Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
an act on the other.
And that when I'm merely engaged in action for Lacan, that is where I am engaged in performing certain instances of conduct that are fully compatible with and are just part of the normal run of things, just the flow of business as usual.
And in performing an action, I don't at all radically change or alter myself.
I'm just continuing to be the sort of familiar character that I am in my given reality.
But for Lacan, sometimes, and without being able really for Lacan to consciously plan ahead of time for doing it, I will perform a...
an action that is more than just an action in that it's something which once I have done it, it shatters the very coordinates of my reality and, you know, destroys my previous form of selfhood that, you know, once I have, you know, as it were passed to the act and I come on the other side of it, I don't come out of it the same, right.
That, that it basically using Nietzschean language, it breaks my life history into, into a before and an after, right.
and that I basically become a different sort of subject in the aftermath of a deed that rises to the level of what Lacan calls an act as distinct from an action.
But again, one of the common denominators with Kant here is the notion that there is a part of ourselves that has this power to
in a way negate what we typically are.
And, you know, in terms of business as usual functioning, the humdrum run of things, you know, our, our, you know, self character, you know, personality, and even like, you know, the kind of life that we are living that manifests itself in terms of, you know, owning property, being in certain relationships, et cetera, that we do have this power, whether it's, we consciously exercise it or whether it unconsciously comes into action.
to radically alter or even destroy
this selfhood and everything tied up with it.
And to pass through what Lacan called subjective destitution, a kind of radical loss of selfhood and all of its trappings.
And that this power of negation is a peculiar feature of human beings.
I mean, the most extreme but concrete example, I think, for Lacan was inspired by
Alexander Kozhev's famous interpretation given in seminar form of Hegel's phenomenology.
You know, and Kozhev, you know, in unpacking
certain moments in Hegel's phenomenology emphasizes following Hegel, that one of the things that's distinctive about human beings that differentiates us from other animals is that we can commit suicide, right?
That we can, I mean, the most radical negation of self would be the self-destruction that is taking one's own life.
Showing 521–540 of 618 · page 27 of 31
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