all that is solid melts into air

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

Freud

an outline of psychoanalysis

the origin and development of psychoanalysis

the complete psychological works

the ego and the id

the interpretation of dreams

introductory lectures on psychoanalysis

a collection of critical essays

Lacan

four fundamental concepts (other edition here)

the ethics of psychoanalysis

the limits of love and knowledge

the language of the self

seminar i: freud's papers on technique

Sartre

existential psychoanalysis

being and nothingness

Žižek

the sublime object of ideology

violence

everything you always wanted to know about lacan (but were too afraid to ask hitchcock)

the plague of fantasies

in defense of lost causes

enjoy your symptom! lacan in hollywood and out

others

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists – Joan Copjec

Imagine There's No Woman – Joan Copjec

gaze and voice as love objects – Žižek et al

jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis – Žižek et al

a clinical introduction to lacanian psychoanalysis – bruce fink

lacan: the absolute master – mikkel borch-jacobson

It is incredible how obvious it is that the language tactically selected, the methods employed, and justifications regurgitated are all replicated from across the US empirical violence throughout the years, from Iraq to Gaza to now Venezuela and beyond.

U.S. Imperialism Get Out

shared in one of my discords, sort of interesting