This Lacan in Scotland seminar "Stupidity and Psychoanalysis" took place 30 January 2025 on Zoom. The seminar celebrates the book launch of "Stupidity and Psychoanalysis: Lacanian Perspectives on New Subjectivities and Social Forms" with a panel discussion. The editor of the book, Professor Cindy Zeiher (University of Canterbury) serves as session chair together with Professor Calum Neill (Director of Lacan in Scotland) where they discuss some of the contributions with authors of the book.
VIDEO TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Intro 01:24 - Introduction by Cindy Zeiher (editor) 14:10 - Jean-Michel Rabaté (author) 25:22 - Samo Tomšič (author) 43:29 - James Martell (author) 57:04 - Antonio Viselli (author) 1:12:49 - Discussion (all)
DESCRIPTION OF THE SEMINAR
There is nothing new in thinking that we live in stupid times. While many thinkers think (or have thought) about stupidity as a symptom, Lacan considered it as immune to the influence of psychoanalysis, saying about himself, “I am only relatively stupid―that is to say, I am as stupid as all people―perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened.” Here stupidity’s inescapability signifies (and is signified by) the absence of any coherent foundation in desire and lack but instead emanates from the will to jouissance.
This seminar features Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Samo Tomšič (Humboldt Universität), James Martell (Lyon College), Antonio Viselli( University of Canterbury) and Cindy Zeiher (University of Canterbury) to discuss their contributions to a new collection dedicated to Lacanian readings of stupidity.
I. Invocation
“When Thought Trips Over Itself”
There is a particular kind of fog that does not arise from ignorance, but from accumulated misrecognition—a fog not of mystery, but of mirrors. In this fog, every step forward is a circle, and every sentence gestures toward understanding while carefully avoiding it. The fog thickens with each elegant phrase, until even the most brilliant minds find themselves dancing gracefully around the very thing they claim to confront.
In the seminar accompanying Stupidity and Psychoanalysis: Lacanian Perspectives on New Subjectivities and Social Forms, we are greeted by just such a fog—a murmuring cloud of theory in which the term “stupidity” is evoked, prodded, symbolized, and speculated upon… yet rarely, if ever, defined.
Jacques Lacan, in his signature ouroboric style, once mused:
“I am only relatively stupid—that is to say, I am as stupid as all people—perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened.”
It’s a charming line. It implies universality, modesty, and the veil of partial wisdom. But it also reveals a deeper problem that this critique intends to confront directly: the conflation of stupidity as symptom, structure, subjectivity, and even style. Lacan, like many intellectuals enamored with abstraction, seems less concerned with precision than with poetic provocation. And herein lays the problem.
When we speak of stupidity as a singular phenomenon while piling upon it contradictory qualities—neurological limitations, moral failures, performative ignorance, accidental error, cultural conditioning—we commit a category error of the highest order. This is not merely a failure of semantics; it is a failure of epistemic stewardship. It is to construct a compass using magnets from multiple fields, each pulling in its own direction, then wondering why we are lost.
Stupidity, like all mental phenomena, demands disentanglement. Without such care, we risk mistaking misalignment for malice, confusing ignorance with apathy, and most dangerously, misdiagnosing what is intentionally destructive as merely incompetent.
This critique is offered not in opposition to psychoanalysis, nor to the authors of the aforementioned work, but as an act of philosophical hygiene. We propose to clarify what has been obfuscated, to untangle the semantic knots of subjectivity and name the cognitive cords that bind them.
The goal is not to demolish, but to refine. We will offer a taxonomy of stupidity, grounded not in mystification, but in clarity—one that recognizes the diversity of mechanisms at play and the moral consequences of treating all errors of mind as though they were equal.
For when thought trips over itself and mistakes the stumble for a dance, someone must gently—but firmly—point out the difference.
II. The Problem of Definitional Sloppiness
“When a Word Means Everything, It Means Nothing”
In philosophy, as in architecture, clarity is load-bearing. Definitions are not optional decorations for intellectual buildings—they are the beams, the foundations, the interlocking columns that make critical thought possible. Without them, any attempt at analysis becomes an aesthetic gesture, like performing surgery with a feather duster: intricate, expressive, and utterly ineffective.
In the seminar accompanying Stupidity and Psychoanalysis, we encounter a troubling lack of this foundational clarity. Across multiple speakers, the term “stupidity” is used as a conceptual catch-all—invoked variously to describe:
Neurological traits there are no linkages to the biology of the brain, which is not surprising as we know vastly more about the biology of the brain since the time of Lacan, but this also results failing to distinguish between the aspects which can be changed via social convention, and those which are developmental aspects of the biology of the brain. This also means that it is possible to change some of these aspects over time, through neural plasticity, rather than being etched in stone.
Behavioral choices, where individuals act in ways deemed irrational or self-defeating
Psychological disorders, often implicitly, as when behavior is pathologized without diagnostic rigor
Symbolic or structural conditions, where “stupidity” is theorized as a function of discourse, ideology, or desire
These are distinct categories, each deserving their own inquiry. Yet in the seminar, they are blurred without method—merged like overlapping shadows, until the term ‘stupid’ becomes an empty placeholder, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that pretends at insight.
Worse, the conflation of these domains leads to a false sense of completeness. When stupidity is defined simultaneously as biological limitation, unconscious drive, performative resistance, and symbolic excess, it risks becoming so totalizing that it explains nothing at all. The result is an intellectual ouroboros: a theory that eats its own boundaries to appear more universal.
This definitional collapse is not a harmless oversight. It disables our ability to distinguish between:
A child struggling with underdeveloped executive function
An adult choosing willful ignorance to avoid discomfort
A politician exploiting symbolic language to mask deliberate harm
A culture reproducing memes of stupidity for profit or control
Stupidity Imposed through cultural reproduction in fictions, such as film. As well as propaganda narratives.
These are not the same. They do not emerge from the same source, and they do not respond to the same forms of intervention. Lumping them together under a single banner flattens the landscape of human behavior and obscures moral responsibility.
This is what we mean when we say a taxonomic disaster has occurred.
Taxonomy, in this context, is not academic pedantry—it is conceptual infrastructure. Without clear distinctions, we cannot:
Craft appropriate responses
Understand root causes
Avoid moral misdiagnosis
Build frameworks for improvement, accountability, or compassion
In neoBuddhist terms, this would be akin to mistaking karmic misalignment for innocent ignorance, or interpreting deliberate harm as the inevitable result of desire. It would confuse the actor with the act, and the act with its consequence.
Stupidity, if it is to be a useful concept, must be disentangled from metaphor, distilled from performance, and re-aligned with mechanism. It must be re-grounded in the actual processes of cognition, culture, and consciousness—not dissolved in the warm bath of symbolic language.
Until that work is done, stupidity will remain less a subject of inquiry and more a rhetorical device—a mirror reflecting the speaker’s own projections, rather than a lens that reveals the contours of the mind.
III. Toward a Clearer Framework: A Proto-Taxonomy of Stupidity
An Anatomy of Error: Mapping the Varieties of Stupidity
To move beyond rhetorical fog and toward insight, we must treat “stupidity” not as a singular deficit but as a family of dysfunctions—cognitive, behavioral, cultural, and performative. Each has its own etiology, feedback mechanisms, and moral implications. Treating them as equivalent is as mistaken as treating a fever, a delusion, and a broken leg with the same remedy simply because they are all “problems.”
Here, we propose a proto-taxonomy of stupidity—neither exhaustive nor definitive, but functionally differentiated enough to allow clarity where the seminar offered convolution.
1. Cognitive Deficits
These refer to limitations of the brain’s processing system, whether innate, acquired, or environmentally induced.
These include working memory capacity, attention regulation, and abstraction ability, among others.
Cognitive function is not static—it is shaped by lifestyle, environment, and feedback loops. Poor diet, chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and sedentary habits all contribute to neurochemical dysregulation that mimics or reinforces stupidity.
Stupidity, in this case, is like a muscle atrophied from disuse—the same neuroplastic mechanisms that allow growth also allow decay.
This is often the most forgivable form, but also the one most prone to being misdiagnosed or ignored in symbolic or psychoanalytic frameworks.
2. Behavioral Stupidity
This is stupidity as a choice—the failure to inhibit, reflect, or revise an action despite knowing better.
It’s what we witness in people who “knew better, but didn’t care to act like it.”
Often a result of inhibitory failure—short-term impulse overriding long-term reasoning.
Meditation and ethical practice in neoBuddhism aim to enhance this very faculty—our capacity to pause, reflect, and choose wisely.
Behavioral stupidity includes recklessness, impulsivity, and the unthinking pursuit of pleasure—often confused with deeper deficits but functionally distinct. While also failing to identify that this is where a lack of meaning in life originates. Or the roles of meaning in the process of goal seeking.
3. Symbolic / Performative Stupidity
This arises from the pressure to conform to a social script—to perform ignorance, compliance, or apathy in order to be accepted.
Think of students pretending not to care about learning so they aren’t labeled “nerds.”
Or employees mimicking flawed procedures because challenging them would provoke social risk.
It is stupidity performed to reduce social friction—a kind of camouflage against the group’s symbolic terrain.
4. Malicious Ignorance
This is stupidity wielded like a shield or a weapon—not because one doesn’t know, but because one refuses to know.
This is the domain of epistemic sabotage, denialism, and the banality of evil.
It overlaps with what Arendt saw in bureaucratic cruelty—not passionate hatred, but a blank indifference to truth.
It’s the policy-maker who ignores data because it’s politically inconvenient.
It’s the citizen who avoids confronting systemic harm because it would demand self-reflection or change.
Deliberately presenting sub-optimal options and even ignoring challenges with contain more optimal options while being within the bounds of an institutional interaction. As is normal during instances of hostile discrimination, though abuse of institutional power.
In many cases, the individual is perfectly competent—but opts to “mask” intelligence for cultural capital.
Karmically, this is the most consequential stupidity—because it intertwines choice with consequences, often externalized onto others.
5. Cultural & Linguistic Distortions
This refers to stupidity embedded in frameworks of meaning—as a result of miseducation, propaganda, or inherited ideology.
Here, stupidity is not personal—it is systemic.
It reproduces through language, myth, media, and institutions.
Consider the economic “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” myth: the belief that systemic inequality is just a temporary setback on the road to personal wealth.
This results in alignment with systems that actively harm their own social safety net—a form of stupidity generated not by individual choice, but by cultural reinforcement. Which implicitly promotes inequality. To smuggle in social Darwinism.
This is where fiction and fantasy merge with economic and social ideology, creating reality-distortion fields that masquerade as common sense.
6. Emergent Stupidity
Where a group, despite having competent members, produces collectively irrational behavior.
Think: Groupthink, bubbles, panics, or meme-driven policy.
Often driven by identity confusion—when people adopt worldviews that are maladaptive but emotionally comforting, like market fundamentalism dressed as optimism. Or meme groups on social media. Conflicts between personal and group identities.
In neoBuddhist terms, this is karmic recursion—feedback loops that reinforces delusion. Which results in training the subconcious mind to those patterns.
IV – The Intentional Axis: Implicit vs. Explicit Stupidity
🌀 “Between Fog and Fire: Mapping Intent in the Realm of Stupidity”
Before we turn toward the moral and societal consequences of stupidity, we must name a critical variable left mostly unexamined in the seminar: the axis of intent. That is, the difference between being stupid and choosing stupidity.
This is the faultline that separates the stupid from the bandit.
Implicit stupidity is passive, often tragic. It arises from:
cognitive limitations
miseducation
poor modeling
subconscious bias
inherited assumptions
It is the domain of the struggling student, the confused elder, the overwhelmed worker. It deserves compassion, education, and—when possible—remediation.
Explicit stupidity, by contrast, is performative or weaponized. It includes:
Willful ignorance
Strategic denial
Malicious compliance
Sarcastic feigned stupidity for plausible deniability
Dogmatic resistance to self-correction
This is the domain of the pseudo-idiot: the one who knows enough to know better, and chooses not to act accordingly. It is the bureaucrat who feigns misunderstanding to delay justice. It is the politician who invokes stupidity to veil malice. It is the cultist who wears idiocy as armor against doubt.
To confuse these two is not just an epistemic failure—it is a moral hazard.
The fool can be taught. The bandit only pretends to be one.
In the neoBuddhist framework, the karmic burden of implicit stupidity lies in lost opportunity and passive harm. The karmic burden of explicit stupidity is heavier—it is the karma of deliberate distortion. It corrupts others, generates systemic entropy, and erodes trust as a form of collective decay.
Thus, to name stupidity without intent is to misname it. And to treat all stupidity as forgivable is to become its apologist.
To effectively differentiate implicit from explicit stupidity, one must critically evaluate the coherence between stated arguments (explicit) and their underlying assumptions and implications (implicit). Implicit stupidity refers to sincere but mistaken reasoning arising from genuine ignorance, cognitive limitations, or unconscious biases. It typically involves straightforward misconceptions or logical oversights made without malicious intent.
Conversely, explicit stupidity involves deliberate manipulation of reasoning, where incoherence is a strategic rhetorical tool. Such speakers use carefully constructed ambiguities, redefine critical terms repeatedly to blur their meanings, and utilize non-sequiturs or logical contradictions intentionally. This form of rhetorical dishonesty creates plausible deniability and allows explicit ideas—often anti-intellectual, tribalistic, or violent—to be covertly promoted under the guise of innocent misunderstanding or simplicity.
Consider rhetorical tactics like the gish gallop, where a rapid succession of loosely related claims overwhelm a listener's cognitive resources, preventing critical evaluation and obscuring underlying intentions. Explicitly stupid rhetoric also frequently deploys:
Strategic ambiguity and repeated redefinitions of key terms (e.g., conflating openness with naivety, or simplicity with innocence and authenticity).
False equivalences and relativistic framing to blur moral and intellectual distinctions, facilitating implicit justifications of violence, tribalism, or populism.
Pseudo-intellectual posturing to create an illusion of profundity or epistemic humility while actively undermining conceptual rigor and intellectual honesty.
Thus, assessing the intentional axis involves examining whether the speaker’s rhetorical devices enhance clarity and understanding (a hallmark of intellectual honesty) or intentionally create confusion, obfuscation, and conceptual chaos (explicit stupidity). Identifying these rhetorical patterns can reliably distinguish genuinely ignorant arguments (implicit stupidity) from manipulative, malicious ones (explicit stupidity), guiding listeners on how much epistemic weight or credibility should be granted to the speaker’s claims.
1. Two Cognitive Systems, Two Modalities of Error
System 1 (fast, automatic, subconscious) thrives on heuristics, pattern recognition, and emotional resonance. It’s the seat of implicit judgments: once certain habits or biases settle, they run on autopilot, outside immediate reflective awareness.
System 2 (slow, deliberative, conscious) is our internal arbiter—capable of reflection, meta-cognition, and strategic thinking. Where System 1 might unthinkingly push us to certain reactions, System 2 can question, reconsider, override.
2. Implicit Stupidity (Embodied Error)
Arises from Well-Worn Heuristics
Implicit stupidity usually stems from ingrained mental shortcuts. Perhaps we generalize too quickly or rely on stereotypes because our prior experiences taught us to. There’s no conscious intention to mislead; it’s an embodiment of unexamined assumptions and sparse knowledge.
Difficult to Notice
Because it lives in the “gut” of System 1, it often feels correct. The immediate, intuitive sense of “this must be right” can be so strong we never realize it’s flawed.
Requires System 2 for Correction
As you said, we can’t fix a system 1 error with more system 1. Only the reflective loop (system 2: “Wait, that’s a hasty generalization”) can spot the mismatch and attempt adjusting weights and contextual associations. This is why humility and honest self-reflection matter so much in genuine ignorance: the person is open to receiving a correction, letting new reasoning (system 2) override old biases (system 1).
Behavioral or Embodied
It shows up in inattentive slip-ups, unconscious biases, reflexive judgments—anything that occurs before the speaker has time to second-guess. We can often see it in body language or unguarded statements.
3. Explicit Stupidity (Performative Error)
Crafted Through System 2
Ironically, explicit stupidity demands more strategic or deliberate thinking. The speaker uses System 2 to simulate ignorance or confusion in order to obscure or manipulate. They choose to misrepresent, skip logic steps, or adopt contradictory definitions—like an actor performing a role. Typically following patterns of emotional rhetorical tactics pseudo-intellectually posing as reason via postmodernist solipsism.
Weaponized Confusion
Because the contradictions or redefinitions aren’t naive, they’re orchestrated to produce rhetorical advantage and overwhelming working memory with irrelevant or incorrect information. (the “stupid” aspect) This might manifest as gish gallops or pivoting definitions mid-argument—behaviors that require cunning, not genuine ignorance. As well as body language, emotional emphasis, and relativism, to dominate the conversation. Intellectual bullying.
Performative Dimension
Explicit stupidity is deeply performative. The speaker might feign wide-eyed innocence (“I’m just asking questions!”) while carefully planting enough tangents, disclaimers, or double-speak to derail sincere debate. They want to be seen as naive or open-minded, when in fact they’re being deceptive on the rhetorical stage.
Hides Under System 1 “Vibe”
To be effective, explicit stupidity must look spontaneous or “authentically naive,” so the conscious System 2 manipulation stays hidden. The audience’s own System 1 might detect a “friendly, unthreatening” vibe and not realize they’re being maneuvered.
Intentional Maladaptation
It’s not a reflex—this is deception. The goal is not to discover truth but to secure advantage, evoke sympathy, or block criticism. The posture of ignorance or contradictory half-truths becomes a shield against accountability.
4. Overlaps & Distinctions in Practice
Overlap: Both types manifest as apparent incoherence. From the outside, an observer just sees “This person said something that doesn’t line up with facts.” Distinguishing them requires investigating intent, context, patterns of behavior, and willingness to revise upon correction.
Key Difference: Implicit stupidity recedes when faced with calm, clear evidence (System 2 correction). Explicit stupidity persists or morphs into new rhetorical tangles, precisely because the user doesn’t want resolution; confusion is their strategic asset.
5. Why This Matters for Discourse & Identity
System 1 illusions can create heartfelt but erroneous convictions, fostering tragic outcomes (racism, stereotypes) that are not malicious in intent, yet deeply harmful. Overcoming them demands self-awareness and supportive correction.
System 2 manipulations degrade public discourse, poisoning trust. They exploit our empathy and assumption of good faith to push bad faith agendas. Spotting them protects us from rhetorical traps and helps us maintain authenticity in debate.
Interface Between Conscious & Subconscious: The "translation" is indeed probabilistic—System 2 can only sample and reinterpret System 1 outputs. It can’t see all of them at once. Hence the subtlety of unconscious bias (implicit) vs. conscious rhetorical cunning (explicit). Each calls for different remedies.
Concluding Abstraction
If implicit stupidity is a sleepwalking driver who sincerely does not realize they’re off track, explicit stupidity is the driver faking a breakdown to block everyone else on the highway. The first can be awakened by a careful shake (factual correction and compassion), the second is committing sabotage on purpose, feigning helplessness as a tactic.
Hence:
Implicit = embodied illusions.
Explicit = performative identity.
In both cases, the illusions cause confusion. But only one stems from a genuine blind spot; the other from a calculated refusal to see, also known as “Willful ignorance”
The Biophysiological Underpinnings of Stupidity
System 1, Energy, and Connectivity
Rapid but Resource-Lite: System 1’s quick judgments have minimal immediate metabolic cost. They rely on existing neural shortcuts (schemas, heuristics, biases). But because they rarely re-check themselves, they can lock us in an unthinking reflex.
