2000-07-23 - ten twenty one

"Freud told us the reason why the unconscious material is unconscious is because we can't face it, and so repress it: the unconscious contains the unbearable. For Freud, the unbearable topic is sexual. But more than that Lacan states that we constructed the world and ourselves from language, and language is completely inadequate for both those tasks. Nothing is real. Nothing is solid. You are not real. This, is unbearable and therefore we reject and repress it.

To prove this, think of the word "cat". That noise. "Cat". Now try and imagine the distance, the incredible gulf, between that noise "cat" and the cat you know. It's immense, isn't it? The one hardly captures a particle of the actuality of the other. If you can hold that distinction between the actual cat and the empty word, in your mind, you are getting a glimpse of how completely language is in fact alienated from the actuality of the world. The fact is that language cannot adequately describe the world. Not even a small fraction of it. There is a gulf between the world and language, between the animal and the word.