Lacan and Sexual Difference Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (March 23, 2011) This lecture is longer by 15 minutes than the one below.
This is identical recording of Žižek’s lecture by another person.
Mp3 audio recording of lecture here.
Lacan reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference How can he re-sexualize universe without regressing in a premodern ontology.
Sexual difference is purely formal. The way SD functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. Even natural sexuality can be sexualized.
Formal structure and immediate reality: you can imagine a couple just doing it as a pure instrumental activity, doing it mechanically. And we do some things that have nothing to do w/ sexuality but can be sexualized. Imagine I meet you, we shake hands, the very simple act of squeezing your hand, and not letting go.
This act of repetition sexualizes it. Sexuality spills over, is not sign of its strength, but its weakness. It doesn’t work in its own domain so it must expand.
We should move to ontology of incompleteness. Like Kant mathematical and dynamic antinomies, the Lacanian not-all. This impossibility of getting it all, of getting a totalized reality. The first thing Lacan gets us to do: We move from Kant to Hegel.
Kant remains too epistemological, he thinks there is an objective reality out there and because of the limitations of our categories we can’t get at it. Hegel says what if we transpose this structure of failure hinderance into the thing-itself. Heisneberg thinks its epistemological way, but Bohrs, this impossibility is in the thing-itself.
Incompleteness of society The incompleteness of the structure of reality and in order to make it consistent is to supplement with a virtual fiction. Bentham’s point is yes we can distinguish what is fiction/reality, BUT if we take away the fiction we lose reality itself. This point was made by GK. Chesteron.
Necessity of fictional supplement: We all know that we want to do that (have sex) but the question in what way. You ask 5 men, what you want to do, the cloud should show you need a fiction to do it, that is don’t just show cloud of naked woman, but the cloud should show, while reading a book, while walking on the beach etc.
Reality structured like a fiction: show only reality, but to make us experience it as a magical fiction.
Children of Men At the very end, in a small boat to a scene where some kind of ship called ‘tomorrow’. It seems so obvious that although it is shot like reality, the ship is pure appearance, it was the dying dream. A radical ambiguity at the end.
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