Gaslighting: Sometimes Pervs R' not us

Why can't we all just side with one another in the pain of the signifier?

Hello again listener! From the flu-ish depths comes at you an almost  contagion-free installment of the Tossers, this time dedicated to Merriam-Webster's 2022 'Word of the Year': Gaslighting. We also have a first-time guest, Andrew, a master summarizer of whom we are still in awe.
We introduce the term through a rough semantic history, from its humble beginnings to its humiliating present. We tried to watch the 1944 movie adaptation of  the play 'Gaslighting' (1938), which gave its name to the word. Sagi's delicate sensibilities didn't allow him past the halfway point.
We can't all be heroes.

Appearing both in public and intimate discourse, gaslighting reveals the fragile, not to say spurious role of a postulated interest/advantage by its perpetrator; something towards which the word devolved from its original meaning, which necessitated a lapse of time and precluded a lapse of reason. We see that the sexual relation is in a constant gaslighting state, and that the accusation proceeds to attack that very state... As Jake notes early on: 'gaslighting' in 'The Bachelor'-type miasmas often devolves to the "Let me do me" dancing-partner of the idiocy "you do you."
 
Another route we tried to take was that of a purloined letter, the Poe story and Lacan-Derrida debate concerning the role of the "letter" as a medium of meaning, where the meaning remains hidden and yet somehow still acts upon the world by virtue of its marked absence(/lack/castration). The letter in Poe's story, as the signifier in (post-)structural linguistics,  proceeds by detours.
Indeed not sooner does it come up that we take a detour away from it. Luckily, whoever pitched this idea must agree a priori that the letter/discussion arrived at its destination, since it always does that anyway...
There are still some good Lacanian angles on the functioning of language with us desiring animals (the 'primacy of the signifier'  and the 'name of the father' in Lacanese).
We also briefly discuss Trump and his 'gaslighting'; an accusation that collapses under the scrutiny of those that take great pleasure in "exposing" his "gaslighting machinations," and those that not only know, indeed expect him to make brazen, almost proud denials/lies (in the name of a worldview they hold like a middle-finger to the other group).

So much for the uninteresting stuff. If you wanna hear the other stuff then you have to find an excuse to listen. Like a pebble, it loses its luster out of its original context.

Stars on this one: Pervs R' Us and Beast And Sovereign