“The only pathological feature is Zeno’s obsession with smoking, his passion to stop doing it.” https://t.co/qxLhDQdnde

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/939058241165778944 http://ift.tt/2CgE6EG

what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/938695848032129024 http://ift.tt/2C296El

The only way to really beat Trump is to radically rethink what does the left mean today. Otherwise he’ll be getting ordinary people’s votes.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/938332312596549632 http://ift.tt/2CnK8A4

Criticizing Trump is just symptomatic healing. Trump is an effect of the failure of the liberal-left. Everybody knows this now.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/937972345968451586 http://ift.tt/2BO2LMt

It’s nice to make fun of him, but you laugh at him & he wins. There is something terribly wrong with playing this game of..making fun of him

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/937607574513504257 http://ift.tt/2zEv6D0

the “when they go low, we go high” strategy didn’t actually work for Democrats against Donald Trump in 2016.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/937247549265711104 http://ift.tt/2DgQssy

If a guy talks like a jerk…ignore him. …That’s the..violence I would call for. Not physical violence. …Symbolic violence can be worse

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/936886424950816768 http://ift.tt/2DODIKS

disenchantment of our actual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space:

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/936520428557881344 http://ift.tt/2BJyQZY

Trump made his real hair look like a wig…trying to sell us..his own vulgar reality as a beautiful dream.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/936517741510561792 http://ift.tt/2D3PD69

private disobedience coupled with public obedience is precisely the way the system functioned

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/936159143425183745 http://ift.tt/2BmdmhI

The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions but how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/935795588196651010 http://ift.tt/2p8AMoP

that’s the idea, to split it into two. I put down notes, … then … I edit it. Writing disappears.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/935434372001488896 http://ift.tt/2BpfaKY

perverse logic: the shift from Bouyeri’s readiness to die for the truth to his readiness to die as direct proof of his truthfulness.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/935068198533320704 http://ift.tt/2kLJR1w

while we have no direct access to the… Real, we also cannot get rid of it

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/934710839898144770 http://ift.tt/2yTGYk8

shared obscene jokes functioned not as …excluding the others… but as..means of their inclusion, of establishing a minimal symbolic pact

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/934349715382161408 http://ift.tt/2owrbba

The death drive …stands simultaneously for life that persists …and for the endeavor to end up this very life-beyond-death.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933983727109144576 http://ift.tt/2CoxnUH

It is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933933420237017089 http://ift.tt/2ogzWWG

Identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933933223515697153 http://ift.tt/2Arx5fc

Stuckness is not just a consequence..of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental…immersion in the primordial Void); stuckness bears witness to a strife at the heart of Being. https://t.co/BebiT8Us5l

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933918905424375811 http://ift.tt/2AUkRwN

When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933917568666042368 http://ift.tt/2AdR2Gr

the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a..meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of..sexuality..as opposed to the animal instinct while Christianity sees in sex..the..force which drags humans towards animality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933912026254118912 http://ift.tt/2jPoEUV

That is my fear, as if I am nothing who…has to be hyperactive all the time, just to fascinate people enough so that they don’t notice

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933619901998288896 http://ift.tt/2AHVtub

when we use certain notions, when we do certain acts, and so on, what is the implicit horizon of understanding?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/933256264133386240 http://ift.tt/2jCj9J5

This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/932896525210083328 http://ift.tt/2jywGRK

Muslims’ allies are not who first published the caricatures for shock value but those who in support of freedom of expression reprinted them

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/932535271534546944 http://ift.tt/2kwaHyr

Hegel’s..stance..on objective reality is…letting-it-be: purified of pathological particularity, the universal subject is certain of itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/932167836604227585 http://ift.tt/2B8zekf

the true meaning of the subject’s words or deeds-their reason-is disclosed by their actual consequences

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/931807968806531072 http://ift.tt/2koCIYy

the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/931450642845044736 http://ift.tt/2A180vp

taking of sides has to rely on the necessary illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/931084607528857601 http://ift.tt/2jbRCho

the struggling subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his..consistency, his..identity hinges on opposing the enemy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/930720799341928448 http://ift.tt/2zY4Qsw

Hegel here celebrates labor:…labor forces me…to alienate myself from my natural Self…into the universal Self

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/930360942256324608 http://ift.tt/2zES65H

there is no Other World in which we’ll be repaid for our losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, Hegel’s name is “absolute negativity”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/929997431521112064 http://ift.tt/2BA2b5d

he always loses anew that which he never possessed, while he continues to succumb to the necessary illusion that ‘he’d otherwise possess it’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/929632379291033601 http://ift.tt/2zAM5ap

the experience that the object in its fundamental dimension is the positivization of a void, is this not the traversing of the fantasy?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/929269999528706048 http://ift.tt/2Ae7mcQ

experience..the ‘positive’ character of loss,..the original void filled by the dazzling and fascinating experience of the fantasmatic object

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/928910265504149504 http://ift.tt/2n9kBXr

In the ‘loss of the loss’,…the regained ‘positivity’ is that of…the experience of loss as a ‘positive’, indeed ‘productive’, condition.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/928549000860655616 http://ift.tt/2BoGIfD

loss ceases to be the loss of ‘something’, becomes the opening…the moment…the empty place is conceived as prior to that which fills it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/928182829435047936 http://ift.tt/2n3d8JE

the Symbolic is a differential network structured around an empty, traumatic place, …das Ding, the ‘sacred’ place of impossible jouissance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/927825482451750913 http://ift.tt/2mZR56p

if the Other is not fractured, if it is complete, the only possible relationship of the subject to the structure is that of total alienation

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/927464356404711425 http://ift.tt/2A2SSfT

he avoids alienation as he posits himself as the correlative of this remainder, objet a, the lack,..a non-integratable residuum in the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/927101958938398721 http://ift.tt/2Bg5WwT

this…Hegel who mortifies the living substance…is the Real of his critics:…the construction of a point which effectively does not exist

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/926739577460621312 http://ift.tt/2B9m4jD

the final moment of the analytic process is the experience of the lack in the Other, the void against which signification articulates itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/926377199653048321 http://ift.tt/2B7KTw8

Name-of-the-Father…allows..to “symbolically kill” the father, to be able to abandon father…and freely set on one’s own path in the world

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/926014805705678848 http://ift.tt/2yYwy3U

The hysteric is horrified at being..the object of others

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/925646114367442945 http://ift.tt/2yWPQGF

