August 15, 2025 • 14 mins
We wanted to review some Lacan because everybody's still desiring, and Bruce Fink's Lacanian Subject (1995) is quite often touted as the best unofficial intro, and we can see why.
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Get this and all our eps at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
This is the book: https://amzn.to/4oubPxQ
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, we often though, we throw out these other words
like big other. It's become part of our parlance, and
I don't know if we're using it strictly or not.
I don't want to say we use it incorrectly, but
it's not not perhaps as strict as the context might demand.
But if we're going to cover psychoanalysis, why now? What's
(00:22):
the benefit? LACAN is always relevant insofar as someone or
someone around you is doing things worth analyzing, and at
least for me, why I think this is a pertinent
to go into now is because of belief, the competitions
(00:43):
for belief, the factions of belief. Politically speaking, those voices
that appear on the news, what do all these different
groups want, particularly the factions of the right wing. They're fun,
but what is believed in? What is design? And what
are the different interests hoping to get out of it?
(01:05):
So I guess in some what I want to use
LACON for is a weapon so that I feel like
a wizard standing outside of the fray, able to analyze
anyone else. So aside from weaponizing it against our ideological opponents,
what's the use of LACAN?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I always enjoy it. I think what'll be nice for
me is there was a time when originally the dissertation
that I finished a year ago was going to include
some Lacan stuff, but then I really ended up pivoting,
and you know, for just pragmatic reasons, and really I
just got focused way more on phenomenology, and I've kind
of been doing stuff that touches phenomenology, but sort of
(01:49):
my interest in psychoanalysis and Lacon in particular has fallen
a little bit off. So it's going to be nice
to just return for that reason, because it was something
that I originally wanted to include more in academic work
that I was doing before. So and in which case,
of course, will be you know, the political implications of
(02:13):
you know, psychoanalysis for democracy. I mean, I think at
the time, you guys kind of know what my you know,
critique of certain kinds of radical democracy is. And you know,
phenomenology is one way of talking about why I think
it's overly optimistic, but I feel like psychoanalysis could be
another way of talking about why it's overly optimistic.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Right, Like, if if the.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Subject is really as kind of messed up and vulnerable
as Lacon describes it, then like how could we ever
want radically horizontal democracy in a way or not so
much want, but how could we ever expect that to
be possible?
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Basically speaking to the applicability, there's there's a sense because
we're not we're not psychoanalysis partisans. Some people will, I'm sure,
think it's the answer to everything, and I don't think
any of us do. But psychoanalysis does give you kind
of a sense of being a wizard completely outside of
the context, able to determine motivations, able to ascribe motivations
(03:12):
maybe to all these different actors. And there are some
problems with it as a method, like not not what
people say about Freud, for instance, like ow everything he's
written has been completely disproven, not going that far. But
there is an element even to lak On that's like unfalsifiable, right,
You would never be able to determine whether one interpretation
(03:35):
is correct and tested against another. And it's it's almost
a little more like like interpreting literature than than than
a science. I don't know, if you you had something.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
To say, yeah, and inevitably no on just that point. Inevitably,
any time I returned to look on, which is always
fun to do, to the earlier point. Yes, I think
anything you're trying to look at or study or understand
can only benefit from incorporating psychoanalysis, either Freud or Lacan.
(04:10):
Anytime I returned to Lacan, I inevitably remember Chomsky's dis saying,
you know, Lacan is a perfectly self aware charlatan or
something like that, and it kind of bugs me. It
bugs me first that he would say that without giving
too much of a reason for it. I mean, I
(04:31):
know Chomsky is also a linguist and leftist intellectual and
an activist and an expert on Israeli Palestine and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
And a house guest of Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah, and he's really brilliant, has a disgusting memory, and
has debated Fuco and he's but then he has this quote,
and it always bugs me. There's actually a book then
I discovered on this return to Lacan called I didn't
get a chance to read it, but it's called Lacan
the Charlatan, and I think it's sort of refuting. I mean,
(05:04):
it sets out, I think, to refute these kinds of claims. Yeah,
by Peter Matthews. It was published in twenty twenty, and
it actually speaks to just this point. I think it says,
you know, this book sets out to determine the validity
of an accusation made against Chako La Khan by Noam
Chompsky in a nineteen eighty nine interview, so that I
(05:25):
actually really want to read that to see how he
refutes that claim that Lacan was just a charlatan, which
basically means like a snake oil salesman, like he was
just there to be famous. He was, he was faking it.
