Symbolic order

ordre symbolique

Worked through in 30 videos · 54 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani sets the symbolic order against the natural order: where nature knows only causes and effects, the human world is made of signs and meaning1. This order, produced by language, presupposes that one has left nature behind. It has a ternary structure: the triangle of speaker, thing and other, with the word at the centre2. He links it to the Freudian and Lacanian field, and regards Marxism and psychoanalysis as the two great ways of thinking about this order3. The symbolic order is not scientific, but it is rigorous: it leaves no detail to chance4. It does not do away with natural causality, but it is decisive in human relations5. He takes his examples from Nerval, where the landscape obeys a symbolic causality, from Wagner, from the rites of the meal and from the pairing of water with the feminine. He adds that the reality of this order is not a fiction, and that confusing it with the real is a form of naive realism.

Summary produced automatically from 54 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 28 Aug 2026From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!

9:06The triangle of two subjects and an object, like a peace pipe passed around, defines the symbolic field.

Cycle 12 · 4 Jun 2024The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present

6:40The flower-maidens and the birds of Siegfried answer each other in the symbolic order, like bird names given to women.
1:08:44It is the symbolic order that catches up every time: the Valkyries are the origin of the swans; the reality of the symbolic order is not a fiction.

Cycle 12 · 30 May 2024From fidelity to grace: from substance to subject

13:57The desert separating the Grail from the world signifies that a crossing, a series of trials, is needed to reach it.

Cycle 12 · 1 Apr 2024The quest for the Grail, sanctimony or sacrilege?

31:38The sun is neither the eye nor the object but the third term that makes the relation possible: the tertium quid Freud speaks of.
1:28:23The swan gazing at itself belongs to the symbolic order, not to zoology.

Talks · 29 May 2023From the debauchery of sense to the orgy of sentiment

1:22:43A link between feminine speech, song and flowing water: not physical or scientific, but rigorous within the order of the symbol.
2:00:52Rousseau beneath the favorite's window is historically false but true within the order of the symbol.
2:27:16The first garment is the loincloth: the symbolic order does not eliminate natural causality but it is decisive in human relations.

Cycle 11 · 18 May 2023Worldliness in Clouscard, or privileges for all

31:01For millennia, fire has been on the masculine side and water on the feminine side, water being the origin.

Cycle 11 · 18 Mar 2023A springtime of the peoples?

1:19:06Beyond each mother, the mother goddess (Virgin or Isis) is a universal figure that reunites the fragmented body.
2:04:41The symbolic order mediates between the chaining of concepts and the oceanic feeling, through sound and analogy.

Cycle 10 · 7 Apr 2022#12 From Kafka to Proust, the dialectical passage from the intermezzo to the perpetuated edge

2:01:39The symbolic order, produced by language, presupposes that one has left nature; double articulation distinguishes language from animal communications.
2:16:11The sun that dies in the west belongs to the symbolic order, not to the reality studied by the astronomer.

Cycle 10 · 24 Nov 2021#10.5 The figure of Antigone, such as into herself at last…

1:41:05The sun, which centralizes the sky, prefigures an immanent monotheism and becomes a moral center.
1:45:21A symbol is a subject figured by an object without consciousness, which receives the form of consciousness.

Series · 4 Oct 2021#4 Nomad and sedentary: the case of Nerval

1:17:06The shore is a conversion, from horizontal to vertical, from solid ground to flow; Célénie is the moon, the star heaviest with meaning.

Cycle 9.2 · 30 Jun 2021#9.24 “Ruled like music paper!” Nerval, Baudelaire (part 2)

22:46Logic of the subject, logic of meaning immanent to the sign, not of the transitive cause in relation to the effect.
33:37The maternal house superimposed on the Rhine is a nonsense in the causal order, an irrefutable logic in the symbolic order.
1:14:15The symbolic order leaves no detail to chance; with cause and effect alone, there would only be chance.

Cycle 9.2 · 9 Jun 2021#9.23 “Ruled like music paper!” Bach, Nerval, Lévi-Strauss

23:00It is not reserved for poetry: it governs the whole of language, down to the commentary on a football match.
1:57:14The Wagnerian discovery, that the structure of myths is unveiled by a score, applies to symbolic order in general.

