X/19/22
“
3) Last story: There is a Shrimp that Eats Sand.
I’ll explain. I’m almost done, I swear.
Lacan’s Seminar X was called Anxiety. For Lacan we have to go to
the edge of this anxiety, rather than stay trapped in its narrow confines and nagging whiny demands. We might find a point of equilibrium if we experience separation in contact with what is absolutely Other. He uses the surreal naturalistic fable of a shrimp that needs to imbibe a grain of sand to establish equilibrium.
The shrimp, he says, needs to take this outside inside. But it has to be the right grain of sand, it has to find this right grain of sand at all costs—scientists forced them swallow all kinds of things that set them off balance, including grains of metal that allowed the scientists to play with these poor little shrimp using magnets. Strange that evolution can make room for something like this! Some psychoanalysts tried to explain anxiety by the idea of the shock of birth, the separation from the mother’s body. Freud didn’t buy this because then everyone would be crippled by virtue of being born. Lacan says,
“
-> in
-> Night of Philosophy and Ideas
January 27th, 2018
-> Anxiety, Anxiety, Anxiety!
->Jamieson Webster
3) Last story: There is a Shrimp that Eats Sand.
I’ll explain. I’m almost done, I swear.
Lacan’s Seminar X was called Anxiety. For Lacan we have to go to
the edge of this anxiety, rather than stay trapped in its narrow confines and nagging whiny demands. We might find a point of equilibrium if we experience separation in contact with what is absolutely Other. He uses the surreal naturalistic fable of a shrimp that needs to imbibe a grain of sand to establish equilibrium.
The shrimp, he says, needs to take this outside inside. But it has to be the right grain of sand, it has to find this right grain of sand at all costs—scientists forced them swallow all kinds of things that set them off balance, including grains of metal that allowed the scientists to play with these poor little shrimp using magnets. Strange that evolution can make room for something like this! Some psychoanalysts tried to explain anxiety by the idea of the shock of birth, the separation from the mother’s body. Freud didn’t buy this because then everyone would be crippled by virtue of being born. Lacan says,
let us think of the shrimp, a foreign exterior, not so unlike oxygen, breath, must invading us from the outside.
“
-> in
-> Night of Philosophy and Ideas
January 27th, 2018
-> Anxiety, Anxiety, Anxiety!
->Jamieson Webster
