Rev Left Radio - Learning About Lacan w/ Todd McGowan

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Todd McGowan returns to the show, this time to discuss the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. Breht and Todd explore many of his core concepts, his relation to Freud and Freud’s theory, his politics, his contributions to psychology, how his insights can useful for us today, and so much more.  Check out Todd's podcast “Why Theory?” on your preferred podcast app! Previous episdoes with Todd: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/capitalism-and-desire-in-dialogue-with-psychoanalysis https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/hegel Outro music: "Cold Blood" by Josiah and the Bonnevilles Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on this show, Professor Todd McGowan, to talk about Lacan's psychoanalysis, its relationship to capitalism, to the left, to Marxism, to French existentialism, and much more. Now, Todd McGowan is not only a fan favorite, but also one of my favorite guests, because not only is he deeply intelligent, and very insightful, but he's also incredibly entertaining and genuinely down-to-earth and funny in a way that makes, you know, complicated discussions understandable and enjoyable. So you couldn't ask for a better guest to wrestle with something like Lecon. And of course, Todd McGowan has been on the show a couple times already. He came on for the first time in 2019 to talk about his book, Emancipation after Hegel,

achieving a contradictory revolution, in which we talked about Marxist and Hagellian dialectics, contradiction, the role of the unconscious, et cetera. And then he came back on in 2020 to talk about his book, Capitalism and Desire, the Psychic Costs of Free Markets, where we had another wonderful discussion about Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Freud, the Death Drive, Desire, Black, etc. And this can be seen as sort of a third installment, if you will, of the Todd McGowan show coming on Rev. Left to share his insights and his knowledge.

And of course, you don't have to listen to. of these in any order. But if you like this episode, definitely, definitely go back and check out those other two if you haven't already, and I'll link to those in the show notes. So without further ado, here's my fascinating and very entertaining discussion with Professor Todd McGowan on Lacan and McCannian psychoanalysis. Enjoy. I'm Todd McGowan. I teach at the University of Vermont, critical theory, philosophy, film studies, and I've written a couple books, a book on comedy called Only Joe Can Save Us, a book on Hegel called Emancipation after Hegel, and a book called Capitalism Desire. My newest book is called The Racist. Actually, two new books coming out, The Racist Fantasy, and enjoyment right and left or enjoying right and left. I can't remember what the final title is. One of those. Anyway, that's me. Yeah, well, welcome back. You're definitely a fan favorite of the show. You're

one of my personal favorite guests. Very glad to have you back. You have two new books that have not come out yet, but are coming out soon. Is that right? That's right. In the next couple of months. That's right, Brett. I just have to say that this is my favorite podcast to come on. So I love, I love coming here. Well, I appreciate that deeply. And I was going to, we were talking before we started recording and I was saying, I was even laughing with my audio guy because Todd is the only guest where when I send him the questions ahead of time, he responds by saying, I was kind of hoping that we could have it spontaneous. So if you want to just throw some random questions at me throughout this episode and put me on my toes, I'm down for that, which is why Todd is a great guest and

why this conversation is going to be very fun. Well, that's very generous of you. Absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and start with a with a question I did not put on the outline, which is much more personal, actually. I've actually heard you refer to yourself as a francophile, and I have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to France to Paris next week with my travel and my hotel completely paid for, which is absolutely astounding. Awesome. But I'm very nervous because I know that there's like this stereotype about,

I've only had two weeks to even know about this, much less try to learn French. So I was wondering, do you have any advice or I assume you've been to be? Paris? Do you have any advice or recommendations? I've been a few times. Yeah. Yeah. I think I I tell you, until I went to Berlin, Paris was my favorite city in the world. So it's, it's amazing. And I, and people are, people are nice enough. I mean, they're, they're, they're, they're, it's not, I think the stereotype is a little over over done. Okay. So it's and and and and, and actually if you, everyone speaks, I mean, almost everyone speaks English. So that's not a, I mean, that's true wherever you travel in the world. So that's not a problem. And I think it's actually easier if you're just an English speaker not trying

to speak French than if you're an English speaker speaking French. Because I, yeah, I got a lot of, I get my, I'm not a really, I don't have a good facility with language and I have a terrible ear. So my, I have a very strong accent in both German and French. And I got a lot of corrections of my, my accent, what I've read. So that's a little off footing. But I think if you're just speaking, like my sons were with me on the last trip and they had no they encountered no problems at all okay so because i was thinking of at least at least learning in french um i'm a stupid american and i can't speak french to try to soften the blow or something but i've heard yeah that's fine but i don't think you even need to do that okay i think it's i think it's they almost can identify you by

your dress and so you at least they could be because i have a you know i always wear a baseball there's not too many people walking around paris with a baseball cap on so uh that that that kind of gives it away and and so they just would know they I had that they would speak to me in English and then I just speak back in French and that would start the conversation in French so it's it's often that they even just can look at you and they know okay that's very interesting so I'll run with that yeah because I'm I'm very nervous about that part in particular and don't want to play that's nothing I but I have to say that I I don't really like traveling places where I don't know the language so I feel I understand your your feeling about that for sure cool

Yeah, one time I was, well, I did a whole episode on Al Thuzei a few years ago. And I was trying to be, I guess, too cute by half. I was just trying to speak it in more of a French way. And I would say Al Thusay and somebody reached out to me and absolutely devastated me and the DMs over my pronunciation. I know, I know. It's like I, when we, this actually comes right to the topic of the podcast. So when, when friends of mine and I first in graduate school started to read Lacan, we started to, we would talk about his. translator is Jacqueline Melaire. And his name is Jacqueline Melaire. So that was a time where we were trying to, you know, just like you were saying with Alta Ceres, we were trying to pronounce it a la Francaise in the French way. And we were butchering it even worse that we normally would. So yeah, so that's, it's interesting. And La Cahn's name is an interesting one too, because I once heard Maler give a talk in English in Los Angeles. And he just said La Con, Lacan, Lacan, La Con. And of course, in French, it's Lacan. So that's a tough one. Like, I have friends that always say Lacanne, and I find it a little pretentious. So I'm not going to say that during this podcast. Okay, yeah, well, let's go with Lecon, but technically it's Lacan. La Con. And one more thing about France, do you just have, like, obviously there's the Louvre and the catacombs and like the Notre Dame and, you know, walking along the Sen. Do you have any, like, out of left field?

like one place that you would recommend them there for a whole week. And there's two of those days I'll be completely alone. So I'm wondering. Yeah, I think a couple things. So like there's a, there's a bookstore called,

I think it's called Shakespeare and Company. And that's a real, it's an English bookstore. And Hemingway used to hang out there. That's, if it's still open, that's pretty cool to go to. It's right on the scent.

And I would, just the thing you said, like walking along the sand, I think is amazing. I think the Louvre, this is going to, I'm going to occasional lot of, of hostility.

I think the Louve is wildly disappointed. Yeah, I think, because the art is all very old, and so that's a little less interesting. So like Musei Dorsay, I think, is a little, which used to be a train station, that's a little cooler, I think, to go to. But I have to say, my favorite thing in Paris, this is going to sound stupid, but they have the greatest film, like they have all these film, old theaters, and there's, there's all kinds of film, like little festivals, little, you know, screenings of different older films. And so that's what, so when I was there with my boys like four years ago, we saw the wild bunch and we saw all about Eve. And that's what they remember. They remember all about Eve more from Paris than anything else. So that's what that's what I like to do there. I just think it's amazing. You know, there's these things you never get to see in a big screen and they're just playing all that time in Paris. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Well, I appreciate that. I'll definitely let you know how the, how the trip goes. I'm excited and anxious and equal measure, but we'll see. Yeah. But it's also a really good little Mexican restaurant, not. far from the scent i forget what road it's on so really that's kind of counterintuitive i know i mean i the thing is if you're if you're vegetarian france is not the greatest place so we had to kind of seek out uh mexican asian kind of places but oh the other thing is a crap is amazing so

and and and my advice on the crep is always on a street not in the restaurant so the street crep is almost always better than what you would get in a restaurant oh yeah I substituted that for a meal of chocolate crap about, you know, every day I was there. Well, I deeply appreciate that. Thank you so much. But today's topic is not about my upcoming trip to France. It is about the psychoanalytic thinker Lacan. So we're going to talk mostly about the con.

And Lecon is, at least in my, you know, experience difficult. I'm certainly, this is a topic that I am coming into the conversation knowing probably less than average. on, you know, the average topics I cover, I know more, I have more background information, always been interested in psychoanalysis, but have veered more towards reading Freud and Jung than Lecon, if for no other reason than of the difficulty and not having a really, the time and energy to dive into them specifically. So just, that's the caveat up front. And we also have had you on for a few other episodes on your book, Capitalism and Desire and your book on Hegel, so people can go back and check those out if they're interested. But I guess the best way to get into this conversation

is actually another question that wasn't on the outline, which is about psychoanalysis more broadly before we get into Lacan proper. And that is just to kind of frame, you know, because my audience is more, you know, left-wing political philosophy types, political theory, not so much super into psychoanalysis necessarily, at least not all of them. So with that in mind, like, what is the, how would you say the core project of psychoanalysis is? Like, what core issue or set of issues is psychoanalysis broadly attempting to understand and address. So I think there's two things. I would say, and these two things to me determine if you're someone invested in psychoanalysis or not.