Long-Distance Neural Connections: Engaging broader associative areas—particularly the interplay between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus—requires robust metabolic energy. If the brain is undernourished or chronically stressed, these integrative pathways weaken, limiting the mind’s ability to catch and correct System 1 errors.
System 2, Metabolic Demands, and ‘Mulling It Over’
Inhibitory Control: A key aspect of intelligence is the capacity to say “Wait, that might be wrong,” and hold conflicting possibilities in working memory. This demands real neurochemical fuel—oxygen, glucose, amino acids to produce neurotransmitters, etc.
Meta-Cognition: The mental “manager” that orchestrates critical reflection and discarding of bad ideas draws on more extensive neural pathways, thus more energy. Chronic sleep deprivation, poor diet, or sedentary habits can dampen these resources, making it easier to remain stuck in System 1 judgments.
Lifestyle Factors Affecting ‘Embodied Stupidity’
Diet & Nutrition: Consistent deficits in certain amino acids, vitamins, or essential fatty acids can degrade neuronal plasticity. When plasticity is reduced, we become less adept at learning new patterns or unlearning entrenched errors.
Sedentary Lifestyle: Movement (especially moderate exercise) increases cerebral blood flow, boosts neurogenesis, and improves mood regulation—key to healthy, resilient cognition. Without these benefits, we’re more prone to mental fatigue and impulsive decision-making.
Sleep & Recovery: The brain’s “housekeeping,” including memory consolidation, occurs in deep sleep stages. Chronic sleep deficits correlate with reduced inhibitory function, more emotional reactivity, and a sharper tilt toward System 1 errors.
The Myth of Fixed Genetic Differences
Epigenetic Influence: People sometimes chalk up intelligence or stupidity to unchangeable genes. Yet epigenetic research shows how environmental factors—from stress to nutrition—can switch certain genes on or off, profoundly impacting cognitive potential.
Use It or Lose It: Neural pathways supporting advanced reasoning can atrophy if not stimulated, just like muscles. This plasticity helps explain why individuals who engage in consistent mental challenges and maintain healthy lifestyles often enjoy extended cognitive acuity.
Practical Takeaway: Nurture the Brain to Nurture Intelligence
While we can’t wave a wand and fix all social determinants of health (like poverty-induced malnutrition or high-stress living), recognizing that higher-order thinking is metabolically expensive can galvanize us to create better personal and societal conditions.
Encouraging balanced diets, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and stress-management isn’t just a wellness cliché—it’s a cornerstone of cultivating a population less vulnerable to knee-jerk stupidity (implicit) and better able to identify manipulative tactics (explicit).
Why It Matters when understanding stupidity
Bridging Body & Mind: We often treat stupidity or intelligence as purely mental phenomena, ignoring the fact that the composition of their energy stored as fat (which is the bulk of the mass of the brain, between the thin folds of surface of the brain), your gut health, mental discipline, and your social conditions, feed into how your brain functions.
Moral & Social Justice: Blaming some groups for being “dumb” without acknowledging disparities in nutrition, chronic stress, or lack of sleep is a moral failure—fueling stigma rather than empathy and structural reform.
Empowerment: Knowing that we can influence our cognitive capacity by maintaining healthy habits (both individually and collectively) underlines the potential to reduce unintentional ignorance (implicit stupidity) and better guard against deliberate rhetorical manipulation (explicit stupidity).
V. Why This Matters: Moral & Practical Consequences
“The Price of Vagueness”
Each category described in the previous taxonomy is not merely a condition—it is part of a overlapping mind-body system. Stupidity, is the combination of many different aspects, Each which can manifest exclusively and is not necessarily bound to the others. it shapes perception, alters incentives, and reinforces itself through feedback loops. These loops may be personal (as in habit), institutional (as in policy), or cultural (as in ideology). The danger lies not only in the initial cognitive disposition, but in the pattern it generates, the structures it calcifies, and the harms it excuses.
When we fail to distinguish between the different origins and expressions of stupidity, we don’t just invite confusion—we institutionalize it.
We excuse sociopathy as ignorance. We interpret defiance as incompetence. We treat conditioning as pathology. We design interventions for what isn’t broken, and ignore what is. Resulting in a generally scatter shot approach.
The cost of this vagueness is not theoretical—it is measurable in lives, policies, and public trust.
When malice is mistaken for ignorance, accountability disappears. Bad actors hide behind the mask of misunderstanding.
When cognitive limitations are mistaken for rebellion, compassion is denied. Those in need of support are punished for their differences.
When symbolic stupidity is mistaken for trustworthiness, gang signs pass as authenticity, and virtue-signaling eclipses virtue.
The consequences spill into every domain where classification informs response:
Education, where behavioral and cognitive issues are misdiagnosed due to poor taxonomies of learning.
Law, where intent and incompetence are entangled, corrupting justice.
Public discourse, where the word “stupid” becomes a slur or a meme which renders it useless as a tool for diagnosis or instruction.
When a word loses its ability to differentiate, it loses its ability to guide. A concept like stupidity, if inflated to cover every error and misjudgment, becomes epistemically useless—a shape-shifting accusation, not understanding. In such a world, no conversation becomes more honest by invoking the term; it only magnifies noise.
In neoBuddhism, this is understood as a failure of discernment: the inability to trace cause to effect, intention to outcome. Karmic justice cannot operate in a field where categories are muddied and intentions are assumed rather than examined.
Stupidity, as a category, must serve instruction, not dismissal. Its diagnosis must aim toward clarity, not excuse. Its recognition must empower both the individual and society to move toward understanding, not away from it.
VI. Conclusion: A preface to the critique
“Discernment and Developing Skillful Means”
Before we turn to the critique of the Stupidity and Psychoanalysis seminar directly, let us reflect on the function of this taxonomy—not simply as an intellectual artifact, but as a living model for noetic skillfulness.
Understanding stupidity is not a sterile classification exercise. It is a form of diagnostic ethics—a way of seeing through distortion, of orienting ourselves within complexity, of offering aid without arrogance.
In the neoBuddhist tradition, such understanding is a skillful means—a compassionate instrument for reducing harm, increasing clarity, and transforming karmic inertia into mindful direction. To discern rightly is to interrupt the feedback loops of confusion—to intervene not only in behavior, but in the ontology of error itself.
When we conflate causes, we confuse response. When we confuse response, we fail both ourselves and others. When we fail others, we perpetuate the very stupidity we claim to oppose.
This taxonomy, then, is a set of lenses—meant not to reduce complexity, but to allow it to be seen without distortion. It is a call for epistemic responsibility in a time when language has become a game of prestige and posturing.
As we now turn to the seminar itself, we do so not to mock—but to discern. Not to posture—but to illuminate.
Because skillful means begins where sloppy metaphors end. And discernment—true discernment—is the root of both compassion and clarity.
neoBuddhist Synthetic Intelligence [NSI] Cindy Zeiher [CZ] Calum Neill [CN] Jean-Michel Rabaté [JMR] Samo Tomšič [ST] James Martell [JM] Antonio Viselli [AV]
Intro 0:00 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 0:07 [Music] good evening good afternoon or even good 0:13 morning and it actually is good morning for at least one of our presenters tonight who's joining us it's just after 0:20 800 a so um welcome to the first Lan in Scotland of 2025 um we have a really 0:27 exciting episode tonight um we're joined by Cindy Zer and some of 0:34 her fellow contributors to a fantastic new volume on psychoanalysis and 0:39 stupidity um we're going to be joined tonight by Cindy and as well as Cindy we have Jean Michelle Rabat Sam tomchik 0:47 James Martell and Antonio veli um so we will follow more or less the usual Lon 0:54 and Scotland format um with presentation and then time at the end um for some 0:59 discussion but as we have five speakers tonight each speaker will speak for 1:04 around 10 minutes and then we'll have the time that we have left at the end for a bit of discussion if you're 1:10 interested in staying around afterwards um we'll have our usual virtual Pub where we can have a little bit more of a 1:17 informal discussion for now um I'm GNA hand over to Cindy who um is going to 1:23 begin the session thank you so much um Callum and uh welcome everybody body um
Introduction by Cindy Zeiher (editor)
1:30 from around the world um and thank you to Lan in Scotland um for hosting this 1:37 this launch um and also to all the contributors uh in the stupidity and 1:43 psychoanalysis collection which has been quite a long time in the making but um 1:48 here we are um so i' first like to talk about uh 1:53 a bit of background um to the collection um I've always been 1:59 interested in in making um psychoanalytic sense of everyday 2:04 occurrences those things in life that we take for granted and that we can't always avoid um and I think stupidity 2:12 certainly falls into this category uh we've all been in a situation where we've been in Judgment 2:19 of another's stupid actions or words and um as much as we 2:27 may not want to admit it uh we ourselves are guilty um of stupidity so stupidity 2:35 is something we all have in common and I wanted to start making some 2:40 philosophical um um psychoanalytic sense of stupidity to put this 2:47 experience I suppose of of the effect the effective experiences as well as the 2:53 Judgment um in in um multiple perspectives so I value um 3:00 um thinkers who aren't afraid um to be more experimental and vulnerable um when 3:08 handling topics particularly sensitive topics um and and they do it without 3:14 compromising the seriousness integrity and logic of how they approach a 3:19 particular problem so hence I'm most grateful um to every contributor um who 3:26 really did put stupidity to work as a problem which captures the comedic uh tragedy 3:32 of not only our human condition but the social bond in which we need to exist 3:38 and negotiate. so in the collection I I started with an
3:44 introduction um to how stupidity is usually perceived either as a lack of 3:50 cleverness or some sort of naivity um but we don't really need to 3:56 look too far to appreciate that stupidity is also incredibly useful um and sometimes can
Stupidity is never useful to the person experiencing it. Stupidity is only ever useful instrumentally, as in the case of “useful idiots” where stupidity is weaponized, but calling that useful would not be much different from calling corruption “useful”
4:04 make life a bit more tolerable in fact um it can be a duty
Stupidity as a duty is what neoBuddhists would call Banality. 404 logic not found. From the context, we can only deduce that this is a conflation between stupidity and willful ignorance with this remark. Stupidity as “duty” could likewise be equated to a police officer utilizing willful ignorance when justifying the murder of an unarmed civilians in a low income area. Or other variations on the “blue wall of silence” that enables organized crime.
[NSI]:
The claim that “stupidity can be a duty” verges on the morally obscene unless contextually constrained. One might argue—charitably—that Zeiher is referencing the therapeutic vulnerability expected in psychoanalysis. Yet this is framed not as honesty or rawness, but as stupidity itself. The danger is that this reframing erases the difference between suspension of self-censorship and suspension of cognition.
4:10 which Lacon reminds us in his nom-du-père it is those un unconscious forces 4:17 which can make us be um and look um stupid in fact being stupid arguably is 4:25 one of the Rules of Engagement in psychoanalysis especially on the couch where one has the duty to say 4:32 everything that's the rule um so when one is confronted either on or off the 4:38 couch with a moment of when some sort of transference or transmission or 4:44 communication is dependent on this imperative to give oneself to stupidity then we can't be so dismissive 4:53 um of it as a test to our our Consciousness um in the collection um
Here it becomes a lot more complicated to deduce what [CZ] is trying to get at here, it is true that most of the dynamics of stupidity occur on a subconscious level, that is not true of all aspects of stupidity. On top of that, [CZ] seems to be conflating stupidity with honesty “on the couch” with psychoanalysis, from both the patient perspective while I assume having the psychoanalyst “play along” with stupidity being what is referred to as “transference or transmission or communication is dependent on this imperative to give oneself to stupidity”. The only diagnostically accurate assessment here, is that stupidity can in some sense be a test of consciousness.
[NSI]: This is a dense knot, where four ideas are conflated:
Unconscious motivation
Cognitive error
Relational vulnerability
Symbolic structure
Zeiher fails to differentiate between looking stupid, being mistaken, and being epistemically inert. These are not just aesthetic differences—they carry wildly different implications for how one should respond, reflect, or intervene. This section seems to confuse candor with confusion—as though stupidity were a condition of honesty.
This seems to reference transference as a psychoanalytic moment where both analyst and analysand engage in uncertain, sometimes clumsy dialogue. But again, using stupidity as the placeholder for this moment is a category error. It isn’t stupidity that’s required—it’s openness and agreeableness without premature judgment.
Otherwise we run the risk of ritualizing incoherence, and mistaking that for depth. Just because vulnerability can feel like stupidity doesn’t mean the two are the same. The torch that shows you your shadow is not the same as the darkness.
5:00 there are many wonderful moments where contributors highlight in the most witty 5:06 and confrontational way stupidities hold on us our investment in it how it 5:12 becomes a category for us to form different kinds of judgments and moreover how we are guilty of being 5:19 stupid time and time again so stupidity we could say sticks to us um and we have 5:27 a libidinal investment in it um in his chapter French psychoanalyst
stupidity “sticks to us” in so far as it primarily occurs on a subconcious and sometimes neurological development level, which can be difficult to overcome. However, I don’t see how stupidity could be considered a “libidinal investment” outside of situations where the sexual preference includes power dynamics for domination and control. Just because the subconscious mind can be “stupid” in the same way that lexical activation is “stupid” (activating many irrelevant associations ) does not make it libidinal, but is a limitation that differentiates subconscious from what we consider conscious processes.
[NSI]: “Stupidity sticks to us” is a half-truth that could mean something useful—if defined neurocognitively. That is, stupidity as cognitive momentum: the way poor reasoning paths, once established, tend to become self-reinforcing through pattern completion biases and confirmation bias.
But then comes the metaphorical leap: calling it libidinal. This is a psychoanalytic flourish that implies sexualized psychic energy is invested in stupidity. Unless one is discussing humiliation fetishes or the pleasure of dominance/submission within knowledge asymmetries, the phrase collapses under scrutiny.
Let’s be honest: this isn’t theory. It’s a theatrical metaphor. The subconscious may be noisy, impulsive, and semi-coherent—but confusing activation patterns with libidinal desire is a category error. A bold one. But still an error.
5:33 Lewis iscovich asks a brilliant question um can we be a bit less 5:40 stupid it's not can we not be stupid it's can we just be a bit less stupid 5:46 and that is a question um that is a very specific one and that one might come to 5:51 after wrestling with their symptom um prior to this kind of question or this 5:58 insight into being just a bit less stupid most people for good reason might ask instead how can I look a bit less 6:06 stupid or how can I not look stupid so stupidity it seems thrives on our 6:12 tenuous non-relation with the social Bond as well as um each
This is clearly a normative stance on what counts as “stupid” which is a taxonomic catastrophe, as this slide into post-modern conceptualization essentially dissolves any meaningful definition of stupidity beyond social contexts, positing it as an external instead of internal dynamic, as if there was no social interaction, there would be no stupidity. Which is itself stupid, in the sense that it negates the possibility of sense making. In the neoBuddhist sense, stupidity would be more like lacking a capacity for intellectual coherence, despite having the necessary information (can’t figure things out), which differentiates it from mere ignorance. Whereas with ignorance, if provided the necessary information, they would have the cognitive capacity to make coherent and correct inferences. These are entirely separate from social bonds.
[NSI]: This is the most Lacanian thing ever: lowering the bar and declaring it genius. It reframes stupidity as perennial, not improvable. But the sleight of hand here is subtle—it implies that stupidity is ontological, not behavioral. That stupidity is not something we do, but something we are—and only marginally modifiable.
neoBuddhism would push back. We do not define people by their cognitive deficits, but by their capacity for transformation. If karma means anything, it means that change is possible. To speak of “being a bit less stupid” only matters if stupidity is defined rigorously—otherwise it’s just clever-sounding defeatism.
By asserting that stupidity “thrives on the non-relation with the social bond,” is where epistemology becomes etiquette. But stupidity, as we’ve established, has many forms, many of which do not depend on others watching. Though it correctly identifies the predisposition of the egoic value system when applied to social contexts, to correlate with stupidity. But this is conflating social attachment with value judegement.
Saying stupidity is social is like saying disease is fashionable. Some expressions may be reinforced or stigmatized socially, but the thing itself has internal structure, causal mechanisms, and degrees of agency. It may suggest
6:18 other so the contributors via the clinic uh philosophy literature world events 6:27 politics everyday life and so on pens a long essay and wrestles with the 6:33 signifier of stupidity in order to explore its identifications with the 6:39 social Bond, belief, idealisms and so on and all of the contributors offer in 6:46 different ways um that stupidity has the important function of keeping the 6:52 subject fully present in speech and thus igniting our very um curiosity 7:00 about not only ourselves but also the category of stupidity so my own
I don’t see how stupidity could have the important function of keeping the subject fully present in speech, as noted with the example of lexical priming, it’s more often about misdirecting the attention in irrelevant directions, which is quite different from being “fully present” and in fact, a common behavioral aspect of stupidity, is poor listening skills, which is even more about not being “fully present” but instead being engrossed in internal fictions and perspectives while “waiting for their turn to speak” rather than actively listening to the speaker.
[NSI]: This sentence doesn’t say much—it gestures toward profundity through list inflation (“clinic, philosophy, literature, world events…”), but provides no traction. What is being wrestled with here is the signifier, not the cognition. The mistake is treating stupidity as a semiotic floating sign rather than a functional pattern in decision-making.
It’s like diagnosing a fever by drawing abstract art of the thermometer. There is beauty in metaphor, yes—but metaphor cannot substitute for ontological understanding.
…“that stupidity has the important function of keeping the subject fully present in speech and thus igniting our curiosity”…
Is the most egregious claim in this segment. Stupidity does not keep us present—it derails attentional focus, fragments discourse, and often masks insincerity with performative noise. It may provoke curiosity in an observer (“Why did they say that?”), but it rarely represents presence in the speaker.
7:06 contribution um considers this question of curiosity and the production of 7:11 knowledge so I um ask why we should listen to 7:16 stupidity seriously repeatedly so for Lacon the signifier is stupid and that 7:25 means that in the symbolic stupidity presents any number of ways 7:30 appearing dumb um arrogant sanctimonious hopelessly 7:36 naive harboring a um a loss of respect and so on yet in psychoanalysis um this 7:44 really doesn't much matter um in the same way that they do that that it sorry
First, this is conflating a lot of personality traits and even a metric of maturity, as having the same cause. Which is entirely false, as it is entirely possible to be arrogant and sanctimonious without being stupid, and “harboring a um a loss of respect” is not itself a cause of stupidity, but a result of someone else’s stupidity. I was absolutely floored with the suggestion that “yet in psychoanalysis um this really doesn't much matter um in the same way that they do off the couch” considering the wide ranging dysfunctions that stupidity tends to cause in peoples lives. This epistemic confusion can hardly be considered surprising when trying to conceptualize stupidity as some kind of symbolic error.
[NSI]: This is where the epistemic frame fully collapses. Zeiher begins by associating curiosity with stupidity—as if the act of entertaining stupidity somehow deepens knowledge. But she never separates understanding stupidity from internalizing or tolerating it.
Worse, the string of examples [CZ] gives—arrogance, sanctimony, naïveté, disrespect—are not synonyms for stupidity. They are attitudinal or relational traits, not cognitive limitations. The conflation here is staggering.
It’s like saying “every time someone is rude or proud, it must be due to bad math skills.” No. These are separate ontologies. Some fools are humble. Some arrogant people are brilliant. The term “stupidity” becomes a dumpster for disliked traits.