Absolute Otherness is…the subject beyond subjectivization,..not bound by the symbolic pact,..the point of failure of every identification’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/925286402920779776 http://ift.tt/2hBRWVB

unable to integrate it into..reality we..experience it as nightmarish apparition. This is what the captivating image of the WTC collapse was

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/924926379631808512 http://ift.tt/2ioaHwu

what awaits us at the end of this process of virtualization is that we begin to experience “real reality” itself as a virtual entity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/924557689102962688 http://ift.tt/2mv9Uy4

I am not a communist out of optimism but out of despair. …I am saying, yes probably we are doomed, approaching a new apartheid society.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/924186500769644544 http://ift.tt/2AJ1k1P

one must leap into action, even prematurely, in order to reach, through this very error, the correct path.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/923819081320615936 http://ift.tt/2iUf3uJ

One must be taken in by one’s own desire, even if this desire is impossible, in order for something to actually happen.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/923457948109692928 http://ift.tt/2hotQ0i

The hysterical subject is above all the subject who asks himself a question while at the same time presupposing the Other has the answer

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/923100608269348864 http://ift.tt/2AyLxBE

the way to confront anxiety is to transform ourselves.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/922736959688200192 http://ift.tt/2ysatuj

in anxiety we become aware there is something wrong with our identity itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/922372208722350085 http://ift.tt/2zqtTDo

the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious “passionate attachments,” attachments publicly non-acknowledged by the subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/922013428667109376 http://ift.tt/2hSGfu2

“I’m not responsible, I merely fulfill the Other’s Will” -…this is what Kantian ethics prohibits.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/921649788847878144 http://ift.tt/2yezd91

For Kant our capacity to desire is…“pathological”,…Lacan claims…desire does have a non-pathological, a priori object-cause:…objet a.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/921286154728693761 http://ift.tt/2hMlTCu

renouncing the guarantee of some big Other is the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/920925018716033024 http://ift.tt/2hJLFHH

In alienation, the subject experiences the Other as the full agent running the show, as the one who “has it” (what the subject is lacking)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/920557588013568000 http://ift.tt/2hFmEgY

when the Master loses his authority and becomes hystericised (after his authority is questioned, experienced as fake), … authority reappears but is now displaced, de-subjectivised, in the guise of the authority of neutral expert-knowledge (‘it’s not me who exerts power, I just state objective facts and/or knowledge’). … ‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that it is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.’ Is this remark by Kafka not the most succinct definition of what went wrong in the communist states of the twentieth century?

http://ift.tt/2h9oWHU

Putin’s foreign policy is a clear continuation of this tsarist-Stalinist line. According to him, after the Revolution, it was the turn of the Bolsheviks to aggrieve Russia: ‘The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic makeup of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine.’10 In January 2016, Putin again made the same point in his characterisation of Lenin’s greatest mistake: Ruling with your ideas as a guide is correct, but that is only the case when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich. In the end that idea led to the ruin of the Soviet Union. There were many of these ideas such as providing regions with autonomy, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia and which would later explode.11 In short, Lenin was guilty of taking seriously the autonomy of the different nations that composed the Russian empire, and thus of questioning Russian hegemony. No wonder we see portraits of Stalin again during Russian military parades and public celebrations, while Lenin is obliterated. In a big opinion poll conducted a couple of years ago, Stalin was voted the third-greatest Russian of all time, while Lenin was nowhere to be seen. Stalin is not celebrated today as a communist, but as the restorer of Russia’s greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic ‘deviation’. For Lenin, ‘proletarian internationalism’ goes hand in hand with a defence of the rights of small nations against the big nations: for a ‘great’ nation dominating others, giving full rights to smaller nations is the key indicator of the seriousness of their professed internationalism.

http://ift.tt/2zrOk3r

What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion: the figure of the ‘big Other’ that had provided the background against which they were able to pursue their ruthless drive for power.

http://ift.tt/2zbJ2Iq

Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis

http://ift.tt/2hrOlJZ

alienation does not introduce a gap…into a pre-existing organic unity, on the contrary, it covers up the gap in the Other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/920197886054420480 http://ift.tt/2hl1yEp

by alienation, we mean self-experience as..subordinated [to] some substantial big Other that runs the show (History, Destiny, God, Nature …)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/919839120524038145 http://ift.tt/2zNPq5l

Alienation is “overcome” when the subject experiences that “there is no big Other”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/919475453227884544 http://ift.tt/2iacfcr

“reconciliation” is not an overcoming of alienation, but a reconciliation with alienation itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/919114332528676865 http://ift.tt/2iFi1qB

universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist notion. It’s functions relatively well–Canada, most Western European countries.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/918750688414486528 http://ift.tt/2h9W6nz

large corporations are delighted to accept..evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries…to strengthen air pollution regulations

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/918387046850416640 http://ift.tt/2yP9Myc

there is no secret beyond the door, this door is intended only for me, to capture my desire!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/918023560169508864 http://ift.tt/2h1o8BI

the Other for whom the subject “makes herself (seen, heard, active)” is only what your desire introduces there, has no independent existence

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/917658486661697536 http://ift.tt/2xYqB5n

no matter how decisively we act ‘all around is darkness & impenetrable gloom’, as Godunov sings in his great monologue in Mussorgsky’s opera

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/917297353081704448 http://ift.tt/2l879lG

the ultimate fantasy of every organic-authoritarian vision is that of society organized as a family, with the leader as father to his people

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/916936324778790912 http://ift.tt/2yCXIzr

the need to be punished generates guilt feeling and gives birth to criminal intentions. (at time -27:17) https://t.co/2W68KTXXjf

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/916571311329153024 http://ift.tt/2hQqGCq

Nazism was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised. Zizek https://t.co/OBtvzRUAmH

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/916215234645364736 http://ift.tt/2il9LLS

instead of ‘winning’ (taking power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from the state. But is this solution really adequate? What about heroically accepting the risk of self-obliteration? A revolutionary process is not a well-planned strategic activity with no place for a full immersion in the Now without regard for the long-term consequences. Quite the contrary: the suspension of all strategic considerations based upon the hope for a better future is a key part of any revolutionary process

http://ift.tt/2kXiAMX

if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (the attack didn’t succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restoration. That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not repression by the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void

http://ift.tt/2xNyAHr

Is not the basic experience of the end of Really Existing Socialism precisely the rejection of this shared feature, the resigned ‘postmodern’ acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of ‘sub-systems’, which is why a certain level of ‘alienation’ is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia replete with totalitarian potential?

http://ift.tt/2gp8inm

even the struggle against [racism] can serve as means to…reproduce [racism].