So you believe in the importance of centrality, the unconscious, and then you secondly believe in something like the death drive or importance of our unconscious self-destructiveness, so that the unconscious manifests itself as self-destructiveness. And I think the way that what psychoanaut, the project of psychoanalysis is how we can allow ourselves to follow our desire in a way that doesn't totally destroy us and allows for some kind of freedom, equality within the social order. So I see in this, I see that what drives psychoanalysis is very much linked to what drives Marxism, leftist politics, et cetera. So to me, I don't, other than this emphasis on the unconscious and on the self-destructive nature of subjectivity, I don't see a gap between what psychoanalysis is trying to do

and what leftist, other leftist political projects they're trying to do. Very interesting. Yeah, I like that a lot. What is the, I mean, I think I have like a sort of a half-assed understanding of the death drive and I've talked about it at some, sometimes in the past and feel like maybe I don't have the full picture of what it is. Can you kind of flesh out what the death drive is and see if I match up to it? Sure. So it sounds strange. The name of it is maybe unfortunate. It comes just Freud himself came up with this in a book called Beyond the Pleasure principle in 1920. And it suggests that we're driven to just to die. And I think that's, misleading and what but what it means is that we whenever things seem to be going well for us we create some internal sabotage in order to in order to keep our desire going so so you might think of it like death drive is the thing that keeps us always desiring and never getting to a point of even calm where everything is just smoothly going nicely right like if if if things are going well then you

find a way to disturb how things are going well. And I think that's the, that's to me, that's the best understanding of death drive. And so what it manifests itself in as is repetition. So you repeat these same self-sabotage, same failings in order to keep yourself desiring. Because if you don't do that, then if you don't, if you don't make these self-destructive moves, then things flatten out. You might say it's a way to keep your life interesting. interesting, right? Like that's sort of the psychoanalysis theory of how we, what we do to keep ourselves, our lives interesting. Yeah, so let me, let me bounce this off you really quick. And this is kind of personal. Let me see if this dovetails with that idea, which is, you know,

if you would have asked me a couple years ago when I was working these shitty retail jobs and all these terrible jobs I had to work, if you could do anything, you know, in your life and to get a good paycheck, you're not going to be rich, but you'll be able to pay your bills. What would you like to do? And I would have said something like doing this, doing these shows that I do, educating, hopefully inspiring people, you know, being a contributor to the left in the U.S., etc. And so before I thought that so much of my, you know, neurosis and anxieties and depressions were not fully but half at least centered around this drudgery that I was forced to do all the time. And then when I got what I wanted, you know, this show took off and I'm able to

support my family by doing it. I find myself, even with my wildest, dreams more or less answered, still completely unsatisfied. And actually now I've had periods of time where I've flirted with the idea of going back to like cook pizzas in a kitchen or go work as a maintenance guy on a golf course again. And it's like, what the fuck? Like nothing, nothing can make me me happy. I don't know. Like is that, does that dovetail? It's absolutely right. It's absolutely right. It's a great, it's a great example of what the psychoanalytic notion of death drive is. And I think what I like to think of it. terms of sports, right? Like if you're, if you're watching the sporting event and the team that

you root for, the person you root for wins convincingly, you're just like, okay, that's boring, I'm going to even turn it off. So, right? And so, but if the person's struggling and barely getting by and might is on the threat of losing, then, or the team is in that situation, then it's riveting and you're, you can't take your eyes off. And so same thing with our lives, I think. Like the, I was just, I, I, I end up overcommitting myself to different projects. And I've I complain about it constantly to my, to my part, my spouse and my twin sons. And they're all like, can you please shut up? You do it to, you do it to yourself.

Like, you could just say no to any number of these things, but you never do. So consciously, I feel like, oh, I'm so overburdened, et cetera, et cetera. But unconsciously, and this is why that drive is linked to the unconscious. So unconsciously, I keep on doing, I keep doing it. So clearly there's, I'm getting a. satisfaction from it. And that's, I think, the key thing, that there's something satisfying about that, you know, keeping yourself desiring. And if you, and if, once you, if you reach that stable point, like you with this job, like, it's a nice point, right? Like, you can just say, like,

let me just rest in this and enjoy it and, and, and really, like, I'm getting to do my dream, but that's not what happens. So I think that's a really, it's like a, I think I was almost a perfect example of the way that psychoanalytic death drive manifests itself what would be the psychoanalytic approach to dealing with that problem well it's to see that i think it's to see that you're always in that situation right so that the the point is that you you stop looking for this it's not that you stop trying to get a better job or you know change the world politically of course not but you don't think that when i move to that new thing all of a sudden i'm going to like all this feeling of being put upon or being, you know, not being missing out on something, all this,

the problem, like, that's not going to go away with the, with the change. And I think that's really, to me, that's the, the driving engine behind capital's subjectivity. It's that if I get this new thing, all of a sudden, the way I, this, this sense I have now that I'm, I'm unfulfilled, it'll be gone. But that, you know, everyone who's purchased a commodity knows that that's not true, right? Or got a different job. It's not true. Like I, I, I, when I was teaching in Texas, I thought, it's just exactly the same situation to you. I thought, if I get to Vermont, it'll be perfect. And then I get here and it's, I say the same kind of thing because I could, there's a, there's a great Adam Sandler. It's like a little five minute ad about a vacation. It's like a, he's a travel agent or a

vacation. He says, like, we can take you somewhere else, but you're still going to be, you when you get to that new place. And it's a great, it's a great psychoanalytic point, I think. Yeah, absolutely. It dovetails kind of like with Buddhist ideas, like, you know, you can go to the top of the mountain, but you're bringing your mind with you. You know, going to the external new place or getting the new thing isn't going to eradicate the 30 plus years of momentum and psychological structuring that has been reinforced.

So wherever you are, you're there, and that's kind of the realization at some level. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. Well, let's get into the topic of this episode, which is Lacan. For those who know, this is the last time I'll say that. For those who know little to nothing about Lacan, can you kind of tell us just like who he was, what he's known for generally and like why he's an important, you know, thinker or historical figure? Sure, sure. So he lived for most of the 20th century.

He dies in 1981, but was born in 1900, 1901, I think. And he, even though his life somewhat overlapped with Freud, he's basically a second or even third. generation psychoanalytic thinker who made it his project to do what he called a lot of people just known for this, a return to Freud. And what he meant by that was he thought that subsequent psychoanalysts had lost touch with these things that I just mentioned, unconscious death drive, and the importance of sexuality. So basically those three things. And he tries to re-read Freud's text with keeping those concepts to the four. So that's what he tries to do. I think what he doesn't announce in his project and what I think is vital to it is that he's bringing. So Freud was notoriously

wanted to keep psychoanalysis free of philosophy. He thought this is a, and I think he was just wrong about this. He thought this is a scientific endeavor. It's not a philosophical one. And so I'm not going to talking. I'm not going to make reference to different philosophers. He didn't read Hegel, for instance. His reading of Kant is very tendentious. He's reading of Marx equally, I think. So one of the things Lacan does, which is to me very interesting, is that he brings incredible reading in the history of philosophy, which he brings to bear on his understanding of Freud. So that's the first thing, I think, is the key part of this project. The second part that I think is key is that he, this is how I would put it. I think there are other people that are Lacanian that

wouldn't put it this way, but I think it's, obviously I think it's right. He socializes Freud. So Freud, there's a few moments where Freud totem and taboo, civilization discontent, Moses, monotheism, where he thinks about the structure of the social order in relation to the individual psyche. But for Lacan, that's the, in a certain way, that's the whole ballgame. So that's why he's been very fecund for this philosophical interest of his but also he introduces the importance of the social order

into thinking about psychoanalysis in a way that Freud didn't. He stresses that with his concept of the big other, which is basically Heidegger's idea of the they or Dasmann. So he brought that into psychoanalysis. There's this pressure to conform,

pressure to belong. And so that's what a lot of leftists have found really helpful about Lacan is that he brings this social dimension of psychoanalysis way up front. And that's something that Freud, you could say he does, but it's more implicit except for these few works that I mentioned. Right. Yeah. So he brings in a robust sort of respect for philosophy and brings it into his work more broadly. And he gets away from the hyper individualism of Freud and socializes it to me. make more sense of the social as opposed to the merely individual?