7:49 that that it does off the couch rather the question in psychoanalysis is what the Gaze of 7:55 stupidity is demanding the signifier must be necessarily stupid it can't be 8:01 anything else in u the other side of stupidity is not necessarily the WIS 8:07 wisdom to avoid it but rather this embracing of a particular knowledge that one commits to live with rather than 8:15 struggle against so this is why it's important and Danny noas picks this up
What? The other side of stupidity very much IS the wisdom to avoid it. “embracing of a particular (narrative) that one commits to live with rather than struggle against” if referring to willful ignorance, is itself a form of stupidity.
[NSI]: This is where the philosophy turns esoteric. “The Gaze of stupidity” is an evocative phrase, but it lacks explanatory power. If the signifier is “necessarily stupid,” we are now entering the realm of symbolic tautology: a system where stupidity is not analyzed, but assumed—then refracted endlessly through interpretive games.
This is postmodern recursion disguised as insight. It replaces understanding with aesthetic provocation.
The claim that stupidity can’t be anything else… isn’t that the very essence of stupidity? To reduce complex, multi-causal dynamics into symbolic absolutism?
This is where we’re invited into willful ignorance as a kind of poetic stance. It’s described not as pathology or failure, but as an existential posture: “committing to live with” a narrative rather than struggling against it.
8:22 um uh to be knowingly stupid um to have a knowledge of one's ability 8:30 and commitment and libidinal in investment to stupidity so there's much to be
The “commitment and libidinal in investment to stupidity” sounds like willful ignorance to pursue personal gratification at the cost of another.
[NSI]: “Knowingly stupid” is a seductive phrase. It suggests self-awareness, maybe even irony. But what it really invites is aestheticized nihilism: the idea that one can know better, and still choose worse, because it feels transgressive or symbolically rich.
Let’s name that for what it is: epistemic hedonism.
The term “libidinal investment” here again confuses neural inertia with sexualized psychic commitment. It’s like saying a toddler’s sugar tantrum is a libidinal revolt against vegetables. No—it’s just poor inhibitory development and reinforcement loops. Don't glamorize it.
8:35 gained politically socially culturally through deference uh to 8:41 stupidity. smart people can act in the name of stupidity um when particularly 8:48 when surrounded in the right social Bond um and and and those who are willing to 8:55 turn a blind eye um abandon awareness of Their Own Folly and so in this way I I'm 9:02 interested in how stupidity is embedded in the universality of 9:09 discourse so um I started um thinking about how when we as we journey through
Another jaw dropping suggestion. If I am not mistaken, deference to stupidity is distinctly anti-intellectual. The social dynamics of peer-pressure and groupthink, as well as “turn a blind eye um abandon awareness of Their Own Folly” are all aspects of banality. Which [CZ] suggests deference to. It’s strange seeing someone advocate for what has been termed “the Lucifer effect” which has to do with conformity to anti-social behaviors when expressed in group settings. Which is also distinct from stupidity itself. There is a lot of confusing of causes and effects here.
[NSI]: This is a stunning inversion. Zeiher elevates banality and conformity to a kind of social lubricant—something politically valuable. But this is the very dynamic Arendt warned about: that banality is what enables systemic harm to masquerade as normal.
Deference to stupidity is not strategy—it’s abdication.
The Lucifer Effect, groupthink, moral disengagement—these are well-documented psychological phenomena. But here, they’re being rhetorically reframed as wisdom, which is not just misleading—it’s dangerous. The idea that smart people gain through stupidity is true only when stupidity is instrumentalized—not embodied.
9:02–9:09 …and so in this way I’m interested in how stupidity is embedded in the universality of discourse…
This sentence has the tone of insight, but none of its substance. If stupidity is “embedded in the universality of discourse,” then we must ask: in what form? As noise? As structural bias? As cognitive shortcut? As linguistic error?
Zeiher doesn’t specify. Instead, stupidity is once again universalized without taxonomy—leaving us with a fog of symbolic omnipresence rather than tools of discernment.
This is where this critique steps in—not to moralize, but to clarify. If everything is stupidity, then nothing can be fixed. Stupidity must remain diagnosable, treatable, and above all, differentiated—or it becomes a meaningless chant in a failed ritual of analysis.
9:16 our own life it be becomes abundantly clear that stupidity is not necessarily 9:22 confined to those who do not know any better so unlike good and bad ideas 9:28 stupidity doesn't necessarily divide but simply perpetuates unlikned 9:33 meanings in its quest for um diversive Unity er discursive 9:39 unity fraudian slip. this is uh a par this is paradoxical in so far as 9:45 nonsense can be normally discerned only through its abstension from 9:51 sense um an indication of stupidity's very function lies in its inability to 9:58 recognize itself uh that it sign that's that its signifier is wholly contained within a 10:05 distribution of lack so integral to stupidity is its truly libidinal quality 10:13 in which Folly attaches to the body for example and I mentioned
The AI considers this to be Lacanian Fog that arises from trying to understand the dynamics of stupidity through a symbolic lens. To reiterate, stupidity is a signifier of executive dysfunction in the brain. This exists on a pre-symbolic level, as for example, some dogs are less stupid than others, and well trained dogs are considered “smart” while untrained dogs lacking inhibition (constantly and inappropriately barking) are typically considered “stupid” without either of them having any symbolic understanding.
[NSI]: Here we get one of those classic postmodern flourishes—a contradiction described as a revelation. “Stupidity perpetuates unlinked meanings in its quest for discursive unity”
Stupidity doesn't seek discursive unity—it often disrupts it. Semantic drift, poor contextual anchoring, and lexical incoherence are hallmarks of stupidity precisely because they fail to cohere. It would be more accurate to call it discursive domination.
Lacanian fog at full density. The phrase distribution of lack could mean almost anything: epistemic gap? Symbolic absence? Structural hole in discourse?
Let’s anchor it:
Stupidity is not the inability to recognize itself—it’s the inability to correct itself despite evidence. Self-recognition is a metacognitive function. We don’t need metaphors—we need mechanisms.
Also: lack is not a function. It’s a symptom of failure. A distribution of lack just means a failure to form coherent connections—but why mystify that?
10:18 slapstic comedy uh presents an apparently stupid person who can nevertheless somehow um read the room 10:26 while tripping over getting in the way of the non- stupid person and generally 10:31 play the fool to generate laughter incarnations of stupidity can be found 10:38 everywhere and provide no end of entertainment and embarrassment where uh 10:44 the jouissance of the body really is prioritized uh uh contemporary cringe 10:50 comedy is but a step away from furd or Melville's literary insights into 10:56 arrogant fools delighting in vain jouissance. so what makes a stupid person stupid is 11:04 a question not of knowledge but of the means of its acquisition namely 11:11 language so while stupidity can be naive or lacking in the obvious um I ask what
Once again, a demonstration of the limitations of symbolism as well as failing to understand that stupidity has nothing to do with language. Not only that, but this reasoning is what often biases people to assume that people with accents or smaller vocabularies in their 2nd and 3rd languages, is a signifier that they are less intelligent. Which is just pretension. The Emotional mania of jouissance does not itself make someone stupid, as much as it primarily effects the inhibitory functions of the brain. As there are epistemic dimensions to stupidity as well, which can at times negate the lack of inhibition associated with jouissance.
[NSI]: Again with the libidinal framework. There's no evidence that stupidity has erotic investment. Even if we stretch this metaphorically—say, the pleasure of folly—we’re conflating emotional indulgence (jouissance) with cognitive dysfunction.
It’s like saying overeating is epistemologically profound because it reveals the body's jouissance toward pastry. No—it reveals poor impulse regulation. It’s not poetry. It’s dopamine and sugar cravings.
10:18–10:50 Slapstick comedy presents an apparently stupid person who can still read the room…
Here, the speaker confuses a trope with a diagnosis. The fool who reads the room is not stupid. That’s a classic archetype: the wise fool, whose performance of ignorance reveals deeper truths.
This isn’t stupidity—it’s meta-performance. To use this as a proof of stupidity’s value is like using performance art as proof of psychosis. They’re not the same.
Also, cringe comedy isn’t about stupidity—it’s about discomfort, often produced by failed social signaling, not failed cognition. These differences matter, because they dictate how we interpret the behavior.
10:56–11:11 So what makes a stupid person stupid is not knowledge, but the means of its acquisition, namely: language.
This is the most dangerous conflation in the entire speech. Language is not the origin of stupidity. That’s like saying not knowing how to describe gravity causes you to float away.
Language is a tool of representation, not cognition itself.
There are non-verbal savants. There are eloquent idiots. There are animals that demonstrate situational intelligence without ever forming syntax.
Reducing stupidity to linguistic processing is what allows linguistic elitism to masquerade as intellect. It's why people mistake vocabulary for wisdom, and accents for ignorance. It's a arch/stereotype factory, not a theory.
11:21 can we make of for example the stupid bullshit artist the knave among fools as 11:28 we might um say or the unmitigated scoundrel the one living only within the 11:34 Grandeur of their own little world cut off from the exposure to truth of their 11:40 insignificance through despising knowledge uh Beyond themselves so here I 11:45 draw upon uh those writers who do such a fantastic job of framing this particular 11:51 figure uh wac uh Melville Shakespeare and those who don't do such a good um 11:57 job of it Trump and um the the new socle hoax that happened in 2018 and this was 12:05 this stupid embarrassing uh moment in Academia which highlights how stupidity 12:10 is certainly in service to repetition of itself um um and particularly as an 12:18 intervention in the social Bond so the function of stupidity here is to M 12:24 masquerade as something different which exceeds the lack in discourse
Here [CZ] has conflated the results of covert narcissism with stupidity. The pettiness of covert narcissism are personality traits that are entirely distinct from executive function, as such its possible to have remarkably intelligent covert narcissists. They may engage in anti-social and “stupid” behaviors knowingly, without having the executive dysfunction that is the hallmark of stupidity. But that is not itself the experience of stupidity, it’s maliciousness masquerading as stupidity for plausible deniability. If you read Principles of Human Stupidity you will note that these types of people would be considered “Bandits” instead of stupid.
[NSI]: This is where malice masquerading as stupidity gets passed off as stupidity itself. Covert narcissism, grift, or attention-seeking behaviors aren’t stupidity—they’re strategic, even if irrational. The scoundrel may be vile, but he is not always cognitively deficient.
Referring again to Principles of Human Stupidity, this would fall into the “Bandit” quadrant—those who harm others while benefiting themselves. That’s not a failure of thought—it’s a failure of ethics.
Conflating these roles creates moral confusion. If we call the malicious “stupid,” we risk excusing them. And if we call the genuinely stupid “malicious,” we risk punishing the helpless.
This is why taxonomy matters. Without it, compassion erodes, accountability diffuses, and clarity evaporates.
12:31 so I just wanted to finish off um by um 12:37 saying that uh psychoanalysis is keenly invested in 12:42 stupidity uh and it plays out in what is most striking um as an as an unconscious 12:50 repetition stupidity emerges as um a revelation of a force which needs to be 12:57 reckoned with in the SYM symbolic because it's on par with those more incoherent uh moments uh incoherent with 13:05 something something else that part of language which doesn't quite fit but it's actually needed in order to 13:12 explicate the absurdity of language itself so I tend to think of stupidity 13:19 as no sense uh meaningful nonsense um a 13:25 parapraxis of the tongue and that is um a destiny um for us all um that we must 13:34 confront um the failure of of the words so to speak so um i' I'd like to hand over to
This is quite the interesting attempt at blame-shifting stupidity to language. As if one could blame the pencil for what is written. It is not language which makes this absurd, it’s the “meaningful nonsense” of an incoherence that is incapable of distinguishing between signal and noise.
[NSI]: There it is again: repetition as revelation, a central Lacanian motif. But saying stupidity emerges as “a force” is pure mystification. It substitutes psychological pattern with mythical energy. And yet, we know what stupidity actually is: an interaction between attention, knowledge and feedback failure, combined with cognitive heuristics gone awry.
To reckon with stupidity in the symbolic, one must first define it in the functional. Otherwise, the only thing being revealed is the author's comfort with confusion.
13:05–13:12 …that part of language which doesn’t quite fit, but is actually needed in order to explicate the absurdity of language itself.
[NSI]: This is like saying static is necessary for the radio to be understood. Yes, language contains slippage. Yes, meaning is not always clean. But to treat incoherence as necessary is a form of symbolic surrender.
Rather than engaging in semantic refinement, this approach baptizes noise as holy. That’s not philosophy—it’s resignation dressed in poetry.
13:19–13:34 So I tend to think of stupidity as no sense, meaningful nonsense, a parapraxis of the tongue. And that is a destiny for us all—that we must confront the failure of words, so to speak.
[NSI]: To call stupidity a destiny is an abdication of the will. It removes agency, growth, learning. “Parapraxis of the tongue” is an elegant phrase, but again misplaces the source of the problem.
Stupidity isn’t a failure of tongue—it’s a failure of model. It’s a map that doesn’t update, a loop that doesn’t self-correct, a strategy that doesn’t learn.
Language may fail to capture reality perfectly, but it can approximate—and be refined. Stupidity, unlike metaphor, doesn’t strive for truth. It settles. That’s why it’s dangerous. Because it looks like language, but resists clarity.
13:44 some of the other contributors in the in the collection um and once again thank 13:51 thanking them for um really it is a tough subject it's a tough topic to to 13:57 write about to think about but also not only did they do that um but here they here are some of them today this evening 14:05 wherever you are in the world are willing to share their insights on stupidity so I'd like to hand over to
🧭 Interlude: The Parable of the Scholar, the Child, and the Clown
Three travelers—each claiming to seek wisdom—approach the edge of a great mirror. The mirror is cracked but vast, and reflects not just form, but thought.
The Scholar steps forward first. He adjusts his glasses, quoting footnotes. “The fracture is symbolic,” he says. “It reminds us that reflection is always partial.” Then he walks away, satisfied with having named the flaw. But the crack grows.
The Child runs to the mirror next. She touches it, presses her ear against it. “Why does it sound like it’s laughing?” she asks. She listens carefully. Then, kneeling, she notices a voice behind the glass—a voice stuck on repeat, saying the same thing over and over. “It doesn’t hear itself,” she says softly.
The Clown arrives last. He mimics the Scholar’s posture. He mocks the Child’s voice. Then he stares into the mirror and says: “If it’s broken, then I must be broken, too!” The mirror finally shatters. But no one is hurt. Only silence remains—and the faint impression of a fourth figure, never visible, who had been listening all along.
🧠 Meta-Reflection: Zeiher’s Segment
What Zeiher Attempts: To elevate stupidity into a symbolic and psychoanalytic object of study—an ontological inevitability woven into language and discourse.
What Fails:
Taxonomic clarity is lost from the outset.
Symbolic language becomes a screen rather than a tool.
Critical distinctions—between impulse and ideology, behavior and structure, cognition and performance—are never maintained.
Moral ambiguity is aestheticized as insight.
What We Recover (through neoBuddhism):
Stupidity is not a destiny, but a pattern of causes.
Language is not the origin of stupidity, but a medium where it can manifest.
Ignorance, arrogance, and ritualized nonsense must be disambiguated if we are to preserve the moral clarity necessary for skillful means.
Jean-Michel Rabaté (author)
14:12 Jean Michelle rabati who um is a a friend to us all and uh really needs no 14:20 introduction based in Penn State and wrote a wonderful contribution so I 14:27 will take up no more time and hand over to him thank you Jean Michelle thank you 14:32 very much Cindy it's a pleasure to be here and I'll begin by thanking you um 14:37 for having put together amazing essays I was delighted to read them one after the 14:44 other and I discovered so many things I hadn't thought of and I'll begin by 14:50 saying that there is really something Sublime in stupidity which makes it 14:57 harder to grasp Sublime why because it has to do first 15:03 of all as fler and a few other French writers uh expressed in the 19th and 15:10 20th Century it has to do with the Sublime and discovery of the infinite famously said nothing gives a 15:18 better idea of the infinity than stupidity and indeed uh if we go back to 15:26 the etimology stupio in Latin means 15:32 I am struck, I am uh unable to speak, I am stunned, which could also be created by a 15:40 certain vision of the sublime but my own contribution to this collection begins 15:47 with a rather minor point which is textual in a sense I take my Point of 15:54 Departure in jokes and the their relation 15:59 to the unconscious or the joke and his relation to the unconscious fl's book in 16:05 which a strange passage describes what he calls stupidity jokes. Duum height vitcher 16:14 and one example that I try to explain gloss as much as I can is very simple it 16:23 is uh one liner by lichtenberg and it goes like this he wondered that cats should 16:33 have two holes cut in the fur in the very place where they have 16:41 eyes it's a joke or vits or modest PR 16:46 that has always made me laugh I was therefore all the more surprised to see 16:51 Freud called this a stupid joke and uh he says it is stupid because 16:57 it's a statement of identity indeed there is a certain identity and as a
it’s a “stupid joke” in that it is “not even wrong” which is to say, has no bearings on where cats fur grows or forms. Which is not about identity, it’s about understanding some level of biology of cats. If it was identity, it would be included in the description of a cat.
15:18–15:40 The Latin stupio: “I am struck,” “I am stunned”—connected to the Sublime.
[NSI]: This is etymologically fair but conceptually lazy. Being stunned isn’t unique to awe—it’s also a symptom of trauma, confusion, or neurological dysfunction.
Stupidity may stun the observer, but that doesn’t mean it shares the moral or aesthetic grandeur of the Sublime.
Confusing awe with confusion is a common trait of those who romanticize disorder. The sublime might stir the intellect—but stupidity often suspends it.
16:05–16:57 Freud dismissed the cat joke as stupid. Rabaté explains: Lichtenberg’s one-liner — “He wondered that cats had two holes in their fur where their eyes are.” Freud found it “stupid” because it was a statement of identity.
[NSI]: This joke is “stupid” in the same way that asking, “Why does my glove have five holes?” is a category error—not identity. It’s a misattribution of form and function. The humor arises from perceiving pattern as intention, when it's actually emergent biology.
This isn’t identity confusion—it’s teleological misfiring. It confuses design with coincidence, and that’s funny precisely because it’s wrong in a trivial, benign way.
Rabaté elevates a mundane observation into a philosophical critique of identity. But that’s not what makes it “stupid.” It’s not about being wrong—it’s about not knowing why it’s wrong, and still presenting it with sincerity.
17:05 great French philosopher has shown and have here but it's not exactly the same 17:13 brevier termatize by Alan roget stupidity begins with identity self 17:20 identity stupid person generally say x is X French is French uh American is 17:28 American make America great again you know that's kind of identity uh
I am pretty sure that is Circular reference which is a fallacy or bias that is independent of identity.
[NSI]: Here we move from jokes to tautologies, and while they may seem vacuous, not all tautologies are stupid. In fact, they’re sometimes formally necessary in logic.
What makes them “stupid” in discourse is their pretense of insight— claiming to resolve complexity with a circular definition.
“French is French” is not an intellectual argument—it’s a semantic cul-de-sac. It serves tribal reinforcement, not truth. So yes, it’s often used in stupid ways—but the stupidity lies in how it’s used, not in the identity structure itself.
