Is making people ‘see what it is they do feel’ not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? (An elementary case of ‘seeing’ would be to discern the ambiguous hatred beneath which the analyst suspects there is hidden love [or vice versa].) The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I ‘see what it is that I feel’, I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind – why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (‘to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analysing, and just do it!’) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void. Therein resides the link between analysis and love: in love we really do know the other person in some profound sense – and also we really don’t. And you could think that the fantasy of knowing is spurred by or prompted by something like ‘this person has a powerful effect on me and it’s so overwhelming that I’m going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge’. For Proust, for example, knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one can’t control them.3 Disparities (Slavoj Žižek) 4132-4135Wednesday, 18 January 17:44:34 the subject is the retroactive effect of the failure of its representation. It is because of this failure that the subject is divided – not into something and something else, but into something (its symbolic representation) and nothing, and fantasy fills the void of this nothingness. And the catch is that this symbolic representation of the subject is primordially not its own: prior to speaking, I am spoken

http://ift.tt/2kcuFMR