strangely Lacanian
someone i know has bought a gift for a friend’s baby toddler: “toe-tappers rocket-star booties.” these, apparently, are shoes for a kid, but no ordinary shoes. besides being shaped like rockets, these are moreover lacanian shoes.
evidently, “the crinkle paper encourages self-discovery.” is this some sort of warped lacanian mirror-stage, where the child identifies itself in the crinkle paper? what kind of kid identifies with crinkle-paper, rather than a statue, standing tall, which belies her own lack of motor skills? the crinkle paper says little about the child’s capacities, and i fail to see where the identification comes in.
incidentally, a web site sheds some light on the question, though not in a particularly encouraging way: it apparently has something to do with babies “discovering their feet.”
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What if the child was expecting to discover his feet but instead comes to think he has two rockets at the end of his legs instead?
Comment by moll @ 11/14/2005 8:37 pm
yeah. that’s much more of a fundamental ontological distortion than Lacan could come up with, the fact that the mirror gives us an inverted self-image!
Comment by geo @ 11/14/2005 8:53 pm
On the contrary - isn’t it precisely the distortion of our self-image in the mirror that allows for the construction of the subject (a negation of then negation, as it were), the move from S to $? Now that I think of it, I wonder what pathologies we are all suffering from the lack of Lacanian footwear while we were growing up (but is it not the case that the real Lacanian booties are always lacking, with these rocket boots only functioning as a fantasy object?).
On a related Lacanian note, have you seen this Žižek parody which is so note-perfect, it turns out to also be a pretty interesting analysis of the French riots?
Comment by Tim @ 11/15/2005 12:41 am
hehehe. Lacan as sales discourse. Capitalism at its most esoteric?
Comment by steff @ 11/15/2005 5:02 pm