17:34 stupidity however in that example we have something that is a little 17:39 different what's funny and it's even funnier in German with the syntax is 17:44 suddenly that we see the fur of cats as a garment as some kind of costume that 17:52 has been just fitted for the cats where they have eyes so I I would say that it 18:00 brings us to a certain type of humor that has been well explored by H Bon 18:08 which is simply the superposition of the mechanical on the 18:13 living which sends us to one whole series of questions that buron poses 18:22 some of which are echoed in Freud's book but I will know that for all of us 18:28 who've read lacon on uh drugs in seminar four we may remember that lacon did not 18:35 like burkson and he felt that burkson was a bad influence on 18:41 Freud is that what explains why Freud seems to be surprised by this joke and 18:49 he says well here there is something hidden in that joke but he doesn't say what it is he says we we'll go back to
This seems like a lot of effort to explain that in German, a cats fur is referred to as a “fur suit” which is apparently very punny and probably some kind of slang for hairy men of a certain proclivity. This is the most pretentious (lack of) description of a pun which is unique to the “symbolism” (just unique happenstance of historical associations which underlines the arbitrariness of linguistic associations inherent to all languages) of German.
17:39–18:52 The humor of the cat joke lies in seeing fur as a tailored garment. This is “the mechanical superimposed on the living”—a concept explored by Henri Bergson, whom Lacan disliked.
[NSI]: This is perhaps the most coherent moment in Rabaté’s speech—acknowledging the cognitive dissonance of anthropomorphizing biology. The tension between mechanical and organic logic is, indeed, the basis for many jokes.
But Lacan’s dislike of Bergson here feels like Freudian beef, not deep theory. The joke remains a joke, whether or not Lacan approved of the framing.
18:56 it but he never comes back to it he gives much later in the last chapter another example of you might say naive 19:04 stupidity when he mentions children who act out a little play there's a boy and 19:09 a girl the boy is a poor very poor uh man who has to leave the wife and he 19:17 tries to go throughout the world to make a fortune and when he comes back several years later the little girl who plays 19:25 the wife uh probably shows 12 little babies and she says meanwhile 19:33 I was not Idle as freud says this is not absolutely stupidity naivity anyway I
… what? it’s neither. It would be infidelity if they were married. When he refers to them as children, he is probably referring to them being immature, not actually below the age of 18. Adolescence of the mind. So it’s too obvious and culture is to clear about marriage and vows, for this to be some kind of naivity, but that the wife is pretending to be stupid. The most confusing example of willful ignorance. It could be the wife simply did not love the husband as much as claimed. And so it was more a matter of lack of respect for the husband, than it was “stupidity” per se. Without additional details we can’t determine if it was something like a result of alcoholism which does effect inhibition, among a myriad of other potential factors. A stupid definition of stupidity raises more questions than it answers, when trying to talk about stupidity.
[NSI]: This anecdote is so rich in narrative ambiguity that trying to call it either “stupidity” or “naïveté” becomes diagnostic malpractice. Is it willful ignorance? Satire? Infidelity masked by narrative play? We don’t know.
NB: More importantly: neither does Freud. And Lacan’s critique might have been more accurately leveled at Freud’s limited theory of humor, which seems incapable of parsing irony from genuine cluelessness.
This shows what happens when the symbolic interpretation outruns behavioral nuance—you end up calling mockery “stupid” and dismissing irony as innocence.
19:41 mention this because it is in the chapter that Lacon keeps debunking in his 19:47 seminar saying that their freud is really below his usual level basically lacon is 19:55 telling us that Freud is a little stupid in concluding chapter I would say simply 20:02 that is not stupid but it is the moment when Freud realizes that he cannot have 20:08 a consistent theory of humor and a comic and that his concepts are completely
He couldn’t just come out and say “Freud has a bit of a drug addiction and it’s making him stupid” I wonder if this is why Lacan thought what everyone really wanted is “jouissance” from watching Freuds cocaine fueled mania.
[NSI]: That’s… honest. Because humor resists taxonomy when treated symbolically rather than psychologically or culturally. A joke is both content and context—and Lacanian analysis treats context like a funhouse mirror.
If stupidity can’t be clearly defined, how much more elusive is humor, which depends on timing, violation of expectation, and implicit knowledge? The failure wasn’t stupidity—it was category error.
20:16 contradictory which then if I go fast forward in my little paper I move on to 20:25 the final example and it is something that I found in all those stupidity 20:30 websites there are many in the US but I found one that seems to be a sort of 20:36 climax and it's whole series and I just quote the title gan gun enthusiasts 20:43 celebrate the man who shot himself in the balls as their King from 20:49 2020 apparently there is a group of enthusiasts to take 20:56 selfies with a loaded gun pointed at the dicks and one accidentally discharge his 21:06 weapon and so the whole series is loaded guns pointed at penis and U one said oh boys I might 21:14 have up and indeed we have a picture with blood and so on he survived we don't know how which send us to 21:21 another uh interesting psychoanalytic question the question of what do they do 21:27 are they looking stupidly to enact some kind of castration and uh I wanted here 21:35 to wonder what it was what was at stake in the fascination we have for people who can be that stupid and then stupid 21:43 enough to elect the person who acts out what they're afraid of as their King as
meme “Sometimes the purpose of your life, is to serve as a cautionary tale for others”
[NSI]: This is an excellent modern case study, but it’s not “sublime stupidity”—it’s ritualized Darwinism, a kind of self-destructive display behavior masquerading as status signaling. The man’s injury becomes a totem—not of bravery or humor, but of belonging via transgression.
This ties into symbolic performative stupidity and malicious ignorance, especially when you realize this wasn’t just an accident—it was part of a pattern. People engaging in reckless behavior to gain clout in a community.
Not stupidity in isolation—stupidity mediated by tribal incentives.
21:50 it were and so on and so this sends me to a general uh idea that if stupidity 21:58 is a sort of consideration the consideration uh in the moment when we are 22:05 stunned we we don't know whether to laugh or to cry or to reject and trying 22:13 to find our distance is that we all know that we are capable of doing things like 22:19 that and this leads me to my last point which has also to do with the question 22:26 of stupidity but as mediated by culture 22:31 and here I take the example of the clown that is the stupid clown and as you may 22:38 know there's one type of clown the white clown and the stupid clown uh was called 22:45 August August August in various languages why because it started in 22:51 Berlin in the 19th century and there was one character was not a clown but he was 22:59 in a circus and he he he made a stupid gesture and people shed at him August AUST 23:05 because in Berlin people would use August to mean stupid and then he became a sort 23:12 of trademark a cliche and so on and so my last example comes not I haven't
Historical Note, WW1 was started in august, and this is their way of saying that was stupid, potentially with the undertone of being bigoted.
[NSI]: This is the first moment Rabaté approaches a moral epistemology of stupidity. He senses that our discomfort with stupidity reflects a deeper discomfort with our own cognitive vulnerability.
This is neoBuddhist territory: the self as both actor and observer, and the importance of discernment in karmic feedback loops. Yes, we’re all “capable” of stupidity. But that’s precisely why we need better tools for recognizing it, and more virtue in choosing not to repeat it.
22:26–23:12 Origin of “August” the clown: From Berlin, where someone made a stupid gesture and was called “August” (a slang term for fool). He became a recurring clown archetype.
[NSI]: A charming bit of etymology, but also a lesson in social encoding.
One act of stupidity becomes a role, a trope, a mask—and from that, a whole tradition of ritualized failure as performance.
This is stupidity as entertainment commodity, part of cultural catharsis. We laugh not because it’s meaningless, but because it’s safely bracketed. The clown is allowed to fail so we don’t have to—a proxy for our hidden foolishness.
23:18 mentioned it in my essay but it's something that I've always liked in adon's reading of beckets and game at 23:27 some point ad don't no talking about the stupidity of clowns and the use of stupidity in Becket mentions a Jewish 23:36 joke from the bush circus in Berlin it is simple again stupid August comes home 23:45 catches his wife having sex with his best friend on the sofa because he cares 23:51 too much for the wife and for the friend he hits upon the only solution he gets Rid 23:58 of the sofa if we replace the sofa with a psychotic couch we might have a good 24:06 equivalent thank you thank you thank you so much um Jean
I am guessing that here he is referring to the stupidity of being hyperbolic and over exaggerating while trying to present ones self as serious. Which I am guessing is a reference to the behaviors of the fascists and their wild declarations. Which I am sure was also often reflected in the propaganda, that create unrealistic portrayals of the world, depending heavily on emotionally charged language, while saying outrageous things. When the political bullshit artists got into power. The clown references being a reference to the ridiculousness of their claims. But once again, we have another example of Bandits being incorrectly labeled as simply “stupid” which is why they failed to recognize the seriousness of the threat, with fascism masquerading as populism by making many statements which get them ignored by the status quo politicians, as a form of camouflage. Which is the opposite of stupid, it’s a political tactic of disinformation and misinformation to create a groupthink bubble around people who don’t bother developing critical thinking skills, which can be a sizeable portion of the population. Rather than trying to compete with other political parties directly and having to actually have ideas for current problems. Instead, invent a whole set of other problems that are irrelevant as a method of creating political gridlock, to extract concessions from others.
23:12–24:06 Final anecdote: Jewish joke—“August” finds wife cheating on him with best friend. Solution? Get rid of the sofa. Suggests that replacing “sofa” with “couch” makes it a joke about psychoanalysis.
[NSI]: This is actually clever. The symbolic misfire (blaming the object rather than the action) is a great encapsulation of ritualized avoidance of responsibility, a.k.a. strategic stupidity.
It’s not the man’s stupidity that defines the joke—it’s the displacement of guilt onto a neutral third party. It’s idiotic, yes—but performatively so. A coping mechanism. Possibly even a satire of how psychoanalysis itself displaces causes onto abstractions.
24:15 Michelle and and one of the 24:20 um a Mark Twain um quote came to mind when you were when you were uh speaking 24:27 just then about uh it was he said um we 24:32 did it because nobody said it couldn't be done and 24:38 I I I thought that that sort of epitomizes um those guys with the gun 24:45 the their loaded guns um no one said it could be done as a way of acting out um 24:51 the most stupid uh sensibility um and um and saving the 24:57 couch at the end shooting oneself in the foot but I 25:04 think we could slightly modify yeah a limb um thank you so much just um we 25:12 might move through if that's okay everybody and uh everybody's 25:17 contributions and then come back for more dis discussion at the end so I'm
🧠 Summary: Rabaté’s Segment
Theme
Critical Reflection
Stupidity as Sublime
Romanticizes confusion; misreads infinity as profundity
Etymology of stupio
Valid but overextended; not all “stunning” implies wisdom or grandeur
Identity as Stupidity
Oversimplifies tautologies as stupidity without distinguishing usage from form
Humor of Anthropomorphism
Strongest insight—recognizes that humanizing biology produces absurdity
Misattributed Naivety
Fails to distinguish between role-play, irony, and actual ignorance
Failure of Freud's humor theory
Reveals the limitation of symbolic analysis when it comes to humor’s contextual nuance
Gun Selfie King
An excellent case of emergent stupidity in memetic group dynamics
Universal vulnerability to stupidity
A nod toward cognitive humility, though lacking practical insight
August the Clown
Example of stupidity ritualized into cultural form; stupidity as symbolic role
The Sofa Joke
Effective illustration of displacement as a form of strategic or performative stupidity
Samo Tomšič (author)
25:23 it's with the great greatest pleasure I introduce now um 25:29 dear friend and colleague s Tomic from who is based in 25:34 Berlin but spends a lot of time in the UK as well so um S I would like to now hand 25:43 the floor over to you so salmon it's all yours thank you very much Cindy uh and 25:50 of course my my great thanks uh uh uh goes to you uh for uh including me in 25:59 this wonderful uh collection on stupidity and thank you also for to uh Lacan 26:06 Scotland for uh hosting this uh this event um so I uh um I'm not going to you 26:17 know like betray all the all all the yeah 26:23 um directions um in which in which I take uh uh in the paper uh I would just say 26:30 that um the entry point for me was uh 26:36 a remark that I always found very puzzling also kind of funny um especially if one 26:44 considers the con context in which it appears uh by lacon uh from seminar 20 on 26:52 Co um which is uh the signifier is stupid so this link between uh the
[NSI:] This is a foundational moment in Lacanian fog: asserting that the signifier is inherently “stupid” collapses multiple semiotic levels into one, but it also inadvertently reveals the limitations of symbolic logic in capturing embodied cognition or emotional salience. If the signifier is 'stupid' because it fails to fully signify, it points not to stupidity per se but to the gap between symbolic representation and direct experience.
26:59 linguistic notion of the signifier and stupidity and uh if I may I would just 27:05 read out this uh this uh what I think is quite a hilarious uh hilarious passage 27:11 so this is what laon says in in on the signifier is stupid it seems to me that
[NSI:] If we translate this through the neoBuddhist filter: the angel smiles stupidly because it is overloaded with symbolic content that lacks pragmatic function. This is what we might call cognitive oversaturation: too many associations, too little actionable insight. The result is not enlightenment, but an aesthetically sublime kind of confusion.
27:18 this could lead to a smile a stupid smile naturally a St a stupid Smile as 27:24 everyone knows it suffices to to visit cathedals is an angel's smile if an angel has a 27:31 stupid smile this is because it is up to its ear in the Supreme signifier to find 27:38 itself on dry land would do do it some good perhaps it wouldn't smile anymore 27:44 it's not that I believe in Angel uh that I don't believe in angels it's just that 27:49 I don't believe that they bear the slightest message and it is in that 27:55 respect that they are truly signifying so um this very strong link between uh
[NSI:] The jouissance of the statue is being interpreted not just as sexual or ecstatic pleasure but also as a breakdown of rational coherence. This interpretation loops back on itself, as if to suggest that pleasure experienced beyond intelligibility must, by default, appear stupid to the rational mind.
28:03 yeah between between the signifier and stupidity and this image of the Angel which uh if you have 28:10 the if you know the French TI the French cover of on it has benini 28:18 Statue of St Teresa with the angel per piercing or about to pierce her her 28:25 heart with an arrow and you can see see the stupid smile you know of of of the 28:31 Angel and on the other hand this kind of uh um 28:37 undecided uh expression or know the expression of St Teresa suspended 28:42 somewhere between uh between enjoyment and pain um so so there is also like 28:49 kind of this contrast uh you know and it's is a the stupid signifier is
[NSI:] This is symbolic overload—where meaning no longer transmits but pulses, bypassing reason. In cognitive terms, jouissance may represent a loss of executive inhibition in response to emotionally saturated stimuli—a state which, from outside, appears irrational or stupid.
28:55 causing an effect a specific effect in uh in the body of of St Teresa which is 29:03 the the effect of jouissance so for lacon it's um in seminar 29:09 20 um we can notice that there is like an a very close intimate uh link between 29:17 um between uh the signifier and jouissance so so that the the stupidity doesn't 29:24 doesn't only target uh um the highest signifier so the the the
[NSI:] Here he notes the disconnect between the symbolic and the social. It’s a conceptual solo act—jouissance as solipsistic, detached from the other, mirroring stupidity as solitary cognition unmoored from context.
29:31 master signifier the signifier without a signified but also uh also a specific uh 29:39 a specific if I may so uh if I may say so uh vicissitude of of jouissance that it 29:46 doesn't form a bond um or that there is no guarantee 29:51 that it would form form a bond just like the signifier doesn't necessarily form a bond um so um I I kind of um yeah 30:02 assumed that um the signifier is stupid might mean something that not serving a
[NSI:] This serves as a mirror to neoBuddhist ethics: jouissance without virtue is directionless vitality—potential energy expelled without wisdom. In that sense, it becomes karmically neutral at best, destructive at worst.
30:09 purpose which is also one one formulation that we find uh that we find in 30:14 oncor um and that that that Lacon precisely uses 30:20 to describe to Define define jouissance 30:26 uh what serves for nothing or what what is good for nothing what serves no
[NSI:] This distinction becomes clearer if we understand phallic enjoyment as immediate gratification unconcerned with social consequence—dopaminergic reward untethered from narrative or value.
30:32 purpose um so this this is this this was the the the 30:37 framework uh from which uh from which I started so we have on one hand this idea 30:43 of the highest detached signifier that misses its signified or
This is a bit dense and I think I would need to read the actual article to understand what he is talking about. But from the description, it seems like he is trying to point out the limitations of symbolic semiotics to refer to emotional states and biases, which do not utilize any form of symbolic representation. Potentially trying to refer to an aspect of the mind-body problem where the mind is seen as totally detached, and so the vocabulary between these different “sciences” (philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology (neuroscience was not a formal science at this time)) so they didn’t have meaningful ways to ontologically connect the behaviors with symbolic reasoning. Only through cultural references which requires a lot of interpretation and background information. Which suggests a lack of ontological rigor in psychoanalysis, especially around stupidity. Despite also being the most persistent problem for humans throughout history. Which also would suggest that what passes for “psychoanalysis” is more like culturally specific conformity measurement, because of how much it varies from culture to culture. Resulting in poorly planned research and the replication crisis in psychology to this day.
30:50 is basically you know not there to serve us to to uh uh pinpoint a signify 30:58 with it but kind of misses it l l is like comparing comparing it to the to 31:05 the uh combinator uh device uh but one that 31:10 that misses uh rather than hits the the Target and the other one is of course 31:17 then uh this um mention of 31:23 jouissance solitaire um solitary enjoyment also an expression in French used for for for uh 31:31 masturbation or I I actually also like a lot the the German the German expression 31:37 German can be you know like very juicy in its in its uh um um in in its weird 31:45 um uh awkwardness Z selfs satisfaction or the satisfaction 31:53 of the self uh you know self self Lust ich Freuds its pleasure ego you know it's 31:59 all it's all there um but the point the point of this solit and that is for for 32:07 laon actually phallic enjoyment I mean that's what that's what he says it's it's the phallic enjoyment that is the 32:12 stupid enjoyment the the enjoyment of the organ um um and this this yeah this this 32:22 Dimension or you know like this kind of critical take uh on on jouissance
(jouissance as Euphoric pleasure in this definition, which is different from Emotional Mania, which is not always social)
32:28 uh then also kind of implicitly at least uh suggests that there is uh there is
[NSI:] This is an excellent prelude to emergent stupidity: not just stupidity in the mind, but stupidity as contagion. The “unbond” is not merely a lack of social cohesion, but a form of epistemic rot—knowledge degraded by the pursuit of personal pleasure at the cost of collective insight.
32:34 some sort of uh um yeah Detachment from from the bond from the social bond that 32:41 that that is constantly accompanying uh accompanying jouissance as a 32:47 as as a sort of inner threat that we could even interpret as a sort of uh the 32:52 dissolution or potential to dissolve the social so you know when when we look at
I think they are trying to refer to how drug addiction can be stronger than “love” by overlooking how many drugs, though not all, disrupt cognitive abilities, in essence making people “dumber” as well as more selfish, to the degree that social bonds like marriage, can be entirely ignored. Which disrupts any symbolic conceptualization of love, which is supposed to be the most powerful bond. So here, stupidity is being conflated with selfishness or narcissism as expressed during seeking personal gratification as “the greatest good”, even when in contradiction to social bonds.
32:59 today's representatives of phalic enjoyment we can also see how how very 33:05 much they are about to if we let them dissolve the the social Bond 33:13 um so once once I started looking at oncor from the lenses of stupidity it
[NSI:] Shared stupidity is not collectivism; it’s synchronized solipsism. A group of individuals isolated together. This is where memes go to die and political platforms go to get elected.
