“I was into Lacan from 1975 to 1979 and then became disgusted with the dogmatic exclusive use of his thought”
“We all have to live in some province or other, or even in several. But the province where we live should not be declared to be the world.”
“My attitude to Lacan is the same as to any other thinker. As heuristic he is potentially useful, as dogmatic he is dangerous”
“Lacan had a heuristic relation to his own thought, he constantly transformed his ideas, and his analytic practice was something else, probably even more transformative.”
“This is why I will accept no dogma of the three or the four. Latour’s 16 is a useful heuristic reminder that stopping short is simply a temporary expedient, a provional halting point, and not a definitive discovery.”
“Lacan was an experimenter, but he was also a school builder as his choice of Miller over Guattari exemplifies quite well. He may have dissolved his own school, He did not dissolve Miller’s ministry, nor the money it brought him.”
“The imagination is not natively binary but pluralist. Images are not inherently dual. James Hillman, the post-Jungian analyst, is a good antidote to Lacan here. There is no reason to believe that images are always and everywhere reducible to dual relations.”
“There is no reason to believe that all images are reducible to dual relations.There are many regimes of images, and the dual is just one regime among many others. If we had to play the head-shrinking game of speaking in terms of the imaginary and the symbolic, I’d say that the dual regime is a contamination of the imaginary by the symbolic.”
“Any insistence that such a dualism necessarily exists in the duality of consciousness of an image amounts to smuggling in the presupposition of duality by the use of the notion of an encounter between consciousness and image”
“Far from being self-evident, this is an unjustified posit. It can easily be falsified by citing those thinkers who get along quite well without having to presuppose it (Bergson, Deleuze, Hillman)”