Right. I think that's right. Or he brings out the social dimension that was just implied in Freud. I think that's how you said it is right, I think. So in my admittedly, you know, limited understanding of Lecon, I've also heard, and I've heard you talk about how Lecon has brought in the related fields of structural linguistics and semiotics into psychoanalysis. And I think there's some quote, maybe by Lecon himself, about Freud never had access to structural. linguistics, but clearly it would have been absorbed if he had. Can you tell us if that's right? And then what structural linguistics and semiotics are and how LaConne kind of puts them in service of psychoanalysis? Yeah, that's absolutely right. And what's interesting is Freud

almost is an exact contemporary of Ferdinenda Sassur, who is the thinker that Lekon, one of his main, the main semiotician linguist that he references. So, but Susser's works weren't published during Freud's lifetime or very late. So that's what LaConn means by he didn't have access to it. And it's really, Lecon really comes to Sussure and structuralism, structural linguistics through his friend Claude Levy Strauss. So it's Levy Strauss who introduces him to that whole line of thinking. And that provides the basis for what I mentioned before,

this social dimension of psychoanalysis that Lecon is going to develop. Because once you put the emphasis on language, you put the, the emphasis on how there's a whole web of mediation that informs the structure of subjectivity and that's what he's going to that's what psychoanalysis is is paying attention to so it so Freud is good I think on the inherent antagonism between the individual and the society but he doesn't get at how totally how the the social web of the network of symbolic relations what lecon calls symbolic order, how that informs the very structure of subjectivity. And Lacanis said, you know, and you have an entire episode dedicated to this aphorism that

the unconscious is structured like a language. Can you flesh that out for us a little bit? Yeah. So he, what's interesting about this, he does this all the time. He's disingenuous because he does actually say at one point earlier in his thought, the unconscious is language. but then he says later, I never have said the unconscious is language. It's structured like, but anyway, the point is it's structured like a language, which means it has a structure. That is, that it relies, if you think about it, like the way a slip works, right? Like you have a, you make a slip because there's a certain relation between those two words. And that relation between the two words is how your unconscious can manifest itself. So I can't directly say what's on my,

what's in my unconscious mind but if I if I you know I make a I used to I've given this example several different places so hopefully people listening haven't heard this but when I was with my girlfriend in college I wasn't so satisfied with her she wasn't very nice and was a terrible relationship and I would constantly call her name was Zoe I would constantly call her Jill who was my girlfriend from high school who I still liked and so so she would go berserk she'd be like what the hell but i so my unconscious and finally i just got to calling her honey or so you hear some of these stupid uh little terms because i was like it's just too painful to keep doing this so but but that's the way that my unconscious like there was no other way other

than to make this little linguistic connection between the two between the two signifiers jill so So that's a, that's a, that's a one, that's just, that's what he means, that, that, that, that the unconscious has to manifest itself and use the structure of signification to appear. That's how it works. And, and that, that kind of cashes out in, on one level in, like, dreams where there are certain symbols and metaphors for things that aren't directly being pointed to, but sort of have maybe an adjacency, um, conceptually to them that the brain makes use of in dreams. Is that a fair way to think about it? No, that's absolutely right. And so Freud uses these terms condensation and displacement to describe how dreams work. And then Leconn interestingly translates that to the terms of structural linguistics, metaphor, and metonymy. So he sees condensation, displacement, and dreams working in the same way that the language structure makes connections between different words or different

signifiers. So that's, that's, yeah, it's a good example by you that the dream shows that nicely this transition from Freud to Lacan, from condensation displacement to metaphor and metonymy. Now, you've also talked about Lacan's dialectical approach to psychoanalysis and his insistence on subjectivity. Those are your words, I believe. Can you talk about those ideas and approaches, in part because I really appreciate how clear thinking you are when it comes to contradiction in particular in dialectics more broadly. I think there's a lot of lazy thinking and half-assed understandings around it, but you do a really good job of doing that. So you can talk about how Lacan brought in this dialectical approach in particular. Yeah, thanks. I think that's

right that Lecon really brings, and it's, let me just give a little historical background. So he went to, he was friends with Alexander Koja. the great interpreter, misinterpreter, but so great interpreter of Hegel in the early 20th century. So Kojeb famously gave these seminars in Paris on reading the phenomenology. Lacan went to those. Not only did it go to those, he had a separate sort of secret seminar with Kojev and only a couple people at his house every week after the actual seminar. So he really got a sense of Hegel from Kojev and a sense of dialectics, I think.

So I think he understands rightly by dialectics that it is the it is the understanding how contradiction is the motor of our social life and all everything that is. It's ontological too. I don't know that O'Conn would say that, but I would say that. And that it is the basis of the relationship between the subject and the social order is a dialogue of one, which means that the subject emerges through the contradiction within the society. So if there was no contradiction in society, there would be no subject and vice versa, right? So the subject is itself a contradictory entity, just like the way you described your, you know, when you're working the terrible job, you wanted the job you have now and now you don't want it.

So that's contradiction. And so it's out of that contradiction that then we have an opening from the subject to society. So there's this, I think Lecon sees how there's contradiction on both sides. and that's how they work together, not in a complimentary way because both are contradictory, but that's how there's an opening between subjectivity and the social order. So that's to me how he's really, he really is thinking dialectically, and I think he got that from Kojev, and that's part of the way he's bringing philosophy into psychoanalysis, although oftentimes not in ways that he thinks.

Like, he'll think I'm breaking from Hegel when he's saying a totally Hegelian thing, but that's because Koshab's reading of Hagell wasn't. exactly right. I see. And do you, I know we've done this in a past episode, but I really appreciate the way you do it. Can you kind of dismantle this thesis, antithesis, synthesis notion that that's dialectical and argue against it? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I think that's the definition of anti-dialectics, right? Because for Hegel, the point of dialectics is that we never just, and I think it can be dismantled on each of its points, right? So we never, first of all, we're moving toward a synthesis, that we're moving toward the reconciling ourselves to contradiction.

So we move toward greater contradiction, not toward the elimination of it. I think that's the Hegelian. That's the idea that the way that Hegel thinks. And that's not how Kojev interprets Hegel. So just to be clear. And I think each term is wrong. So Hegel doesn't believe that there's ever just a thesis articulated because he believes every claim that's made implies the contrary claim, which is why he's against making arguments and just working out philosophy in that way. And there's also never just an antithesis because the antithesis is always involved in the thing that it's trying to correct. And then there's never a synthesis in Hegel's thought, that every point that you would get to that would seem like it's the ultimate point is always

self-undermining. And that's the, to me, that's the main way to think about contradiction and dialectics is this idea of self-undermining so that it's not an external opposition between two points, which is what I think that thesis, antithesis, synthesis, like there's one point, second point, and then there's a third point that brings the two together. Well, no, even the first point is internally at odds with itself. So how can it be, how can there be this opposition that then comes to a solution? It just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And that's why Hegel never uses any of those terms in his, in his thought. So it's a, it's a strange. thing that that caught on is the way to read Hegel, but it did.

Totally. People should definitely get away from thinking in those terms. And one of the examples that, you know, helps make this idea clear is like just broadly speaking, progressive and reactionary forces in our broader society. The idea that their that their confrontation will somehow create a synthesis that, you know, that somehow resolves the contradiction in a way that's satisfying for both ends is sort of incoherent. And the idea that you could have peer progressiveness or peer reaction in lieu of their opposites. The moment progressiveness arises on the social scene, so too inherently and in that exact moment does the reaction to it. So it's not like this thing exists and then this other thing emerges to confront the thing and then something new

is made out of that confrontation. And I think that is a fundamental sort of fallacy inherent in that tripartite conception. Beautiful. Beautiful. What could I say after that? We should just stop the podcast. That was great. I loved that. I appreciate that. Okay. That makes sense then. And I think a lot of my listeners will be able to grapple with that. So moving on, what was, and we talked a little bit about this and we talked about going back to Freud. But what was Lecon's intellectual relationship to Freud and the tradition of psychoanalysis more broadly up to the point where he made his intervention? And in what ways did he perhaps develop psychoanalysis beyond Freud or even outright break with Freud? yeah I don't think he would say that he broke with Freud at all so he he he says very late in his thought he says it's this funny line he's like it's up to you to be Lacanian for my part I'm Freudian so he and that's very late it's like right before he died so he he I think whether he's right or wrong I think he he thinks of himself as a committed Freudian interestingly their only

interaction took place. Lacan sent him his thesis, which was on paranoid psychosis. And Freud sent him a postcard back that said, thanks for sending me your thesis. And that's it. And LaCard was pretty devastated, I think. And he had a chance. So when Freud was escaping the Nazis, he had a chance, this psychoanalytic thinker, Marie Bonaparte, basically financed his flight from the Nazis, paid them off. and as he came through Paris Lacan had a chance because some of his friends were just going to see him

he had a chance to meet him and he demurred he didn't want to do it so I think he didn't want to be disappointed a second time maybe but so that's just personal but in terms of theoretically yeah I think that he really thought

that he was being true to the Freudian legacy and you know he the number of there's a number of thinkers that are important for him psyched analytic thinkers you mentioned Jung not Jung I mean, he thinks Jung is a problem, not a, not a, not part of the answer.

Melanie Klein, although there is one thing from you, which I'll bring up in a second, but Melanie Klein, I think, would be the, the most significant other psychoanalytic thinker other than Freud for Lecona. And there, I think, I don't mean, it would take a more nuanced discussion, which I don't think is not that interesting, probably people listening, but to talk about his relationship to her. I don't think it's as close as. maybe some would, some would say, but a lot of, there are people that say his notion of the, the object, which is he says at one point, this is the only thing that I invented. It's a very

important notion to him. People link that to Melanie Klein. So, and her certain notion of the object and her the interjected object. So there is maybe some connection there. But Jung, just the point I was going to bring up is that he, he claims, Lecon claims Jung told him in a private conversation that as they were, as the steamer carrying Freud and Jung and a couple of their colleagues to America was arriving at the shore, Freud turned to him and said, they don't know we're bringing them the plague. And the only report of Jung saying that is still a con. So it's, I like that idea that maybe he just made it up. You know, he just, he said it after Jung was already dead. So there's like, you couldn't say, wait a minute, wait a minute, I didn't say that. So I like that idea that

But it just, he made that up. Freud should have said that if he didn't say. Well, what would, what in your estimation would Freud say about LaConne, right? Like we can know we can say LeCahn says that he's Freudian. Would Freud see it the same way? Yeah, I don't, you know, it's, that's a great question. And I think, wow, I. So part of me thinks he might respond.