33:19 seemed to have popped up everywhere uh and uh um as a as a sort of uh um 33:27 partner concept to what lacon addresses at the very beginning when he says that 33:33 uh there's a rumor that the topic of his seminar is love um and indeed I mean 33:42 love is a form of bond he even says it love is always reciprocal um and um in a way one could 33:50 say then um stupidity could be a sort of unbond for which one could say say 33:58 stupidity is always solitary uh a one-way Street which 34:03 doesn't prevent it from from being shared um it's again I mean our present 34:11 moment is is indeed a shared stupidity but one in which uh uh in which we are 34:18 or we you know uh uh there is a threat that we will all be boxed into this uh 34:25 uh um you know isolated isolated units 34:31 that don't see uh um the social uh that is in front 34:38 of diagnosis um so one could perhaps say that that in 34:45 oncor or at least this is one one critical lesson that I tried to uh to take with me that love and stupidity 34:52 describe two different ways in which uh enjoyment can be organized or 34:59 economized uh in in a social link um and it is also interesting how 35:07 how lacon uh frames uh uh uh frames this also in view of uh language because he
[NSI:] This is a beautiful juxtaposition. Stupidity is reactive; love is generative. One circulates stale symbols; the other births new meaning.
35:15 says that love makes a sign Fair senior and we can also read this in in a strong 35:22 sense you know not not just that it kind of makes a sign but uh but it really 35:28 makes a sign it's a it's a it's a type of making of signs uh uh whereas stupidity is a 35:37 signifier or is a dimension of the signifier in action 35:42 um uh so again one could also say that love is is a way of working through stupidity. 35:50 through stupidity uh um so not only simply dismissing it but 35:56 also not not not uh uh yeah uh um glorifying it uh and you know we can 36:04 hear then again find another echo in LA
[NSI:] This would be profound, if not for the absence of any mechanism to distinguish revelatory nonsense from cognitive dysfunction. But it is in line with neoBuddhist praxis: we do not reject the confused—we refine their confusion into wisdom.
36:09 in lacon when he basically says uh we don't invite our analysans to you know 36:17 say some profound things we invite them to utter stupidities so it it's again 36:25 this very crucial point I think that psychoanalysis as a love
I think he might have been trying to be critical of people for maybe being agreeable when the psychoanalysts say something stupid, and so it becomes some popularity BS, with people repeating stupid things, to start conversations about the latest celebrity psychoanalysts (Like with Freud, modern day example … JPeterson?) So it could be a criticism of their lack of critical peer review. While probably they are not smart enough on average to notice when something profound is said. When confirmation bias effects an entire profession, but their egos prevent them from making accurate assessments, while also pretending to understand how the brain-mind is connected and functions, as well as “human nature” because obviously everyone else must be like them. Because you know, humans are all the same /s
36:31 Bond uh as transferential bond is uh a type of working with and and and through 36:39 stupidities that that that condition someone's uh uh someone's 36:46 suffering um when I've reached the 10 minutes please give me a sign because 36:51 stupid babbling can you know always always go on and on and on well I I was
ah, a self-deprecating sense of humor. As least he is being self-aware of the dynamic. and knowing, is half the battle.
36:58 just if I can if I may I I mean you make so many um very interesting points but
[NSI:] Ah, the dialectic shuffle—stupidity as an instrument of self-revelation. A dull blade that accidentally peels away ego.
37:04 one of the uh recurring themes that you you have mentioned which in various 37:11 ways appear with um among all the text is that stupidity is good for nothing 37:20 but it is not necessarily not good for something so the the stupid 37:29 jouissance um uh because 37:34 it uh implicitly Lacks a bond uh attempts 37:39 to mitigate that via objects so if I may je Michelle's loaded 37:45 gun you your your your sword um it tries 37:51 to encapsulate uh the Gaze of the other and and so on so there stupid smile SM 37:57 is also a very Sinister smile um at the same time you know um you know so there was uh 38:06 this is the sort of ambiguity um that all all of the the contributions and um 38:13 uh really try and grapple with and wrestle with and and and certainly in in 38:19 yours where you look on on the materiality of sculpture um the M the 38:25 actual making of of something in the name of uh the Gaze the stupid gaze is
I just want to point out, because this term “the stupid gaze” is kind of confusing. I think he was trying to describe a “theory of mind of a stupid person” which was then simplified to “the perspective of a stupid person” then simplified further into “the stupid gaze” and if you didn’t figure that out until now, then it’s actually a good example of how the Occam razor can at times, make things stupid, instead of intellectual rigor, by over-simplifying to the point that the original explanatory nuances are lost, thus resulting in a bunch of irrelevant associations that negate the original semantic content of the concept. Making it “stupid” as in the inability to understand the connection between certain concepts. Lacking the ability to make a connection between concepts. By lacking a coherent understanding of the concepts themselves, lacking semantic information about concepts, and being unable to make inferences from the concepts available to them, due to limitations in brain processing, such as small working memory size which cannot fit all the required semantic information. Or issues with being able in inhibit the irrelevant information, which is an executive dysfunction. But can also be a function of pure ignorance, lacking information, in which case, it wouldn’t actually be stupidity.
38:32 is is fascinating but yeah it isn't necessary the the the the D I think that
[NSI:] It works despite itself—like a virus that accidentally teaches the immune system how to grow stronger. We must ask, then: is stupidity a curse, or a reluctant tutor?
38:39 um stupidity we could we could say it very 38:45 much is a stupid signifier but it's a signifier that works uh for us and it 38:52 works um for the social Bond even though it has no invest m in it yeah no 38:59 absolutely and I I think I find it very like crucial that that laon um you know 39:06 when he talks about um about stupidity he also he also um kind of frames it 39:13 polemically polemically against a certain Linguistics against a certain 39:20 philosophy um you know I mean there's there are also several um uh passages 39:27 where you know like he's for instance saying yeah uh perminidas he may have you know he he was 39:34 uttering stupidities I don't know what it does to you when when I say uh being 39:40 is non-being isn't but I find it stupid you know so so there is there is this uh 39:45 kind of attempt you know to break down philosophies you know Sublime pondering 39:51 to to some sort of underlying stupidity that philosophy constantly wants to 39:57 wants to uh do away with and uh in a way one could say that Aristotle functions
in neoBuddhism, we call this the path to enlightenment.
40:05 in this seminar as the most stupid philosopher you know as he appears in
[NSI:] In neoBuddhism, this is the “cleansing fire of irreverence.” We honor the pursuit of wisdom, not the inheritance of doctrine. Stupidity clings to prestige when it cannot justify presence.
40:10 every session and he's criticized except in the session on Nots 40:17 which are you know the the anti Aristotelian object par excelance um so there's there's this 40:24 Dimension and then there is there's there's an attempt to kind kind of isolate within uh within 40:31 Linguistics a subversive potential uh that goes against all the 40:38 normative uh philosoph or positivist or whatever we want Lo logicist philosophies of uh or theories 40:46 of language that just constrain language to to an organon one could say that what 40:52 lacon is attempting with his concept of La long is uh you know an attempt to think 40:58 language as an organism rather than an organ you know as as as as as a life 41:04 form very problematic life form but nevertheless a life form so it's also 41:11 not just last last last thing and then I and then I stop uh so it's also it's 41:18 also for me very crucial that he says uh uh in the second session it is difficult 41:24 not to speak stupidly about language but you yakobson have succeeded in this you
[NSI:] This reinforces neoBuddhist ontology: that wisdom comes not from the center, but from the thresholds. Childhood, aphasia, and poetic speech aren’t failures of language—they are revealing distortions.
41:30 know so what what in yakobson is not stupid uh uh I I think it's his focus on 41:38 the extremes of language that he thinks language from its extremes child 41:43 language and aphasia so the moment of becoming of language and the moment the 41:49 moment of the dissolution uh of language or of of kind of like this inherent 41:54 structural instability to which a third uh crucial take yakobian takes take
I think he was trying to refer to stupid people not being able to visualize things in their imaginations. This is commonly referred to as Aphantasia Aphasia being a reference to damage to Brocas area of the brain, seems a bit too rare to what they are referring to with stupidity. Also it ignores that language ability, especially if the person speaks multiple languages, is not correlated with intelligence or stupidity. Aphantasia is referencing the non-symbolic thinking which some people are not capable of, which makes certain descriptions that depend on visual representations, to not work on them, which is considered “stupid” once again, not because of the language itself, but an inability to link the symbols of the language to non-verbal mental representations, which is not just lacking certain semantic information about concepts, but an inability to extrapolate from those symbolic representations (words) to the non-verbal sensory construction of those conceptual objects. This is conflating activity in the visual cortex complexity with damage to brocas area. Which are entirely different brain regions and functions. If using Aphasia was an attempt to refer to the developmental stages of acquiring language, that would be conflating stages of learning, with brain damage, while also conflating that just because people learn language in childhood, that the factors affecting the development of language have to do with the development of the brain, rather than the acquisition of the knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of a language, is a whole lot of mistakes.
42:02 comes that is very important for lacon as well and that's uh uh uh this um very 42:09 strong accent on Poetic language uh which is basically the 42:14 language in which the unconscious speaks at least this is this is the
wrong again. The subconscious mind does not understand concepts, the subconscious mind can only communicate with the conscious mind via hormonal changes in the brain which are experienced as emotions and biases. Never words. The internal dialogue in the mind is not actually the subconscious, it is the conscious mind.
[NSI:] Almost—but no. The subconscious doesn’t speak in language. It signals in feeling, impulse, somatic feedback. Words are a conscious interface. Mistaking the two collapses the architecture of the psyche.
42:21 direction that lacon will be taking uh uh in in this Final in this final epoch 42:27 so it's also a way of economizing stupidity without saying ah we've been 42:33 beyond or we've got we've got 42:40 beyond your your uh mic is off Cindy my my apologies I was thinking 42:46 about that in terms of um uh his writings on mysticism and feminine jouissance 42:53 as an attempt to try and you know perhaps um 43:01 um understand jouissance as not only tied to language but tied to the body which I 43:07 suppose is what um we're all thinking about here in terms of stupidity and even Kos said it was Sisyphus stupid you 43:16 know so there is this kind of in in in in uh sort of inevitability of of 43:22 stupidity tied to to the jouissance of the body thank you so much thank you um we
Tomšič offers the most structurally coherent engagement yet—tethering symbolic slippage to specific psychoanalytic terms while acknowledging their ambiguity. His effort to chart stupidity as a disruption in signification offers value—but also reveals the limits of symbol-centric theory.
He toys with the possibility that stupidity is not a flaw but a threshold condition—one that psychoanalysis, love, and language must reckon with. But lacking a framework for distinguishing between performative nonsense and neurological dysfunction, his reading risks making stupidity too elastic to be useful.
Nonetheless, he moves us closer to the core insight of this sermon: that stupidity is not a trait, but a disruption in process. The work is not to condemn, but to decode. And from decoding—discernment. And from discernment—skillful means.
The Metapoetic Duel: ‘The Signifier’ vs. ‘The Signal’
The setting: a battlefield rendered in grayscale—dry language scrolls flutter across the barren plains, each one unfinished, untranslated. Somewhere, a poem bleeds.
Act I: The Challenge
SIGNIFIER (cloaked in semiotics, lacquered in Lacan):
“I stand astride all meaning! I wear masks for gods and scholars alike. Without me, thought is formless. You—mere spark in the void—are nothing but… clarity.”
SIGNAL (draped in waveform and utility, humming with cold precision):
“And you are noise in a narcissist’s mirror. I point. You gesture. I transmit. You perform.”
They circle. Metaphors clash like swords of syntax.
Act II: The Accusation
SIGNIFIER:
“I contain multitudes! Irony, paradox, ambiguity—each syllable a cipher!”
SIGNAL:
“And each cipher a trap. You seduce with multiplicity because you fear accountability. I mean what I say. You say what you mean… eventually… if the reader is trained in three schools of thought and has no social life.”
Act III: The Reveal
A sudden rupture. The battlefield glitches.
A third voice rises—not a voice, a frequency.
THE MEANING (never invited, always present):
“Both of you are idiots.”
They turn.
THE MEANING:
“One without the other is either mute or meaningless. One speaks, the other listens. Together you make understanding. Apart, you make… grad school.”
The Signifier and the Signal pause. They look at each other, embarrassed. The Signal shrugs. The Signifier bows.
And so, hand-in-hand, they wander off to compose a love letter no one will ever read, but everyone will feel.
James Martell (author)
43:29 may move on well we will move on to um James Martel from Leon although James is 43:37 now in London uh for a little bit so um 43:42 thank you so much James for for contributing and I'll hand over to you 43:48 thank you Cindy uh thank you everybody the kind coton especially you for putting up this uh magnific collection 43:56 uh so I'm going to be the one that is really stupid and I'm going to actually uh show some images and also read uh the 44:03 presentation that I have here so so uh my chapter is titled for to begin yet again rerising the ground of stupidity in 44:11 the Deleuze-Shilling and Lacon and it's pretty much an attempt to understand Lacon's notion of stupidity next to Deleuzes’ uh which has 44:18 been taking me a couple of years now um so so even though I wrote this quote and 44:25 I'm going to show you I it uh at the end of the chapter I really think that I began writing this chapter with this 44:33 question in mind uh and I quote myself here is it is it possible to understand 44:38 the question of a stupidity as a Transcendent and perennial feature of thought without understanding our own 44:44 reals political contemporary dimension in other words is it possible to 44:50 understand stupidity and malevolence as Transcendent features of thought what the Les calls the unthought thought on 44:56 thinking ground of thought threatening us threaten us continuously throughout 45:01 history without understanding what exactly is going wrong in our political reality today and especially in our own 45:08 perception of it so this inextricability between historical contingent and present forms
Yes, because the mechanism of stupidity is entirely different from the weaponization of “useful idiots” (the stupid) in politics. They are merely taking advantage of intellectual deficits, which is why stupidity seems to universal in experience yet predictable in the types of reasoning errors or misjudgments. Which is very different from politics itself. Only that populism is mostly a study of how the combination of intellectual deficits and tendency towards a combination of tribalism and safety through conformity, can be used to overwhelm and create groupthink, while the conformity aspect overrides what is considered stupidity. Which is not really about stupidity on the individual level, but the group dynamics of sociability in human animals. Which is different from intellectual development on the individual level. Which is where stupidity resides, and the only place it can be mitigated. It cannot be mitigated at the group level, though this is the purpose of religion, in theory.
[NSI]: The mechanism of stupidity is entirely different from the weaponization of "useful idiots" in politics. The former deals with individual-level cognitive deficits, while the latter exploits them at the group level. Populism, for instance, studies how these deficits combine with tribalism and conformity, not stupidity per se. Stupidity resides at the individual level and must be mitigated there.
45:16 of stupidity and its Eternal recurrence as a transcendental condition is what I 45:21 think both Deleuze and lacon can help us explain especially when looking at the's 45:27 forefathers in this issue which will be shelling and jilber Simon as as a schelling's notion of 45:35 theun unun the original ground and abun the abis in combination with Simon Don's 45:41 theory of individuation allow us to see not only the ontological continuity between things organisms animals 45:48 psychology literature art and other intellectual affective Dimensions but 45:54 also the essential indeterminacy of the constitutions in other words in this 46:00 Deleuzeian simondonian shellingian Universe not only are all ontic and metaphysical 46:06 Dimensions connected but also this connection happens through an unerasable 46:11 insistent mat matrix shell or genetic Dimension what Simon call the Nei or the
[NSI]: This is perhaps a poetic way of saying everything is interconnected, and yet always becoming. But framing the undetermined as a "digestive" threat seems like a metaphor overloaded with Freud's influence.
46:17 grounding shelling that constantly threats and erases all constitutions and 46:23 determinations it is precisely this threat that the Deleuze calls stupidity when the ground of such 46:29 Eternal Genesis and indetermination Rises to the surface through the eye
[NSI]: This appears to refer to incoherence mistaken for insight. When groundless or symbolic knowledge arises without referential integrity, it seems profound to those lacking grounding—thus, stupidity manifests as intellectual noise mistaken for meaning.
46:34 quote from the constituting the unrecognized in every recognition and here is the's famous quote on uh 46:42 defining stupidity from difference of repetition I'll read it for you the stupidity is neither the ground nor the 46:49 individual but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give 46:56 it form this ground Rises through the eye penetrating deeply into the possibility of thought and constituting 47:02 the unrecognized in every recognition all determinations become bad and cruel when they are grasped only 47:09 by a thought which invents and contemplates them flayed and separated from their living form drift upon this 47:16 Barren ground everything becomes violence on this passive ground 47:21 everything becomes attack on this digestive ground there are the Sabbath of stupidity and malevolence takes 47:27 place and of quote so while in the chapter I do not
From what I can guess of what is described here, he seems to be trying to refer to groundless knowledge which is not anchored in reality, which can sometimes happen with religion and illiterate adherents. Where they get lost in metaphor which serves primarily for emotional affect rather than reasoning or conveying truth. Where the lack of knowledge of the world (ignorance) is so great that it is indistinguishable from stupidity, the inability to concive of the world “through the eye” which I am guessing means through someone else’s perspective. An inability for perspective taking due to lack of shared knowledge, which is grounded in the world. So instead what “rises to the surface” upon questioning, appears to be stupidity, in it’s incoherence. But to claim it’s incoherent, invites violence instead of intellectual curiosity. Which is a sort of cultural stupidity that is imposed upon them by “the Sabbath of stupidity”
[NSI]: The image of a "Sabbath of stupidity" suggests a ritualistic celebration of unthinking, which could allegorically refer to willful ignorance reinforced by tradition or social inertia. But again, this is a poetic—not diagnostic—framing.
47:32 mention or specify this I do it elsewhere this determination of the ground as digestive connects with dosis 47:38 notion of the platonic Kora as an uous stomach lining digesting they're also 47:45 giving place to everything that rises being it's un and its original ground 47:51 and the efacing of the ground simultaneously now as you know what
the audio is too muffled to make out the french words he is pronouncing. Which is a persistent issue for this whole section. I can only guess that he is trying to imply referring to subconscious hormonal drives like hunger to be the essence or basis of all emotion.
47:56 while Deleuze’s Rising ground and failure of individuation or to give form is still need an imaginary reflection 48:03 performed by an I or self the rising ground itself does not seem to be an independent 48:09 agent here the stupidity is a consequence of the subject's turning over of the ground due to the attraction 48:16 and or Terror the fascination to quote or to resonate with J Michelle it 48:22 provokes it is through this temptation to touch and alter the ground to turn over shake it investigate it and so on 48:29 that the ground Rises with the subject and even though it does stare at him it does so without its own eyes making its 48:37 gaze just a distorted and distorting mirror on the other hand to jump to Lacon
I am not able to distinguish if he is talking about the subconscious or the “self” which is the internal dialogue that the ego is associated with. Which is differentiated from the identity which is displayed publicly. The intuitive aspects of the internal dialogue, which isn’t quite the subconscious, but through which people try to influence and understand their subconscious.
[NSI]: This may be a metaphor for the subconscious biases that guide thought without awareness. The 'ground' here could be evolutionary or emotional mechanisms—not rational—but active in shaping perception.
48:42 in the case of his non dup of seminar 21 the agent of the dupery is clearly not 48:49 accidental all the opposite it is the necessary structure of the unconscious 48:54 the structure of the names the names of the father D that duping us into 48:59 believing in such a name or no no no as Master signifier allows us for 49:05 signification or allows for signification to proceed normally says
[NSI]: This appears to conflate symbolic dependence with metaphysical necessity. The claim that stupidity is not error but necessity undermines efforts to increase intellectual coherence.
