Came to you through the Astral Codex Ten Lacan Review pipeline, lol. Interested to see what you have to say. I'm new to rationalist spaces (new, and not entirely sold) and something that's been niggling me since coming upon them was the absence of influence from continental philosophy/critical theory/psychoanalysis/post-structuralism etc. The thing which set me off, I remember, was somebody trying to come up with a new term, for use in the analysis of cultural progress, that would mean not just to move past, but to "transcend and include". I can't remember the term and I can't remember the poster, but I remember thinking: "You must be trolling, this is just sublation!" There have been other instances since. So, I was very excited to see someone holding down the lacanian side in the comment section--and yet more excited when I found out that person had a blog. I'm wanting for intellectual community, and while the rat space is vibrant, I think I am too heterodox to fully take the Yud-pill--so I'm hopeful for this space in the future. I've been reading a Secular Age all by my lonesome the past few weeks D,,,,,: So it's nice to imagine somewhere people are reading those sorts of books together.
I usually don't like to ask questions in comment sections of creators/writers--when other people do it it always strikes me as presumptuous--but given this comment section isn't exactly packed, I don't feel my usual reservations. You mention in one of your comments over on ACX blogs you read which brought you to Lacan--would you mind name-dropping those? I'm trying to develop a good diet for myself of this sort of stuff; your blog here is going to be my start, but I'm interested in expanding out from there. Also, more generally, do you have any general advice for someone isolated from more traditional forms of intellectual community--I'm not associated with any university, is what I mean--who is therefore seeking such online? How did you fall into it?
Hiya, happy to see you here! If you're checking out my blog, I recommend starting from most recent and reading backwards, rather than reading forwards. It's very scattershot and I always back-link when necessary. And I'm always happy to see comments, especially thoughtful ones, although I don't get many!
I'll answer the easy questions first: unfortunately, most of the Lacanian blogs I used to follow are dead, or at least very inactive. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/ was a great one, as was https://psuedoanalysis.blogspot.com/. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ is also great, although it's been dead for years (recent books excepting) and isn't totally Lacanian, although it is psychoanalytic. I also pay some attention to Reddit /r/lacan and used to spend a lot of time on the nosubject wiki. But there's no substitute for books and thinking through it on your own.
Re: intellectual community, you might not believe this, but I met most of my peers through Twitter (you'll see me drop content from there a lot; plenty of cool and well-read folks, I'm often humbled by people who're way ahead of me in terms of knowledge). I'm in a couple Discord chats where I have good discussions (one is affiliated with a group blog, https://tis.so/ that I've posted on occasionally). I also live in NYC which helps, because I can get more face time with an intellectual crowd, although I'm also not affiliated with any institutions. It's mostly friends I met on Twitter and ended up hanging out with irl. Feel free to add me on Twitter/Discord (@qorprate / snav#6069) and I can point you to some folks!
As for the rationalists, I think part of their hesitancy to deal with continental ideas goes back partly to a conception of those ideas as being "academic" (and they are *vehemently* anti-academic). To use their own framing here, a lot of the status signaling in rationalist circles is about coming up with new ideas based on the site's previous canon (this status game is ironically a mirror of academia), so "importing" ideas from old books means they'd lose out on a chance to show off by coming up with something new. Best approach tbh is to reframe ideas like dialectics in their terminology and coin new terms for whatever you end up with.
The disdain for theory also ties into their idea of "beliefs paying rent" and avoiding "floating beliefs": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences. The rationalists seem to believe, based on this, that knowledge exists fundamentally as (1) a predictive tool, for (2) pointing to specific empirical referents (i.e. a weirdo positivism). This rules out entire classes of knowledge, as well as actions that involve the play of messages across society (in the Foucaultian sense). This mindset makes itself known when they call some things "fake" and other things "real", as you surely saw in the ACX post's comment section. In practice, they don't think too hard about epistemology, and mostly wield a sort of modified common sense. This is why rationalists get pilloried as "liberals" (well, before they started getting pilloried as "right-wingers"). At least, this is what I think.
Hope you enjoy A Secular Age! It's a great book, although it can be a bit repetitive and tedious at times. Having deadlines helped a lot, lmao. Suddenly you start seeing Protestantism everywhere...
Hello! Thanks so much for your reply. Apologies for the delay on my response--embarrassingly, I thought I was more or less shouting out into the void when commenting, and so when you responded I had a flash of social anxiety, like I had been fishing without bait on the line but got a bite. So, I got unnecessarily in my head about it.
Thanks for the lead on the old Lacan blogs you mention: no substitute for the genuine article, of course, but a fourteen(?) volume series of books for the seminars and then the big chunker of the Ecrits make for a daunting shelf to just jump into--psychologically, I don't know what it says about me, but I prefer sliding slowly into topics. My friend who is an (aspiring) Heidegger scholar is bringing me slowly through Being and Time, so I think my ideal approach to Lacan will be to net a Lacanian and have them help me through it.
The focus on beliefs paying rent is a reason, actually, I'm surprised more rats don't react positively to theory. Or no, that's wrong--I'm not surprised they don't react positively, but I would say that I could justify my engagement with theorists like Butler and Sartre and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (and because of her Melanie Klein) and Maggie Nelson and Alan Grossman and Fredric Jameson solely on the basis how well their theory anticipates experience I've had I thought private. The amount of times I've been reading theory and been like: "Oh my god, that's me, this gives me language to explain this super specific experience I thought marked me out from the human community and reveals that experience of exception was actually, if not a universal one, then at the very least shared". But a lot of other smart people I know (not rats, but irl) have that reaction not at all to the stuff that's revelatory for me.
I revivified my old twitter to add you, and whomever else dwells on that part of the site, and added you on discord. Thanks again for that and thanks again, sincerely, for responding!
