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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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to the micro politics of desire on which is founded, in each particular<br />

situation, the social differentiation of the sexes, the alienation of the<br />

child. As far as we are concerned, the struggles of desire should not<br />

just be circumscribed in the domain of the signifier-even in the case<br />

of a "pure" signifying neurosis, like obsessional neurosis. They always<br />

overflow into somatic, social, and economic domains, etc. And<br />

unless one believes the signifier is found in everything and anything,<br />

one may as well admit that the role of the unconscious has been singularly<br />

restrained in order to consider it only from the angle of the<br />

signifying chains it activates. "The unconscious is structured like a<br />

language," Lacan tells us. Certainly. But by whom By the family, the<br />

school, the barracks, the factory, the cinema, and, in special cases, by<br />

psychiatry and psychoanalysis. When one has fixed it, succeeded in<br />

crushing the polyvocity of its semiotic modes of expression, bound it<br />

to a certain type of semiological machine, then yes, it ends up being<br />

structured like a language. It remains fairly docile. It starts speaking<br />

the language of the dominant system, which is, moreover, not everyday<br />

language, but a special, sublimated, psychoanalyzed language.<br />

Not only has desire come to accept its alienation within the signifying<br />

chains, but it keeps demanding more and more signifier. It no longer<br />

wants to have anything to do with the rest of the world and its modes<br />

of semiotization. Any troubling problem will find there, if not its<br />

solution, at least a comforting suspension in the interplay of the<br />

signifier. Under such conditions, what becomes, for example, of the<br />

age-old alienation of women by men For the signifier, as it is conceived<br />

by linguists, only neutral and innocent traces such as the<br />

opposition of masculine/feminine, and for the psychoanalysts, the<br />

mirages that play around the presence/absence of the phallus. In fact,<br />

for each type of linguistic performance, for each "degree of grammaticality"<br />

of an enonce, there is a corresponding formation of power.<br />

The structure of the signifier is never completely reducible to pure<br />

mathematical logic; it is always partly bound by diverse, repressive<br />

,:' 261

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