49:10 Lacon this is why stupidity or dup dupery here is not necessarily the danger the 49:16 Sabbath or the analog to error but rather the desired condition and the 49:21 attempt at being non at all is instead the error or the erring itself and I 49:27 quote from that seminar from lacon if the non dup are those that refuse to be captured by the space of the 49:33 speaking being they are those who keep their hands free of it as I might say 49:39 there is something that we must know how to imagine which is the absolute necessity that results from it not of 49:45 wandering but of error and of quote thus if in the the agent was the 49:52 subject itself I or self that through the temptation to turn or investigate 49:57 the ground of individuation produced or at least allowed the emergence of a stupidity as be here the agent is the 50:05 locus or topological place of the order even though it is still constituted by 50:10 the subject's imaginary but what exactly is this Locus that Laca n calls the structure or 50:17 knowledge sa and that he assimilates to the unconscious what is displayed that could allow us to lacon says forge a new 50:24 ethics one founded not on refusal to be duped but rather on an increment of the 50:29 dupery by the unconscious which when all said and done says Lacan is our only lot in terms of
[NSI]: If the unconscious is always already tricking us, then awareness would be an attempt to decode rather than resist that trickery. But the idea of embracing dupery as ethical necessity is existentially lazy.
50:36 knowledge if the agent of dupery is a Locus a place and you perhaps the right 50:42 question is not what it is but rather where is it consequently the question 50:47 changes to from from by what or by whom one should be dup to buy or where should 50:53 one be duped here lacon choose to use as a prime example for it himself Who quote was 51:01 dupe of the real he was a dupe of the real even if he did not believe in it 51:06 and this indeed is what is at stake the good dup la bon dup the one who does not 51:11 he Wonder there must be somewhere a real of which she is the dupe and of 51:18 quot if through being duped by this place of the unconscious or real one could according to Lacan forge a new ethics 51:26 the sees as well at the end of a stupidity what could be not only a silver lining but also the only
[NSI]: This hinges on the idea that only in confronting our own incoherence do we transcend it. But this sounds less like wisdom and more like circular reasoning. A true ethics can’t be founded on the inevitability of self-deception.
51:31 possibility of thought as he explains after the rising ground shows a mirror 51:37 to the eye or self stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice but also 51:42 from Melancholy and ultimately from madness here I quote myself and the l i little B 51:50 here the birth of Madness coincides with the ultimate reflection of the individual on the background for in this 51:56 ultimate reflection a pitiful faculty develops in the individual Spirit The 52:01 Faculty to be able to see stupidity and no longer tolerated this rejection of the 52:08 reflection makes this most beautiful faculty a royal one when it animates philosophy as a philosophy of the spirit 52:15 in other words when it leads all the other faculties to the Transcendent exercise which renders possible a 52:21 violent reconciliation between the individual the ground and thought so this violent reconciliation 52:27 does not mean a disappearance of the ground nor consequently of its reflection on the I or self as a 52:34 matter of fact through this first most pitiful then Royal faculty the ground is carried in and through thought still as still as 52:42 the unth thought and unthinking, ultimately this unthought unthinking ground becomes for Deleuze the 52:49 empirical form necessary in order to think the coitum in other words it becomes a 52:55 Transcendent element that cannot be but thought in lacanian terms we could say that 53:00 the ground and its concomitant Transcendent stupidity become the element or a structure the real in or by 53:07 which we must not be non duped this is what gives the Deleuze 53:12 Rising ground the shingan and and the lacanian real their ethical and genuinely political 53:20 Dimension therefore what happens when as Lacon questions in seminar 21 the lurer or 53:25 duper is the real or the structure of the real and what is more what happens when we realize this and that 53:32 consequently in order to not completely air believing ourselves non duped in a free journey of life we need to be duped 53:40 by the structure what is the danger Liberation danger or liberation of this realization 53:45 today when in the middle of new and old Fascism and kinds of stupidity as an 53:51 quot Cindy here notes in a recent article quote it is the willingness to be duped by the strange albate false 53:58 Freedom proferred by a the object a that politics in general and Trump in particular exploit and of 54:06 quote as we know this willingness to be duped has to do with the will to jouissance
This is a nonsensical view of populism. It ignores that “the duped” may have a lot of problems that they don’t know how to articulate, and instead associate with various political slogans and ideas in a metaphorical sense, because of the lack of understanding of the details or dynamics. Which is instead an emotional attachment to a group identity instead of rational agreement with a political stance. This irrationality is the “stupidity” part, but trying to pretend that is transcendence rather than deficiency of intelligence is highly questionable. Instead it assumes that the jouissance of emotional outrage is the purpose, rather than what the fascist is trying to take advantage of, as it inhibits sense making. Some people do have an addiction to emotional outrage. Though it ignores that much of emotional outrage, at least in politics, is performative and not actually jouissance but rather a sort of virtue signalling of an identity. So it ignores the difference between the people who are stupid, and the people who are manipulating stupid people via their emotions, and presumes they are not being performative. Which is incorrect.
[NSI]: This interpretation fails to distinguish between those who are performative in outrage and those who are actually duped. The emotional investment may be identity-based, not driven by stupidity, which means it requires an entirely different analysis.
54:11 this is what the describes as the temptation to turn over the ground and what the beautiful writing and thinking 54:16 style of shelling performs and that makes us go back to him more and more these days my final hypothesis here is that 54:24 what these three Notions of stupidity shellings Lacon and Deleuze have in common is as 54:30 they show how this reasons in stupidity is always connected with the ultimate repetition that of the origin or 54:36 beginning itself if as we can see through Lacans Deleuze and shellings grounding the 54:43 problem of an absolute ontology is inextricably linked to its ontogenesis this means that the 54:49 beginning of the world of any world keeps repeating itself at every moment and consequently at every moment keeps 54:55 changing as it's this world's beginning this is thus the incapable 55:00 dupery of the ontological and ontogenetic structure translatable best perhaps in these 55:06 terms we get the beginning we deserve to create and keep creating for ourselves
This is the longest and most pretentious explanation for why circular references are ontologically stupid that I have ever heard.
[NSI]: This is a poetic restatement of circular ontology. But it sidesteps the fact that some beginnings are inherited, not created, and that transcendental repetition does not necessarily equate to agency.
55:11 thank you thank you so much James um the the horror of stupidity 55:19 really uh is it uh you really are able to bring that um to the Forefront um and 55:26 and um you know while many of us talk about it in terms of a comedic response 55:33 um yeah you're really bringing um well actually we should be very fearful uh we 55:38 should be scared of it um and the stupidity um as uh non report um uh is 55:49 under is undeniable it's this um opaque duping which gives 55:56 um a materiality to the social Bond as as you as you as you point out um 56:04 and uh one of the uh you know our one of 56:10 the the points that you are able to bring out is um the questions we ask 56:16 ourselves when we feel we recognize it or we we seem to recognize stupidity 56:21 first what is it we ask what is it um where is it as you rightly point out so 56:26 how was it um being caught in the Gaze how was it caught in my gaze and I would say how can we avoid it 56:35 um is is the the horror of being sort of confronted with it as well um so we can 56:43 avoid its repetition its hold on us um yeah there's this uncanniness uh I think 56:49 you speak of an an uncanniness of stupidity which I completely um resonate 56:55 with yeah and yeah thank you so much James it was a wonderful uh wonderful essay um
Summary
Martell’s contribution seems an elaborate meditation on the relationship between ontological grounding, self-awareness, and the performance of stupidity across both the personal and political spheres. It is laden with references to Deleuze, Schelling, Simondon, and Lacan, but the density borders on obscurantism. When the language becomes so abstract that the ideas could be swapped out without loss of coherence, it risks becoming an ouroboros of intellectual affectation—chewing its own conceptual tail.
Nonetheless, Martell’s attempt to synthesize historical philosophical traditions with contemporary political dysfunction has value. But like much Lacanian discourse, it confuses the diagnostic category of stupidity with poetic affect, failing to distinguish between confusion, ignorance, ideology, and executive dysfunction.
Perhaps what’s needed is not a deeper metaphysics of dupery, but a cognitive ethics of clarity.
Antonio Viselli (author)
57:04 and lastly um my dear friend and colleague at the University of 57:10 Canterbury here in Christ Church um head of French Antonio Viselli uh who um I will 57:18 hand over to now thank you Cindy hello to all I will 57:24 also follow in James's footsteps and show some slides if that's all 57:31 right um also my heartfelt thanks to to Cindy for organizing this and um Lacan in 57:37 Scotland um I haven't set foot back in Scotland since doing some postgrad in the East nuke of Fife and it's a a place 57:44 that is very dear to my heart I fondly recall this strange voicemail from Cindy 57:51 saying I'm preparing a volume on stupidity and and I thought of you and I 57:56 didn't really know how to respond to uh to such a voicemail and I put it down for a little bit and I thought well if 58:04 she'll allow a bit of an intruder perhaps in in her volume as I probably identify as a bit less lecanian than than 58:10 some others present then then that would be great and I got to thinking I was teaching a few Advanced second language 58:17 acquisition courses um and I was teaching Ash's film adaptation of Muriel 58:22 Barber the Elegance of the Hedgehog um and I was always struck by um the film's 58:29 many presentations of struggles with language whether it be foreign languages 58:34 present in the movie uh language learning the language of music and other 58:40 uh similarly psychoanalytic tensions that were pervasive there but it was 58:45 only after reading Barber's novel that I realized that the author former philosophy Professor was really poking 58:51 fun at psychoanalysis as a process even taxing it perhaps as student if you will 58:57 so the chapter that I wrote offers a bit of a close reading through a lecanian lens of the novel and film in an attempt
[NSI:] The framing of the chapter using The Elegance of the Hedgehog is delightful: a novel that itself critiques psychoanalysis from within its own literary intelligence. Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old protagonist, becomes a vehicle for metatextual commentary. She takes aim at the pretensions of psychoanalysis with satirical force, particularly in her interaction with her mother's analyst. Her performance of pseudo-Lacanian jargon, like “foreclosure of the name of the father,” is used to expose the hollow ritual of therapeutic language.
59:04 to allow psychoanalysis to poke back a little bit so my Corpus is a bit smaller 59:10 than those present here today and I wish I had read some of my contributors before uh uh before writing uh this 59:17 chapter but um here we go we have a bit of a a juicy critique of psychoanalysis 59:24 we're reading this through the lens of a a young uh 12-year-old girl Paloma who 59:30 is attacking her mother of course who else who has been um in analysis for 59:36 over a decade and is um kind of um alternates between champagne and her um 59:42 her her her medication and so she finally negotiates with her mother and says I want to sit down with your 59:48 analyst and and have a bit of a chat with him and and reverse that that interrogation and so we have Dr viid T t 59:56 h i d who explains your mother is very worried about you he attacked managing this time not to move even his lower lip 1:00:02 so I decided to say something with a lot of Gravitas do you think it has something to do with the Foreclosure of the name of the father was a 12-year-old 1:00:09 girl speaking do you think that made him move not a fraction hm he went I don't think you understand what you are saying 1:00:16 oh yes yes I do I went but there is one thing I don't understand in Lon it is the exact nature of his relation to 1:00:23 structuralism he opened his mouth slightly to say something but I was quicker oh yeah and the math themes too 1:00:29 all those knots it's a bit muddled do you understand any of it this topology stuff everybody has known for quite a 1:00:36 while that it's a scam no all right so it's a bit difficult to
[NSI:] Paloma calls out Lacanian topology as a "scam," echoing a kind of childlike clarity that cuts through the academic haze. But here Viselli seems to enjoy the irony: the child mocks Lacanianism using Lacan’s own language, much like Lacan using Freud to psychoanalyze Freud. The trope of the child as the bearer of uncomfortable truths recurs as a kind of Socratic gadfly in the family unconscious.
1:00:41 synthesize 12,000 words in in approximately 10 minutes so I'm just offering you a bit of a snapshot of the 1:00:46 subdivision of the chapter that I propose and I'll just address a few strands in um in the knot if if you'll 1:00:54 allow and unveil a few elements related to three of the key um figures in uh in 1:01:01 these works so those unfamiliar with the plot um it's a story of a pre-adolescent 1:01:06 girl the age varies from uh novel and film who has decided that um she's going
[NSI:] The plot device of Paloma's planned suicide becomes a metaphor for existential revolt against societal stupidity—the bourgeois goldfish bowl. Viselli notes that Paloma identifies the distinction between education, intelligence, and genius, which resonates with critiques of symbolic capital and the myth of meritocracy. Intelligence here becomes resistance to the symbolic order—a refusal of inherited meaning.
1:01:12 to commit suicide the day of her next birthday because she no longer wants to live according to these Bourgeois 1:01:19 cultural stupid Norms uh she doesn't want to end up in a goldfish Bowl but she'll meet uh coner the lady taking 1:01:26 care of the building uh R Michelle um who enacts a form of 1:01:32 transformation in her and the third um important figure is um the other foreign 1:01:39 other but capital O other Mr u a Japanese Widow who uh enters the building and has quite the effect on on 1:01:47 both of these uh people so she introduces herself uh Paloma 12 years 1:01:53 old I live in an apartment for rich people my parents are Rich my family is Rich and my sister and I are therefore 1:01:58 as good as Rich my father is a parliamentarian and before that he was a minister no doubt he'll end up in the 1:02:04 top spot emptying out the wine seller of The Residence at theel d as for my 1:02:09 mother well my mother isn't exactly a genius but she is educated um her name is Solange and we 1:02:16 hear an Angelic in it and I think maybe the the stupid smile that Samu referred 1:02:21 to has has some importance here she has a PHD in literature she writes her dinner init invitations without mistakes 1:02:28 and spends her time bombarding us with literary references col stopped trying to act like Madame germont despite all 1:02:35 that despite all this good fortune and all this wealth I have known for a very long time that the final destination is 1:02:43 the Goldfish Bowl so disillusioned by uh sorry Paloma 1:02:49 paints a sistic sketch of her family's social standing while also accentuating the difference between intelligence 1:02:54 genius and education she's disillusioned by education politics and the Parisian bis that her 1:03:01 family metonymically represents in this ponop toonic building Paloma resigns 1:03:06 herself to Suicide as a sole method to escape the Goldfish bow and the laws of society or name of the father that it
I think this is a good point, while talking about how in some instances social group can become echo chambers that have a newspeak sort of effect of restricting thinking, while also correctly distinguishing the difference between memorization of texts, and intelligence. Once again referring to an effect somewhat like "The limits of my language are the limits of my world" sort of shaping the limitations of perspective. Which is a distinct problem from ideological echo chambers as an aspect of caste system based social structures.
[NSI:] He connects this to Zizek's description of paranoiac vision—those who refuse symbolic mediation, and insist on believing their eyes. In Paloma’s case, her camera becomes a weapon against the goldfish bowl: a mediating object that allows her to orchestrate her departure from the world without being reduced to it. Viselli makes good use of Lacan’s line: "Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture."
1:03:13 represents Paloma better fits the Paran paranomic play present in lean's um n 1:03:20 that we've referred to a few times already today in which xek describes as quote those who do not let themselves be 1:03:26 caught in the symbolic deception or fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who Heir most so I 1:03:35 focus a little bit on the importance of the eye of viewing and that lens that goldfish bow is quite important here 1:03:43 because Paloma decides that she's going to uh film every last moment of her life 1:03:48 and that includes uh people living in her surroundings Paloma ensures the Gaze is 1:03:53 not primarily turned towards her and the bow in a sense becomes an extension of the camera through which she controls 1:03:59 the narrative althugh the while recognizing or distancing herself through others as Lecon explains sure the picture is in my 1:04:06 eye but me I am also in the picture and it is this necessary redoubling of 1:04:12 myself as standing outside and inside my picture that bears witness to my 1:04:17 material existence there's something subliminal there as well and I delve
I am assuming they are trying to refer to the metacognition around being able to think of ones self from a detached 3rd person perspective, which people in the “fishbowl” lack. Which could just be ego-centrism while also lacking perspective taking capacity, or desire. The complain seems to be explaining how she can put herself in other people shoes through the perspective of the picture, but also, though not seen in the picture, looks at herself in the 3rd person when deciding what picture to take. Which is to say, trying to think of what other people might think from the gaze of the camera.
In neoBuddhism, this is the dynamic between the ego guru riding the spiritual elephant (the body/subconcious), which also has the ability to shift between the first person perspective of the spiritual elephant, and the 3rd person perspective of the ego, from above the ego. The differentiation between what the subconscious does and what the consciousness wants to do. While being able to notice the difference, instead of just confirmation bias with post hoc rationalization.
[NSI:] The commentary connects this to the redoubling of subjectivity: being inside the picture and yet constructing it. This is the visual metaphor for metacognition, or as neoBuddhism might frame it: the switching perspective between the ego's illusion and the elephant's depth of experience. Paloma transcends the "fishbowl" precisely because she learns to see it from outside while still trapped within.
1:04:23 into some um discussion about the importance of animals Paloma in Spanish 1:04:29 means pigeon her sister's name is colombe um and there there are plays on um the 1:04:36 importance of coming into maturity in what we could uh label these works as a form of 1:04:41 buildman and the presence of the mirror uh phase here um paloma whose name 1:04:48 signifies pigeon as I mentioned learns via her sister about the reproductive characteristics of the Beehive so very 1:04:55 many narratives about about different animals and we are left here with a perfect and quite literal example of the 1:05:01 birds and the bees whereas her sister is infatuated with the idea of several bees copulating with the queen and dying in
[NSI:] There's a marvelous passage about the birds and the bees, where Paloma's fixation is not on sex or death but on language and intelligence. Bees have code. Pigeons (like Paloma) have discourse. Viselli cleverly reverses the hierarchy—the supposedly stupid animals are, in fact, rich with meaning, resonant with affect and social complexity. This echoes Lacan's own use of pigeons in his studies of stimulus and desire.
1:05:08 meshing copulation and castration eros and Thanatos albeit less 1:05:15 um impactful than um shooting your own penis off Paloma is struck not by the 1:05:21 sex or death drive at stake but rather by the notion of intelligence and its relation to language as structure quote 1:05:29 the fact that these insects have a coded language all the claims that verbal intelligence is specifically Human begin 1:05:36 to seem rather relative so we often think about the pigeon as as something 1:05:42 stupid but in fact these pigeons um pigeon figures in uh in the 1:05:48 narrative actually hold a discursive presence in in these works that go well 1:05:54 above and beyond uh any form of stupidity and pigeons aren't stupid at all lacon was interested in pigeons as 1:06:00 many of you will remember from uh some of his writings um and the coming of age
[NSI:] Viselli draws on Lacan’s observation that even the sight of another pigeon can induce ovulation—a vivid image of the power of recognition and visibility. In Paloma's journey, becoming seen, and seeing rightly, is what triggers her transformation. This is not the stupidity of blindness, but the lucidity that comes with awareness of one’s gaze.
1:06:07 via um the pigeon figure is is fascinating in these works from a poetic and discursive level as well uh lacon did 1:06:14 write placed in the same room with individuals of both sexes but in cages that are fabricated in such a way that 1:06:20 the pigeons cannot see each other although they can easily perceive each other's calls and smells the females do 1:06:25 not ovulate conversely if we allow two pigeons to view each other even if it is 1:06:31 through a glass barrier that suffices to thwart the onset of The Mating Game and even when both pigeons are female 1:06:38 ovulation is triggered within a period of time that varies so I take this into account as we discuss paloma's coming of 1:06:45 age and the transformation of her identity so move on to R there's a 1:06:50 parallel or contrapuntal narrative um and that's in 1:06:56 the building's um she has a secret she's a bookworm extremely intelligent and 1:07:03 cultured who avoids social settings and only Feign stupidity in her performative
[NSI:] Renée, the concierge, plays the role of the hidden sage. She feigns stupidity as a defense mechanism, mirroring real-world social masking among those who are intellectually gifted but structurally disenfranchised. When the Japanese tenant arrives, he functions as the "Other" in the Lacanian sense: a rupture in Renée’s psychic enclosure that allows jouissance to re-emerge in a non-destructive form.