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/915852850865086465 http://ift.tt/2hMOdUE

there is nothing sublime in sacred; Nazi parades were also sacred.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/915482907904561152 http://ift.tt/2yuD30T

by “sacred" I mean this kind of ecstatic communal feeling. I hate it. This is as sacred as an old religious ritual.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/915123021278535680 http://ift.tt/2xHu0dU

there is nothing sublime, really great in sacred

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/914763161798156288 http://ift.tt/2xFUyqM

when symbolic authority loses its efficiency we get subjects who are strangely derealized deprived of their psychology as if robotic puppets

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/914399620251471873 http://ift.tt/2kOevdN

symbolic authority disintegrates, what fills in its void is the brutal Ur–Father. Modern totalitarian masters are much this Ur-Father figure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/914035854951231488 http://ift.tt/2gA25ld

We can do whatever we want today, but the result is at the daily level we’ve so many prohibitions so as not to prevent others from enjoying.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/913673472940871680 http://ift.tt/2hDcyfx

the message is “You may enjoy, but because you may, you must”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/913316136250470400 http://ift.tt/2ze6rGK

A very principled position serves as an excuse to do nothing. ..Everyone agrees in principle

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/913080394349731840 http://ift.tt/2kAgcM8

It is the full recognition.. of the absence of any external guarantee that distinguishes [you] from.. ‘totalitarianism’ or 'fundamentalism’.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/913034185794899968 http://ift.tt/2y5lfav

We must make a clear break with the 20th century communist experience if the communist project is to be renewed as a true alternative

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/913032007579504640 http://ift.tt/2hV653p

[a superegoic fake permissive dad says] not “You must obey my orders and do your duty” but “You must do it with pleasure. You must enjoy it”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/912951230871298048 http://ift.tt/2fQsM4q

superego inverts this Kantian “You can, because you should!” into “You should, because you can!”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/912585053384912897 http://ift.tt/2ggc5QF

For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental…confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/912223924833980416 http://ift.tt/2fQk4qu

in China ..my translator ..was so embar­rassed that she stopped translating and almost lost consciousness.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/911862903627829253 http://ift.tt/2xQ3Bti

I have doubts about political correctness. Of course I agree with its goals – no humiliation, against power relations – but think about the figure of ‘human being’ that is silently presupposed by political correctness, its obsession with harassment and victimisation, we are always threatened. I look into your eyes for two seconds too long – visual rape. The vision beneath political correctness is very sad, a vision of ‘we are all potential victims’.

http://ift.tt/2yFZblV

the ideal country today is a country that is fully integrated into a global market but at the same time ideologically ethnocentric, focused on its own culture. Even Trump is doing this. That’s why Trump gets on well with dictators. China, India, Putin are playing this game. We are approaching a new world where a global market will coexist with a lack of universally accepted emancipatory rules. This is very sad

http://ift.tt/2yTXLF0

In every crisis, Putin let the ordinary people suffer to the end

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/911504187304873984 http://ift.tt/2xbv1pv

Being unseen is an illusion, however, a screen against the fact…that I am here for the Other’s gaze

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/911135502094528512 http://ift.tt/2fDb4S4

perverts never have questions, only the answers. They are not a danger but an annoyance. They pretend…but…without anything substantial.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/910773116992999424 http://ift.tt/2kduXE6

‘femininity’ is a mask supple­menting a failure to become a woman. [Each sex gives form to never cancelling sexual difference to oneself]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/910410728565288960 http://ift.tt/2kanWUT

in…hedonism, when the goal of life is directly…happiness, anxiety and depression are exploding

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/910048341215600641 http://ift.tt/2xF9asf

The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice; it functions as a fetish that prevents us thinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlights of another train approaching us from the opposite direction

http://ift.tt/2xMnocV

‘masculine’ & ’ feminine’ positions are 2 modes of coping with this obstacle/loss [called sexual difference that both sexes have in common]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/909688654674763776 http://ift.tt/2fRZ13Q

Woman is never fully a woman & man never fully a man [sexual differences is not difference between man & woman but difference to themselves]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/909328595344117760 http://ift.tt/2wieoIP

it is not that woman is what man is not, and vice versa. Woman is never fully a woman and man never fully a man

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/908959917142347777 http://ift.tt/2huACoJ

sexual difference is not the opposition allocating to each of the two sexes its positive identity [defined] in opposition to the other sex

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/908602574198202369 http://ift.tt/2xyw2v9

Desire’s raison d’être is not…to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/908235150298927104 http://ift.tt/2jS69Se

The subject who directly believes need not exist for the belief to be operative: it is enough precisely to presuppose its existence

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/907877796822831104 http://ift.tt/2hqiVCG

for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, yet this guarantor is always deferred, never here in persona

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/907514310477443072 http://ift.tt/2xmYv5q

Symbolic identification…compensates for the ‘impossibility’…of the subject’s traumatic relationship towards objet a.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/907155539456659456 http://ift.tt/2xojYfN

One doesn’t wait for the ripe circumstances to make revolution. They become ripe through the political struggle itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/906791879454445568 http://ift.tt/2xkEuhb

Desire is a defence against desire: desire structured through fantasy is a defence against the desire of the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/906430757886930944 http://ift.tt/2jFjYU1

It’s not that fantasy is an abyss of seduction threatening to swallow you, no, fantasy is ultimately sterile

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/906065855364157440 http://ift.tt/2w1ZCG7

In wanting me, what you want is the fantasmatic image of me. I will thwart your desire by directly gratifying it

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/905700942837886976 http://ift.tt/2xqliiR

in fighting this excess of vio­lence and contradiction, reason is fighting its own excess. It’s reason against its own excess of madness.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/905337297566126080 http://ift.tt/2wgOYzf

The Sadean crime is not empirical madness; it is the madness of reason. Only reason in its perversity can imagine such a radical crime.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/904979951249747969 http://ift.tt/2x0mfys

today ‘social life’ somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real’ life like stage actors and extras

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/904613778062487552 http://ift.tt/2h2jN43

in late-capitalist consumerist society, ‘real social life’ itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/904253904816394240 http://ift.tt/2h1Ve7j

Catholicism is..external playful rituals..allowing to just follow..ritual & ignore the pressure of authenticity characterizing Protestantism

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/903888996027297792 http://ift.tt/2jjky9v