So Martin Heidegger was friendly with LaCon and got, and LaCon in 1966. when I say Cree, his written work, was published. It was the first thing he published in the book form. He sent it to Heidegger, and Heidegger sent to someone, I think the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist. So he was like, I almost think Freud might say the same thing. Because I think that there are certain things about Lecon that he would find foreign. I don't know, maybe that's wrong.

And I esteem Freud almost more than any thinker in his. history. So I may I'm underselling him a little bit that he could he could he could maybe rise to the occasion. But I think he would find it a little and I find it this way too a little like jargony and and and off putting because he strove Freud strove so much to be comprehensible and clear such a great writer and Lecon strove to be opaque and you know hard to read. So I I think that Freud would have a big problem with that. About the ideas, I don't know. I think he would have liked the ideas if he would have got past the style. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, what would Marx have thought of Lenin and Mao? Like it would be fascinating to get them in the same room. It's a great, it's a great question. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, but because it's easy to do the other way because obviously they say something. But the question is like, what are we for them? Which I think is always a great question to ask yourself. Like not how can.

we criticize this prior thinker knowing what we know today but how would that prior thinker criticize us right you know in our situation because that's not always we think like because I think there's this illusion of intellectual progress that oh we're so much beyond these but that's not true like there's a you know each each epic has its own particular contradiction that the thinker is wrestling with and that they're and so how they relate to that can give them a insight, I think, that gets obfuscated later. So that, I, I, I think it's, it's such a great question, yeah, about how, how does the earlier think or think about the later one? Yeah. We will never know, but definitely interesting to think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's a great,

I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a bookworthy question, I think, actually. You know, really, like, somebody, I'm, I'm sure someone probably has, but someone should write a book, like what Mark's really thought of Lenin or something, you know. Yeah, I'm sure there's been wrestles with attempts to wrestle with that, but yeah, I'm not, nothing jumps to mind immediately. Well, this question was actually towards the end, but it's just, I kind of want to talk about it now, which is just out of peer personal curiosity, kind of thinking about Jung. I found Jung particularly helpful in like moments of, you know, spiritual suffering. Obviously, spiritual communities make great use of Jung in particular, not so much of Lacan and Freud. What are your

thoughts on Jung? Why don't you necessarily emphasize them as much as you emphasize Freud and Lacan, and what was his impact on psychoanalysis in your, in your estimation? Yeah, I think that he, there's a lot of interesting things in Jung, and I can see why that would, it's, there's a certain kind of comfort. I can see why religious traditions would turn to him. I almost think that that's also the problem with him. So I think that, and I can, I can really distill what I think the problem with him is in a nutshell, that for Jung, and this comes back to this contradiction question. For Jung, there are certain complementary forces in the world, Yin and Yang, and they exist, part of what he's trying to do is accomplish, and he thinks

psychoanalysis is trying to do, is come to a balance of those opposed and complementary forces. And I think for Freud and Lecon, the whole point is that there's a contradictory relation within the subject, so how in the world can there be a complementary relation between two kinds of subjectivity? So I think that, I think what Ferdin Lecon would say and what I would say about Jung is that he basically erases the problem of subjectivity within under the umbrella of complementarity. So I think that's the, that's the, to me, the problem with the Jungian approach. I think in a way, he's not actually a psychoanalytic thinker. If psychoanalysis means this disjunction or or or discontent of the subject within of you know

civilization as discontentance like the the the the the German term for it uses unbehagen to be unbehagen in their culture like to be un at home in culture like in your culture and I don't think you think thinks that like I think he thinks we can be at home and and that makes him not fully a psychoanalytic thinker but I think on the other hand I think there's a lot of some of the things that he says about myth and, you know, introvert, extrovert. I think there are a lot of really good lines of thought, but then to me, this ultimate point of complementarity ends up being, how would you say it, like stopping these lines of inquiry at the point where they would start to get most compelling.

That's very interesting. What do you find particularly useful in him? Is there anything you can salvage? yeah I think I again like all these things like I think like trying to talk about the introvert and the extrovert trying to talk about the importance of myth I think like is an interesting one collective unconscious like that to me that like it comes really close to getting the point to getting lacan actually right like part of what lacan is getting at is that the unconscious isn't this you know you know you know that X files the truth is out there right like Like that's how Lecon understands the unconscious. So it's not just this individual private thing, right? And so Jung is almost getting at it with collective unconscious. But the problem is that it's really, it exists between the individual and the collective, right?

Like unconscious, it's not like it's a property of the collective, just as it's not a property of the individual. So that's one of those ideas, just as I was saying, where it's moving in the right direction, but then it doesn't, there's something that's stopping from getting there. Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you for that. Yeah, I've always wondered your take specifically on Jung. Yeah. For this next section, I kind of want to just, not necessarily rapid fire, but kind of toss out some core concepts and let you just kind of riff on them as, you know, help us understand what they mean in LaCon's world. So the first one would be desire and its relationship to lack. Yeah, those are the synonyms. They're synonyms. So to be a lacking subject is to be a desiring subject, which means that you. And I think this is the crucial point, which means that you are not trying to realize your desire. That every time your desire is realized, it's not, you don't get the thing that you are looking for.

So to be a desiring subject is to be satisfied without having the object. So that's the key. So again, lacking, desiring subject, same thing. But it means you find your satisfaction not getting the object. And Lacan thinks that that distinguishes speaking being, from other beings in the world. He thinks other beings can just get their object and then there's a satisfaction in that. They have a downtime. They feel the need awaken again. They get the object. They get satisfaction, downtime. Then the need arises again. And so he thinks that speaking subjects are

not subjects of need. They're subjects of desire, which means they want to keep desiring rather than fulfilling that desire. By virtue of our sort of linguistic conceptual apparatus that animals, for example, probably don't have? Right. And if they do, then they're in the same boat. That's what he would say. So he thinks that there are, and if anybody has a dog or a cat, they're going to be like, wait a minute, I see the same thing operating a cat all the time. So cats and dogs can be neuroticized, right? So even though they're not speaking beings, they're within the symbolic structure because we have them as pets. And we, you know, so that, I mean, our cat was complete, like it would, you wanted it to do.

you, it thought it, you wanted it to do something? What did it do? The exact opposite, right? So that's a, that's a very, that's a thing a subject would do. Okay. The next one is, is actually I'm going to skip a couple and come back to these other ones because I think this might be a little related, which is the symbolic and the real and how those dovetail with desire. Yeah. So the symbolic is the field of signification in which we are bathed all the time. So it is what allows me to talk to you right now. There are words we're using. And it's the different codes that we have for this relation. Like, I'm not going to say, I'm not just going to, all of a sudden, during the podcast, go, Brett, you fucking suck. You're an asshole. Like, I'm just not going to, I mean, I just don't. But I'm not. So, so that's part of the, that's part of the symbolic web, right?

It's, there's certain things I will say. There's certain things that I won't say. Like, if you know that I've, I don't know that my, my father just died, you'll express, express, condol, you know, all these kinds of things are part of the symbolic structure. The real is for Lacan, the impossible. So it's what, it's what, that's impossible. So it's not ontologically impossible. It is structurally impossible. So my, one of my favorite examples of the real is the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. So the, or I guess the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union lived on as a corpse for a little bit after that. What's interesting about that, so I was,

in college into four years prior to that time. And there was absolutely no sense in American life that it was a possibility even. Like it just was, it was symbolically excluded as a possibility. And then it just happened. So for Lacan, that would be a real event. So it would be that would be the way in which the real disrupts the symbolic web. So there's just something that seems like it couldn't happen. It's it's structurally not possible. And then it happens. Like the other example of the real, which is an interesting example, is the square root of negative one, right? So the square root of negative one in the system of real numbers, that's an operation you can do. And yet, what does it produce? It produces an irreal

number, right, in the imaginary number. But that's not imaginary and lecon sense. So that would be the real. So even though it's a number that doesn't fit within the system of real numbers, in this example, the system of real numbers is a symbolic system. The thing that is possible that is the point of impossibility, but nonetheless can happen. So that's for for for for for the real is what is impossible, but nonetheless happens. So that's a really I think that's a and you can see politically why that's really interesting for people. Right. Like that so you know the every revolution fits that I think like it's it's the all like it seems impossible and then it just happens like I think Ukraine kind of got caught up on this like they I think Zelensky thought you know Biden's

telling him, look, they're going to invade. It's like, no, impossible. And then they invaded, right? So I think that, I think it happens all the time. I mean, oftentimes on the left, but I think it happens, I think a right wing event, the Russian invasion. I think it happens on the right as well. So it's a, like the Roe v. Wade thing was a fascinating one, right? Like they, we knew it was coming. And, and we're like, okay. But yet it happened. It still was total shock. So that to me is the perfect example of the real, right? So there's 60 years, whatever, it's a certain, 50 years, a certain kind of status quo, symbolic structure. And this thing that's, that is impossible, nonetheless happens. And then it's everything has changed. Yeah, those are great examples. And another

example you give that I'll rehearse very quickly is the example of like on the interpersonal level, the example of infidelity, you have a partner, you're convinced that they're, you know, thoroughly loyal, you have no real threats to your relationship, and then one day you come home from work early and find them in bed with somebody else. And that is an intrusion of the real upon the symbolic conception that you had of your relationship. And it's an eruption event. Yeah, absolutely. If you want to see, I think, the best filmic depiction of this, it's the first five minutes of, this is where I leave you. And it's exactly what you just described. This guy is totally confident in his relationship.

