Wittgenstein and Lacan?

now as i’ve said, i’m in this class on theology and language where we will be reading through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, among other texts. What about Lacan? Well, here is the direction of my thinking concerning the linguistic turn for a couple of years.

After studying philosophy in undergrad and entering into seminary life (and all its talk about sematics and interpretation, and Ricoeur), I felt that we needed to go somewhere beyond language (but of course not leaving it behind, but moving on by moving through). But where? initially i thought that after emerging through the necessary passage through language (both turns, analytic ancontinentalal, being necessary to get the problem out there) I thought that we could return to division 1 of Being and Time, a phenomenology of life, etc, etc. I still sense this intuition to be correct, and it is being borne out in my research of contemporary political theorist (theoris disgruntled with deconstructive ethics) and their return(ish) to a subject. For many this return to a political subject is conceptualized via the Lacanian Subject ($). And I also read somewhere in Badiou that Lacan was the last and greatest thinker in the linguistic turn (although B. doesn’t mean this a necessarily a compliment b/c he see much of the LT as pure sophistry from which philosophy must protect us). All that to say, I decided I needed to read up on Lacan and have been reading through Encrits, Book VII, XI, and XX for last 6 months or so.

Now after reading Lacan I think that badiou is correct, that he is thinking throught the concrete areas of life, and how they are pentitrated by the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real, in a way the Division 1 of B&T could never have acheived (although I still love it).

So, in this course, and many (too many probably for most of you) of my blog entries, will focus on the intersection of Wittgenstien (who have been appropriated by both analytics and continentials) and Lacan as both working a type of anti-philosophical therapy curing of mundane philosphy and preparing us for robust theology.

Well, i didn’t get to what I wanted to write today (which was going to be a brainstorm about how to begin getting into W. and L. via their critique of idealism), but o well.