no longer a body (organism), but only a partial object (organ), a subject of drive is Freud’s name for immortal persistence, ‘going on’. Such a subject is a living dead – still alive, going on, persisting, but dead (deprived of body) – undead.

http://ift.tt/2l8WE12

The speaker accepts the trauma in its meaninglessness, ceases to search for its meaning, restores its extrasymbolic dignity, as it were, thereby getting rid of the entire topic of sin and punishment.

http://ift.tt/2lhWJur

ignorance is the condition of an act: in the moment of madness when one decides to act, one has to obliterate the complexity of a situation, reducing it to a simple gesture.

http://ift.tt/2lKzKdw

Schiller was the main proponent of the German aesthetic reaction to the French Revolution: his message was that, in order to avoid the destructive fury of the Terror, the revolution should occur with the rise of a new aesthetic sensibility, through the transformation of the state into an organic and beautiful Whole (Lacoue-Labarthe located the beginnings of fascism in this aesthetic rejection of the Jacobin Terror). Since Hegel clearly saw the necessity of the Terror, his reference to Schiller could be paraphrased as: only from the chalice of this revolutionary Terror foams forth the infinitude of spiritual freedom.

http://ift.tt/2lW7zuM

in traditional power, castration that sustains power resides in the fact that the phallic insignia which provide power are decentered with regard to the subject; in contemporary power, the castration that sustains power is the very fact of being deprived of the insignia of power.

http://ift.tt/2mu9iE4

I put the mask on, and he gets frightened; then I pull the mask off and show him my stupid face which is well known to him, and he (hopefully) smiles; then I put the mask on again and he is terrified again although he knows very well what is beneath the mask – and he is right, since the mask engenders a third reality, a ‘ghost in the mask’ which is not the face hidden beneath it. This X the child is afraid of is the abyss of the pure subject (not to be confused with the personality expressed in a face). This is also the reason why wearing a burqa is so unbearable for (some of) us in the West: not because the face remains hidden so that we do not know with whom we are dealing, but because we in a way ‘see’ the void behind the naked face, this ultimate mask

http://ift.tt/2lwH9hZ

Ordinary people mostly believe at this level: when asked if they really think that two thousand years ago a son of god was walking around Palestine, they would say that while this is of course in all probability not literally true, there is for sure some higher power which softly takes care of us … The lesson of The Rapture is that this very metaphoric approach, the search for some deeper meaning, is a trap.

http://ift.tt/2lwWZYj

a god who is real and really a narcissist, giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives.

http://ift.tt/2kJ6R4g

God lives by a set of rules and laws that he applies arbitrarily at his own moral convenience. …God obviously doesn’t care if you really mean it when you declare that you love him… …An indifferent and narcissistic god is part of the Christian tradition: in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those in distress, God also ultimately loves only himself, and merely uses man to promulgate his own glory.

http://ift.tt/2lES7TK

When the man is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling with fright – there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. ‘Dear fellow,’ says his doctor, ‘you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.’ ‘Of course I know that,’ replies the patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’ Therein resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the Unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth. a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers’.

http://ift.tt/2kX6hvS

Christ explains that whenever there is love between his followers, he will be there – god should not be loved, he is love.) The true temptation to be resisted is thus to declare our love for a god who doesn’t deserve it even if he is real.

http://ift.tt/2l79wTE

Texts are failed betrayals, failed attempts to get rid of the ethical injunction. They are a comical supplement… – an opportunist’s attempt to squeeze out of the call of duty, somewhat like ‘sickness unto death’, where a mortal human being attempts to escape immortality, its unbearable ethical burden/injunction. In this sense, Texts are an optimistic work – their message is that one cannot but ‘go on’ as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity

http://ift.tt/2kSrkQ7

we really renounce god by way of renouncing him not only insofar as he doesn’t really exist, but even if he is real. In short, the true formula of atheism is not ‘god doesn’t exist’ but ‘god not only doesn’t exist, he is also stupid, indifferent, and maybe outright evil’ if we do not destroy the very fiction of god from within, it is easy for this fiction to prolong its hold over us in the form of…‘I know there is no god, but he is nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion’).

http://ift.tt/2kXCpSq

how scared he is of being punished by God. Of course he knows that God does not exist, but does God know too? It is in this precise sense that the current era is perhaps less atheist than any prior one: we are all ready to indulge in utter scepticism, cynical distance, exploitation of others ‘without any illusions’, violations of all ethical constraints, extreme sexual practices, etc. – protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is ignorant about it.

http://ift.tt/2lS0rfe

In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, what Scottie first experiences is the loss of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then realizes that the Madeleine he knew already was Judy pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy is a fake (he knew that she is not the true Madeleine, since he recreated a copy of Madeleine out of her), but that, because she is not a fake – she is Madeleine – Madeleine herself was already a fake

http://ift.tt/2l5YEnz

“I was brought about with a special purpose” is a fantasy hindering that a subject is ‘cause of itself’ not looking for others as guarantee.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/828889822848770048 http://ift.tt/2lDj2zv

Stella Dallas on purpose - plays an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter’s lover, so that the daughter can drop her without guilt. The daughter can be furious with her and marry the rich guy. That’s a more difficult sacrifice. It’s not, “I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart.” No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

http://ift.tt/2l9auzm

‘god’ is a name for the immanent decentrement of human subjectivity, …every positive notion of god (as the highest Being, etc.) already fills in this gap of decentrement, …the only authentic radical materialism is this zero-form of theology, …‘pure’ decentrement without any divine entity covering it up. …The most elementary religious dimension as the experience of out-of-jointness of our existence: …Why should we continue to call what religion refers to ‘god’?