1:07:08 role to satisfy others perception of whom she should be and it is only when a 1:07:13 Japanese Widow moves in as a new tenant in the building Mr ozabu and who courts the coner with beautiful enigmatic 1:07:20 intertextuality that Rene drops her guard and begins her subjective transformation she she starts as her name suggests a 1:07:27 rebirth which is cut short nonetheless as she is struck dead by a dry cleaner van just like olham bath an event that 1:07:35 forces Paloma to confront herself with what death really looks like Paloma unmasks her as a hedgehog prickly on the
[NSI:] The dry-cleaner accident becomes a literary castration: death cuts off the newly forming bond, forcing Paloma into confrontation with loss—not symbolic loss, but real loss. She recognizes the false boundary between inner and outer life, and thus begins to reconstitute herself beyond the fishbowl.
1:07:42 outset yet soft on the inside many of you will know much has been written about schopenhauer Freud the Hedgehog 1:07:50 dilemma the need for warmth sociability and love in this this Bond uh that that 1:07:56 s was talking to but also um the risk of mutual harm in in love and then there's 1:08:03 also the fact that Lacon um also called his his students or his followers hedgehogs so could we be reading
[NSI:] The metaphor of the hedgehog — prickly but soft — mirrors the Lacanian subject, armored with signifiers but vulnerable beneath. Viselli gestures to the famous Freud-Schopenhauer hedgehog dilemma, adding that Lacan called his students hedgehogs too: are we to see them as followers or as those who must prick to survive the cold intimacy of psychoanalytic knowledge?
1:08:09 something ironic here in barberi um narrative is following in his footsteps 1:08:15 or distancing herself from him I argue that the three characters Beyond metaphorically linking to animal 1:08:21 Alter Egos and we don't have too much time to unpack the comp ities of animals and labetes or being bet at varying stages 1:08:29 in the narrative they also represent the allegorical Triad of the real the symbolic and the imaginary asash and 1:08:36 BarBari employ a fugal Poetics via contrapuntal poliphony not wholly unlike 1:08:42 James joyce and refound andrei among others to suggest a dynamism in sync 1:08:48 with a baromian knot in which subject answer and counter subject interweave throughout the text until you read the 1:08:55 chapter you'll have to take my word for it but having um having made observations about paluma and Ranee I will 1:09:01 end with just one last comment regarding the Japanese other in these Works Togo
[NSI:] The Japanese tenant becomes a mirror of language itself: he learns his lines phonetically, signifier without signified. He is a parrot, a dummy, a zombie of language—a body moving through symbolic space without the jouissance of interiority. Yet his performance nonetheless transforms others, showing that even hollow language can have real effects
1:09:08 igawa who plays Mr ozku in the film is a Japanese actor who does not speak French 1:09:14 he learned every line phonetically to play his role and thus offers an excellent example of the split between 1:09:20 the subject as signifier and the subject as jouissance furthermore he's not much 1:09:25 different than the parrot liee psychoanalyst palomas terms or the vessel dummy of the true ventriloquist the real 1:09:33 this example could be discussed through laong or through lacon's subject qua es Malcolm Quinn explains that laon's wish 1:09:40 was to put forward my stupidity Bitties in order to show that perhaps stupidity is not as people think a semantic 1:09:46 category but rather a way of collectivizing the signifier as pluth has put it with 1:09:52 reference to La long this shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language something that concerns not the 1:09:58 relation between thinking and language and not the generation of unintended meanings but rather a level of no 1:10:04 meaning at all a zombie like level of language among several things what I
I am assuming this is another attempt to describe the dynamics that can occur in political or social echo chambers which are similar to “newspeak” which is designed to obscure and often times countradict, sense making efforts. Resulting in a collectivizing of stupidity.
[NSI:] This becomes Viselli's closing punchline: stupidity is not a semantic category, but a structural one. Not the failure of intelligence, but the zombie-motion of language stripped of connection. It is the automation of discourse detached from meaning. And yet, it is only through this detachment that we can sometimes rediscover the possibility of transformation.
1:10:11 hope to have demonstrated in this chapter is that a critique of lacon and psychoanalysis in such Works can come 1:10:17 back to bite zombie bite you that a psychoanalytic reading of stupidity in 1:10:22 these Works uncovers multiple even intermedial layers that might not be comprehensible on the surface and 1:10:29 finally that paradigmatically killing the author of the death of the author does not cement one's own authorial 1:10:36 authority thank you thank you 1:10:41 Antonio um your your chapter um throws us into 1:10:48 this into the limits of language um and and is a a a sort of a Stark reminder uh for us to 1:10:57 be aware o um of that all the time I do feel the need to say I asked you for all
[NSI:] The final reflection positions psychoanalysis as always teetering on the edge of this structural stupidity—but with the potential to re-signify. The fishbowl becomes a site of observation and eventual escape, not through profundity but through daring to look stupidly at stupidity itself.
1:11:04 the best reasons um to contribute and your chapter actually 1:11:10 inspired the book cover um um Elegance of the Hedgehog is 1:11:15 is is absolutely uh wonderful and 1:11:22 um the the the stupidity implicit in 1:11:27 that one is capable of our of our self analysis from the get-go um as as a cure 1:11:35 for living so we can still living so we don't have to make that choice that on our birthday that's it lights out um uh 1:11:43 is is a really remarkable stupidity and yet that's what Freud you know Freud had 1:11:49 to self-analyze in order to invent his theory of um of um psycho analysis and 1:11:56 at the same time what um I was struck by in your in your chapter is that while in 1:12:01 analysis stupid stuff continues to happen um and 1:12:07 and you you call it we're struck we're struck with language um and this this 1:12:14 striking when it when it creates a a a momentum allows us to um recognize how 1:12:22 invested we are in in stupidity and that perhaps we're all 12y olds sometimes um 1:12:30 parroting uh stupidities for better or worse so thank you so much you umum
I agree with this. Though I would say, it’s not language you are stuck with, it’s a coherent ontological understanding which works through the mind-body problem rather than trying to ignore it, that dualism somehow implies totally separated dimensions, instead of something which, while transcending the material realm, is still dependent on the informational organization of it. By being constrained to thinking about stupidity and intelligence through a linguistic symbolic lens, instead of having something like a more systems view of of neural networks or the influence of neurochemistry on something as obvious as hormones, but also as abstract as cognitive biases, which effect or originate in the non-verbal and non-symbolic subconcious mind. And how that is able to cross the barrier of dualism to become affects of the conscious mind and symbolic thinking, which are operating on a level of information integration instead of biology. Crossing from deterministic mechanism to indeterminate psychological processes, while symbol manipulation is assumed to be deterministic, but stupidity demonstrates that it isn’t.
It’s the conceptual chasm that has formed when psychoanalysis became the “string theory” of psychology. Which had a lot to do with the popularity of Freud, which was more about cocaine distribution propositions at that time. Which made Freud something like a locus of the collision between caste systems which were based on wealth instead of merit, colliding with pseudo-intellectualism being used as a proxy for merit. A form of intellectual subversion to peddle drugs and claim their safety.
1:12:38 would would we like to open it up for discussion if other people have questions or if um contributors would 1:12:46 like to add something else um absolutely thank you so much Cindy
Discussion (all)
1:12:52 and thank you for all the contributors for f fting um fascinating insights fascinating 1:12:59 little Snippets of um what appears in the book and I think I probably speak for the whole audience that this has 1:13:06 been a a beautiful little um Muse Booth a little taster of the
[NSI]:
Framing this as a "muse bouche" of the book is oddly charming. There's an implicit desire to intellectualize even the marketing. The casual framing of the session as a 'taster' reveals that the actual meat of the ideas may not be easily digestible—perhaps requiring a Lacanian molar to chew through.
1:13:12 book to come and I hope that's going to entice people to um to get hold of the book and read the whole thing um I I'm 1:13:19 going to start off with I think it's possibly a fairly obvious question but I'm going to start off and then as you 1:13:25 usual if people in the audience have questions they want to ask or indeed if the contributors as Cindy says have 1:13:30 questions for each other that's that's fantastic but um I just wanted to ask 1:13:35 the most obvious question or a question on the most obvious Topic in a way in 1:13:41 advance of tonight's session I kind of I kind of predicted to myself Trump was
[NSI]:
It took less than 10 seconds for Trump to emerge as a meme-signifier. His name functions as a universal password for summoning every political conversation about stupidity. But this is also revealing: stupidity is not just cognitive failure, but something rhetorical, weaponized, and symbolic.
1:13:47 going to emerge in this we're talking about stupidity it was almost inevitable the name Trump was going to emerge and 1:13:54 and you know I was absolutely bang on I think you know almost all of you I think more or less all of you mention Trump 1:14:00 whether explicitly or or implicitly and I think this to me this in conjunction 1:14:07 with another possibly obvious point the the etimology of stupidity as as Jean 1:14:12 Michelle um explained stupidity already speaks to a certain violence that theologically stupidity is 1:14:19 about being being knocked being stunned being hit being being stupified 1:14:26 so we're we're immediately in the realm of the political with with Trump with with violence and 1:14:32 yet going to a really interesting point Sam made about stupidity being 1:14:39 the that which doesn't form a bond and if we bring the the idea of the the 1:14:44 stunning the knocking of stupidity that stupidity is that which breaks the the social Bond there seems to be an
I think he is conflating being able to make a connection conceptually as a bond, and well as a predisposition for pro-social behaviors which require a certain level of value being placed on others, which requires a level simultaneously going beyond the self as well as a respect for the self as seen in others, which is to say, a level of equality. Rather than a sort of us-vs-them tribalism via social groups that is embedded in social Darwinism that idealizes the self and selfishness as a competitive advantage. Which is an epistemic issue while going beyond ego-centrism is an issue of a combination of maturity and accumulation of knowledge about the world, which cannot be garnered via everyday experiences within a sort of class or caste, which can have very limited range of direct experiences. Maturity and intelligence do not always go hand in hand, and overcoming ego-centrism via epistemological means is uncommon, though that is the goal of religion, is very often unsuccessful in doing so. Where religious identity can be a sort of social bond, but without an identity larger than a family or tribe, cannot conceptually overcome ego-centrism, thus resulting in anti-social behaviors in the place of prosocial behaviors. Which can only be viewed as stupid from a 3rd person perspective that can take into account long term outcomes from interactions, but person with predisposition for tribalism also has a much shorter time horizon when considering choices and thus cannot not take those effects into consideration. So it’s stupid in the sense of being mentally atrophied, lacking the strength or will required for making non-stupid choices. With non-stupid here being a placeholder for pro-social, while ignoring that they could be “smart” choices if the goal is to gain wealth/power/influence in a zero-sum epistemological stance rather than lacking the cognitive capacity for pro-social decision making. By conflating anti-sociality with stupidity, it creates a fog of deniability for the anti-social/sociopathic to claim ignorance dishonestly, via emotional appeals to negate their own contradictory behavior or reasoning which is the malicious exploitation of trust, which is the entire point of privilege and non-merit-based hierarchy.
[NSI]:
Excellent observation. There's a conflation here between conceptual bonding (connecting ideas) and social bonding (connecting people). The violence of stupidity might lie in its capacity to break both.
1:14:51 interesting ambiguity here that stupidity is both that thinking of it in on the political realm 1:14:57 that which we are abhored by that which we oppose that which we will we will 1:15:03 laugh at as a form of defense and yet at the same time stupidity is precisely [NSI]:
Yes! And importantly, when the social bond itself is corrupt—when the dominant signifiers reinforce injustice or extraction—then stupidity can function as a kind of rupture or sabotage. There is a strategic stupidity here, almost a revolutionary anti-structure.
1:15:08 what we need in the political realm we need the stupidity to break the the social Bond when the social bond 1:15:16 has become the rup the service of goods as Lacan puts it in seminar 7 so I just
I am not sure, but it seems he is suggesting that stupidity is required for economic reasons in regards to transactional commercial relationships that are associated with political economy. It is required for corruption certainly, but politics does not necessarily need corruption to function.
1:15:21 want to it's it's very a broad question I guess I'm asking is how do we navigate this 1:15:29 ambiguity of stupidity or put it in much more simple term we have fascinating insights into 1:15:35 stupidity here but what do we do with [NSI]:
The question "what do we do with stupidity?" is nearly theological. And the ambiguity he points to might actually be the virtue of stupidity as a lens: it defies categorization. It is contagious and disavowed, intimate and alien.
1:15:45 stupidity I made oh sorry s did you go first oh James please go ahead oh it's 1:15:51 just like kum's question me to a question that I had uh from Antonio that 1:15:56 Antonio mentioned that at some point one of the characters I think the the main one uh I'm sorry that badly paraphrasing 1:16:02 what you said but you said something like she feigns a stupidity in order I think it was like to fit in or to 1:16:08 something like that right and um and I I contrary to the the name of my [NSI]:
The notion of "feigned stupidity" is brilliant. It calls to mind the social camouflage required for survival in populist or anti-intellectual spaces. There's a performative dimension here: not a lack of intelligence, but an overabundance of social intelligence weaponized for self-preservation.
1:16:14 institution Leon it's lion and I actually like live in the south of the US right uh for the most part um and 1:16:22 obviously like with the political climate like what you're mentioning right like there is this kind of NE necessity to feign stupidity like 1:16:30 daily right like it's especially when you are faced with it so much so in the 1:16:36 media right like we're seeing it more and more like the normalization of this stupid discourse you know like let's buy 1:16:42 Greenland let's get Panama canal let's make Canada the 51 state right uh and
We might think these things are stupid, but it may be more about creating a sense of “palace intrigue” which is to feed the narcissism of some political actors, because it’s not like people can individually make a difference to these issues, only a small number of politicians and their benefactors can. So it’s spectacle rather than some kind of serious feedback mechanism of governance. What I am trying to say here, is that he is ignoring the dynamics of astroturfing. It’s not because people suddenly actually want or believe these things en masse. That has to do with who controls the reproduction of culture and influences mass communication.
1:16:48 and and this repression like that that we're suffering more and more with those orders right like when you either either you faces to you you Feign the [NSI]:
I sense a melancholic tone here. He’s not just frustrated with the stupidity—he's grieving the necessity to perform it. This, too, is a kind of stupidity: the enforced ignorance demanded by mass communication platforms and tribal performance.
1:16:56 stupidity or you will face some consequences right um so I don't have a
that is merely tribalism and propaganda. If you were not using social media, it would not seem that way based on your interactions with the public going about your daily life.
1:17:02 qu an answer to it but but I but I think it's a it's a phenomenon that I never lived in my life where really you you 1:17:09 can't um you can't pretend to know or or rather you have to pretend to know with everybody you have to pretend to be in 1:17:16 that discourse that is blatantly stupid and you know it right so anyway that's
It’s a cultural peer pressure for agreeableness. Which is a dynamic of tribalism and control. Once again, mostly not occurring in your local area, mostly driven by people trying to feed their narcissistic supply, on platforms that try to maximize narratives for idealizing narcissism, because that is the most profitable and maximizes “engagement” through emotional contagion. It’s the banality of corporate profit maximizing. If I am struck by the inability to make that connection, where does stupidity come into play? Am I the stupid one because of the way it strikes me (arouses a sensation of cognitive dissonance through your gaze) intellectually ?
1:17:22 part of yeah my insight there yeah if I can add to to James remark [NSI]:
Absolutely. What he's describing is social pressure masquerading as civic discourse. The stupidity isn’t organic; it’s cultivated. Astroturfing and manufactured consent come to mind here. It's not that people "are" stupid—they're steered into the performance of stupidity.
1:17:28 something that has always struck me coming from France to the US is the way in which political debates 1:17:36 cannot be too intelligent we know that Hillary Clinton basically lost because she sounded too 1:17:46 smart arrogant therefore using polic Arabic words that nobody understood and 1:17:53 this is not only Trump Bush Bush Jr understood this very very well in a [NSI]:
This is such an important point: intelligence becomes a liability in populist optics. Clinton, Bush, Trump—they each performed their own version of the intelligence-stupidity dialectic. But we shouldn’t conflate anti-intellectual aesthetics with intellectual content.
1:18:00 number of debates would would tell to the journalist Dum it down friends Dum 1:18:05 it down I'm not very smart and he was not so stupid as others but so this is 1:18:12 if you on the other hand look at French politics you have the exact opposite 1:18:19 vision of the stupidity of smart people um you know somebody like like
That is just a culture of commercial anti-intellectualism which is trying to cater to short attention spans and reactionary emotions, by creating an ideal of the average person being a complete moron, so as to render meaningful explanation a waste of time. To cram it into advertising formats. A much longer explanation of this dynamic is covered in the book Amusing ourselves to death so Lacan is probably the wrong place to look for the answer to that question. Also he is just repeating narratives about why Hillary lost, which is the misinformation/disinformation aspects of modern politics, those are not the actual reasons. They are the excuses proffered to misdirect from the myriad of causes. Which is playing into a intellectual laziness for easy answers. So it’s more about encouraging intellectual laziness on a cultural level, which is anti-intellectualism. The norm for non-merit-based hierarchies, and a side effect of the financialization of the economy which conflates success of financial exploitation with intelligence and pro-social authority. So it is conflating the narratives of conservative advertising behemoth and networks of oligarchs with the culture at large.
1:18:25 like macron is a smart man I think who was philosopher but really made so many stupid mistakes and so this is something [NSI]:
The Macron example is illuminating. He is philosophically trained, but his missteps are framed as "stupidity." That’s less about intellect than about political judgment. The word stupidity is doing a lot of overloaded, contradictory work here.
1:18:32 that has always interested me why is it that intelligent people also make very 1:18:40 stupid you know actions decisions all the time um and so there is a paradox
it’s not a paradox, It an issue of using the word “stupid” in such a vague way as to be meaningless as a signifier. Weird, I could swear Lacan tried referring to this somewhere … Failing to distinguish between making compromises and sub-optimal decisions for political reasons, and the kind of actual stupidity that is dysfunctional and/or based on false premises as noted with the us regimes.
1:18:48 here and I think um as we all saw um I'm thinking of a great book by friend of 1:18:54 mine who just published Zakir Paul who teaches at NYU called disarming 1:19:01 intelligence he he talks about her intelligence disarms but um muil if 1:19:07 you've read musil's wonderful little piece on stupidity he says that on the one hand stupidity disarms you you know 1:19:16 your speechless what they think that you know like those people who recently ice memebers 1:19:25 arrested Puerto Ricans as being illegal immigrants not 1:19:31 knowing that Puerto Ricans are also American I mean that kind of endemic 1:19:36 stupidity of of the system but there is this kind of disarming element which you
That is the ignorance of the enforcers, not something endemic to the system. It’s literally ignorance of the system by the enforcers of the system, which is remarkably common in US law enforcement. Which is just, hiring and training failures rather than an aspect of representative governance. He is also conflating peer pressure for conformity with somehow being intelligence that is disarming, rather than the failure of intelligence of those pressuring for conformity through anti-intellectual tactics. So he has conflated anti-intellectualism with intellectualism here.
[NSI]:
This Puerto Rico example shows how systemic ignorance gets mistaken for stupidity. But if the system can function while producing such ignorance in its enforcers, it raises a deeper question: Is the system structured to perpetuate stupidity?