He was pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
It's so hard for me to square up my respect
(05:46):
for Chompsky with that dismissive statement.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
All right, well, let's let's find an example then, because
mister smarty Pants or missus smarty Pants, well say something like, well,
Freud thought there was all this meaning to dreams, but
then we studied the brain or whatever in neurochemistry, and no,
these are actually just completely random synapses firing, and they think, well,
(06:12):
we've defeated the hypothesis that dreams have meaning. But really,
like even Freud would say, Freud's like he says things
to the effect of, I'm not sure about the origins
or the physical causes of this stuff. I just know
that the effects have meaning that don't seem to come
from the physical origins. So with dreams, it actually makes
(06:35):
no difference whether dreams are random or whether they're memory processing.
What matters is that somehow, even unconscious or not unconsciously sorry,
in sleep, your brain assembles these into a kind of narrative,
which seems weird that it does that. And then the
implication to that is, well, is your brain turning signals
(07:00):
into narratives when you're awake then, because then the the
ego story that you have going about your life wouldn't
be the only story. And that's the same thing that
that Lecan says with some structuralism in there. I just
wanted to say, speaking of the other example, one example
is dreams. The other example is Freudian slip, because it's
(07:23):
the most common example people can ascribe to freud and
you go, well, no, Freudian slips, they're not They're not
indicative of some secret layer of meaning below the surface.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
It's just random mistakes.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
They're just random. And just like the dream thing, even
if they are random, that's not going to just.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Going faster than my mouth and I tried to say
two words the same time. That's that's the usual explanation.
That's the I'm in control explanation.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
There was this week a monumental like a history changing
Freudian slip that I clocked, and no one else has
picked up on it yet, I don't think so this
is a this is an exclusive. It was Netanyahu on
his Fox interview.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Oh bb o bibe.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So he's getting interviewed and the interviewer says, so you're
taking control of the Gaza strip I guess right, And
in Netanyah, who's answer, I can actually clip to it here,
but in nten Yah whose answer he says, quote, I
want to or we want to enable the population to
be free of Gaza.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Enable the population to be free of Gaza. Well, Israel
take control of all of Gaza.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
We intend to in order to assure our security, remove
hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza.
So we want to free them from their land that
they're on.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Wow, that's that's a very kind of uh freedom and
scare quotes.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Did he correct himself?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
He did not correct himself. But some of the transcripts
put sick in brackets.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Sounds like sounds like he's had something on his mind there.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So anyway, if you're doing confirmation bias, of course you
can be like, well, this Freudian slip belies the genocidal intent.
But of course that's not even how Freud meant for
Freudian slips to work. What a Freudian slip is, it's
just to say that, yeah, we consider ourselves and our
speech and our person our ego to have this dominant narrative.
(09:31):
The dominant narrative is what we intend primarily by speech,
and it comes out in this line. And just the
fact that that line can be interrupted, or the fact
that you can make mistakes in speech, that doesn't belie
a whole secret layer where your mind is conniving against you.
That's not what it means at all. What it means
(09:52):
is there's more than when speech in speech, there's more
than one quote unquote speaker in speech. The fact that
you can make mistakes is very important because that means
that all of language is like a mistake waiting to happen,
a potential mistake. You can always be missing the mark
of what you're trying to say, even if you say
(10:12):
what you intended to say, can be misinterpreted. It just
means that there's multiple discourses in a single discourse. And
that's kind of an important introduction to this book, the
Lacadian subject.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, he talks about ego talk and some other kind
of talk which I like, which I like that, And
he says, and ego talk is just everyday talk about
what we consciously think and believe about ourselves. Basically, everything
that common sensically a person thinks is like themselves and
their thoughts is ego talk. And then what he's interested
(10:44):
in is some other kind of talk, right, the.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Other which originates elsewhere. That's the idea. They have two
different origins, Like ego talk originates in your consciousness, in
what you think of as your consciously controlled flow of mind,
whatever you're thinking about, and then there's the other, this
other place that the other kind of talk comes from.
