(no subject)
Take a personal example from my own economy of desire. I have a lot of hostility to the organization known as SPEP (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). I believe that there's no place for me in this powerful, professional philosophical organization, and that they only recognize a way of doing philosophy and set of philosophical figures that leave little place for the sort of work that I do. As a Continentalist I believe this organization is partially responsible for me not having a better academic position, etc. The Continental academy in the US wants, I believe, phenomenologists, hermeneuticians, and Derridians, not Deleuze-Lacanian-Badiouian object-oriented ontologists.
This is a perfect example of a fantasm or particular belief in the Other in the Lacanian sense. I believe that there's an Other that has particular desires and that makes particular demands on me. Traversing the fantasy in the analytic setting would reveal 1) that no entity such as SPEP making these specific claims and demands exists (SPEP is every bit as fissured and unsure of its own desires as anyone else), and that 2) I have constructed this Other, this fantasy of SPEP, as a way of maintaining my own desire and sense of identity. Lacan argues that desire is a defense against jouissance and that the neurotic must defend against jouissance because, in jouissance s/he experiences her fading or disappearance as a subject, which is highly anxiety provoking. In other words, the key thing with Lacan's concept desire is that it maintained unfulfilled. The subject organizes desire to insure this lack of fulfillment and does this through positing an Other that has particular demands and that issues certain prohibitions.
Yet nonetheless, we also suffer from our own fantasies. Because I have this fantasy about SPEP I believe that I am unjustly excluded in all sorts of ways, that there's no place for me, etc., etc., etc.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/
This is a perfect example of a fantasm or particular belief in the Other in the Lacanian sense. I believe that there's an Other that has particular desires and that makes particular demands on me. Traversing the fantasy in the analytic setting would reveal 1) that no entity such as SPEP making these specific claims and demands exists (SPEP is every bit as fissured and unsure of its own desires as anyone else), and that 2) I have constructed this Other, this fantasy of SPEP, as a way of maintaining my own desire and sense of identity. Lacan argues that desire is a defense against jouissance and that the neurotic must defend against jouissance because, in jouissance s/he experiences her fading or disappearance as a subject, which is highly anxiety provoking. In other words, the key thing with Lacan's concept desire is that it maintained unfulfilled. The subject organizes desire to insure this lack of fulfillment and does this through positing an Other that has particular demands and that issues certain prohibitions.
Yet nonetheless, we also suffer from our own fantasies. Because I have this fantasy about SPEP I believe that I am unjustly excluded in all sorts of ways, that there's no place for me, etc., etc., etc.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/