Philosophy Now Forum

I personally think that Lacan's identification of the masculine with the symbolic order leads to a sexist dichotomy. It seems to me that Lacan's primary injuction-acting as the Patriarchical/Other/God- is the separation of the Real from language. I think that that separation is not only false but it leads to the segregation of women and other others from the symbolic domain.

I think it matters because I think that Lacan is a symbolic expession of our deep prejudices as they relate to gender.

Yet many feminists agree with Lacan. Perhaps that only stems from the current politically correct fashionability that says that metaphysical matters have no place in academic sphere.

there after all does seem to be an empirical validity to Lacan's assertion. Why is that? Am I wrong to breach the division of the Symbolic and the Real? Could the division be overcome simply by asserting that Lacan is wrong in claiming that the Symbolic is masculine in spite of the seeming historical validity of that assertion?

Lacan's claim, as stated here (and very likely as stated in the original), is a vacuous claim by a vacuous author. I suggest that before spending any time at all on Lacan or people like him, you spend a little time reading Sokal and Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (also published as Fashionable Nonsense).

Sure that proves all continental theory is bunk. I imagine that many hoaxes occur daily in the physical sciences.

I did not make that claim. I only claim that some of it is bunk. But Lacan is in that class.

Try re-wording some of his claims, or explaining their content. The re-wording or explanation must be faithful to the original: it would be cheating to substitute what he should have said, or what we might imagine him to have meant.

Your hasty dismissal of the hermeneutics of quantum gravity disappoints me.

This is not a perfect wording. The paper sent to Sokal did not advance a thesis. It rehashed the more supposedly egregious claims about Quantim theory by continental philosophers and then added his own innaccuracies about Quantum theory and then when they published it because they wanted the view of a scientist they said Got Yah!

David Bohm was a Hegelian. Many Quantum theorist had very abstruse and spiritual beliefs about Quantum Theory. Wigner believed that "consciousness collapsed the wave function" He won a Nobel prize but how could you ever peer review such an amazing claim? Sokal abused the trust of Social Text in my opinion.

Alas, I do not feel its pull.

I was not referring to the hoax, hilarious though that was, but to the analysis in the book by Sokal and Bricmont. And an academic journal should not rely on trust in deciding what to publish, but on the quality of the writing.

I agree that physicists have interesting, and often not directly testable, views on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. But:

(i) they get their Nobel prizes for the physics (which very often essentially means the mathematics and its application), not the philosophy;

(ii) while their philosophical claims do not have the same status as their scientific claims, they are still clear. We can see what Wigner meant, and we can re-phrase it and explain it. Lacan, Deleuze and others fail that elementary test.

We seem to have got diverted from the original topic of your thread. Feel free to pull us back to that topic, although I will not bother saying anything about Lacan's claim, because I find no meaning in it.

The eyes of the beholder wise see wisdom. Everyone has his own mind about history and events.
No one can tell the accurate relationship between women and symbolic order.