He..in his indecision..puts off the choice. What he truly fears to lose is..uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/903531665246609408 http://ift.tt/2xexR0B

woman’s impossibility of achieving an identity with herself…is why woman is a symptom of man.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/903162967394541568 http://ift.tt/2xWAT7n

the pervert’s fundamental illusion is that he possesses a (symbolic) knowledge which enables him to regulate his access to jouissance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/902799328410042368 http://ift.tt/2xScC1F

There is always something damp, claustrophobic, inauthentic, and even desperate in this striving for sexual and other pleasures.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/902436939869147137 http://ift.tt/2gLg5YV

the depoliticized private sphere is in no way the free domain of innocent pleasures.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/902074554083835904 http://ift.tt/2gIoGLE

The private indulgence in cynicism etc are all ways in which totalitarian ideology is at work in “non-ideological” everyday life

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/901712161168293888 http://ift.tt/2wDO9PU

When a man wears a wig, he usually tries to make it look like it’s real hair. Trump achieved the opposite: he made his real hair look like a wig; and maybe this reversal provides a succinct formulation of the Trump phenomenon. At the most elementary level, he is not trying to sell us his crazy ideological fictions as reality - what he is really trying to sell us is his own vulgar reality as a beautiful dream.

http://ift.tt/2w0vbPz

in the long term, the only way to fight anti-Semitism is…to express the underlying anticapitalist motive in a direct, non-displaced way.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/901357326862626816 http://ift.tt/2xHVlJ8

acting out is an attempt to break through…an impossibility of…putting into words

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/900988642671431680 http://ift.tt/2eQgXuU

[Something] loses its alienated character of a foreign force..the moment the subject renounces..that there’s deep inside [it] some..treasure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/900627559641165825 http://ift.tt/2vyBPRS

if we get too near the object, it loses its sublime features

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/900263867800068096 http://ift.tt/2eIy2H7

the positive object is a ..stand-in for the void of the impossible Thing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899906521018109954 http://ift.tt/2wp20YE

The subject’s desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899545394606198784 http://ift.tt/2vCz5yQ

If the symptom dissolves, the subject loses the ground under his feet

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899177953233436674 http://ift.tt/2wdjNUb

belief is embodied in our very social practice.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898816969742397441 http://ift.tt/2wTRhrh

The symptom is ..a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment. ..That is why he “loves his symptom more than himself.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898453185848680448 http://ift.tt/2izBk42

the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all “pathological” particular content—duty should be accomplished “for the sake of duty.” …Reality reaches its truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that there is no Other World in which we will be repaid for our terrestrial losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, what is “beyond” finite reality is nothing but the immanent process of its self-overcoming . Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence is “absolute negativity,” as he makes clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of Master and Servant: the Servant’s secure particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets a whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self… …What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing —in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only “greatness” here is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with their “pathological” desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality. …Hegelian “negativity” serves to “proscribe absolute difference” or “non-being”:8 negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determinations. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/maintained/elevated, posited in their “truth” as ideal notional determinations. What remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no : the no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, the no of struggle which aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation

http://ift.tt/2wvEFXG

Identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”…It is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it bluntly, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more radical discord, one which derails the very Harmony of Being? As Davis perceptively notes, Heidegger is ambiguous here, oscillating between the radically open “strife” of Being and its reinscription into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving in which, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “‘discord’ is at best what makes ‘unity appear’”

http://ift.tt/2g9ZMrO

When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute. The next, and crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just a consequence of our human deficiency or finitude, of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, then the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental self-effacement, an immersion in the primordial Void); rather, this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife at the very heart of Being itself.

http://ift.tt/2vgKxjn

Such is the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis: not its emphasis on the role of sexuality as such, but its rendering visible the “meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. In order to uphold its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words, this violent de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human

http://ift.tt/2vmwpED

This, in simple terms, is the basic difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of (specifically [in]human) sexuality,of the “undead” drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality the very force which drags humans towards animality and prevents their access to immortality.

http://ift.tt/2ilsXJ7

Is our identity fully determined by DNA? Or are we are not just biological automats? Do we have some spiritual freedom and so on?…I think if we are just our DNA. If the interaction of our DNA with environment determines us completely, then yes we should worry. But in a way, we just discovered that we never were free. We were automats [machines] also now but we did not know it. Our freedom was an illusion… So are we automats which just can be controlled or is there hope for our freedom? …We are effectively entering some kind of post human universe where everything, our inner most identity can be reduced to a formula. …What I’m afraid of is a possibility of a direct contact-link between our brain, what we are thinking, and a computer network, because there we lose our autonomy.

http://ift.tt/2v4b03H

“The fact that it is possible to hack a computer through a DNA, means that our identity, determined by DNA is nothing more than just another computer formula,” Zizek said.

http://ift.tt/2xeNOAG

when the leader is caught with his pants down this strengthens the solidarity of the group through this public denial of impotence.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898089539801149440 http://ift.tt/2uQ5Lst

Identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt, or more precisely, upon a fetishist disavowal of this guilt

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897729832397807618 http://ift.tt/2wTXe5d

how do we pass from Revolutionary Terror to Kant’s autonomous and free moral subject? By way of what, in more contemporary language, one could call a full identification with the aggressor: the subject should recognize in the external Terror, in this negativity which constantly threatens to annihilate him, the very core of his (universal) subjectivity; in other words, he should fully identify with it. Freedom is thus not freedom from a Master, but the replacement of one Master with another: the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all “pathological” particular content—duty should be accomplished “for the sake of duty.” …when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually concrete I, since I am caught up in an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one way to understand what Lacan called “symbolic castration”: the price the subject pays for its “transubstantiation” from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions. A Nietzschean reading easily discerns in this reversal of Terror into autonomous morality a desperate strategy of turning defeat into triumph: instead of heroically fighting for one’s vital interests, one pre-emptively declares total surrender and gives up all content. Lebrun is here well aware how unjustified the standard critique of Hegel is according to which the dialectical reversal of utter negativity into a new higher positivity, of catastrophe into triumph, functions as a kind of deus ex machina , precluding the possibility that the catastrophe might be the final outcome of the process—the well-known common-sense argument: “But what if there is no reversal of negativity into a new positive order?” This argument misses the point, which is that this is, precisely, what happens in the Hegelian reversal: there is no real reversal of defeat into triumph but only a purely formal shift, a change of perspective, which tries to present defeat itself as a triumph. Nietzsche’s point is that this triumph is a fake, a cheap magician’s trick, a consolation prize for losing all that makes life worth living: the real loss of vitality is supplemented by a lifeless specter. In Lebrun’s Nietzschean reading, Hegel thus appears as a kind of atheist Christian philosopher: like Christianity, he locates the “truth” of all terrestrial finite reality in its (self-)annihilation—reality reaches its truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that there is no Other World in which we will be repaid for our terrestrial losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, what is “beyond” finite reality is nothing but the immanent process of its self-overcoming . Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence is “absolute negativity,” as he makes clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of Master and Servant: the Servant’s secure particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets a whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self… …What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing —in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only “greatness” here is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with their “pathological” desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality. This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: “One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous.”7 It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become “universal citizens” by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality—in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. The obverse of Hegel’s “nihilism” (all finite/determinate forms of life reach their “truth” in their self-overcoming) is its apparent opposite: in continuity with the Platonic metaphysical tradition, he is not ready to give negativity full rein, that is, his dialectics is ultimately an effort to “normalize” the excess of negativity. For late Plato already, the problem was how to relativize or contextualize non-being as a subordinate moment of being (non-being is always a particular/determinate lack of being measured by the fullness it fails to actualize; there is no non-being as such, there is always only, e.g., “green” which participates in non-being by not being “red” or any other color, etc.). In the same vein, Hegelian “negativity” serves to “proscribe absolute difference” or “non-being”:8 negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determinations. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/maintained/elevated, posited in their “truth” as ideal notional determinations. What remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no : the no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, the no of struggle which aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation

http://ift.tt/2fNq4Qo

we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that.. life would be the trauma and we build a fantasy to shield ourselves from it. But perhaps the trauma is the fantasy we construct to protect ourselves from something else.

http://ift.tt/2v279U7

the working over of animal instincts—the drive is not instinct but its “denaturalization.” There is, however, a deeper logic to this paradox: from within the established human universe of meaning, its own founding gesture is invisible, indiscernible from its opposite, so that it has to appear as its opposite. This, in simple terms, is the basic difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of (specifically [in]human) sexuality, of the “undead” drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality the very force which drags humans towards animality and prevents their access to immortality. Such is the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis: not its emphasis on the role of sexuality as such, but its rendering visible the “meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. The paradox of Christianity is that, in order to uphold its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words, this violent de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human is the “truth” of the Christian elevation of human spirituality. Unfortunately, Hegel does the same in his theory of marriage—as does Heidegger too. The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute. The next, and crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just a consequence of our human deficiency or finitude, of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, then the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental self-effacement, an immersion in the primordial Void); rather, this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife at the very heart of Being itself. Deeply pertinent here is Gregory Fried’s reading of Heidegger’s entire opus through the interpretive lense of his reference to Heraclitus’s polemos (struggle—in German, Krieg , Kampf , or, predominantly in Heidegger, Auseinandersetzung ) from the latter’s famous fragment 53: “War is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”32 It is not only that the stable identity of each entity is temporary, that they all sooner or later disappear, disintegrate, return to the primordial chaos; their (temporary) identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.” There is, however, a further step to be taken with regard to polemos : it is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it bluntly, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more radical discord, one which derails the very Harmony of Being? As Davis perceptively notes, Heidegger is ambiguous here, oscillating between the radically open “strife” of Being and its reinscription into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving in which, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “‘discord’ is at best what makes ‘unity appear’”

http://ift.tt/2x2pEcm

the Christian attitude to Christ’s death is not one of melancholic attachment to his deceased person, but one of infinite joy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897368545289539584 http://ift.tt/2uGxY52

In its very Otherness, Solaris generates spectral phenomena.., our innermost idiosyncratic whims

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897005053181136896 http://ift.tt/2w4AphZ

Solaris brings us too close to what in ourselves must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/896639980507996161 http://ift.tt/2vRUHL4

The radical break introduced by Christianity consists in the fact that it is the first religion without the sacred

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/896278849293602821 http://ift.tt/2wSG3A8

The rupture introduced by Christianity: now we know.. The impact of this…opens up the space for violence not contained by any mythic limit

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895915211332472833 http://ift.tt/2wBsOod

Life substance is derailed (the Freudian name of this..is of course the death drive). This is why the human being is not a “rational animal”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895556607018496000 http://ift.tt/2vTjJK7

in Christianity God profanes himself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895193093342973952 http://ift.tt/2vk8wRf

The Sacred is the last veil that conceals the horror of the Profane.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894830696031813632 http://ift.tt/2vBLA11

cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality,…against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894470703633891329 http://ift.tt/2vdqULR

the art resides in a demand which, while ‘realist’, disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology and implies a much more radical change

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894108298731020289 http://ift.tt/2ueqW2Q

The masochist ,thinking ‘he knows it for her,’ ‘pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire)’. He perversely ‘exerts control through’ ‘what he is for the Other’: ‘the object of’ their jouissance, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2fjVFZN

the realization of desire does not consist in its being “fulfilled,” “fully satisfied,” it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893747178514120705 http://ift.tt/2vB2oVc

we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893383538061529089 http://ift.tt/2vpIflF

Shakespeare’s Richard II is confronted with the void of his subjectivity outside the symbolic title “king,” forced into hysterical outbursts

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893016111704420353 http://ift.tt/2vmpqzK

Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/892653726028230656 http://ift.tt/2vjzaus

The object is “objectively” nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of “something,” begot by “nothing.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/892297640599224320 http://ift.tt/2hlcdRW

confusion is introduced by desire into socalled “objective reality.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/891930201764057088 http://ift.tt/2hhPohS

Desire “takes off” when “something” (its object-cause) gives positive existence to its “nothing,” embodies its “nothing”, its void.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/891570330321514496 http://ift.tt/2eYVsvb

social demands no longer take the form of the ideal of the ego, of an “interiorised” symbolic code, but remain at the level of the Superego.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/891205419296751616 http://ift.tt/2vTCB8M

today’s society is no less “repressive” than it was at the time of “organisation man”, the loyal servant of the institution.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/890843038733537280 http://ift.tt/2uG8QcE

we undermine the hold a fantasy exerts over us: through overidentification with it,..embracing..the inconsistent fantasmatic elements.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/890485699794919424 http://ift.tt/2tGMyVD

borderline marks the point of its hysterisation, the point at which the subject is faced with the..contradiction of..pathological narcissus.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/890120796504567808 http://ift.tt/2uZR4C5

I interact with others obeying external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their “inner world”,…a dose of alienation is indispensable.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/889757276705234945 http://ift.tt/2tXq6Xg

“pathological Narcissus” is a helpless, terrified subject, victim of a cruel..Superego, faced with impossible demands