(11:11):
And that that other places is of course the I
wouldn't I don't want to jump to saying it's the unconscious,
but it's the other place is a kind of internalized
language system that we call the unconscious. So if you're
trying to convince somebody, say, you're not always in control
(11:32):
of your own discourse, right there, there is some other
discourse that comes out through you, and it comes out
through you. We can best see it in things like dreams, jokes,
slips of the tongue. Those are three like things that
show that there's some other kind of discourse or other
(11:54):
discourses besides your ego discourse, besides your ego talk, clamoring
for attention. Let's say so to jokes, jokes, and slips
of the tongue, I mean slips of the tongue. Yeah,
prove it like in a way, you know, it's saying
saying something you didn't mean to say, and then it's
(12:16):
like a weirdly kind of you try to dismiss it
as you know, that was just a mistake. I didn't
really mean anything else. I meant to say this. And
and of course Freud's response is the truth, the truth
has spoken. But even in that case, it's not necessarily
something that's like more true about you, like you've just
accidentally said a deeper truth about yourself. It could be
(12:38):
some truth the other's truth, right, it's something that came
from that other place that wasn't yours, but it came
out of your mouth, or it mixed up a word
replaced a word with another word, or combine two different
words together and it comes out as this weird word
like schmocker stick or something, and it's it's some other truth. Still,
(13:00):
it's not like a deeper truth about you necessarily, but
it shows this alienation in language that is all of
our human condition, and that's that's what it's supposed to show.
There's we're alienated from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, I think I think we both kind of address
the same point here that the common misconception is that
the Freudian slip or the dream, what these things have
secret access to is a deeper truth, the deeper core
of your personality inside inside some kind of stupid inception
(13:37):
model that the truth is closer to the middle. And
that's not true here because like you don't you don't
know what the slip was. It might be slipping into
your mother's words, or maybe not even your mother's actual
words that you've remembered, but what you think your mother
said about you on some occasion. So it's not like
(13:58):
it's a deeper truth. And this is part of the
reason why psychoanalysis in this way, when it comes to
the other it's not reproducible because there's no one certain origin.
If if Freudian slips were just revealing your true intentions,
then you would say, oh, the core personality, the true
personality is closer to the middle of you underneath this viniar.
(14:22):
But the point of this psychoanalysis is like the unconscious
is a is a S, and there's not There's not
one solid real version of yourself in that sea. There's
a bunch of versions of a bunch of others.
Okay, we often though, we throw out these other words
like big other. It's become part of our parlance, and
I don't know if we're using it strictly or not.
I don't want to say we use it incorrectly, but
it's not not perhaps as strict as the context might demand.
But if we're going to cover psychoanalysis, why now? What's
(00:22):
the benefit? LACAN is always relevant insofar as someone or
someone around you is doing things worth analyzing, and at
least for me, why I think this is a pertinent
to go into now is because of belief, the competitions
(00:43):
for belief, the factions of belief. Politically speaking, those voices
that appear on the news, what do all these different
groups want, particularly the factions of the right wing. They're fun,
but what is believed in? What is design? And what
are the different interests hoping to get out of it?
(01:05):
So I guess in some what I want to use
LACON for is a weapon so that I feel like
a wizard standing outside of the fray, able to analyze
anyone else. So aside from weaponizing it against our ideological opponents,
what's the use of LACAN?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I always enjoy it. I think what'll be nice for
me is there was a time when originally the dissertation
that I finished a year ago was going to include
some Lacan stuff, but then I really ended up pivoting,
and you know, for just pragmatic reasons, and really I
just got focused way more on phenomenology, and I've kind
of been doing stuff that touches phenomenology, but sort of
(01:49):
my interest in psychoanalysis and Lacon in particular has fallen
a little bit off. So it's going to be nice
to just return for that reason, because it was something
that I originally wanted to include more in academic work
that I was doing before. So and in which case,
of course, will be you know, the political implications of
(02:13):
you know, psychoanalysis for democracy. I mean, I think at
the time, you guys kind of know what my you know,
critique of certain kinds of radical democracy is. And you know,
phenomenology is one way of talking about why I think
it's overly optimistic, but I feel like psychoanalysis could be
another way of talking about why it's overly optimistic.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Right, Like, if if the.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Subject is really as kind of messed up and vulnerable
as Lacon describes it, then like how could we ever
want radically horizontal democracy in a way or not so
much want, but how could we ever expect that to
be possible?
