Saturday, September 24, 2005

Where do we begin?

With an explanation of the blog name, I presume, lest I be accused of deliberate obscurantism. First things first: I think I am going to be a rather bad blogger. I only feel like writing when I have to rant against someone or something, or when I have poetic fancies and need to off-load.
Neither of them are attractive prospects, I guess, for the reader. But let me give myself some credit for the time being and see how this shapes up.
Onto Lacan: I know that being but in the first year of my M.A. and having read about three or four essays/extracts from Lacan, I'd sound rather 'echore paka' (this lovely Bengali phrase meaning precocious) if I presume to present a formal critique of Lacan here. But the reaction to him comes as one from the guts: I'd have major problems with anybody who presumes that something as protean and as unfixed, as socially contingent as Language can be pinned down analytically in a principle like the law-of-the-father. That precludes the possibility of viable alternative, contingent or simultaneous subject-positions vis-a-vis language, except 'man' and 'woman'. As someone who has - for the past few years - negotiated with terms like 'gay', 'bisexual', 'effeminate', 'boy', 'man' etc. and managed to retain some working sense of selfhood (I hope), may be I have a right to claim that Lacan was wrong, or at least fell short of the radical possibilties of a post-structuralist attitude to language. Incidentally, there are excellent and perceptive critiques of Lacan by the likes of Kaja Silverman and Judith Butler. Some useful web addresses on Lacan I found: http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/Faculty/Professors/Protevi/DG/Lacan_notes.html
and http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelopmain.html

2 Comments:

Blogger Rimi said...

hi ani! am here, have linked you, and will edit your link list as soon as you tell me who you want on that list.

er, the reasons why you think you shan't be a good blogger? well bud, those are exactly why most people blog, and exactly what they put in their blogs. so he he, what?

i've never read lacan, so i shall diplomatically refrain from commenting. 'a little learning' and all that, y'know.

7:31 AM  
Blogger Aniruddha Dutta said...

hey
thanks and all... and never mind the Lacan part... I solemnly promise that henceforth my posts will be much more palatable and much less precocious... seeing that I'm hardly exempt from the 'little learning' charge myself!
thanks again :-)

12:19 PM  

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