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/889398538786000898 http://ift.tt/2vCbWgr

It often seems that in the case of a neurotic, father is perceived as oppressive or as too weak, ridiculous (or even both at the same time)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/889031092719759361 http://ift.tt/2gVeiUj

It effectively often seems that in the case of a neurotic, father is always the Other, traumatizes, the one who it experiences as too strong

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/888667450799161344 http://ift.tt/2uTjwq1

It effectively often seems that, in the case of a neurotic, it is impossible to imagine a situation from the father’s standpoint

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/888305071376740353 http://ift.tt/2vJgP6J

through love drive descends into the Symbolic: through love, the circular movement of drive is transposed onto another subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/887942682521346048 http://ift.tt/2ufehiF

Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of reproducing its experience in an artificial medium.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/887585332459429888 http://ift.tt/2uaWqcC

a human being overcomes its mortality (i.e. to risk life for spiritual cause). Hegel’s name for this is negativity, Freud’s is death drive.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/887217904273457152 http://ift.tt/2u5vM3n

a human being overcomes mortality (i.e. readiness to risk life for spiritual cause). Overcoming is paradoxically a form of ‘death in life’.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/886858176301346816 http://ift.tt/2tyFuZW

a human being overcomes its mortality through gaining a distance towards its life-substance, i.e. readiness to risk life for spiritual cause

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/886493121873408001 http://ift.tt/2vrsW84

Fritzl complained his life was ‘ruined’ by the discovery of his secret family. Fritzl is a child of 68, ruthlessly realizing his fantasy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/886134517785923584 http://ift.tt/2tVBZR3

external threat of annihilation is nothing but the externalized/fetishized image of the radical negativity of self-consciousness

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/885769610737352704 http://ift.tt/2tUsiR3

To quote Ghandi, ‘be yourself the change you want to see in the world’: the subject is itself the catastrophe it fears and tries to avoid.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/885407223748448258 http://ift.tt/2tRDNsH

a throw of the dice will never abolish the hazard (Mallarme) the abyss of negativity remains forever the background of subjective creativity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/885046286965239809 http://ift.tt/2ueFOlk

no annihilation of the entire natural order is needed, subject already is this cut in the natural circuit, the selfsabotage of natural goals

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/884684981435588609 http://ift.tt/2sRPxK8

The true function of the Name-of-the-Father…is…to allow the subject to “symbolically kill” the father, to be able to abandon father

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/884322589992157185 http://ift.tt/2ujQAqX

Kafka’s reluctance to assume the Name-of-the-Father is the very indication of his failure to break with and off from the father.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/883955153262587904 http://ift.tt/2tKUCVQ

not vitality undermines authority; that one is bothered by father’s excessive vitality already presupposes the failure of symbolic authority

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/883597808066015232 http://ift.tt/2uaUv8u

This father’s “too-muchness”…is that of life, the humiliating quality of the father’s excess of vitality which undermines his authority.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/883237954579296256 http://ift.tt/2v5gyun

Kant’s ethical rigorism:…a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/882869255951265792 http://ift.tt/2sIjfBz

The neurotic clings to his doubts, to his uncertain status as the only sure support of his being. (Die Nacht der Welt, p. 85 - Slavoj Zizek)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/882511913686532096 http://ift.tt/2u7nNpj

‘sublime object of ideology’ is the…object which has no positive…consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a constitutive impossibility.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/882148270734290944 http://ift.tt/2t2rQ17

Because of the “father’s absence”, the child is incapable of resolving the contradiction between the protective and threatening other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/881783346988277760 http://ift.tt/2tBAOV4

The subject persists in his indecision. What he truly fears to lose is doubt, the uncertainty, the state where everything is still possible

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/881423473121398784 http://ift.tt/2tYdaEm

desublimation of sexuality intellectualizes it, changing an intense pathetic bodily experience into a cold, apathetic mechanical exercise.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/881062348970237952 http://ift.tt/2tr0kh7

there is something ‘spiritual’, spectral, sublime, about a passionate sensual lust, and vice versa (as the mystical experience teaches us)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/880693681761734657 http://ift.tt/2tRK0ap

What Sade heroically takes into account is that bodily sensual pleasure and spiritual love are not opposed, but dialectically intertwined

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/880335235728248833 http://ift.tt/2uw28Ea

So, far from being an entity of full, earthly passion, the Sadean hero is apathetic, reducing sexuality to a mechanical planned procedure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/879968902561894400 http://ift.tt/2tWEPq7

we should control our fury and think­ and ask what kind of a society it is that renders the bank bailout blackmail possible.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/879610456943579136 http://ift.tt/2tK1Agd

we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/879246629202788352 http://ift.tt/2uKYBkM

The 20th-century saw a passion for penetrating the Real Thing (the destructive Void) through semblances which constitute our reality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/878884253563588608 http://ift.tt/2unpr2L

the story we tell ourselves about ourselves to account for what we are doing, is a lie - the truth is rather outside, in what we do

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/878520596614844416 http://ift.tt/2umPDef

Hysterics provoke, master commands, analyst sits down and does nothing … I am for obsessional neurotics! we obsessionals do all the work!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/878159467887685632 http://ift.tt/2tjNvn7

the postmodernist universe is the universe of the naive trust in the screen which makes irrelevant the very quest for “what lies behind it”.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/877795864982548481 http://ift.tt/2tJWuRN

cyberspace as a transparent, clearly structured universe allows him to elude (momentarily, at least) the opacity of his everyday environs

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/877438483924701184 http://ift.tt/2swHGFY

convinced, deep within that “we are not really that,” preserving an intimate distance toward “the social role we play,” we deceive ourselves

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/877071065373171712 http://ift.tt/2sBIgxm

“pretending to be something” “acting as if we were something,” we become something, assuming a place in the intersubjective symbolic network

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/876708660747096065 http://ift.tt/2t3Uy56

We effectively become something by pretending that we already are that.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/876351321737224193 http://ift.tt/2uwh1pk

the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his or her existence.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/875987666612887552 http://ift.tt/2usWyBR

I am a subject insofar as the radical perplexity persists as… as to what the Other… finds worthy of desire in me. …When Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative:… the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other’s desire. …The subject’s desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other’s desire

http://ift.tt/2u7K4QI

So, the typical attitude of the left is ‘there will be a crisis and then our moment will come.’ Well, fuck you. The crisis is here

