Aesthetic theory’s tenet that in order to overcome limitations in our ability to monitor the accuracy of our perception we instead utilize a sense of harmony to relieve the tensions between ideas and emotions and thereby create a coherent subject is something Freud refutes by arguing subjectivity is produced through the tension created between competing drives.
The proposal of a master signifier by Lacan indicates the existence a kind of hierarchy among signifiers (of at least two levels) set by the ability of some signifiers to affect a bum rush of subjective rules and a cultural framework into the mind of the beholder.
Lacan’s theory that subjectivity is built by a kind of dialogue is the ultimate structuralist argument in that he argues language is fundamental to the formation of the self.
When desire, unconscious because it has ‘slipped beneath’ need, becomes a demand on the other, it places a locus of power over the subject because only the other can fulfill the need and the accompanying unconscious desire, thereby creating a defining boundary between the subject and the other.
Believing loss is inevitable, Kristeva sees depression as a time to renegotiate object relations, often through creative expression, and thereby step out of a relapsed ‘depressive position’ or worse yet, a schizoid one.
Kristeva’s notion of the abject and the accompanying required adherence to prohibition and law combined with her fixation on the biological elements of life cause Drew Carey’s nightmare of late night hog dog eating at Denny’s and the ensuing race home to haunt me when I drive.
Zizek’s theory of the gaze and voice gives me an excuse for my endless blathering at my wife (which she calls pseudo-intellectual inane chatter) because with the loss of my earliest frameworks of reality including maternal and partial objects I have to do this in order to stem the repressed fear of non-existence.
Kristeva believes that the processes of signification stem from a natural sate of affairs within the body and rises of its own accord, before the type of structuring Lacan describes takes place.
Abhorring any distinction between man and nature, Deleuze and Guattari argue that all reality is production, composed of binary machines linked in a ‘connective synthesis’ that is the production of production and is in and of itself identity production.
