[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by m1rr0r dash

although under-read students and graduates are sadly all too common, there are other problems... one of the lacanian professors at UF has the telling e-mail signature, "reading in no way obliges you to understand."

the double-speak bullshit label is one often thrown at derrida, lacan et al. but it oversimplifies while it dismisses. first because they were trying to show you how their philosophy works through their rhetorical methods (puns, triple puns, obscure references, coined words) as much if not more than simply explaining it to you.

and second because before these writings were ever borrowed by other fields, they were borrowed from another language. and puns pose a particularly difficult translation problem, compounded by the fact that the puns and references are just as often in german as in french, and frequently in ancient greek or even aramaic. for this reason the body of work that we have available in english for these authors is often well below half of what exists in the native language. what we know as foucault's madness and civilization is a severely abridged version missing all of the appendixes, and lacan's most well known english work the ecrits is also merely a selection, and some of the more esoteric ones at that. lacan's seminars, in which he attempts to explain his ideas in less flowery language, without the puns and obscure references (or so i've heard, i've read about them, but haven't read them) have never been translated.

...to return to the tool analogy, while i agree with you that many academics seem to think of these writers as comprising some sort of swiss army knife that can do anything, the translation issue creates a situation sort of like trying to learn how to use chopsticks, or even judge their usefulness for eating, by going the local chinese takeout place and watching some rednecks use them.


[srsly... up until 2002 the only translation of the selections from the ecrits that were available in english, was done by someone who did not study psychoanalysis, let alone lacan or freud specifically]

Good points regarding the translation issue. Another problem is the way in which figures such as Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and, in particular, Guattari have so effectively been domesticated by the university system. The true message of books like Anti-Oedipus and Discipline and Punish call into question the entire structure of institutions: structures that the university system relies upon for its very existence. Departments get around this by de-politicizing such books, reducing them to abstract (read safe) theory. The Anti-University in London in the sixties was a good example of an institution that absorbed these ideas into its very structure, rather than simply employing them as a way of sexying up course reading lists. In many ways, it's this very fear of letting the lunatics take over the asylum that stops universities from teaching such writers properly.