COMP 421 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Externalization, The Symbolic, Jacques Lacan
27 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Pasolini
● Relationship to death
● How subaltern spaces related to queerness
● Why queerness should be taught in relation to death
Edelman
Sinthome
● Relates to the Freudian symptom
● Basically they are the same word
● In Freud symptom relates to a pathology, symptomes are the manifestation
● In Lacan, the sinthome lacks pathologization
● The sinthome links the symbolic/real/imaginary
○ Something that allows us to make sense of these three things
Imaginary - imagined wholeness, sense of subjectivity, mirror stage
Symbolic - network of meanings and signs - language
Real - underneath/outside is something that eludes the symbolic order
● Language detaches you from the real
○ For an infant - the real is an agglomeration of sensation
● We lose contact with the real when we order things with language
○ We can try to fracture the symbolic order
● The sinthome has to do with how we cope with these three levels
● The sinthome is a substance - positive support of our being
● Tension between the negativity and positivity of the sinthome
○ Both a positive support and has to do with the death drive
● Meaninglessness that liberates
● Signifier is something that can be replaced…
○ But there is something impossible to translate in the sinthome
○ It is not talking about a thing that we can identify
○ It is the knot - but not a chain between word and object
○ It includes things that are unthinkable/unknowable
● Way of being in the world
● Connects us to something beyond the discourse of the Freudian symptom
● Gives us support through its connection to the death drive
● Sinthomosexuality - denies the appeal of fantasy
○ Imagery of clothes turned inside-out
● The sexual is the pull towards the death drive
● The very means by which we make sense of the world is marked by the drive for
undoing meaning
***** Many films - romance films - the final fucking (culmination of the film) is what finally gives
the film meaning, but this is also the undoing of the character. Moment when you want all of that
meaning to vanish. There is no sexual relation
. Sexuality is always a negation but we use it to
structure meaning. (edelman’s jouissance comes from things like irony)
● The sinthomosexual performing a function for the rest of society
● Scrooge is the disavowed figure who needs to be corrected
○ We read him symptomatically - pathologized
● Why is edelman choosing asexual figures?
● For pasolini there is no one sinthomosexual - there is dispositions in everyone
○ Rather than identities, everyone has access
Pasolini
● Pasolini is like scrooge - sinthomosexual
○ Before a filmmaker he was a poet/novelist/scholar/film
theorist/journalist/philosopher
○ All of his films and novels went to trial for obscenity
○ He occupied the space of undoing of meaningful things in 20th Century Italy
○ First poetry book in fascist italy - resistance against the linguistic homogenization
■ He used a regional dialect
○ He was found having oral sex with two 16 year old boys (this was a legal age)
■ But this created a scandal and he was fired as an elementary school
teacher
■ He was excommunicated by the communist party
■ Forced to move from his small town to rome
○ He entered the space of very vital artistic environment in rome at the time
■ He starts becoming successful with his book of poetry
■ He depicts what happens at the margins of rome
● The underbelly of the city - there is something queer in this
● Periphery of rome becomes a space of resistance
○ In the 60s italy's economy starts to grow
■ Bourgeois entropy
■ The spaces he inhabits starts disappearing
○ Teorema is his first film that is not set in a marginal setting
Teorema
● First three minutes - factory scene
● If the subaltern cultures have disappeared he has to look at what is happening in the
center
● 1968 - Marxist revolution in France (La Chinoise) students revolution
● He thinks the students protests in italy are not effective
○ They are using the same language as the bourgeoisie
○ For him this is just a readjustment of power - not a rejection
○ Pasolini is disgusted with power
○ He didn’t believe in civil rights or sexual liberation
○ He wants to refuse any links to power
● In the film there is a fracture after they meet the visitor
● Pasolini originally wanted the Visitor to represent a fertility/preindustrial god
○ Later he becomes a metaphysical apparition
○ Mixture of god and the devil?
Document Summary
Why queerness should be taught in relation to death. In freud symptom relates to a pathology, symptomes are the manifestation. Something that allows us to make sense of these three things. Imaginary - imagined wholeness, sense of subjectivity, mirror stage. Symbolic - network of meanings and signs - language. Real - underneath/outside is something that eludes the symbolic order. For an infant - the real is an agglomeration of sensation. We lose contact with the real when we order things with language. We can try to fracture the symbolic order. The sinthome has to do with how we cope with these three levels. The sinthome is a substance - positive support of our being. Tension between the negativity and positivity of the sinthome. Both a positive support and has to do with the death drive. Signifier is something that can be replaced . But there is something impossible to translate in the sinthome.