He comes home and he's watching the guy, comes into the bedroom and the guy that he works with is having sex with his spouse. So that's a, to me, that's the, like, that is the, that's the, that's the best example because you're, you're totally sure it can't happen. You don't even think of it as a possibility and then it happens. Right. Yeah. No, brutal.

And I can, yeah, the, the psychological wake of, of that eruption of the real, you know, it's disorienting in every sense, yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I kind of feel like the symbolic order in the United States, the order and the way that we've conceptualized life, you know, in the last 40 years since Reagan, but even more broadly since the end of World War II, is coming to an end.

And we see a lot of the eruptions of the real occurring in our political sphere, kind of heralding, you know, the end of something and the emergence of something new, but this is all very vague as to where this is going. Is that another example, or how would you understand things in our current political space? Yeah, perfectly, perfectly, right. And I think, isn't it interesting that it shows how that eruption, the real, does not have a political valence.

There's certain eruptions that are right wing, like this Roe v. Wade thing. And then there are certain eruptions that are left wing. Like, could you have imagined in the Reagan Bush years, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, being an openly Democratic socialist member of Cont? No, right? Like that, so there are things that are also- that in 2020, the left could take to the streets and burn down a police headquarters and get a majority of Americans, at least in that moment, giving the thumbs up to it. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

And or even like all the massive, and this is tied to the same event, like the massive numbers of people coming out for Black Lives Matter and even cops, you know, coming across the line and putting, kneeling us alongside. So I think, I think, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Now, is the real, a, you know, like I'm sort of thinking in Conti in terms a thing in itself that exists as the actual objective way things are and we clouded up with our conceptions or is that too weird of a way to think about the real? No, I think it's not weird enough, actually. So I think it's, I think it, but I think that is wrong. Like, I think that the real is just this point of disruption that you, that you only get to.

And I think this is a really key point. Like, you don't get to it by taking a cool, calm, objective look at things. Like, look, how did Alito and company create this disruption of the real? Well, it wasn't an objective look at things. It was an extremely partisan look at things that then allowed that break. So I think the notion of taking a cool, objective look at things is wildly overrated. And I think it always, and I think the reason why is it always misses this disruption of the real, which is not a layer behind the symbolic, but a hole within it, like that there's no, that

Lecon's basic idea is that, and I think this to me is one of the easiest ways to understand it just because of the way English functions, and he wouldn't have had this available to him, but that you have to think that there are always holes within the hole, right? They're always H-O-L-E within the W-H-O-L-E, and that, and the big hole, is the symbolic order and the little holes within it are the real. Like a swish cheese conception. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Very good. Now, this went on to impact a thinker like Elaine Badu, for example, because I still hear some residents there. Yeah, that's for sure, right? Like, you can totally see the way in which the Baduian event piggybacks on the Lacanian reel. The only difference is that for Badu, event is necessarily progressive, right? which is a, politically, of course, that's nice, but it's, philosophically, it seems a little, I mean, he has a whole argument for why it is, but it does seem a little, why would those disruptions necessarily be, why would those evental disruptions necessarily be progressive? But he thinks they are. But yeah, totally. Like his, the influence of Lacan on him is immense, I think.

So for our job of like people that kind of are understanding this, the symbolic and the real, how does it cash? out in our interpersonal lives, does it just amount to being aware of the symbolic order you're constructing and the willingness to be open to the real? Is that basically all we can do? I don't think that's, that's too far off, actually. I think that's pretty good. Like, openness to the disruption of the real, an ability to, a willingness, ability to see that disruptiveness and to see the way in which that disruptiveness isn't abnormal, but is the constitutive dimension of, it has a consensurate dimension in normality itself, so that every normal structure is always tipping, right? It's always on the verge of collapsing, and that's what the real

means. And that some awareness of that, I think, is really important for both politics, obviously, but also, as you say, for interpersonal relations. Does the symbolic order, is it always fundamentally changed by the eruption of the reel, or can we have an eruption of the real and going back to the previous symbolic order before that eruption? Yeah, yeah, for sure that happens all the time, right? Like that's, I mean, that's what Alito is trying to do. It's not going to work out. But there are certainly, I think, eruptions of the real that are affected to hold things

just as they are. And I think the best example of this and it's horrific example is lynchings, right? like lynchings are eruptions of the reel, but they're designed to keep everything as it is in place in Southern society. So that Southern American society. So that, to me, that's the horrific best example of that, the way that the real can have this really conservative function, trying to keep the symbolic structure, the symbolic order as it is and keep it intact. And so it, in fact, it requires these outbursts of the reel to keep it as it is. Like, like, think about the way this functioned for a Trump supporter. Like, there are constant outbursts of the real. And the mainstream media was like, okay, now the Trump

supporters are going to leave him because of, but that, no, no, those outbursts of the real are precisely what make them Trump supporters. So it's not, you know, this disruption of the symbolic fabric. That's what they like. That's they get off on. So I think that that, you know, I mean, even in these latest revelations from this congressional committee, the same thing, I think. I don't think there's anything different about that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. That actually helped me understand those two concepts a lot.

Let's go to the next one, which is a famous one, which is the big other and how that relates to ideology and the little other. Yeah, that's, okay, there's a big question. So big other, so we have a symbolic order that's the entire web of, of, of, mediation that allows us to relate to each other and to understand the world, et cetera. So big other is a part of that. It is a symbolic entity. And it's the entity that tells us to, that pressures us to conform and tells us to do certain things in order to belong. So it might be one, the best example of big other is you get up in the morning, you look in your closet, you try, even what's in your closet as a result of the big other. And the big other says to you, put on this, put on that. Like if I,

I'm going to, if I'm going to be on a, this is one way, this is a classic big other influence on me. So if I'm going to be on a podcast, I have a couple of shirts that have a lack on the, there's a little design and say, say lack. And so I'll put on that lack shirt or else I'll put on a Cincinnati Bengals baseball cap or something. So something that's, I'm trying to, I don't know who I'm trying to belong to. It's a very small group, but there's still a pressure to these Lacadian theorists that are, It's a single number. But there's a, there's a, there's a, this pressure to, to do a certain, and that's pressure from the big other. So the difference between the big other and the little

other is the little other is these, is the actual different individuals that you're interacting with, right? So they can be, they can act as a force of the big other. Like if you, if you meet someone and you're wearing something bizarre and they give you a dirty look that's their act even though they're a little they're acting like a force of the big other or the popular click at school they're all little others but together they form the big other or you know i'm trying to think of social authorities because the big other is a social authority not a political authority so it's that's why popular click or advertisements are great uh you know media for the big other like that's how the big other communicates with us. It says you should want this. You should want this. Put your desire in this

direction. So that and but little other are the just the actual people that I interact with on a day to day basis. So the the, are the little others actual like singular entities? Whereas the big other cannot be a singular entity, but is a right. It manifests through. Right. I mean, the big other can be singular in the sense that like for the child, say, real young child, one of the parents is operating as the big other and it's pretty singular for that child. It's just that. I mean, that could be two parents, but basically it's one parent like functioning as the big other or two, right, it doesn't matter. But it could be one. So the point is it can be identified with a single, a single person. But generally, you're right. Generally, the big other is a group and the little other is just

isolated individuals who are connected through symbolic order. And we can see how like, you know, maybe somebody who is a Marxist would take this idea of the big other and basically make it synonymous with ideology. That's an error, if I understand correctly. Can you talk about why that's right? That's right. Because there can be ways in which the big other, I don't think it's a total. I mean, I can see why someone would do that, right? It doesn't, it's not crazy. But I think that there are ways in which the big other can operate that are not necessarily ideological, but are just, like there always has to be a big other. So it doesn't have to, and what it can be telling us to do is just something that's not necessarily ideological, but some, you know, like to, like, is it ideological to

say that the big other tells me to wear a certain kind of, I don't know, shirt or something? No. I mean, ideology, I think, is, is, operates slightly differently than that. But I think, I think, I think there is a relationship, and we certainly conform to ideology like we conform to the big other. So there's a parallel in that way. But I don't think there's a direct overlap between the two. Although, again, like you can see why people would say that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, the next one is the mirror stage. I think people are kind of familiar with this, but can you flesh that out for us? Yeah, I can, Brett, but I do I have to? You don't have to. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. So I wrote it. I wrote an essay. It's the last essay.

that I wrote that was rejected. And then I stopped sending essays to anyone. So, and I sent it, and it got two positive readings. And then the journal just said, we're not going to publish this. And the essay was called, you know, Simone de Beauvoir has this great essay called Must We Burn Sod, Foteel Brulet Saad. And so I called my essay, should we burn the mirror stage essay? And my answer was definitively yes.

