzing, and at
Speaker 1: least for me, why I think this is a pertinent
Speaker 1: to go into now is because of belief, the competitions
Speaker 1: for belief, the factions of belief. Politically speaking, those voices
Speaker 1: that appear on the news, what do all these different
Speaker 1: groups want, particularly the factions of the right wing. They're fun,
Speaker 1: but what is believed in? What is design? And what
Speaker 1: are the different interests hoping to get out of it?
Speaker 1: So I guess in some what I want to use
Speaker 1: LACON for is a weapon so that I feel like
Speaker 1: a wizard standing outside of the fray, able to analyze
Speaker 1: anyone else. So aside from weaponizing it against our ideological opponents,
Speaker 1: what's the use of LACAN?
Speaker 2: I always enjoy it. I think what'll be nice for
Speaker 2: me is there was a time when originally the dissertation
Speaker 2: that I finished a year ago was going to include
Speaker 2: some Lacan stuff, but then I really ended up pivoting,
Speaker 2: and you know, for just pragmatic reasons, and really I
Speaker 2: just got focused way more on phenomenology, and I've kind
Speaker 2: of been doing stuff that touches phenomenology, but sort of
Speaker 2: my interest in psychoanalysis and Lacon in particular has fallen
Speaker 2: a little bit off. So it's going to be nice
Speaker 2: to just return for that reason, because it was something
Speaker 2: that I originally wanted to include more in academic work
Speaker 2: that I was doing before. So and in which case,
Speaker 2: of course, will be you know, the political implications of
Speaker 2: you know, psychoanalysis for democracy. I mean, I think at
Speaker 2: the time, you guys kind of know what my you know,
Speaker 2: critique of certain kinds of radical democracy is. And you know,
Speaker 2: phenomenology is one way of talking about why I think
Speaker 2: it's overly optimistic, but I feel like psychoanalysis could be
Speaker 2: another way of talking about why it's overly optimistic.
Speaker 1: Right, Like, if if the.
Speaker 2: Subject is really as kind of messed up and vulnerable
Speaker 2: as Lacon describes it, then like how could we ever
Speaker 2: want radically horizontal democracy in a way or not so
Speaker 2: much want, but how could we ever expect that to
Speaker 2: be possible?
Speaker 1: Basically speaking to the applicability, there's there's a sense because
Speaker 1: we're not we're not psychoanalysis partisans. Some people will, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: think it's the answer to everything, and I don't think
Speaker 1: any of us do. But psychoanalysis does give you kind
Speaker 1: of a sense of being a wizard completely outside of
Speaker 1: the context, able to determine motivations, able to ascribe motivations
Speaker 1: maybe to all these different actors. And there are some
Speaker 1: problems with it as a method, like not not what
Speaker 1: people say about Freud, for instance, like ow everything he's
Speaker 1: written has been completely disproven, not going that far. But
Speaker 1: there is an element even to lak On that's like unfalsifiable, right,
Speaker 1: You would never be able to determine whether one interpretation
Speaker 1: is correct and tested against another. And it's it's almost
Speaker 1: a little more like like interpreting literature than than than
Speaker 1: a science. I don't know, if you you had something.
Speaker 3: To say, yeah, and inevitably no on just that point. Inevitably,
Speaker 3: any time I returned to look on, which is always
Speaker 3: fun to do, to the earlier point. Yes, I think
Speaker 3: anything you're trying to look at or study or understand
Speaker 3: can only benefit from incorporating psychoanalysis, either Freud or Lacan.
Speaker 3: Anytime I returned to Lacan, I inevitably remember Chomsky's dis saying,
Speaker 3: you know, Lacan is a perfectly self aware charlatan or
Speaker 3: something like that, and it kind of bugs me. It
Speaker 3: bugs me first that he would say that without giving
Speaker 3: too much of a reason for it. I mean, I
Speaker 3: know Chomsky is also a linguist and leftist intellectual and
Speaker 3: an activist and an expert on Israeli Palestine and all
Speaker 3: that stuff.
Speaker 1: And a house guest of Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's really brilliant, has a disgusting memory, and
Speaker 3: has debated Fuco and he's but then he has this quote,
Speaker 3: and it always bugs me. There's actually a book then
Speaker 3: I discovered on this return to Lacan called I didn't
Speaker 3: get a chance to read it, but it's called Lacan
Speaker 3: the Charlatan, and I think it's sort of refuting. I mean,
Speaker 3: it sets out, I think, to refute these kinds of claims. Yeah,
Speaker 3: by Peter Matthews. It was published in twenty twenty, and
Speaker 3: it actually speaks to just this point. I think it says,
Speaker 3: you know, this book sets out to determine the validity
Speaker 3: of an accusation made against Chako La Khan by Noam
Speaker 3: Chompsky in a nineteen eighty nine interview, so that I
Speaker 3: actually really want to read that to see how he
Speaker 3: refutes that claim that Lacan was just a charlatan, which
Speaker 3: basically means like a snake oil salesman, like he was
Speaker 3: just there to be famous. He was, he was faking it.
