Editing Jacques Lacan (section)

==Lacan on error and knowledge==
Building on Freud's ''[[The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]'', Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".<ref>Jacques Lacan, ''Ecrits: A Selection'' (London 1997) p. 58 and p. 121</ref> In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".<ref>[[Jacques-Alain Miller]], "Microscopia", in Jacques Lacan, ''Television'' (London 1990) p. xxvii</ref>

Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language",<ref>Bruce Fink, ''The Lacanian Subject'' (Princeton 1997) p. 173</ref> to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse".<ref name="Miller, p. xxvii">Miller, p. xxvii</ref> For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring",<ref>Seminar XXI, quoted in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose eds., ''Feminine Sexuality'' (New York 1982) p. 51</ref> the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... ''les non-dupes errent''".<ref name="Miller, p. xxvii"/>

Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like [[Thomas Kuhn]] (whom he never mentions)",<ref>Oliver Feltham, "Enjoy your Stay", in Justin Clemens/Russell Grigg, ''Jacques Lacan and the Other side of psychoanalysis'' (2006) p. 180</ref> with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "[[paradigm]]" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community".<ref>Thomas Kuhn, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (London 1970) p. 175</ref>