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Basically speaking to the applicability, there's there's a sense because
we're not we're not psychoanalysis partisans. Some people will, I'm sure,
think it's the answer to everything, and I don't think
any of us do. But psychoanalysis does give you kind
of a sense of being a wizard completely outside of
the context, able to determine motivations, able to ascribe motivations
(03:12):
maybe to all these different actors. And there are some
problems with it as a method, like not not what
people say about Freud, for instance, like ow everything he's
written has been completely disproven, not going that far. But
there is an element even to lak On that's like unfalsifiable, right,
You would never be able to determine whether one interpretation
(03:35):
is correct and tested against another. And it's it's almost
a little more like like interpreting literature than than than
a science. I don't know, if you you had something.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
To say, yeah, and inevitably no on just that point. Inevitably,
any time I returned to look on, which is always
fun to do, to the earlier point. Yes, I think
anything you're trying to look at or study or understand
can only benefit from incorporating psychoanalysis, either Freud or Lacan.
(04:10):
Anytime I returned to Lacan, I inevitably remember Chomsky's dis saying,
you know, Lacan is a perfectly self aware charlatan or
something like that, and it kind of bugs me. It
bugs me first that he would say that without giving
too much of a reason for it. I mean, I
(04:31):
know Chomsky is also a linguist and leftist intellectual and
an activist and an expert on Israeli Palestine and all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
And a house guest of Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah, and he's really brilliant, has a disgusting memory, and
has debated Fuco and he's but then he has this quote,
and it always bugs me. There's actually a book then
I discovered on this return to Lacan called I didn't
get a chance to read it, but it's called Lacan
the Charlatan, and I think it's sort of refuting. I mean,
(05:04):
it sets out, I think, to refute these kinds of claims. Yeah,
by Peter Matthews. It was published in twenty twenty, and
it actually speaks to just this point. I think it says,
you know, this book sets out to determine the validity
of an accusation made against Chako La Khan by Noam
Chompsky in a nineteen eighty nine interview, so that I
(05:25):
actually really want to read that to see how he
refutes that claim that Lacan was just a charlatan, which
basically means like a snake oil salesman, like he was
just there to be famous. He was, he was faking it.
He was pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
It's so hard for me to square up my respect
(05:46):
for Chompsky with that dismissive statement.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
All right, well, let's let's find an example then, because
mister smarty Pants or missus smarty Pants, well say something like, well,
Freud thought there was all this meaning to dreams, but
then we studied the brain or whatever in neurochemistry, and no,
these are actually just completely random synapses firing, and they think, well,
(06:12):
we've defeated the hypothesis that dreams have meaning. But really,
like even Freud would say, Freud's like he says things
to the effect of, I'm not sure about the origins
or the physical causes of this stuff. I just know
that the effects have meaning that don't seem to come
from the physical origins. So with dreams, it actually makes
(06:35):
no difference whether dreams are random or whether they're memory processing.
What matters is that somehow, even unconscious or not unconsciously sorry,
in sleep, your brain assembles these into a kind of narrative,
which seems weird that it does that. And then the
implication to that is, well, is your brain turning signals
(07:00):
into narratives when you're awake then, because then the the
ego story that you have going about your life wouldn't
be the only story. And that's the same thing that
that Lecan says with some structuralism in there. I just
wanted to say, speaking of the other example, one example
is dreams. The other example is Freudian slip, because it's
(07:23):
the most common example people can ascribe to freud and
you go, well, no, Freudian slips, they're not They're not
indicative of some secret layer of meaning below the surface.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
It's just random mistakes.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
They're just random. And just like the dream thing, even
if they are random, that's not going to just.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Going faster than my mouth and I tried to say
two words the same time. That's that's the usual explanation.
That's the I'm in control explanation.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
There was this week a monumental like a history changing
Freudian slip that I clocked, and no one else has
picked up on it yet, I don't think so this
is a this is an exclusive. It was Netanyahu on
his Fox interview.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Oh bb o bibe.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So he's getting interviewed and the interviewer says, so you're
taking control of the Gaza strip I guess right, And
in Netanyah, who's answer, I can actually clip to it here,
but in nten Yah whose answer he says, quote, I
want to or we want to enable the population to
be free of Gaza.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Enable the population to be free of Gaza. Well, Israel
take control of all of Gaza.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
We intend to in order to assure our security, remove
hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza.