Speaker 3: He was pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
Speaker 3: It's so hard for me to square up my respect
Speaker 3: for Chompsky with that dismissive statement.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's let's find an example then, because
Speaker 1: mister smarty Pants or missus smarty Pants, well say something like, well,
Speaker 1: Freud thought there was all this meaning to dreams, but
Speaker 1: then we studied the brain or whatever in neurochemistry, and no,
Speaker 1: these are actually just completely random synapses firing, and they think, well,
Speaker 1: we've defeated the hypothesis that dreams have meaning. But really,
Speaker 1: like even Freud would say, Freud's like he says things
Speaker 1: to the effect of, I'm not sure about the origins
Speaker 1: or the physical causes of this stuff. I just know
Speaker 1: that the effects have meaning that don't seem to come
Speaker 1: from the physical origins. So with dreams, it actually makes
Speaker 1: no difference whether dreams are random or whether they're memory processing.
Speaker 1: What matters is that somehow, even unconscious or not unconsciously sorry,
Speaker 1: in sleep, your brain assembles these into a kind of narrative,
Speaker 1: which seems weird that it does that. And then the
Speaker 1: implication to that is, well, is your brain turning signals
Speaker 1: into narratives when you're awake then, because then the the
Speaker 1: ego story that you have going about your life wouldn't
Speaker 1: be the only story. And that's the same thing that
Speaker 1: that Lecan says with some structuralism in there. I just
Speaker 1: wanted to say, speaking of the other example, one example
Speaker 1: is dreams. The other example is Freudian slip, because it's
Speaker 1: the most common example people can ascribe to freud and
Speaker 1: you go, well, no, Freudian slips, they're not They're not
Speaker 1: indicative of some secret layer of meaning below the surface.
Speaker 3: It's just random mistakes.
Speaker 1: They're just random. And just like the dream thing, even
Speaker 1: if they are random, that's not going to just.
Speaker 3: Going faster than my mouth and I tried to say
Speaker 3: two words the same time. That's that's the usual explanation.
Speaker 3: That's the I'm in control explanation.
Speaker 1: There was this week a monumental like a history changing
Speaker 1: Freudian slip that I clocked, and no one else has
Speaker 1: picked up on it yet, I don't think so this
Speaker 1: is a this is an exclusive. It was Netanyahu on
Speaker 1: his Fox interview.
Speaker 2: Oh bb o bibe.
Speaker 1: So he's getting interviewed and the interviewer says, so you're
Speaker 1: taking control of the Gaza strip I guess right, And
Speaker 1: in Netanyah, who's answer, I can actually clip to it here,
Speaker 1: but in nten Yah whose answer he says, quote, I
Speaker 1: want to or we want to enable the population to
Speaker 1: be free of Gaza.
Speaker 3: Enable the population to be free of Gaza. Well, Israel
Speaker 3: take control of all of Gaza.
Speaker 1: We intend to in order to assure our security, remove
Speaker 1: hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza.
Speaker 1: So we want to free them from their land that
Speaker 1: they're on.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's that's a very kind of uh freedom and
Speaker 3: scare quotes.
Speaker 2: Did he correct himself?
Speaker 1: He did not correct himself. But some of the transcripts
Speaker 1: put sick in brackets.
Speaker 3: Sounds like sounds like he's had something on his mind there.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if you're doing confirmation bias, of course you
Speaker 1: can be like, well, this Freudian slip belies the genocidal intent.
Speaker 1: But of course that's not even how Freud meant for
Speaker 1: Freudian slips to work. What a Freudian slip is, it's
Speaker 1: just to say that, yeah, we consider ourselves and our
Speaker 1: speech and our person our ego to have this dominant narrative.
Speaker 1: The dominant narrative is what we intend primarily by speech,
Speaker 1: and it comes out in this line. And just the
Speaker 1: fact that that line can be interrupted, or the fact
Speaker 1: that you can make mistakes in speech, that doesn't belie
Speaker 1: a whole secret layer where your mind is conniving against you.
