Lacan's topologie du sujet

Archvillain

re-reading 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' by Alan Sokal, and having found myself completely transfixed by just how cool Quantum mechanics can get, particularly to those without a damn clue such as my good self, I encountered again a point I breezed over before and this time got stuck on.

Lacan's topologie du sujet is brought up thus:
This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject.
This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.57 58
As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''

re-reading it I'm still stuck. can anybody help. please!!!

SkepticOne

'Transgressing the Boundaries' was a parody by Sokal which was unwittingly published in a journal called 'Social Text' in 1996.

He has a book called 'Intellectual Impostures' where he explains his reasoning behind submitting the paper to the journal.

simu

Aye. I found a website on this "Sokal Affair" here:http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/sokal.htm
It give information about how the whole thing started and links to articles about the significance of this hoax from various viewpoints.

Sokal has his own web page as well: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html

Archvillain

of course: I found it here:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/sokal.html

Lovely site btw. I'm kind of a hoax addict. As at least one previous post will affirm.
But, more to the point, is what he said about Lacan also a hoax????
I'm not filled in enough about the man to know that...