So I feel like it's Lacan's worst. concept. And this guy, Darien Lieder, just wrote a book called Juicons, and in which he says basically the same thing. We should not, Lecon was just wrong about the mirror stage. So it's wrong. It's, and I think it's the, it's the concept most people identify with him. So people that even don't know Lecon at all, they think Lecon mirror stage. Part of it is because whenever Lecon, people read him in a class setting, it's the first thing they read is mirror stage, which is so non-representative of his thought. So it comes very early before any of the seminar. that he gave. And it basically emphasizes what Lacan calls the imaginary. And you note from our

conversation, we've mentioned the symbolic and real quite a bit. We haven't mentioned the imaginary once because even though it's one of the three registers of Lacan, symbolic imaginary real, it's the least important, clearly, except early in his thought, it had much more importance. And the other thing about the mirror stage essay, so the mirror stage essay is an attempt to say, this is how the ego forms of the of the individual subject that the ego forms through the body is in fragments lecon thinks the ego sees in the mirror a whole body and then identifies itself with that whole and so that it's first the first formation of the ego is a bodily ego that is an anticipation of a mastery that the subject doesn't have so that's okay it's even if it's right it's who cares and

it's basically, interestingly, that the mere stage essay ends with the critique of SART and existentialism. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's involved in that, that intern, what I would call internecine rivalry with Sart. So I, I, I find it, I find it, I find it not helpful and I think it takes the emphasis away from this, this, precisely this symbolic real problem that we've been talking about hitherto. Okay. So one of his, his, his weaker concepts that can be, I think so. And I think the sad thing is that it's the most well-known. So that's, I mean, I don't know where it gets you.

And I think a lot of, what's interesting is you mentioned Alta-Sair to me. And I think that that is a, Al-T-Sair, it's, like, I think the mirror stage really plays a key role in his conception of how ideological interpolation functions. And I don't think that that idea is right. But I think that that, that's why I say, maybe we should burn the mirror stage, I say, because I think it's really influenced Marxism. and the Marxist conception of ideological interpolation too much. I don't think that's how ideological interpolation works, that we identify with some image rather than, no, I just don't think that's right. And so I think that everything about that essay is misleading, I think.

Well, here's another concept that is the opposite of the mere stage in its importance, which is, as you mentioned, a juicance. So can you talk about what that is? Yeah. So juicantz is a couple ways to think of it. So it's a beyond of pleasure. So it's pleasure taken to the point at which it's painful. It's what another thing, Lecon said about juicons,

it's the form of satisfaction that we get that keeps us going through the day. Right. So the fact that we have, we experience a certain quantity of juicant's is what keeps us going rather than just giving up. and calling an end to it. So I think that that's, to me, but the point is that that, it's not just pleasure because there's this dimension of suffering, pain also to it, right? So it's, so it's, I like to say, so juriesa's isn't just having an ice cream cone, it's eating enough ice cream cones that you kind of feel sick to your stomach, right? So it's, it's always go,

there's an excess attached to it, but that excess always remind you that you're lacking subject. So there's no way, you don't, it's not like you achieve this nirvana of pure excess. Instead, you, the more excessive you are, the more you experience yourself as a lacking being. So that's, but that excessiveness is juicence, I, I translate it freely with enjoyment or with satisfaction, but there's a number of thinkers that do not, usually French, that don't like that insist on the use of juicons, but I hate jargon so much that I don't, I like to just, whatever, just let's just use the common term. Is it, is it fair to think about it in terms of like addictive and self-soothing behaviors in

particular? Absolutely, absolutely, right? Like, addiction is, is juicence, right? And addiction is, like, that's what keeps you in these different behaviors that are totally destructive is that the excessiveness of it is, that's, there's a, there's a, There's an immense juicence, immense satisfaction to that. And I think that's the thing that that's one. So that's basically Lecon's theory of addiction for sure of all in all forms, right?

So like my addiction to certain kinds of rigidity of schedule or whatever. You know, it can be things like that. It can't, it's not necessarily drug addiction or sex addiction. What purpose does it ultimately serve for us then? None. It doesn't serve a purpose. That's the point, right? That it's that it actually, that it actually, that,

juicence is strictly opposed to use value, right? So, so the juicence value, and I think this is one of the great insights of capitalism, right, that we are not driven by what's useful, but about what, what actually isn't useful at all. If you think about how many of the commodities that are created are useful, very few, right? Like, where their use is just, it's just like a part of them that's not essential to what they're doing. And that that, and that that non-use value, is precisely what we enjoy. So I think there's a really strict opposition between, which makes Marx really interesting, right?

Like, when Marx thinks about exchange value versus use value, in a way, he's maybe on the way to thinking about juicence value versus use value, right? And LaConne actually talks about this slightly, although not developed at all. When he changes Marx's notion of surplus value to surplus juicants or Or actually, he calls it Clues de Jouillard. So it would be surplus enjoyment if we wanted to translate it. So one of the most fascinating things about this and what really helps me understand it is when you talk about how Jouisance manifests on the left and right in America politically. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, yeah. So isn't it, I think on the right, it's almost so self-evident that it doesn't even need a theorist to come talk about it. So when Trump is at a rally saying, let's beat the heck out of these. reporters here. And people start to, even if they're like the people doing it, obviously, there's a juicance in that because it's an excessive behavior. It's a behavior not allowed in polite society. But here, this figure is just licensed you. This leader is this license you to do it. But even just the idea of it provides an enjoyment, right? That there's an excess. He's saying something you're not supposed to say. We're thinking something. We're not supposed to think. That's why

the right wing loves political correctness as a source. of enjoyment, right? Like, we're going to say the, we're going to, even just talking about political correctness is for them a source of enjoyment. It's, you know, we could just, my, my spouse used to, for the longest time, she's like, I'm not even going to say the words political correctness because that's already giving too much to the, to the right. And I think there's a, there's a point to that, I think, actually. Not that I agree, but I think there's a point to it. And, and I think there's, there's all kind, like, that's why they love finding little instances where a faculty member was disciplined for or sending a tweet or some blah, blah, blah.

Like, all that is juicant. So those, so the right, but what's interesting about all those examples, right, is that they require an enemy. So the right wing enjoyment, right wing juicons depends upon an enemy who's, who we enjoy heaping all of our scorn onto. And my thinking is that left wing enjoyment is always enjoyment of the not belonging to this figure or this fact of non-belonging. And so the way in which the social order,

the social structure, the symbolic structure is necessarily incomplete. And that's why leftist movements, Black Lives Matter, I think is a great example, draw attention to those figures that are in that position of non-belonging like George Floyd, et cetera. And then the I Can't Breathe becomes an identification

with the position of non-belonging. And what I think is interesting about the left versus the right is that the left doesn't and cannot have, doesn't require and cannot have an enemy. So there's for the, obviously they're adversaries, right? Like they're right wing adversaries, but they're always people that you could convince to come over to your side. And you're trying to convince to come over to your side. Whereas the right couldn't, like you couldn't imagine the Nazis saying, let's get the communists to come over or let's get the Jews to come over. Like, it's impossible, right? Because their very position depends upon hating them.

Right. But it's very, it's not hard to see for Black Lives Matter to say to the cops, come on to our side and kneel down with us. We can all be in it together. I think so that because what they're opposed to as an adversary is a structural position, not an enemy. And I think that's radically different. Even on the far left, like, you know, capitalism is an enemy of sorts, but there's a certain sort of, hesitation in some instances to claim an individual capitalist to be an unredeemable, you know, enemy or moral enemy.

It's like, no, hold on. This is more of a structural thing. These capitalists are playing within a structure. It's the structure that our ultimate enemy is. And if you fetishize the individual too much, you lose track of the structural, whereas the right wing is just like individual enemies, group enemies, attack, attack, attack, attack. Right. Exactly.

Right. Because, in fact, wouldn't the left say, like, if you've individualized the the capitalist enemy, then you've, you've made, you've, you've, you've already given up too much to bourgeois thinking, right? Like, you're, you're not thinking in Marxist terms because it's a, I mean, that, that individual capitalist is just playing a part within the capitalist structure that if that person were not there, someone else would do it. I mean, that's the whole, that's the whole point of capitalism, right? Like if it doesn't, if, if, if, if Jeff Bezos wasn't there to do it, someone else would have done it. And that's why I always found, I don't know how you found about that. I,

I like Michael Moore quite a bit, but I always thought his attack on Roger Smith for outsourcing or whatever. Like I always thought it's a little bit too individualistic because if GM didn't outsource, someone else would. And then GM would be, they wouldn't be able to sell their cars. Right. Like that's the whole, the whole point about capitalism is if you don't do the thing to maximize your profitability, someone else is. And then they're going to, you're going to be out of business. So it's a totally structural problem. And I think to individualize it is always bad, always a problem. And we kind of see this with our visions, you know, broadly conceived, right, left-wing visions of the future, whereas like left-wing visions of the future, communism or

whatever, is always like everybody of all different backgrounds finally coming together as a human whole and working together cooperatively for the benefit of all. And I think a lot of the right-wing visions of the future is like if we could only purge these specific people or groups we could build a world that's worth living in you know right right right right although you see immediately the problem with the right wing vision right if it depends upon an enemy it never really wants to do the purge that it claims that it wants to do right like even they can never take yes for an answer even even the even the abortion thing like i was just you know you saw a little celebration but then they're like now the real work for life begins i'm like wait a minute you guys just you you won like

you like changed american society you did it but they but no they they they have to the evil abortionists have to they have to always be out there and it's true in germany you know like the in the cities where there they were the least number of jews that was the most anti-semitic right so so there's a i think there that there's this belief in the right that if we just purged we would be okay but you can never purge enough kind of like a conservatives and like a podunk rural town worried about antifa coming to their specific suburb the place where intifah is the most absent i know you know i when i lived in texas i there was a there was a huge black it was very ominous black billboard with white letters and it said united nation helicopters

stay out of texas and i thought to myself that's an interesting statement because clearly they meant as an imperative like you stay out of Texas but I thought it's a nice declarative too like it's true United Nations helicopters do stay out of Texas because why in the world would they go exactly like they have no

like you're right like the rural like oh Antifa's coming from like that's the last place they would go and there's some instances where literally like whole towns would come together and get armed and go stand at the fucking you know county line waiting for this caravan of Antifa to show up

it was absolutely fucking pathological I know. I know. It's pathological is the word. All right. Very last core concept is a that I want to touch on before we move into the last section is the object A. What the hell is that? Yeah, yeah, good one. So as I said before, objie, ah, I say ah, because that's the friend. I mean, people tend to say ah. I'm against the French pronunciation. But actually, people also say object A. But what you really probably couldn't say is obje, object A, because then you're mixing you're melding the two languages together. But. But Object A is fine, or Objaya. Lacan himself, this is the one concept he said should not be translated, which is why people that are Lakanian inclined tend not to translate it. But anyway, who cares?