Speaker 1: That's not what it means at all. What it means
Speaker 1: is there's more than when speech in speech, there's more
Speaker 1: than one quote unquote speaker in speech. The fact that
Speaker 1: you can make mistakes is very important because that means
Speaker 1: that all of language is like a mistake waiting to happen,
Speaker 1: a potential mistake. You can always be missing the mark
Speaker 1: of what you're trying to say, even if you say
Speaker 1: what you intended to say, can be misinterpreted. It just
Speaker 1: means that there's multiple discourses in a single discourse. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of an important introduction to this book, the
Speaker 1: Lacadian subject.
Speaker 2: Well, he talks about ego talk and some other kind
Speaker 2: of talk which I like, which I like that, And
Speaker 2: he says, and ego talk is just everyday talk about
Speaker 2: what we consciously think and believe about ourselves. Basically, everything
Speaker 2: that common sensically a person thinks is like themselves and
Speaker 2: their thoughts is ego talk. And then what he's interested
Speaker 2: in is some other kind of talk, right, the.
Speaker 3: Other which originates elsewhere. That's the idea. They have two
Speaker 3: different origins, Like ego talk originates in your consciousness, in
Speaker 3: what you think of as your consciously controlled flow of mind,
Speaker 3: whatever you're thinking about, and then there's the other, this
Speaker 3: other place that the other kind of talk comes from.
Speaker 3: And that that other places is of course the I
Speaker 3: wouldn't I don't want to jump to saying it's the unconscious,
Speaker 3: but it's the other place is a kind of internalized
Speaker 3: language system that we call the unconscious. So if you're
Speaker 3: trying to convince somebody, say, you're not always in control
Speaker 3: of your own discourse, right there, there is some other
Speaker 3: discourse that comes out through you, and it comes out
Speaker 3: through you. We can best see it in things like dreams, jokes,
Speaker 3: slips of the tongue. Those are three like things that
Speaker 3: show that there's some other kind of discourse or other
Speaker 3: discourses besides your ego discourse, besides your ego talk, clamoring
Speaker 3: for attention. Let's say so to jokes, jokes, and slips
Speaker 3: of the tongue, I mean slips of the tongue. Yeah,
Speaker 3: prove it like in a way, you know, it's saying
Speaker 3: saying something you didn't mean to say, and then it's
Speaker 3: like a weirdly kind of you try to dismiss it
Speaker 3: as you know, that was just a mistake. I didn't
Speaker 3: really mean anything else. I meant to say this. And
Speaker 3: and of course Freud's response is the truth, the truth
Speaker 3: has spoken. But even in that case, it's not necessarily
Speaker 3: something that's like more true about you, like you've just
Speaker 3: accidentally said a deeper truth about yourself. It could be
Speaker 3: some truth the other's truth, right, it's something that came
Speaker 3: from that other place that wasn't yours, but it came
Speaker 3: out of your mouth, or it mixed up a word
Speaker 3: replaced a word with another word, or combine two different
Speaker 3: words together and it comes out as this weird word
Speaker 3: like schmocker stick or something, and it's it's some other truth. Still,
Speaker 3: it's not like a deeper truth about you necessarily, but
Speaker 3: it shows this alienation in language that is all of
Speaker 3: our human condition, and that's that's what it's supposed to show.
Speaker 3: There's we're alienated from ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think we both kind of address
Speaker 1: the same point here that the common misconception is that
Speaker 1: the Freudian slip or the dream, what these things have
Speaker 1: secret access to is a deeper truth, the deeper core
Speaker 1: of your personality inside inside some kind of stupid inception
Speaker 1: model that the truth is closer to the middle. And
Speaker 1: that's not true here because like you don't you don't
Speaker 1: know what the slip was. It might be slipping into
Speaker 1: your mother's words, or maybe not even your mother's actual
Speaker 1: words that you've remembered, but what you think your mother
Speaker 1: said about you on some occasion. So it's not like
Speaker 1: it's a deeper truth. And this is part of the
Speaker 1: reason why psychoanalysis in this way, when it comes to
Speaker 1: the other it's not reproducible because there's no one certain origin.
Speaker 1: If if Freudian slips were just revealing your true intentions,
Speaker 1: then you would say, oh, the core personality, the true
Speaker 1: personality is closer to the middle of you underneath this viniar.
Speaker 1: But the point of this psychoanalysis is like the unconscious
Speaker 1: is a is a S, and there's not There's not
Speaker 1: one solid real version of yourself in that sea. There's
Speaker 1: a bunch of versions of a bunch of others.