Horner's Corner

Tag: imaginary

Hannah Arendt: Imagination, Understanding

by on Mar.15, 2010, under philosophy, politics

hannah_arendt_portrait_300‘Imagination enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge the abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair….Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass that we have. We are contemporaries only as far as our understanding reaches’. [Understanding and Politics p. 323]

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Lacan’s Borromean Knot

by on Feb.21, 2010, under psychoanalysis

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1. The Imaginary: the gaze, the fantasy, the mirror, ideal-ego and ego-ideal.

2. The Symbolic: signifiers, codes, language, law

3. The Real: the unsymbolisable, the gap in representation.

As Zizek argues, its best to take the three orders, not as one Lacanian system, but as part of a developing work -with the Real becoming the focus of interest in the later seminars.

See here for a real life illustration involving Zizek and me!


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Z and I: A True Story

by on Aug.12, 2009, under Chris, photography, psychoanalysis

 

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Zizek (Photo by CH)

Earlier this summer I was making my way home on the Piccadilly line, reading something by Zizek. I got off at Russell Square, thinking about some dialectical reversal or dirty joke of his I’d just read, and picturing the man himself, baggy T-shirt, beard etc.

 

Leaving the tube, I cut through the little lane that connects Bernard Street to Guilford street, looked up and saw: Zizek, in baggy T shirt etc, stood outside the President hotel, waving goodbye to someone in a car. I’d gone from reading, thinking about and now suddenly encountering him in the street.

So, Lacanians: we have the Symbolic (reading his stuff), the Imaginary (me picturing him as I’d seen him last on Youtube or at a conference), and then the encounter. If I understand it correctly the Real wasn’t the empirical Zizek stood in my street there, it was the disorientation/mild trauma  experienced in the disruption of the other modes of representation when I suddenly saw him, big and hairy, looming right in front of me.

jacques-lacan3More on Lacan’s Borromean knot here.


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