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/875627831056678913 http://ift.tt/2trvup7

the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we “officially” desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/875259115236466688 http://ift.tt/2sm6Oz3

her…compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic.. signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. … I cannot.. integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it

http://ift.tt/2tmExYf

The ancient Greeks lost their moral compass precisely because they believed in spontaneous and basic uprightness of a human being

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/874895491326251010 http://ift.tt/2tlTlqz

there is no Self that precedes: the very alienation generates the “Self” from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/874534339945660416 http://ift.tt/2ug8CGn

to get beyond this clinging to meaning, psychoanalysis is] de-subjectivizing [the analysand’s] words, depriving them of … his intention-to-mean. The goal is no longer to assume the meaning of his speech. The goal is … for him to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency.

http://ift.tt/2sjdVDi

Therein resides Dostoyevsky’s ultimate lie: what he presents as a terrifying fantasy of a godless universe is effectively a Gnostic fantasy of evil obscene God. … when religious authors condemn atheism, they all too often construct a vision of the “godless universe” which is a projection of the repressed underside of religion itself from “If you are truthful, you should not fear death,” a pervert passes to “if you wish death, you are truthful.”

http://ift.tt/2td0r0g

The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very ful and sane Body into which the wound was cut.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/874170706631815168 http://ift.tt/2seYqfZ

to avoid] historicism, the notion of the linear succession of “historical epochs,” is to conceive these epochs as a series of ultimately failed attempts to deal with the same “unhistorical” traumatic kernel (in Marxism, this kernel is of course the class struggle, class antagonism

http://ift.tt/2rRI2Cq

fantasy is not an expression of her inability to let go & enjoy the act: the fantasy forms the core of her, that ‘in her more than herself’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/873813361582059520 http://ift.tt/2taKVTv

His motto is “there are no accidents”: there are no gaps in the causal link of responsibility, there always HAS to be someone who is guilty…- his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, which is sorting out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him,

Slavoj Zizek on The Sweet Hereafter http://ift.tt/2s3BGEu

he insists that everything must have a cause in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from her” Zizek writes.

http://ift.tt/2t74lrM

the non‐existing pure Gaze of the big Other…is the gaze for which, on ancient Roman aqueducts, the details were carved on the reliefs at the top, invisible to any human eye; the gaze for which the ancient Incas made their gigantic drawings out of stones whose form could be seen only from high up in the air; the gaze for which the Stalinists organized their gigantic public spectacles.

http://ift.tt/2s5fVPN

“The objet a is … of the subject’s desire … it is not simply an objective property of the beloved—that X which fascinates me in the beloved exists only for me, not for an “objective” view. … the status of that which makes me desire an object is irreducibly linked to my “subjective” perspective … far from simply standing for the excess in the object eluding the subject’s grasp, the objet a is … his or her desire for me … what eludes me in a libidinal object is not some transcendent property, but the inscription into it of my own desire … in desire … the aspiration to fullness is transferred to partial objects … the drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing,” not the getting “fixated onto a partial object—the “drive” is this fixation itself in which resides the “death” dimension of every drive,” Zizek says

http://ift.tt/2sZDspd

the sexual act is, in effect, a defence-formation against the threat embodied in the fantasy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/873445946876715009 http://ift.tt/2s1eTE5

narcissistic “care of the Self,” not “repressive” social prohibitions, is the ultimate enemy of intense sexual experiences.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/873091098821795840 http://ift.tt/2rVXGAW

‘god’ is a name for the immanent decentrement of human subjectivity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/872726184609579008 http://ift.tt/2sCqyeN

debt is an instrument of control and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/872366321652125696 http://ift.tt/2sUP2mk

Behind indifference and contempt there is the fear of establishing contact

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/872001419020251137 http://ift.tt/2tLfQC3

sexuality can infect everything because it is the one most radically thwarted in its actualization

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/871638030074990593 http://ift.tt/2sTbjk5

in cinema that we get that…which we are not ready to confront in our reality.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/871279139042590720 http://ift.tt/2rOSVnS

sex is…a desperate …measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/870916757543931906 http://ift.tt/2sItp7V

the true conspiracy of Power consists in the very attempt to persuade subjects that they are victims of irrational, impenetrable forces.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/870551872872083456 http://ift.tt/2sI4h1N

psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/870191997914685440 http://ift.tt/2rFp4TG

love does not occur when the loving subject desperately searches the beloved for some hidden treasure

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/869828341309874176 http://ift.tt/2rrXpBj

What defines the “human dimension” is the frame (i.e. computer) through which we communicate with the suprasensible found nowhere in reality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/869464690593804288 http://ift.tt/2tzoL9q

man as such is “derailed”, it follows its drives with an excess far beyond “natural” (instinctual) satisfaction

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/869101271265026048 http://ift.tt/2tx2DfM

man as such is “derailed”, eats more than “natural”, is obsessed with sexuality more than “natural”, this excess has to be “gentrified”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/868742429666574336 http://ift.tt/2rzZi2Y

in a permissive universe, in order to have a life full of pleasures, you avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/868372513532850176 http://ift.tt/2t7GTb7

a pervert unabashedly enjoys his symptom. Even if he is later ashamed of it it provides a firm anchoring point to his psychic economy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/868017672868507650 http://ift.tt/2rwe3Uw

a pervert has no need of an analyst, i.e., there is no experience of suffering which sustains the demand for an analysis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/867651715591524352 http://ift.tt/2sckxW1

The Sadean hero is more alienated from the true pleasure of the flesh than is the prudish, inhibited lover

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/867287836562780160 http://ift.tt/2stBOfY

humanity” as such ALWAYS–ALREADY WAS “posthuman

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/866927981704486912 http://ift.tt/2syFNI7

The subject loses itself in its otherness in order to re-appropriate its alienated content, as content willed by the subject, not as imposed

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/866561833263562753 http://ift.tt/2rXGnxC

we are decentered, caught in a web, overdetermined by unconscious mechanisms. Yes, I am “spoken” more than speaking.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/866202087167635456 http://ift.tt/2s47w0s

What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/865837052788658176 http://ift.tt/2sgi3HU

The male dread of woman..from…to..Kafka..is..the dread of..inconsistency:…of…the impossibility of discerning, behind the masks, a consistent subject

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on men’s inability to accept the inconsistency of subjectivity itself http://ift.tt/2rl43Zq

to control sexuality sexualizes this controlling activity itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/865477411739058176 http://ift.tt/2sc0GrI

The surface of pure appearance throws us into the state of “out-of-joint”: striving for that which remains forever ‘virtual’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/865115013668909056 http://ift.tt/2rNcgce

