Lacan's dream / Cartesian monster
example · Lacan ·
retold in 3 talks
Žižek recounts Lacan's dream where the Cartesian subject is an 'inhuman monster,' arguing that the pure Cogito is not a human person but an abstract, depersonalized point of view.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“the eye that remains is the pure Cartesian subject who is no longer a human person”
“Lacan dit que quelqu'un dans le futur va développer une ontologie de ce que je dis.”
“the problem is what happens if I see two white hats… precisely through a certain logic of delay”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Lino Ventura1Simone Signoret1Rade Šerbedžija1Jean Cavaillès1"Jean-Pierre Melville"1Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz1Carl Fredrik Mörck1Charlton Heston1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Žižek recounts Lacan's dream where the Cartesian subject is an 'inhuman monster,' arguing that the pure Cogito is not a human person but an abstract, depersonalized point of view., illustrating Cartesian subject
Žižek quotes Lacan in French, noting Lacan's claim that someone in the future will develop an ontology of his speech, and Žižek questions whether the current interlocutor is that person., illustrating psychoanalysis,hegel-dialectics
Three prisoners can see each other's hats (three white, two black) and must deduce their own. The solution requires reasoning through a logic of delay: 'if I had a black hat, the others would have deduced faster.' Lacan uses this to illustrate the temporality of the subject., illustrating precipitation of the act,logic of the subject,the act as too early and too late