Series · 6 Jun 2021#3 Nomad or sedentary? The case of Nerval

43:03The seafaring man faces the riverbank woman who awaits him: one stops where the beloved resides.
1:14:42The bird, the female voice, and water form a triple presence in the symbolic order.

Series · 31 Mar 2021Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?

27:37Neid, envy, in the name Neidlinger and in Siegfried's "envious sword": a desiring sword, a sword of envy.

Cycle 9.2 · 17 Mar 2021#9.17 The geopolitical metaphor: Planck, Descartes, Clouscard

1:45:43Only the symbolic order can raise this human empirical reality, as observable as the phases of the moon, to scientific rigor.

Cycle 9.2 · 14 Jan 2021#9.12 How can sciences of history be real?

1:30:10The Rhinemaidens' babbling, a song without code, marks entry into the symbolic order.
1:39:54High and low, light and darkness, light and heavy: symbolic dichotomies that express class relations.

Talks · 6 Oct 2020Calves and Things (3): the dictatorship of the bobotariat

4:09Through the Tour de France, the proletarian enters the symbolic order.
12:07Marxism and psychoanalysis are the two great thoughts of the symbolic order, against which there is relentless attack.

Talks · 4 Oct 2020Calves and Things: the preface

8:55The second level of analysis, which science does not address: environmentalist discourse unwittingly expresses fantasies as old as the world.
14:11It is terribly concrete, but it belongs to the logic of the subject rather than to the knowledge of objects.

Cycle 6 · 3 Dec 2019#6.2 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

25:13The symbolic is an object passing itself off as a subject; without it everything is reduced to universal mechanism.
1:25:21Societies without writing show the symbolic order instead of hiding it; it changes register without disappearing.
1:41:41It is inscribed in the body through changing paths, but its meaning remains: to be recognized as free.

Cycle 6 · 10 Nov 2019#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”

26:58The triangle of the sign (speaker, thing spoken of, person spoken to, with the word at the center) shows the ternary character of the symbolic.

Series · 12 Mar 2019Pablo Servigne

17:22A non-scientific but rigorous order, which can be analyzed scientifically: eating oil is eating shit.
1:54:27One cannot speak of the end of the world without addressing the symbolic order.

Cycle 5.2 · 25 Jan 2019#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?

55:02Communication through language belongs to the symbolic order, in the sense of the Freudian field, and not to the natural order.

Cycle 4 · 14 Jun 2018#4.9 Angélique (by Nerval)

56:50Some words express realities, others hide them: we do not know what "the West" means, but we know what we are doing when we say it.
1:14:28Death as a voyage lies in language, not in reality.

Cycle 4 · 12 Apr 2018#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:05:06The dichotomy between Germanic peoples and natives can be read in place names: Vaud, Valois, Walloon, Welsh.
1:37:12Order of meaning and finality, distinct from mechanical order: the pair meaning-sign against the pair cause-effect.

Cycle 4 · 15 Mar 2018#4.6 Angélique (by Nerval)

22:57Sylvain, Sylvie, Sylvanectes: emanations of the woods, symbolic names rather than real ones.
1:01:05In the Ermenonville domain, every square inch has been designed: the rocks and fountains speak.
1:18:03What is distressing in the symbolic order is its repetitiveness.

Cycle 4 · 11 Dec 2017#4.3 Angélique (by Nerval)

19:38In the Senlis text, everything is affected by the same parameter of decline: what appears real is entirely symbolic.
1:26:17The landscape conforms to the symbolic order: Sylvain obeys a symbolic causality, not a Galilean one.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.4 From Ulysses to Daedalus

31:48The key to a dream is a statement, with its wordplay and metaphors, and not a psychological notion.
1:40:29Confusing the symbolic and the real, as in remedies that must be taken at the full moon, is a naive realism.

Cycle 2 · 15 Feb 2016#2.1 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:20:12Access to the symbol, to convention, to the relation to the other; the word gives presence to the absent and inscribes itself in the triangle self, thing, other.

Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 2/3

39:10Between nature and explicit convention, an unstipulated pact between subjects, a middle term that Rousseau brings to light.

Cycle 1 · 11 Dec 2015#1.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:30:20The world of the sign addresses the other: in nature there are causes and effects, in the human world signs and meaning.
1:32:46The rites of the meal vary but all belong to the symbolic order, which adds nothing to the biological.