How to read Lacan

A summary: Zizek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. London: Granta. Chapter 2: The interpassive subject.

As Zizek points out, Lacan asserts that someone else can take over and experience feelings and attitudes (crying, laughing) in our place. For example “weepers” are women hired to cry at funerals in the place of relatives; canned laughter, which is added to the TV show’s soundtrack, laughs in the viewer’s place . Even if one doesn’t laugh while watching the show, hum still could feel relief (as if hum would have laughed throughout the show) thanks to the canned laughter.

Interactivity and new media: the passive viewer is given a chance to be active through choice, dialogue, debates, being part of rule-making.

Interpassivity: An object takes my passivity from me. A VCR is recording a film which I intend to watch some other time (chances are I’m not going to watch this film at all). The VCR is passivly watching (recoding) and enjoying the film instead of me. In this case I am passive through the Other. I can stay active (e.g. continue working) while the Other is passive (e.g. enjoy themselves) instead of me. —> false activity

Hegel’s List der Vernunft (cunning of Reason): I am active through the Other. I let other people or objects do the work for me.

False activity:

• people act to change something
• people act to prevent an event or to prevent change —> pseudo-activity

“Against such an interpassive mode, in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity…”

Lacan’s notion of the big Other

One can concede to the Other feelings, passivity, beliefs and knowledge —> the subject supposed to know

the subject suposed to know + transference —> formal structure of the presupposed meaning

“The more general rule that transference emplifies is that, often, the invention of some new content can only occur in the illusory form of returning to the past original truth {…} their ‘return to’ constitutes the very object to which it returns: in the very act of returning to tradition, they are inventing it.”

‘Culture’ and ‘Politness’

” ‘Culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.”

mechanical gestures of symbolic order —> ‘politness’

Example: I meet an acquaintance by chance, I sticκ out my hand and I say ‘ Good to see you! How are you today?’ —> * I’m not engaging genuinly * I’m not being hypocritical >>> “likewise I do ‘sincerely’ laugh through canned laughter (the proof is the fact that effectively I do feel relieved).”

Symbolic Castration and Hysteria

Lacan calls ‘symbolic castration’ the “gap between my direct psycological identity and my symbolic identity”; “the castration that occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mask or title.” In this case the phallus, signifier of symbolic castration, is a seperate organ, which gets attached to the body, but never becomes intergrated into the body.

The questioning of ones symbolic mask leads to hysteria: “the problem of the hysteric is how to distinquish what he or she is (his true desire) from what others see and desire in him or her.”