http://ift.tt/2lCUYtk

The perverse ritual stages the act of castration, of the primordial loss that allows the subject to enter the symbolic order. In contrast to the ‘normal’ subject, for whom Law functions as the agency of prohibition, for the pervert, the object of his desire is the Law itself; The Law is the ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by Law, integrated into its functioning. The irony should not escape us: the pervert, this transgressor par excellence who purports to violate all the rules…in effect longs for the very rule of Law

http://ift.tt/2kve3wC

What causes anxiety is that we lack the breathing space that would sustain desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/828529980019720192 http://ift.tt/2kxtOWm

Positing oneself as the instrument of the big-Other becomes violence as an end-in-itself: he is staging the fiction of the big Other in order to conceal the jouissance he derives from the destructive orgy of his acts

http://ift.tt/2kSgkW9

a seduction process always involves the risky move of ‘making a pass’ – at this potentially dangerous moment, one exposes oneself, one intrudes into another person’s intimate space. … If my pass is accepted, it is not that I have successfully overcome the obstacle – what happens is that, retroactively, I learn that there never was an obstacle to be overcome. If my pass is rejected, it will appear as a Politically Incorrect act of harassment

http://ift.tt/2lprcr0

repression merely obfuscates a traumatic event which remains there, while the obsessive ceremony strives not only to prevent the appearance of a traumatic event but to undo it, which is ‘irrational’ and magical

http://ift.tt/2lleuJR

you cannot say “This is my duty but I will not do it because it may hurt my friend”, you also cannot use duty itself as an excuse to do your duty. You cannot say to your friend: “Listen, I must drop you now because it is my ethical duty. I know it hurts you but this is my duty.” Because in this way you already objectify yourself, it is not you. Kant means that duty itself is not an excuse to do your duty. You are fully responsible to formulate what your duty is.

http://ift.tt/2lkHxNV

‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ To his answer – ‘There is a problem – I don’t drink coffee’ – she retorts with a smile: ‘No problem – I don’t have any …’ The immense, direct erotic power of her reply resides in how, through a double negation, she articulates an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex: when she first invites the guy in for a coffee and then admits she has no coffee, she does not cancel her invitation, she just makes it clear that the first invitation for a coffee was a stand-in (or pretext), indifferent in itself, for the invitation to sex.

http://ift.tt/2kGysSJ

Kafka’s universe is that of extreme alienation: ..The..stance..towards this Other is that of impotent fascination. He failed to..take into account how he was not merely a..bystander. [Once he knew that he was not nothing to others, the fascination for them stopped.] ..It is his very inclusion into the observed scene that allows the subject to achieve separation from..it.

http://ift.tt/2jVmyFa

‘eliminating the phantasy of the Omnipotent’ is what will become, a year later (in Seminar XI), ‘traversing the fantasy’; how? It is not enough to simply assume that there is no omnipotent/omnivoyant Other? The inner link between omnipotence and impotence is a much more twisted one: the spectre of omnipotence arises out of the very experience of impotence

http://ift.tt/2kHMmDy

fear is the fear of an external object that is perceived as posing a threat to our identity, whereas anxiety emerges when we become aware that there is something wrong with our identity itself, with what we want to protect from the feared external threat. Fear pushes us to annihilate the external object; the way to confront anxiety is to transform ourselves. The 2016 elections were the final defeat of liberal democracy, or, more precisely, of what we could call the Left-Fukuyamaist dream, and the only way to really defeat Trump and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse – in short, to shift the weight from Clinton to Sanders.

http://ift.tt/2kgz3JH

the void of subjectivity is the Real which is obfuscated by the wealth of ‘inner life’

http://ift.tt/2lb6b4a

subject (the void of pure negativity) person (the particular wealth of emotional etc. ‘pathological’ content),

http://ift.tt/2jOBCUK

The Other is in itself incomplete, thwarted, far from a perfectly organized symbolic network or machine: Only the Other is not that. It is precisely not purely and simply the locus which is this something perfectly organised, fixed, rigid. It is an Other which is itself symbolised. This is what gives it its appearance of liberty.

http://ift.tt/2kEXlOj

in France today, the true representative of égalité/liberté is not a pure Frenchman, a Frenchman sans phrase, advocating universal citizenship and exerting pressure on African immigrants to abandon their local customs and integrate themselves into the French way of life, but precisely those immigrants who want to be part of French society as equals and reject anti-immigrant populists – they are literally more French than Frenchmen themselves.

http://ift.tt/2k5kFBy

does the persistence of art mean that art – authentic and relevant art – is only possible in an unreconciled society? Or is it that art persists in its very concept even in a fully reconciled society? Or is it that the persistence of art signals that reconciliation is not possible? … Reconciliation is ultimately the reconciliation with failure itself, not a peaceful state in which antagonisms are overcome. …What appear to us as the chaos of becoming, the infinite goal is already realized

http://ift.tt/2kZWeXg

that art plays a key role in an epoch means that in this epoch Spirit is not reconciled with itself – this is why it still needs sensual embodiment (in a work of art). Consequently, Hegel prophesied the end of art because he failed to perceive radical antagonisms which persist in the apparently nonantagonistic, self-reconciled bourgeois society where individuals are condemned to lead a prosaic, everyday life.

http://ift.tt/2kiDzFU