So what it means? And again, so as I said, it's the one concept Lacan claimed to have invented. And it means it's just this, it is real in his sense. It's this gap within the structure of desire, an absence that causes us desire. So he distinguishes between the object A and the object of desire. So the object A is what drives us to desire, and the object of desire is the thing that we desire. So this is my favorite example because I can't drink a regular Coke anymore, and I love it so much. So it's really an object of desire for me.

So the object a, or the object A, if you're thinking about a Coke, would be the can. and the material the Coke that you drink is the object of desire and if you think about it like the can is just a barrier to you getting the Coke right it's just that you have to open it you have to there's only a there's a limited amount which is very important I think um that's why it to me a two liter never tastes very good right like it's too much you got to pull it's just not good I like the mini cans I like the mini cans are even better right because you have even less And so you have to really, you have to sip every bit, little take really enjoy it. So that's a perfect point, Brett.

Like if the mini can taste better than the 12 ounce can, why is that? It's because the structure, the way in which the object is there more prominent, right? Like it's more, it's more limiting. And so the objaya is the thing that causes us to desire by limiting our access to a thing. So one other way you can think of the objaya is if you, if there's some, someone that you desire, right? And you think, like, oh, there's just this, I really, they're just perfect looking for me. But there's this one part of them, I really don't, I don't really like so much. Like it's their, you know, whatever, like their hair, style I don't really like or they're, they're,

they're maybe too muscular for me. They're too thin, whatever it is, right? So that little thing, you like them perfectly. They're a perfect object of desire for you, except for that little thing. that little thing is the objaya right like that little thing just that slight imperfection is the thing that makes that person desirable for you the fly it's the fly in the ointment the fly exactly exactly exactly like the fly in the ointment is the thing that makes the object desirable i mean people talked about maryland mroe her little birthmark right like that would be a classic sexist example of this concept but it works for every every kind of thing desiring i think everything kind of thing that one and this is why when you know apple i think understands this perfectly

so i just got a new computer i'm talking to you on a new computer and it has all these little flaws that seem to be designed exactly into it right and so those are the things that make me still drawn to the like if if they become too much then i'm like okay i'm going away from apple back to some pc but they they make they're just enough that it doesn't work totally perfectly but but good enough that I'm still desiring to use the apple. So I think that like all those, to me, capitalism, like planned obsolescence, all these things are ways in which the objayas, the cocaine, all these things are ways the object is being employed by capitalism.

But if we think about any kind of way that desire works, it's evident too. So interesting, yeah. So, and this stuff is, you know, initially they're, especially for people that aren't studied in this stuff, It can be kind of difficult or challenging. But once you hear somebody, especially like Todd, you know, flesh this stuff out and help us understand it. It really becomes so evident in your day-to-day life how all of these things are operating. If you can become aware of them, it's actually very fascinating to see them operate within you on a daily basis.

Yeah, that's, I feel the same way. Like, you know, when I before I was, I had any relationship to this, I'm just kind of going through my daily life, whatever. And then once I, then I'm like, my God, like this object I just was like, wow, that really. makes a lot of sense if you think about what you know what makes someone cease to like there was a there was a person in my i remember this so well when i was in sixth grade there was a person who everyone thought was perfect looking right perfect but no one ever thought to like ask her out even befriend her because they thought she's just out of our she's out of she's not she's so perfect she's not desirable right and i think that works you can think about how that works for every like

you want to see a flaw in the person for them to become desirable to you. And I think that that, you know, we think of the, we always think of the flaw as negative. We think like, oh, that's, we kind of weigh the balances. Like, oh, they have a lot of positives, but then they have these flaws. But LaCont's point is, no, not really. Like, the flaw is really the thing that makes the positive characteristics evident to you and desirable to you. And this, this operates. I think I've heard you talk about this operating in long-term romantic relationships to some level.

Absolutely. absolutely right isn't what happens is the other person no longer has if the if the relationship dies the person no longer seems to have this objayat to you and and i think that's a yeah that happens all the time sadly for anybody that's interested in this stuff like i am you know todd's podcast with with his co-host y theory has full episodes on each of these topics so you can have an entire hour long episode on just you know each and every one of these concepts for those interesting So definitely go check out Y Theory if you haven't already. Moving into this last section is we're a few more questions for sure. And let me know if you have time constraints on your end. No, I have no time constraint, Brett. Much time as we will. One thing I'm interested in, and this is probably coming from a place of ignorance on my part.

But you mentioned the seminars. And, of course, when you think of Lacan, you think of seminar one, two, three, four, all the way up through 12, 13, 14, 15. Are his seminars things that he wrote? Are they things where he orally gave a speech and then they were transcribed? How do we? yeah orally okay that's why they're called seminars yeah and then he but not only that but he he often he would have a he would often work from a type script so they were transcribed but then they would you know weigh the type script against the transcription so yeah they were and there's 27 and they

the later ones are sort of uh but yeah the the you know he was sort of losing his mind and he he started to play with knots all the time in his seminar so it's amazing basically some of the later seminars are just him working out the bromian knot different forms of bromian knot not so great if you just want to understand how enjoyment functions but uh he thought it was the secret to everything uh yeah so the seminars are oral and but they have been more or less i say more or less because it's the project is still not done so his his son-in-law jacquelin milare i mentioned earlier he La Conde gave him all the rights to it. So Millare did one, I think, only one, Seminar 11, the most important one for fundamental

concepts of psychoanalysis during Lecon's lifetime. And then all the rest, I think he's done maybe 17 or 18 of them and different random orders. So they're not, there's no rhyme or reason to it. And some, but some of the most important ones have still not been edited by him into, even into French. So I think most of the ones in French have been, I'll, all but two that have been edited into books in French have been translated to English.

But there are still, there's still huge gaps that exist. So that's, and you can find them, you can find them in English online too. I think it's called Lacan in Ireland. If you just look up that, you think you can find the trans, a translation of the non, the ones that haven't been made into books yet. Interesting. Now, you kind of said there in passing that he was losing his mind toward the end. Were you being facetious or is there?

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. No. He was going crazy? Well, I just think he, I think it's senility more than craziness. Like, I think he just got lost touch with, I think up through Seminar 23, which is on James Joyce, they're pretty, they're okay, but he's still gotten a lot of this not crap in there. And I'm saying this in a lot, luckily there's not a lot of Lacanian scholars that are going to listen to your thing. I hope they would get, they would be really upset with even that way of calling it. Not crap, but yeah, so he just got really interested in knots and as like the key to the structure of the psyche and his relationship to the social order and I don't know.

I mean, maybe he was on to like the secret of the universe, but it didn't, I don't feel that way. Interesting. Okay, so LaConne, like many thinkers of his caliber and renown, also had his fair share critics. Noam Chomsky, for example, called him an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan. And others have criticized him for his lack of scientific risk. or his obscure writing style, et cetera. Do any of these criticisms hold any weight for you? Why or why not?

And what criticisms of him do you personally think are valid? Yeah, most of those hold a lot of weight for me, actually. So the charlatan thing, I think, is just wrong. I mean, I think that you could, I mean, people say that about Marx and what does Chomsky say to them? So that's just, I don't know. I find that ridiculous. But the other ones, I'm pretty, like, I'm pretty, like, I'm pretty, like,

like he's a terrible writer he he wrote intentionally obscurely and that that's that's inexcusable so there that's terrible i think personally he was very unappealing guy and so that i think if you're some of one of these people that you need to like the person that you're reading you probably shouldn't read lecon i think so he's he's just not very likable he you know he he he had let me just give you one example so he had he when he was his first wife was pregnant he got the woman who would become his second wife pregnant at the same time so that i don't know that seems like not cool yeah not cool so that's you know okay and so and he you know he regularly like would have relationships with people that he was psychoanalyzing he would you know famously would go

around in a cab in paris and have sex in the backs of the cab i mean whatever it's free love i guess it's whatever but you know and just and he and he was not i think he was I think he developed, for theoretical reasons, this idea of this short session, which means the analyst does, there's not a prescribed time for the session, but the analyst, what he called, punctuates the session after a certain amount of time so that the patient can't just game the system, right? So that, okay, that's fine. But then he used that so he would start, he would do sessions one, two, three minutes

so that he could maximize the amount of money he was earning. So I find that pretty repugnant. I don't know. So there's, and politically he was conservative. Interesting. That's a whole other thing. So politically, I'm totally not on his side. So there's a lot of things that I think are pretty, that are, that are, that are good

criticisms. Yeah. Why, you said that he was intentionally obscure, and this is obviously something that weighs on a lot of French intellectuals is their obscure rantist writing styles often criticized. But why would somebody intentionally be obscure? Okay. So here's this theory. His theory is that Freud was misunderstood because he was too clear and simple in his writing.

