Louis Sass lecture on 'Lacan and Phenomenology' (with response by Rick Boothby), 14 October 2022.

Louis Sass delivers a lecture on Lacan and Phenomenology, based largely on relevant sections from his paper 'Lacan, Foucault, and the 'Crisis of the Subject' at the 'Lacan: Clinic and Culture' conference held at Duquesne University, on the 14th October 2022. Rick Boothby offers a response. (The paper was originally published in the journal 'Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology' in 2014 (21, 4, pp. 325-341)).

[@OH-pc5jx]

wonderful! much needed imo given the reducing treatment heidegger has received from some lacanians

[@jsalvo8633]

IMO merleau-ponty is the vanishing mediator in these conversations, in his attempt to combine existentialism with structuralism and psychoanalysis in order to overcome sartrean humanism and return phenomenology to a historical inquiry into the unconscious origins of sense in the living body. unfortunately he continues to be routinely misidentified as another existentialist defender of consciousness and freedom when even his early works began from a critique of sartre and husserl

[@OH-pc5jx]

i agree with this to an extent. in particular, his direct parallels with Lacan - who, iirc, MP draws upon in later years - are clear, as is his usefulness to psychoanalysis’s efforts to think through the sexuated body

[@OH-pc5jx]

however, i think in some ways Heidegger does genuinely do more to overcome the challenges to phenomenology described at the start of the lecture, an a hermeneutic and ontological phenomenology is probably closer to psychoanalysis’s essential project than a somatic one. but i think both are very useful resources for psychoanalytic theory

[@jsalvo8633]

@@OH-pc5jx I understand MP's project, and especially his later works, as very explicitly Heideggerian. He just "fleshes" out Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics with a carnal aspect. In that respect I agree that Heidegger remains a foundational figure for thinking phenomenology & psychoanalysis together

[@OH-pc5jx]

@@jsalvo8633 yes i’m hoping to study the later works more, where there seems to me to be a productive turn back towards heidegger relative to e.g. phenomenology of perception which, while insightful, seemed a bit too husserlian for my taste

[@mobiditch6848]

Maybe the more pressing issue is that in excavating a free space for maneuvering the theoretical treatment of “freedom” we have provided a foothold for those tyrants that would supply a false resolution to the “real”…in other words the critique of the master has not in public life fostered a fascination with the indeterminate or provisional but rather become the opportunity to foist a false idol…the corporate co-optation of social justice as a brand.