Jacques Lacan Essay

René Magritte Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte was a master not only of the obvious, but of the obscure as well. In his artwork, Magritte toyed with everyday objects, human habits and emotions, placing them in foreign contexts and questioning their familiar meanings. He suggested new interpretations of old things in his deceivingly simple paintings, making the commonplace profound and the rational irrational. He painted his canvasses in the same manner as he lived his life -- in strange modesty and under constant analysis. Magritte was born in 1898 in the small town of Lessines, a cosmopolitan area of Belgium that was greatly influenced by the French.

     Maximillien Robespierre is commonly viewed as the symbol of the Reign of Terror, the short period in which thousands of people were executed because they were thought to be traitors. However, Maximillien was actually an idealistic reformer with an image of peace and equality driving him on, who is unfairly credited with the Terror, and assumed to be a power-hungry tyrant.

On October 23, 1844, in Red River Manitoba, Louis Riel Sr and Julie Lagimodiere, devout Christians, brought a young Métis boy into the world. Little did they know, Louis Riel Jr. would grow up to become known to many as “the founder of Manitoba.” His life was filled with excitement, both political and personal. The question is, were his actions against the government acts of honor and truth, or deception and lies?

acques LeCoq, a French practitioner and Augusto Boal, a Brazilian practitioner both aim to take their actors and the audience on a journey of discovery. Both Practitioners believed in ‘Freeing’ the body and making it ‘De-mechanicalized’ to enable full interpretation. LeCoq and Boal both use emotion, imagination, extensive body movement, playfulness and political matters to create their methods of theatrical practice.

Louis Riel was born in 1844. He was captured and executed by Canadian authorities in November 16, 1885. He was a leader who gave up his life and time to fight for the right of the Metis, Indians and the western settlers. He was an well-educated young man fluent in both French and English. He was also selected as the Metis’s spokesman to negotiate with the Canadian government. During the 1869-70, he led the rebel when Canada purchases Manitoba from the Hudson’s bay company. Also, he organized and led a similar rebellion in 1885. Above all, is he a patriote or a traitor? It was inappropriate to accuse Riel as a traitor. He tried to defend the traditional rights of Metis and made sure they treated as equally as the

When the readers meet the young, subordinated wife of a physician, who remains nameless throughout the entire story, perhaps hinting at the commonness of such situations where all those women are the same: faceless and nameless, this woman’s dilemma becomes obvious. She has been stripped off the only function a woman in those times had, the domestic one, due to the fact that she suffers from a mysterious illness which requires the infamous bed cure. Gradually, she is treated more and more as a child, unable and even forbidden to express herself in a creative way, namely to write, being persuaded that it cannot do any good to someone in her condition. This is why the protagonist (who is simultaneously the narrator), takes it upon herself to write a journal about her experiences and the mysterious woman that haunts her from the

It not only threatens, but also breaks through. Betrayed by love once in her life, she nevertheless seeks it in the effort to fill the lonely void; thus, her promiscuity. But to adhere to her tradition and her sense of herself as a lady, she cannot face this sensual part of herself. She associates it with the animalism of Stanley's lovemaking and terms it “brutal desire”. She feels guilt and a sense of sin when she does surrender to it, and yet she does, out of intense loneliness. By viewing sensuality as brutal desire she is able to disassociate it from what she feels is her true self, but only at the price of an intense inner conflict. Since she cannot integrate these conflicting elements of desire and gentility, she tries to reject the one, desire, and live solely by the other. Desperately seeking a haven she looks increasingly to fantasy. Taking refuge in tinsel, fine clothes, and rhinestones, and the illusion that a beau is available whenever she wants him, she seeks tenderness and beauty in a world of her own making.

when it was in the middle of a stride with its hooves in the air and

In the 1880’s Sigmund Freud developed a theory about the unconscious mind and went on to create psychoanalysis.

The work of David LaChapelle can be seen everywhere you turn, be it on a magazine rack, album cover, advertisement, or even a music video. Dubbed the "New Surrealist", LaChapelle's vivid, colorful, bizarre, and humorous images have been admired by millions and have made him one of the most famous photographers alive today.

In both pieces she wishes to be detached from love and responsibility, yet as the poem progresses, she has a change of heart, almost an epiphany.

This weariness with life is a symbol of schizoid suicide, which leads into withdrawal into death, into a ghostly world. In the unconscious, the narrator believes that the corruption of relationships through sexual contact brings nothingness. This again indicates the presence of a schizoid element in his mind. A person with a schizoid mind seeks isolation. Union with a woman will not take him into the path of separateness, so he buries the woman. Now he can be free. He is alone but alive. In the process, he is denouncing the "inferior" half of himself, the woman in him, the part that he fears may corrupt and make him diseased. He expresses the intolerable perplexity of woman as a focus of appearance and reality.

René Descartes was a French philosopher and also mathematician. His method of doubt led him to the famous "cogito ergo sum" when translated means "I am thinking, therefore I exist". This cogito was the foundation for Descartes' quest for certain knowledge. He explored doubt and how we can prove our own existence, by taking the first steps of scepticism. His book "Meditations On First Philosophy", was written in six parts. Each representing the six days that God took to create the world. Not to upset the Church, Descartes would need to prove the existence of God, and the soul. Within Descartes' argument, we find some important areas. Two, which require focus, are his

Another important text by Lacan is “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” This text

His idealized expectations disillusioned him and thus left him feeling great loss. It wasn’t the fact that he couldn’t triumph in his quest to impress the girl who lives in his neighborhood that made him feel this way, however, it was the fact that he had invested so much expectation and hope into this one pursuit that it destroyed his ability to ever look back at things the same way, it destroyed the innocent lens he had. Reality is a hard road to take and once it sets in, it can’t be ignored. To go back to childish beliefs of adventure and magic is only teasing and a waste of time wrapping up in the unreal.