lacan reading list?

• EVA and Lacan http://minagahet.blogspot.com/2006/03/lacan-avec-evangelion.html
  • Shinji’s story strongly mirrors in interesting ways the trajectory of Lacan’s subject, distraught, tortured by thought, divorced from being. All humans according to Lacan are born premature, incomplete, producing an infant desire to be one with the mother. To be the object of the mother’s desire. But her desire is always deflected elsewhere, never enough to complete the link with the child.
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  • First a clarification must be made here. The crucial difference between Lacan and Freud is Lacan’s emphasis on language as opposed to biology for the basis for his theories. The law of the Father is therefore not so much the father himself, but instead a function of language. A condition of alienation the subject experiences through its constitution in language.
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  • What does the other want from me? What am I to this other, who is always watching me? The question of who am I, is always echoed by an other who must respond to ensure that something exists. That the “I” am here.
  • There is for Shinji and the other characters an eternal desire for recognition. Desire, according to Elizabeth Wright, is always desire for recognition of one’s identity. Throughout Evangelion there is persistent emotional violence, reproaches, crippling dependencies. There exists within each character a dependency of desire that lies beneath the ability of the ego to exorcise or articulate.
  • At one point, Shinji rejects the Evangelion unit and its violence and refuses to fight anymore, leaving NERV and running away. When he is recovered several days later, an Angel attacks. Will Shinji rejoin the Evangelion and destroy the Angel? In this scene and numerous others, his ambivalence is marked by the word “want.” “If that’s what you want me to do.” “What is it that you want from me?”
  • In this ambivalence we can see the split that haunts all subjects. “I want you to want me.” Shinji’s negotiation to anticipate, to match, to entrench himself in the other’s responses. Not, do you want me to fight? But, it seems too much to make someone else fight, I’ll fight. A twisting around the elusive space of the other’s always evasive desire.
  • The response of the other never corresponds to my desire. Never fulfills it. But yet, what happens in Evangelion is this very impossibility.
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  • During both of their terms in the madness of human instrumentality, Asuka had called Shinji pathetic, a coward and he had attacked her, almost choking her. After discovering both him and Asuka alone in this brave new world, the Lacanian mantra of love is illustrated all too well, “I love you, but there is something in you more than you, a tiny piece of the real, which is why I must mutilate you.”
  • Shinji attacks Asuka, his hands again around her neck and then he begins to cry. Asuka in turn, calls him disgusting.
  • For Lacan, there is no end to this story, it continues on dialectically, the subject absolutely able to change the Symbolic world around is, fundamentally unable to alter the forms of its own constitution. The impossible will happen, things will change, but what we can read from this ending is that the subject cannot. The radical change is always too traumatic for the subject, to close to the means of its constitution. And so while the Symbolic can be radically altered, the split in the subject will always return, along with it, this potential for greatness and its inexorable madness.
• what does lacan mean by desire as lack https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/
• psychoanalytic feminism (stanford) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-psychoanalysis/#Lac
• how to read lacan by zizek https://archive.org/details/how-to-read-lacan_202307/How%20to%20read%20Lacan
• i think this is the same but online, good intro https://www.lacan.com/essays/
  • chapters i like:
  • lacan turns a prayer wheel
  • lacan as a viewer of casablanca
• chapter 3 is on jung and freud https://archive.org/details/woundedjungeffec0000smit/page/n7/mode/2up
• https://letterboxd.com/kuntsuragi/film/neon-genesis-evangelion-the-end-of-evangelion/1/
  • Yet there’s still the faintest glimmer of hope to End of Evangelion’s final scene I wrote about in Lacanian terms for a zine I contributed to several years ago: “Ultimately, Evangelion presents the desire to return to and be one with the Mother as an attempt to “run away” from reality and the pains that come with it, much like its creator did for four years. In rejecting Instrumentality, Shinji accepts Oedipal separation from the Mother and emancipates himself from relying upon others―Gendo, the Evas, and Yui herself―to legitimize his subjectivity, reassured by a final motherly caress to his cheek. Following this conclusive separation, Shinji is thrown back into the trauma of reality in the haunting final scene, so horrified by everything that’s happened that he can only respond to Asuka’s presence with the same violent gesture that initiated Third Impact (strangulation). But by responding to Shinji’s traumatic outburst with a maternal caress to his cheek, Asuka leaves Evangelion’s audience with a hopeful reminder against a decimated red wasteland; we may not be able to reconcile with the pain and loneliness definitive of human existence by returning to Mother, but as beings capable of love, empathy and change, we can always strive to better understand others, ourselves, and the bonds between us.” Yet understanding is not the same as forgiveness, depending on how you interpret Asuka’s final line (“I feel sick.”/“How disgusting.”) in response to Shinji’s actions and inactions over the course of the film. Still, in that final gesture, with Asuka’s bandaged hand reaching out to stroke Shinji’s face, there is an act of profound empathy in the face of the Other’s unimaginable pain. To be alive is to hurt, and to hurt is to feel. Feeling means being alive, and as long as we’re alive there’s always a chance we can try to understand the pain of another (and ourselves) better.
• evangelion (explanation of mirror stage) https://skapbadoa.com/2019/05/29/end-of-evangelion-psychoanalytic-impact-iii-2017/