Came to you through the Astral Codex Ten Lacan Review pipeline, lol. Interested to see what you have to say. I'm new to rationalist spaces (new, and not entirely sold) and something that's been niggling me since coming upon them was the absence of influence from continental philosophy/critical theory/psychoanalysis/post-structuralism etc. The thing which set me off, I remember, was somebody trying to come up with a new term, for use in the analysis of cultural progress, that would mean not just to move past, but to "transcend and include". I can't remember the term and I can't remember the poster, but I remember thinking: "You must be trolling, this is just sublation!" There have been other instances since. So, I was very excited to see someone holding down the lacanian side in the comment section--and yet more excited when I found out that person had a blog. I'm wanting for intellectual community, and while the rat space is vibrant, I think I am too heterodox to fully take the Yud-pill--so I'm hopeful for this space in the future. I've been reading a Secular Age all by my lonesome the past few weeks D,,,,,: So it's nice to imagine somewhere people are reading those sorts of books together.
I usually don't like to ask questions in comment sections of creators/writers--when other people do it it always strikes me as presumptuous--but given this comment section isn't exactly packed, I don't feel my usual reservations. You mention in one of your comments over on ACX blogs you read which brought you to Lacan--would you mind name-dropping those? I'm trying to develop a good diet for myself of this sort of stuff; your blog here is going to be my start, but I'm interested in expanding out from there. Also, more generally, do you have any general advice for someone isolated from more traditional forms of intellectual community--I'm not associated with any university, is what I mean--who is therefore seeking such online? How did you fall into it?
Hiya, happy to see you here! If you're checking out my blog, I recommend starting from most recent and reading backwards, rather than reading forwards. It's very scattershot and I always back-link when necessary. And I'm always happy to see comments, especially thoughtful ones, although I don't get many!
I'll answer the easy questions first: unfortunately, most of the Lacanian blogs I used to follow are dead, or at least very inactive. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/ was a great one, as was https://psuedoanalysis.blogspot.com/. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ is also great, although it's been dead for years (recent books excepting) and isn't totally Lacanian, although it is psychoanalytic. I also pay some attention to Reddit /r/lacan and used to spend a lot of time on the nosubject wiki. But there's no substitute for books and thinking through it on your own.
Re: intellectual community, you might not believe this, but I met most of my peers through Twitter (you'll see me drop content from there a lot; plenty of cool and well-read folks, I'm often humbled by people who're way ahead of me in terms of knowledge). I'm in a couple Discord chats where I have good discussions (one is affiliated with a group blog, https://tis.so/ that I've posted on occasionally). I also live in NYC which helps, because I can get more face time with an intellectual crowd, although I'm also not affiliated with any institutions. It's mostly friends I met on Twitter and ended up hanging out with irl. Feel free to add me on Twitter/Discord (@qorprate / snav#6069) and I can point you to some folks!
As for the rationalists, I think part of their hesitancy to deal with continental ideas goes back partly to a conception of those ideas as being "academic" (and they are *vehemently* anti-academic). To use their own framing here, a lot of the status signaling in rationalist circles is about coming up with new ideas based on the site's previous canon (this status game is ironically a mirror of academia), so "importing" ideas from old books means they'd lose out on a chance to show off by coming up with something new. Best approach tbh is to reframe ideas like dialectics in their terminology and coin new terms for whatever you end up with.
The disdain for theory also ties into their idea of "beliefs paying rent" and avoiding "floating beliefs": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences. The rationalists seem to believe, based on this, that knowledge exists fundamentally as (1) a predictive tool, for (2) pointing to specific empirical referents (i.e. a weirdo positivism). This rules out entire classes of knowledge, as well as actions that involve the play of messages across society (in the Foucaultian sense). This mindset makes itself known when they call some things "fake" and other things "real", as you surely saw in the ACX post's comment section. In practice, they don't think too hard about epistemology, and mostly wield a sort of modified common sense. This is why rationalists get pilloried as "liberals" (well, before they started getting pilloried as "right-wingers"). At least, this is what I think.
Hope you enjoy A Secular Age! It's a great book, although it can be a bit repetitive and tedious at times. Having deadlines helped a lot, lmao. Suddenly you start seeing Protestantism everywhere...
Hello! Thanks so much for your reply. Apologies for the delay on my response--embarrassingly, I thought I was more or less shouting out into the void when commenting, and so when you responded I had a flash of social anxiety, like I had been fishing without bait on the line but got a bite. So, I got unnecessarily in my head about it.
Thanks for the lead on the old Lacan blogs you mention: no substitute for the genuine article, of course, but a fourteen(?) volume series of books for the seminars and then the big chunker of the Ecrits make for a daunting shelf to just jump into--psychologically, I don't know what it says about me, but I prefer sliding slowly into topics. My friend who is an (aspiring) Heidegger scholar is bringing me slowly through Being and Time, so I think my ideal approach to Lacan will be to net a Lacanian and have them help me through it.
The focus on beliefs paying rent is a reason, actually, I'm surprised more rats don't react positively to theory. Or no, that's wrong--I'm not surprised they don't react positively, but I would say that I could justify my engagement with theorists like Butler and Sartre and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (and because of her Melanie Klein) and Maggie Nelson and Alan Grossman and Fredric Jameson solely on the basis how well their theory anticipates experience I've had I thought private. The amount of times I've been reading theory and been like: "Oh my god, that's me, this gives me language to explain this super specific experience I thought marked me out from the human community and reveals that experience of exception was actually, if not a universal one, then at the very least shared". But a lot of other smart people I know (not rats, but irl) have that reaction not at all to the stuff that's revelatory for me.
I revivified my old twitter to add you, and whomever else dwells on that part of the site, and added you on discord. Thanks again for that and thanks again, sincerely, for responding!