Pill Pod 222 - Lacan's Subject: The Split (exclusive)
Added 2025-08-29 20:31:54 +0000 UTCWe return to Bruce Fink's Lacanian Subject (1995) and jump to chapter 4 to discuss the barred subject and why Disney's "Inside Out" and Jungian theory suck.
This is the book: https://amzn.to/4oubPxQ
Comments
did u just make a great Freudian slip by saying ‘ it indicates a split..like a Freudian split does..” ? You slipped and said ‘Freudian split’ instead of ‘Freudian slip” . Excellent!!!!! eclipse example precise!
Zachary Manenti
2025-09-15 17:35:12 +0000 UTCThis conversation on the subject emerging in the split is extremely compelling. The statement “I can’t help but feel I am trapped,” also implies something: that a decision must be made, and through that decision a new definition of the self is forged. It recalls Sophocles's play Oedipus the King. In this play, Oedipus, as king of Thebes, must investigate a murder. An important question, then, is: what is his procedure? We all witness him rejecting early evidence that implicates him. Not great from an investigative perspective, but understandable considering how extraordinary the claims are. However the evidence keeps coming and he repeatedly rejects it; however before these rejections, we see him “split,” again and again. Each time, he is unsettled. He wavers. He finally comes to accept the evidence, as everybody knows, gouging out his eyes and exiling himself. But something interesting happens after that: when the chorus asks what drove him to do this, he responds (around line 1330) that while Apollo brought him all this misery, “the hand that struck me was none but my own.” I read this as an affirmation that character (a “subject”?) has no original content. It emerges only in the moment of a “split.” It may be worth noting that “character” (and I get this from Classics scholars) in Greek drama functions very differently from our contemporary understanding of the term (in which the “character” of a protagonist is equated with their “personality” and internal psychology). For Greek drama, instead, there is no predetermined subject within the character apart from its the name and social role. And what that character “is,” operates strictly within the diegesis of the play, in other words, only through the decisions made while navigating the plot in which it is enmeshed. (consequently, to read Oedipus like this would naturally require quarantining Aristotle’s Poetics as well as Freud’s complex, because both import too much content into the character that Sophocles presents) I’m wondering if this is a fair application of Lacan’s “split.” I anticipate he might reject the idea that the subject that is somehow “determined” or “resolved” in the wake of a split…..looking forward to the next episode.
ZDR Mackin
2025-09-08 03:43:07 +0000 UTC
