Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 17:45:27 -0400
From: Daniel McGrady <dMcGrady-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: Lacan's castrating theory .../ The Phallus and the misuse of Lacan


Ken,

>Many thanks for the essential clarity of your explanations.

The mark of understanding is that you avoid repeating the jargon and think
it out in everyday English.   When I read something on Lacan, reproducing
all the Lacanian terms, I assume they don't understand what they are
writing about.   Lucidity is possible with Lacan.

>My only query about that explanation is: it's so clear, why bring Lacan
>in at all? 

Very revealing Ken.  It supposes you can't make Lacan lucid.   Lacan was
deliberately obscure.   He almost feared being understood.  And when some
were able to decode, he began changing the code. 
It is not impossible to put some of it in plain language.  But this leaves
open another difficulty.  When something is put in plain English it leaves
just as much room for misunderstanding.   You seem to have misunderstood
what I was saying about the Father-figure.

> Why not just say that a woman's desire for father-figures
>can never be fulfilled, since none can measure up, none can meet her
>father-ideal? 

The figure is not a father-ideal.   The point was that it was more like a
mathematical function.  It is like Fx.  Anything you can substitute for x
becomes a father figure.   Thus you could have Fa where a is a particular=2E 
 And thus there can be an infinity of substitutions.   And this reflects
upon desire.   Desire is based upon logic and this is what gives it its
infinity.   And this is what makes it insatiable.  There is no possible
complete saturation of x.    This is why it is Lacanian and not say
Jungian.  Because if you base desire on a biological model, then the
insatiability is different.   E.g. hunger is satisfied completely and
utterly by one satisfying meal (as Lacan says, it is in the dimension of
the real).   It requires a new hunger to set up the conditions for a new
object to satisfy it.   But you wouldn't say that one's hunger was
insatiable because an infinity of dinners would not satisfy it.   But this
is the form of desire.   The same desire is insatiable.   It is only that
we try to satisfy through the finitude of our bodies that gives the
impression that it is.   In terms of the logic of the desire for a father
figure, an endless supply of them would not satisfy.   But the individual
themselves simply could not cope.   But if they could they could have a new
father figure subsitute every night.

> Are there (fiction) films which actually require a
>knowledge of Lacanian structures to be integrally understood? 

Loads.   E.g. the film 'Damage'.   A first viewing of that leads
automatically to 'What a load of rubbish'.   It was based upon a book, and
it was the book that was rubbish.   Then you realize that Louis Malle must
have reworked something over the top of the book to make it pointless to
look to the book for the key.   But with a bit of Lacanian Freudianism
applied and the film becomes quite beautiful.   The French films lend
themselves more easily.  E.g.' Monsieur Hire' e.g. is a complex analysis of
the social gaze.   But it becomes obnoxious when some learn a few Lacanian
words, like 'the male gaze' and like the girls in the Crucible point it out
everywhere chanting 'the male gaze, the male gaze ... ' ad nauseam.   Like
looking for demons under every pew. 

 (I've not
>encountered one in my reading of Slavoj Zizek, I believe.)  Mind you, I
>haven't yet read Robert Samuels's 'Hitchcock's Bi-textuality' (1998),
>which also takes a Lacanian approach ...

Have you got an ISBN number for that?

> >'At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean God
> >"not to be named," and such it remained throughout my youth, reappearing
> >whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus.' (Carl Jung,
'Memories,
> >Dreams, Reflections', Chapter 1)

Well, let us say that the phallus for Jung 'really' was the penis.   Freud
realized that sexuality pervaded the analysis, constituting the relation
between analyst and analysand in transference and countertransference, and
saw his part as an actor within the frame of the scenario conjured up by
the phantasy of the analysand.  He was never so foolish as to get carried
away by the scene and take it for real.   But, Jung did.  While he was
denying Freud's sexual underpinning of Psychoanalysis, he was having
affairs with his patients.   Where Freud realized this was part of the
structure of the phantasy to be analysed, Jung was taking it for real and
becoming involved.    He had more to fear from his own penis than Freud did
his.  Whereas Freud saw the symbolic value of the penis, and thus having
divine properties, Jung took the penis at its biological level and got
stuck in.    But for you Ken, when I have time I will have another look at
Dreams, Reflections, etc.,

>Not at all, unless the dream itself was referring to biology.  For it's
>Jung's DREAM that situates the 'ritual phallus' underground; and nothing
>about Jung's description of the dream (at age 3-4) nor his explication
>of it - a remarkable passage in literature - is remotely 'biological'. 
>I might add that to read the full passage (of several pages) is surely
>to know oneself in the presence of one of the great free minds ...

I have always found Jung's dream analyses simplistic, and extremely homely.
  They are so Swiss.   If someone dreams they are  searching their house
for something, Jung asks them which room they were looking in.  If they say
the attic then he tells them they are seeking to understand themselves
intellectually, the attic representing the head.  And if they are looking
in the basement, then they are looking for themselves in terms of their
'basic' (basement) desires.   A man is on a train and the train runs over a
precipice.  Jung tells him that if he keeps going the way he is going his
life will end in disaster.   Then we remember what Orson Welles quips in
'The Third Man' about the Swiss and the Cuckoo clock.  

>Something that might appeal to you, Daniel, with your interest in
>etymology, is this fragment of Jung's musing:

>'... I do not know where the anatomically correct phallus can have come
>from.  The interpretation of the orificium urethrae as an eye, with the
>source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the word
>phallus ([Greek word], shining, bright).'

Where is that from Ken?   The word 'phallus' (it is really 'phallos') has
its stem in 'phao' which means to shine.   There was a god Phales
associated with Bacchic rites.   Jung is thinking of the word 'phalos'
which means 'shining, white'.   It is used of the white on the crest of the
waves which symbolized Aphrodite arising out of Ocean's semen.   

>But the sense of freedom I mentioned is in the power and scepticism of
>Jung's mind that was formed at this time - as he himself came to
>appreciate:

>'Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the
>earth. ...  My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that
>time.'

Is he talking about masturbation?

>(I see that 'the earth' might, ultimately, imply biology, but Jung's
>insights are of an order that is apart from that.)  

Earth is not biology.  Biology as the word shows is the logos applied to
bios.   But earth has no logic.   It is the principle of individuation.  
What makes two pennies identical is that they are both cases of 'penny'
(universal).   What makes them not the same is their physical substance. 
For physical substance occupies space and so a physical penny must occupy
an individual space while the other at the same time  must occupy a
different space.   But the universal 'penny' occupies no space.

If you are interested in starting up a discussion on any of those papers in
Zizek's Lacan on Hitchcock I will join you on that one.

Daniel



     --- from list film-theory-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---<



     --- from list film-theory-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---