21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

off of some aspects of the self into sub-conscious denial has serious consequences for the way we operate in the world.

Feminist author Grace Jantzen explains that Lacan assumes that language, as constructed, is essentially masculine. Women therefore effectively have no voice. Furthermore, language results in an endless deferral of desire (which Lacan describes as ‘jouissance’) and as being forever deferred. There is an endless search for substitute gratification.

The split then, within the mind, in terms of a split that divides off the unconscious by the suppression of desire, has multiple consequences — a denial of genuine desire, the masculinity of Western thought, the suppression of the female, and an obsession with death. These themes will be revisited in later chapters.

Lawrence Cahoone (in The Dilemma of Modernity) identifies what he calls the ‘three pernicious dichotomies’ — the split between subject and object (mind and body, inner and outer), the split between the individual and the individual’s relationships with others and the split between the world of human culture and the natural realm of bio-physical processes. The last few chapters have looked at various splits in our world view, and the subject/object split has been a primary one. Cahoone’s other splits, or dichotomies, relate closely to one another — more closely than might first appear. Hopefully this will become clear as the argument progresses. Cahoone’s dichotomies will be revisited at the end of the work.

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