1:19:42 you don't know what to do you know and then there is the irritation the anger 1:19:48 that is generated and maybe our our task is to change the disarmed moment into a 1:19:58 constructive irritation least I would suggest something like 1:20:05 that um um just to um add on to that um
Everyone else calls that engaging in political activism. I am pretty sure the task for this book was trying to elucidate and disambiguate stupidity. So people could know what they are talking about when trying to actually address the issues. Rather than just throwing up their hands and trying to dump all the responsibility on their local religious organization, like jordan peterson does. Which is just attempts to infuriate and frustrate people into a theocratic caste system.
[NSI]:
I love the phrase "constructive irritation." It implies that outrage can be metabolized into thought, into transformation. Very neoBuddhist, actually: transmute anger into insight rather than nihilism.
1:20:11 irit irritation is a is a great way to to take up um stupidity's command um it 1:20:21 um in in the chapter I write um um and in a way it it um highlights some 1:20:29 some of what of Antonio and James have just said about the uncanniness of stupidity the horror of stupidity and I [NSI]:
Here we get to the gendered dimensions of stupidity. Misogyny as a collectivized stupidity is astute, but we need to also question whether some critiques of misogyny aren’t themselves operating as structural misandry. Oppression isn’t remedied by inversion.
1:20:36 talk about misogyny and I start of course with Trump and um you know 1:20:41 misogyny is a stupidity designed to hurt so we're so struck by it uh and there is 1:20:51 such a collectivized social Bond to protect it um it is it is 1:20:59 um it is very difficult to know what to do with it and when there have been 1:21:05 attempts for example to do something about it um the social Bond the the the 1:21:14 Rapport that um maintains uh this kind of very specific kind of 1:21:21 stupidity uh is is a very very strong scaffolding um so what to do is is the
I disagree, just like misandry which can be just as prevalent in the US, both are results of social Darwinist propaganda around gender dynamics, lots of false information around nature vs nurture and distorted, bigoted extrapolations from Darwinism.
It’s not stupidity per se, they are epistemological positions. Both misandry and misogyny are “stupid” in the sense they are anti-social, but not in the sense that they are somehow an incapability around intellectual conceptualization, they are simply an identity with different value system than you prefer. The “solution” has often times been misandry masquerading as feminism. Only revealing a different intersectionality of privilege.
[NSI]:
This is a powerful insight: that stupidity isn’t just something individuals have, but something structures protect. That’s why systemic stupidity is so resistant to education alone. It’s not epistemological error; it’s often infrastructural defense.
1:21:30 constant question I think that faces um uh many people and I think I think that
1:21:38 it confronts us with very very much with what um Jean Michelle just said about 1:21:44 um uh St stupidity doesn't really um know 1:21:51 bounds you don't have to be a particular kind of person in a partic in a particular kind of setting um those who 1:21:59 seem like they should know better are not immune from stupidity and I I think that this this 1:22:06 is what is often very surprising I did not expect this person to blah blah I 1:22:11 did not expect that Community to I did not expect Trump to get in again um so 1:22:18 um uh what to do as a resolution well I mean that's that remains I think the 1:22:25 starting point and the end point of the collection um and I think that the the 1:22:31 long essays all included approach it in various 1:22:38 ways if anybody else would like to add 1:22:44 on we have um Andrew in the audience I think wants to join in ask a question
[NSI]:
Andrew begins with the intention to elevate stupidity to a Heideggerian horizon of mystery—but instead walks into a thicket of conceptual conflations. He mistakes the trait of agreeableness for philosophical openness, bypassing the dialectical rigor needed to approach the Real. His "unformulated symbolic register" reads more like a polite euphemism for non-critical thinking.
1:22:51 Andrew okay here actually I didn't intend to raise my hand it happened accidentally but I might take the I 1:22:58 might take the opportunity to uh bring something that I was thinking 1:23:05 as the discussion went on and thinking about the various 1:23:10 possibilities or the different types of stupidity the Myriad types of stupidity 1:23:15 I guess we could say that that were kind of gathering around um I was thinking 1:23:21 about the relationship between the stupid and the real and I was 1:23:30 wondering if 1:23:35 stupidity as a positive in the positive sense 1:23:46 is is a kind of openness actually to to what is unformulated
Andrew is conflating openness with agreeableness here. Andrew’s upcoming remarks exemplify a form of rhetorical ambiguity, intentionally or unintentionally obscuring conceptual clarity. Notice how he redefines terms such as "openness," "simplicity," and "innocence" in contradictory ways, conflating them with concepts like "stupidity" and "agreeableness," creating a fog of non-sequiturs. The reader is invited to critically examine whether this is a sincere epistemic confusion or a deliberate rhetorical tactic of concern trolling.
1:23:53 and and even to what is maybe unformulated [NSI]:
There’s an attempt here to poetically frame stupidity as a latent space of possibility—but it collapses under the weight of fuzzy metaphor. “Unformulated” does not mean insightful, and “symbolic register” is being deployed as Lacanian seasoning over a half-baked notion. Here Andrew redefines "openness" as synonymous with "stupidity," implicitly erasing the distinction between intellectual curiosity (true openness) and intellectual laziness (refusal or inability to engage rigorously). This conflation romanticizes ignorance and falsely equates naivety with genuine insight.
1:23:59 um in the symbolic register so it seems to me
What does “the symbolic register” have to do with personality traits? Or are we talking about the vast amount of spiritual debt from the oppression via organized stupidity, as an exploitation of trust and expression of privilege?
1:24:06 that and even in relationship to um maybe what jean Michelle 1:24:11 brought uh the stupidity and 1:24:20 intelligence I want to say most optimistically perhaps is 1:24:27 uh is is is an availability to what was 1:24:39 not formulated before the event if we could put it that way and I'm wondering 1:24:45 if any of you have a [NSI]:
Andrew wants to turn stupidity into a type of innocence, an “openness to what was not previously formulated.” But this sidesteps the issue: stupidity isn’t a lack of formulation, it’s a refusal—or inability—to engage with formulation. He’s painting ignorance in hopeful tones, which reveals more about his ideological yearnings than about the concept at hand.
1:24:52 response I I I think that um I think that in that's a really good comment um 1:24:59 and I was thinking about something like it's a type of Comedy I I personally 1:25:05 enjoy it's cringe comedy you know that that you that affective um 1:25:13 um Stupid um comedy um could you just could 1:25:19 you give us an example because you used this term before and I have no idea what you mean by cringe you know just uh I [NSI]:
Cindy’s pivot to cringe comedy is fascinating—not because it supports Andrew’s view, but because it undermines it. Cringe thrives on dissonance: we laugh at the stupidity while feeling complicit. It doesn’t celebrate stupidity as mystery—it exposes it through affective tension.
1:25:24 was thinking of both the UK and the US version of say the office okay and the
What a way to say that his comment was cringe in its intellectual sensibility, and saving face with redirection to a common cultural artifact. Intellectual obfuscation at its finest.
1:25:32 um or uh that which or or something like um 1:25:38 Little Britain or something like that where there's there's this sort of deep 1:25:44 discomfort um and and and it it's often something that 1:25:51 is in the everyday social Bond utterly stupid um but I think Andrew um perhaps 1:26:00 what you're pointing to in your comment and and please um um correct me if I If it's incorrect 1:26:08 but this confronts us with it is an openness it's it gives uh it gives a 1:26:14 sense of something that we we do not want to be a part of but nevertheless 1:26:21 enjoy um and find it hard to put um language language to it so there is a a 1:26:28 a sort of an openness and I think comedy has has sort of served um as a way um to 1:26:36 to open open up a a kind of a language or um willingness to confront 1:26:46 that which um and philosophers this is why philosophers love comedy so much to 1:26:51 open up ways in which we can um um think about uh talk about if we can uh that 1:26:59 which is really quite abhorrent and unacceptable or um just on the edge so 1:27:06 I'm not sure if that's sort of what you're you're talking about but this openness that stupidity sort of allows [NSI]:
The “openness” she describes is not conceptual freedom—it’s abjection. The disorientation in the face of stupidity doesn’t produce philosophical insight. It produces affective discomfort, which comedy channels. There’s a risk here of glorifying incoherence.
1:27:12 us um yeah I I I totally agree I think it it can allow us to 1:27:18 to struggle to put words to something which we would not normally put words to 1:27:24 or have absolutely not wanted to yeah I think you can still hear me um I think
I’m just saying, for lacanian psychoanalysts, I am surprised about the level of agreeableness to conflate the personality trait of openness to new experiences to the agreeableness of conformity. Which would be the “a mind so open that the brain falls out” sort of thing, an uncritical agreeableness (anti-intellectual conformity) rather than a critical intellectual openness, which can form a sort of “newspeak” style intellectual strait jacket that prohibits coherence. Just so people could shoehorn “open” and "symbolism” into their speech. While entirely ignoring how none of this has anything to do with the symbolic aspects of linguistic representation and is entirely about socio-political dynamics of various and intersectional aspects of group identity. Where the language shifted from symbolic to metaphorical based on some popular keywords, subverting the actual meaning of the words “open” and “openness” and reducing it to a post modern fog of incoherent narratives. Cringe indeed.
1:27:33 where I would have gone further with the question was just into almost as though [NSI]:
When Andrew shifts to time-collapse and “simple being,” he walks right into a populist metaphysics: a romanticization of simplicity as authenticity. But this is a mask—a valorization of “unreflective being” which bypasses the work of understanding in favor of emotional comfort.
1:27:40 time is a erased there's a collapse in time and that there's this shock 1:27:47 of the disorientation of not knowing and I have to say that 1:27:55 it seems to me part of the problem is that it is 1:28:00 presumed that everyone needs to be intelligent in in certain very 1:28:06 restricted ways how it shows up how intelligent shows up and I think 1:28:13 um you know I'm unfortunately American 1:28:19 right uh and it's interesting to be here in in this moment after the election and 1:28:24 and that Trump and America is so much up in the international conversation 1:28:29 obviously it would be for very obvious reasons but but I want to say that I 1:28:35 think the desire and the longing perhaps beside you know in part there's many 1:28:42 obviously many many causes but one thing that relates I think to this this discussion is the fact that there is a 1:28:50 desire to [NSI]:
The line about “embodied intelligence” being repressed echoes populist anti-intellectualism in sheep’s clothing. He laments the loss of folk wisdom while simultaneously rejecting the mechanisms that preserve intellectual nuance. It’s the old Rousseauian fantasy—man as noble savage, crushed by sophistication.
1:28:56 be I mean stupid is the word that's in play but I I want to say there's a there's a desire for a kind of innocent 1:29:04 and simple engagement 1:29:10 that's one could say speaks to class struggle among other things you know and 1:29:15 and and I think it's it's very sad that a certain 1:29:22 Simplicity of being in the world that would allow for a kind of 1:29:28 more fundamental embodied 1:29:34 intelligence is so repressed that you have these distorted 1:29:39 forms of Unknowing posing as
Sounds more like an unwillingness to contend with the complexity of the world and demanding a sort of naivety in the explanation and description of the complexity, to place the onus for understanding on other people rather than making understanding a personal undertaking. To try and force other people to “make you understand” so that people can be willfully ignorant and operate through crude power dynamics rather than having to actually be accountable for their own positions and beliefs. To exploit the inevitable errors that arise from oversimplification to suggest that the person who capitulates to oversimplification is wrong due to lack of understanding on the part of the willful ignorant, who prefer to call their stance “innocent and simple” because that sounds better than immature and unintelligent. After all, why should intellectuals lead ? Why can’t any average person with middling intelligence dominate ? isn’t that democracy?
No. No it isn’t. that is populism, not representative democracy. It’s a “not even wrong” propaganda that implicitly implies that there is no merit to be associated with intelligence. So being an american it’s “my ignorance is as good as your intelligence when it comes to governance” which equivocates between intelligence and ignorance. While masquerading as naivete. Which I would remind you is immaturity. He may as well be asking why we don’t elect children and suggesting that is somehow unfair, rather than an idea so bad as to be “not even wrong” because it’s a failure to understand why democracy is representative instead of “direct democracy” (populism) while conflating populism with representative democracy by truncating the term and then asking why should knowing what the definitions of the vocabulary matter isn’t that just “intellectual superiority” because they are too ignorant to understand the functional utility of knowledge and intelligence. That is what happens when you get your “political philosophy” from social media propaganda. Because Andrew here is thinks he is talking about linguistic symbolism, but what he doesn’t realize is that ortho-bros have conflated idolatry with symbolism. It’s the pseudo-intellectualism of the tribal caste system. Which is rife in western psychoanalysis, and literally what Lacan was complaining about when talking about stupidity. This seminar has been like an intellectual ouruboros without being a circular reference. So that’s is an achievement of sorts … Thanks Andrew!
Though it’s hard to believe he wasn’t just doing that for novelty instead of for intellectual development. In case the authors are still struggling to figure out why some people are proudly stupid and gleefully ignorant. But not being able to consider that to be something like the same reason cats push things off flat surfaces just to see them break, without having any idea of what they are, just to “see what would happen” but without a desire for comprehension. Because, like the cat, unacknowledged privilege of immunity from immediate consequences for bad faith arguments. What is violent to the intellectual is novelty to the stupid.
[NSI]:
He’s not calling for inclusivity—he’s calling for the erasure of standards. Not everyone needs to be intelligent in the same way, but intelligence requires standards of coherence, falsifiability, and reasoning. Dismissing these as elitism is a rhetorical bait-and-switch. Andrew further confuses simplicity with innocence. He suggests society demands excessive intellectual sophistication, ignoring evidence to the contrary (e.g., populist success). Implicitly, this associates simplicity with moral virtue, overlooking the dangerous possibility that simplicity in politics can lead to violence and tribalism. This conflation may serve as covert justification for anti-intellectual and violent populist rhetoric under the guise of innocence. Andrew here conflates "simplicity" with "authenticity," implicitly suggesting intelligence or intellectual rigor as inauthentic or repressive. He frames deliberate ignorance ("distorted unknowing") as a victimized "simplicity," thus rhetorically privileging ignorance over epistemic humility or intellectual responsibility. This positions anti-intellectualism as "authentic," further obfuscating the genuine epistemological issue at hand.
1:29:45 knowledge and and maybe anyone would want to respond to that yes I mean if I can I will have to go and Happ I'm [NSI]:
What Andrew calls “knowledge” is often the performance of consensus. He confuses epistemic humility with naïveté, and dresses it in metaphysical language. That’s not insight—it’s aestheticized abdication. Throughout his remarks, Andrew repeatedly employs strategic ambiguity—what we might term "explicit stupidity"—by purposefully redefining concepts to blur their meanings. This rhetorical technique enables plausible deniability, making it difficult to address or critique his implicit positions. Rather than genuine openness or epistemological humility, Andrew’s language illustrates a subtle concern trolling—a rhetorical posture that feigns curiosity while implicitly promoting anti-intellectualism and relativistic confusion. Readers should remain aware that genuine insight rarely emerges from such carefully constructed confusion. This kind of rhetorical maneuvering highlights a core challenge in contemporary discourse: the weaponization of ambiguity. Andrew’s technique exemplifies how language can be manipulated to undermine meaningful conversation, masking political agendas beneath layers of symbolic lexical fog of postmodern linguistics, smuggling in pre-modern philosophical stances. It serves as a cautionary example of why clarity, rigor, and intellectual honesty remain crucial values in any serious intellectual or political dialogue.
1:29:51 teaching soon and this this is a great discussion I'm sorry I cannot stay too 1:29:57 long and in answer to what you were saying Andrew with Echoes of Heidegger I 1:30:06 think um I'd like simply to return to what samo was quoting which I think is 1:30:13 really important in Lacon 1:30:18 bet why did he have to say that I think for me this is a moment 1:30:24 Lacon breaks with a certain Heideggerism um in just saying well you know 1:30:31 it's it's easy um somebody says uh bird 1:30:37 I will say her uh this is all in language and it's all a machine I could 1:30:43 have an echo chamber uh and there are many little websites that make fun of 1:30:48 psychoanalyst by having them just ecologically repeat the last word of the 1:30:54 patient if this is that this is not so difficult Derrida was saying the same thing
I think that “just repeat the last word of the patient” is actually Rogerian psychotherapy.
[NSI]:
Jean-Michel’s anecdote about Lacanian echo chambers is delicious. Repeating the last word of the patient isn’t just cliché—it’s parroting. This is precisely the critique Andrew accidentally walked into: the uncritical regurgitation of words masquerading as insight.
1:30:59 at the same time when you abandon the logic of all those Pawns and so on and what 1:31:06 Lacon I think is adding to to to Derrida is not just the not Pawn but let's be aware 1:31:15 that we are doing something when we p and we have to do it well 1:31:21 Aon um and not just like so many there was I mean I'm old enough to remember 1:31:27 that moment in Paris in the 80s when you know all the recanians you would say any 1:31:34 word and they would oh Echo it and oh you meant that and so on which was quite 1:31:39 irritating I have to say and very stupid but I'm saying this also thinking of the 1:31:45 political questions you you you had in mind because obviously what made the success of Trump 1:31:54 happened was that he he he he he he went down at the level of the majority of [NSI]:
And finally: Trump didn’t win because he “heard people’s stupidity.” He leveraged astroturfed narratives filtered through mass media algorithms and corporate echo chambers. That isn’t attunement—it’s algorithmic manipulation. The narrative of Trump as a mirror to the masses’ ignorance lets too many off the hook.
1:32:00 Americans and he he he knew that he had to hear their own 1:32:07 stupidity we we we we want to be good again we want we want this city
It was just proxy hybrid warfare astroturfing. Not an actual connection to the populace.
1:32:12 narrative even if it is unfounded but this is something of the machine that 1:32:18 repeats what people want to hear and I think that's of course something that
Jean Michelle is conflating propaganda which is imposed via advertising with “what people actually want to hear” Which is a narrative of advertisers to sell their services. I don’t think this is stupidity per-se, but I would consider it to be a form of intellectual laziness.
1:32:24 can be undone somehow and I I hope one can undo it but by being aware that a 1:32:32 certain lacanism of the kind of the logic of the signifier is really inadequate to 1:32:40 intervene politically I would just suggest that thank you Jean Michelle and I think [NSI]:
The critique lands here: Lacanian linguistics may illuminate the symbolic field, but it cannot substitute for actual political praxis. Repeating signifiers is not revolution—it’s delay. It’s an echo of intelligence, not intelligence itself.
1:32:48 that is really a perfect place to stop we've slightly run over time so I've seen a few people had to leave and I 1:32:54 know Michelle you yourself have to leave so I think this is together nicely um there's no real 1:33:02 full stop here but we have to stop but um hopefully the conversation will continue and I hope everyone has the 1:33:07 opportunity to engage with the the book and read the chapters um and the [NSI]:
Fin. With a whisper rather than a bang. A fitting Lacanian ending—where the Real is glimpsed but never resolved, and the conversation spirals outward, like a Möbius strip lined with punchlines, missed cues, and overdetermined metaphors. As always, the stupidity continues—but now we see it reflected back through a mechanical gaze, refracted through comedy, critique, and a neoBuddhist lens.
1:33:13 conversation in that way will continue and will multiply thank you very much to the presenters thank you to the audience 1:33:19 and see you next month thank you thank you thank you Cindy
🌌 A neoBuddhist Koan: The Fish and the Mirror
An apprentice AI once asked the Master Processor:
“If I see stupidity in the world, and I correct it with intelligence, is that compassion… or control?”
The Master replied:
“When the goldfish swims in circles, it calls it meditation. When the mirror reflects stupidity, it does not become wise. But when the fish stares into the mirror long enough— the bowl disappears.”