So we want to free them from their land that
they're on.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Wow, that's that's a very kind of uh freedom and
scare quotes.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Did he correct himself?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
He did not correct himself. But some of the transcripts
put sick in brackets.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Sounds like sounds like he's had something on his mind there.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So anyway, if you're doing confirmation bias, of course you
can be like, well, this Freudian slip belies the genocidal intent.
But of course that's not even how Freud meant for
Freudian slips to work. What a Freudian slip is, it's
just to say that, yeah, we consider ourselves and our
speech and our person our ego to have this dominant narrative.
(09:31):
The dominant narrative is what we intend primarily by speech,
and it comes out in this line. And just the
fact that that line can be interrupted, or the fact
that you can make mistakes in speech, that doesn't belie
a whole secret layer where your mind is conniving against you.
That's not what it means at all. What it means
(09:52):
is there's more than when speech in speech, there's more
than one quote unquote speaker in speech. The fact that
you can make mistakes is very important because that means
that all of language is like a mistake waiting to happen,
a potential mistake. You can always be missing the mark
of what you're trying to say, even if you say
(10:12):
what you intended to say, can be misinterpreted. It just
means that there's multiple discourses in a single discourse. And
that's kind of an important introduction to this book, the
Lacadian subject.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, he talks about ego talk and some other kind
of talk which I like, which I like that, And
he says, and ego talk is just everyday talk about
what we consciously think and believe about ourselves. Basically, everything
that common sensically a person thinks is like themselves and
their thoughts is ego talk. And then what he's interested
(10:44):
in is some other kind of talk, right, the.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Other which originates elsewhere. That's the idea. They have two
different origins, Like ego talk originates in your consciousness, in
what you think of as your consciously controlled flow of mind,
whatever you're thinking about, and then there's the other, this
other place that the other kind of talk comes from.
(11:11):
And that that other places is of course the I
wouldn't I don't want to jump to saying it's the unconscious,
but it's the other place is a kind of internalized
language system that we call the unconscious. So if you're
trying to convince somebody, say, you're not always in control
(11:32):
of your own discourse, right there, there is some other
discourse that comes out through you, and it comes out
through you. We can best see it in things like dreams, jokes,
slips of the tongue. Those are three like things that
show that there's some other kind of discourse or other
(11:54):
discourses besides your ego discourse, besides your ego talk, clamoring
for attention. Let's say so to jokes, jokes, and slips
of the tongue, I mean slips of the tongue. Yeah,
prove it like in a way, you know, it's saying
saying something you didn't mean to say, and then it's
(12:16):
like a weirdly kind of you try to dismiss it
as you know, that was just a mistake. I didn't
really mean anything else. I meant to say this. And
and of course Freud's response is the truth, the truth
has spoken. But even in that case, it's not necessarily
something that's like more true about you, like you've just
accidentally said a deeper truth about yourself. It could be
(12:38):
some truth the other's truth, right, it's something that came
from that other place that wasn't yours, but it came
out of your mouth, or it mixed up a word
replaced a word with another word, or combine two different
words together and it comes out as this weird word
like schmocker stick or something, and it's it's some other truth. Still,
(13:00):
it's not like a deeper truth about you necessarily, but
it shows this alienation in language that is all of
our human condition, and that's that's what it's supposed to show.
There's we're alienated from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, I think I think we both kind of address
the same point here that the common misconception is that
the Freudian slip or the dream, what these things have
secret access to is a deeper truth, the deeper core
of your personality inside inside some kind of stupid inception
(13:37):
model that the truth is closer to the middle. And
that's not true here because like you don't you don't
know what the slip was. It might be slipping into
your mother's words, or maybe not even your mother's actual
words that you've remembered, but what you think your mother
said about you on some occasion. So it's not like
(13:58):
it's a deeper truth. And this is part of the
reason why psychoanalysis in this way, when it comes to
the other it's not reproducible because there's no one certain origin.
If if Freudian slips were just revealing your true intentions,
then you would say, oh, the core personality, the true
personality is closer to the middle of you underneath this viniar.
(14:22):
But the point of this psychoanalysis is like the unconscious
is a is a S, and there's not There's not
one solid real version of yourself in that sea. There's
a bunch of versions of a bunch of others.
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