Quote:
Originally posted by filtherton
How would you define philosophy, gpws?
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The exact opposite of this:
Quote:
Personally, I will begin with what is articulated in the sigla S(ø) by being first of all a signifier...
And since the battery of signifiers, as such, is by that very fact complete, this signifier can only be a line [trait] that is drawn from its circle without being able to be counted part of it. It can be symbolized by the inherence of a (-1) in the whole set of signifiers.
As such as it is inexpressible, but its operation is not inexpressible, for it is that which is produced whenever a proper noun is spoken. Its statement equals its signification.
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:
S(signifier)/s(signified) = s(the statement)
with S=(-1), produces s = Sqrt(-1)
-Jacques Lacan
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Quote:
No doubt Claude Levi-Strauss, in his commentary on Mauss, wished to recognize in it the effect of a zero symbol. But it seems to me that what we are dealing with here is rather the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol. That is why, at the risk of incurring a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated to what point I have pushed the distortion of the mathematical algorithm in my use of it: the symbol Sqrt(-1), which is still written as 'i' in the theory of complex numbers, is obviously justified only because it makes no claim to any automatism in its later use.
...
Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the Sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
-Jacques Lacan
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The words "philosophy" and "speaking out of one's arse" are not actually synonymous, despite what some people seem to believe. Or maybe Lacan is actually be incredibly profound here, and I "just don't get it"
Check out the side-splittingly funny
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by Alan Sokal (one of the authors of Intellectual Impostures/Fashionable Nonsense) which was published in all seriousness by the highly pretentious "philosophical" journal Social Text, for a wonderful paradoy of this sort of nonsense, absolutely full of completely genuine quotes from various "philosophers".