> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?
> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?