And so, and all of this, what he thought was the misreading of Freud derived from that. And so he was going to write in an obscure way so that no one could just act like they had a lack like they knew what he was thinking just by a passing, you know, acquaintance with it. They'd have to really delve into the text to get it. And it just is not true. It's not true. Like the, and I think history has shown it's not true. So Lecon, one of his most, so mirror stage is one of his most famous concepts, misunderstood. His other most famous concept, the gays, totally dominates film theory, totally misunderstood, totally.

Like it's conceived of completely backwards is how he thought of it. So I just, so it didn't work. It didn't work. The whole, the whole plan didn't work. And that's one of the, you mentioned it earlier, one of the, one of the, you mentioned it earlier, one of the great things about Freud in 2022, you can go back and read his shit and follow along with it precisely. Absolutely. Absolutely. No problem at all. No problem at all. Just like Marx, right? Like no problem. Just clear as a bell. Freud's even clearer than Marx.

Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, one thing I wanted to talk about a couple more questions here is his relationship to Sartre and to French existentialism. I know him and Sartre were contemporaries and actually had a personal relationship, if I'm not mistaken. Can you talk about that? Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. So I have my own little theory about this, and I'm just going to act like it's true. So I think that, so Sart wrote in Being a Nothingness, which he published before, they were almost exact biographical contemporaries, but as people identify Lecon with

the post-Sartrean generation. And part of that is because Lecon didn't really start to write and speak publicly until after Sart wrote Being a Nothingness. So he writes Big Nothingness to 1942. sorry La Conn's first seminar's early 50s so it's kind of a break between and as I said mirror stage he's directly attacking Sart and being a nothingness Sart writes that toward the end writes what he calls existential psychoanalysis I think that really rubbed La Con the wrong way because he wanted to be the developer of existential psychoanalysis so he I think that he there's a real

anxiety of influence with Sart his conception of subject is very close to SART's, I think. And I think he wished that he was SART, basically. And I think he tries to, one way I would see his project, this is more generous to him, is that he is trying to insert the idea of the unconscious into the existentialist philosophical project. So I think that there's your right to pick up this connection between them,

It was, they had a personal relation. There's a famous photo with the two of them in it together and along with numerous other people. And I think that, that he, you know, he's really, he never says it. He almost never cites Sart. Although he does cite him. But I think he's really trying to bring that existentialist idea into psychoanalysis. And Sartre rejects the very notion of the unconscious. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. He says, he says, the unconscious is. just bad faith. That is, we just are, it's just our way of denying that we, it's our choice to do whatever we did. And you clearly think he was wrong about that. Yeah, I love Sart, but sorry, but sorry, he's wrong. You mentioned earlier the con was a conservative. I was wondering what his relationship to French politics was during his life and if he had any thoughts about or talked about revolutionary movements on the left like Marxism or anarchism. Yeah, especially

in the 60s. So he, he was very, interestingly. So he, he was very, interestingly, so he he was conservative, but all of his students were leftist or Maoist. So Jacqueline Maler, who's a conservative now, was a Maoist in the 60s. And so LaConne was very engaged in his his daughter, Judith Maler, she married Jacqueline Maler. She was very, she was a Maoist too and, you know, just had trouble with the authorities. So he's really actively aware of what the leftist, Marxism, Marxist, and even movements that thought themselves left of Marxism were in

Paris. And he very famously, there's this time in 1968 where he went to the University of Vincennes which is it's called Perry Wheat. It's the University of Paris 8. And he gives a talk on what he

developed as the four discourses. And some student comes up, and interrupts his talk by stripping, taking off all their clothes and saying, and said, we're not, we're not going to listen to, you know, your time is done. We're no longer listening to these old masters. We're forming our new thing in our, you know, in our own way. And Lecon said, and he got, it pissed him off. And he goes, you know, you're all hysterical. What you aspire to as a new master, you're going to have one. And so a lot of people in Lakanian political, so now almost everyone who's a licanian is leftist and there's a this thanks by and large i think to slovo

jujc that there's a sense of psychoanalysis as a left of lacanian psychoanalysis is a leftist force and that so that moment is very troubling for people so either people defend a look on that and they're like well the 68 movement in france really wasn't you know genuinely egalitarian whatever it was limited in certain ways. Or like Slavoy, he's like, even LaConne has to go to the gulag for that comment, right? So I think there's a

kind of divide about how you take that comment about, you know, this revolutionist hysterical. Yeah. That's so interesting. And of course, Gijek is a friend of yours and somebody that you've had on your show and, you know, talk to. And he obviously is one of like, perhaps the leading intellectual who combines

Lacan with Marx for a left-wing analysis of society. I think that's correct. Yeah, I would absolutely say that. Can you kind of talk about what, you know, socialist in general, but what Gijek in particular takes from Lacan and applies or can apply to the left? Yeah. So how is it, it's a good question. Like, how is it, what is the left get from Laqan that it wouldn't get if you didn't have a Lecon, right? I think that's the bit. And I think Slavoy's idea, and I think I share this idea, is that, well, what you get is the sense of what the revolutionary project has to look like and what we're striving for, right?

Like that what we're striving for can't be some society without contradiction or some society where every individual feels like they belong. That would be, that would be psychically impossible. But we would, if we were in, if you ever thrust us in such a society, we would do what we ever, could to destroy it, right? So that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that communism means what, what, Salvoi loves the term communism. He hates socialism, but he loves communism. He invokes that all the time. What he means by that isn't this harmonious society. It's a society where the contradiction rather than trying to overcome it, we reconcile ourselves to it. So,

So part of, and that helps, I think, with the analysis of capitalism. I mean, this is from Hegel, too, but the idea that we're not striving to, that what capitalism does is strives to overcome contradiction. So the opposed egalitarian emancipatory movement can't itself take up that same attitude. So I think that that's that idea of like where we're going. And then just the analysis of how capitalism, you know, how ideology works. Like his, his, his, Slavway's definition of ideology is, He owes it totally Lecon, I think. I mean, it's his use of Lecon, but he says that ideology doesn't deliver us from reality. Instead, it presents us with the reality as the deliverance from some traumatic real kernel. So he uses the notion of the real and flight from the real as the way to define ideology. So I think that's, to me, and I think his definition and his conception of ideology is his most important political contribution. Wow. Yeah, incredibly interesting. Thank you for that. All right. Well, I've taken enough of your time. I really, really appreciate. Every time you come on, not only do I learn a lot, but I'm always guaranteed

to laugh a lot as well. And one of the things I appreciate about you. Well, I am happy about that last part. Thanks, Brett. I know you have two new books coming out, so I'd love to have you back on to discuss those. Very much. Oh, absolutely well. Anytime. Before I let you go, though, can you just let listeners know where they can find the books that are out and your podcast, Y Theory online. Sure. So, yeah, they can just, I mean, what type of it.

Are we allowed to mention Amazon's name on here? But yeah, they're all just widely available under my name. But podcast is Y Theory. I think it's on all these things. Apple, sound. I think it's origin to SoundCloud, but you can also get it on Spotify. I think we sold out and went on Spotify.

So, yeah. I do some things on YouTube too. Did Spotify pay you $100 million? like they paid Rogan. They did not pay us anything, actually. But definitely anybody that is at all interested in this stuff, and Hegel and Freud, any of this, definitely go check out Y Theory. It is absolutely essential podcast for me and my intellectual development,

and there's just nothing else out there even close to it. So highly recommend it. That's very generous. Highly recommend. Thank you. Absolutely. We'll be well, and we'll do this again as soon as possible, and especially when those new books drop, let me know.

Excellent. Great. Thanks for her. I got a girl. She only puts our water in the night, in the day, and in the morning, wakes me up, and then I shake her to the bone to calm her down to stop the morning. Got a heart that only fizz me up with calm blood. I got a brain that only fills me with confusion.

Oh, Lord. Got some time, and I fill it up with lies that I repeat to myself to keep on a going. Got a life, man, it's filled up with the sorrow of a thousand other men with sin to tom. I got a heart that only Fizz me up with Cobblah I got a brain that only

Fizz me with delusions Oh love My love Oh love Got a bed I put the bottle down but still it calls me from down

the hall and up the stairs says come on let's go around and when I go it takes me all the way I got a heart that only fills me up with copper got a brain

that never gives me no solution Oh, Lord Got some cash And I bought out from a man that didn't know He was a lingen Held him dear Man, I held that money near

It disappeared Just blew off in the wind I got a heart that only Fills me up with cold blood I got a brain that only fills me with delusions. Oh, Lord, my Lord, oh, Lord. Now my girl, she fills me up with water in the night, in the day, and in the day. morning shakes me up man it wakes me to the boat it's not enough to stop the morning got a heart that only

pumps me for the cold blood got a brain that only fills me with confusion oh Lord my Rather, rather.