Respect for other’s beliefs…can mean only…we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple “regimes of truth,” disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

http://ift.tt/2rhIl8y

Cinema as the art of appearances…tells us something about how reality constitutes itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/864752647752044545 http://ift.tt/2sndgF7

if you are completely isolated from your surroundings, you are left with a void

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/864390246112342016 http://ift.tt/2sclqR1

Hysteria is questioning the identity imposed.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/864031417067593728 http://ift.tt/2r7nUjG

deprived of my symbolic identity, I am no one’s and nameless.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/863666474602434560 http://ift.tt/2sjS1nC

The male dread of woman is the dread of a multitude of masks, of the impossibility of discerning behind the masks a consistent subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/863303094741983235 http://ift.tt/2shpK15

Happiness is hypocritical: it is happiness of dreaming about things we do not really want.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/862939180745330688 http://ift.tt/2r6L8S5

When I organized a colloquium, German secret service asked what we were doing. According to the official ideology there is no censorship.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/862576793240424448 http://ift.tt/2se0AjT

in our postpolitical societies, we encounter…explosions of the raw real of a violence

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/862213160211808257 http://ift.tt/2qUlKzK

the real of the outbursts of the “irrational” violence is generated by the globalization of the symbolic

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/861857078159314947 http://ift.tt/2sxAupu

The narcissistic “big Ego” is…a reaction to an unresolved and unsymbolised conflict situation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/861488379820740608 http://ift.tt/2swXDIj

our inner truth is the lie we construct to be able to live with the misery of our lives

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/861125978956984322 http://ift.tt/2rzZpZf

when the poet loses his lady he acquires her, through loss she gains her place in the fantasy space that regulates the subject’s desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/860766352386252800 http://ift.tt/2qQNyZF

Does not capitalist globalization give rise to the new racism focusing on the “theft of enjoyment”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/860405014648541184 http://ift.tt/2qLKBWk

That which makes me love someone, is objet petit a, the “pathological” tic which makes him/her unique.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/860041575346393088 http://ift.tt/2sqcLHJ

Today, the old joke more appropriate then ever: I am such a tender person that I cannot stand seeing people suffering

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/859677702449659904 http://ift.tt/2rAWwcI

such traumatic encounters, such penetrations into the forbidden or damned domain, in Antigone , are called ate , and can only be sustained for a brief moment. These authentic moments are rare; one can only survive them if one soon returns to the safe domain of semblances—truth is too painful to be sustained for more than a passing moment. At other times (especially in his ruminations about the symptom towards the end of his life), Lacan adopts the opposite (but effectively complementary) attitude of wisdom: the analyst never knows what will happen when he pushes analysis too far and dissolves the analysand’s symptoms too radically—one can get more than one expected, a local interpretive intervention into a particular symptomal formation can destabilize the subject’s entire symbolic economy and bring about a catastrophic disintegration of his world. The analyst should thus remain modest and respect appearances without taking them too seriously; they are ultimately all we have, all that stands between us and the catastrophe. It is easy to see how these two stances complement each other: they rely on a (rather Heideggerian) image of human life as a continuous dwelling in “inauthentic” semblances, interrupted from time to time by violent encounters with the Real. (What this entire field encompassing the two stances excludes is the Christian “work of love,” the patient work of continuous fidelity to the encounter with the Real.) This modest approach of merely “making life a little bit easier,” of diminishing suffering and pain, forgetting about capitalized Truth, makes the late Lacan almost a Rortyan

http://ift.tt/2sycvWb

remem­ber when it was the debate about who is more guilty, either Black demon­stra­tors where some mad­man also shot a cou­ple of police­men, or white police­men who over­stepped their lim­it? And Trump, he actu­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly talked about it. Trump’s idea was no. The ulti­mate crime is when peo­ple are shoot­ing police­men because they attacked the law. No, I claim. The ulti­mate [inaudi­ble] is police­men shoot ordi­nary — you know why? Because if an ordi­nary guy shoots a police­man, it’s deplorable. It shouldn’t be done. But it’s still some­body out­side the law attacks the agent of the law. But if an agent of the law attacks, the whole law and order dis­in­te­grates. The state agent acts as a com­mon crim­i­nal. That’s the true hor­ror

http://ift.tt/2rKFIkD

Žižek: I con­sid­er you — I’m not say­ing this in vain. Although we met just briefly, one of the few peo­ple whom I see as my authen­tic friend here. Tavis: I appre­ci­ate that. Žižek: I am so sick of this full of career-pur­su­ing acad­e­mia and so on and so on. Even if I am an athe­ist, I am pray­ing to God that you will sur­vive here [laugh].

http://ift.tt/2sjlsTR

Fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject, the Unconscious is this inaccessible phenomenon

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/859319109066129408 http://ift.tt/2qCwUJ2

The neurotic acknowledges the Law in order to take enjoyment in its transgressions snatching back from the Other part of stolen jouissance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858950431195754497 http://ift.tt/2rpAuK0

seduction consists in the play of appearances, hints, and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858588087714238464 http://ift.tt/2qDKtqU

We are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession with authentic Being.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858230683365507072 http://ift.tt/2qxeIof

All of a sudden, one appears to possess an unspecified X, provokes transference in others; there is always something “magic” about it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857864512262864896 http://ift.tt/2sfpig2

to get rid of an over-proximity of belief you no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already exist objectified in your praying

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857504895859118080 http://ift.tt/2r4RLHC

Kneel down and you will thereby make someone else believe!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857144786310107138 http://ift.tt/2qqAaLP

Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856777343037255680 http://ift.tt/2r2iO6u

Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856421293855576064 http://ift.tt/2r7O9Dq

a clear prohibition relieves the guilt which weighs on us when prohibition fails to intervene [in today’s] command to be happy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856057600726716417 http://ift.tt/2qniIaV

woman’s impossibility of achieving an identity with herself ..is why woman is a symptom of man [and vice versa]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/855691415640256512 http://ift.tt/2r5GbdY

There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external Real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/855327790454906880 http://ift.tt/2r6rM2T

Symbolic castration is the castration which occurs by the very fact of being caught up in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mandate

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854969197968990209 http://ift.tt/2s0uB2P

the ever-lacking object-cause of desire is embodiment of a lack; its fascinating presence is masks the emptiness of the place it occupies.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854605775142080513 http://ift.tt/2qTCGZu

the best way to destroy an enemy is to leave the field free for him to deploy his potential, so that… the lack of any external obstacle will confront him with the absolutely inherent obstacle of the inconsistency of his own position:

http://ift.tt/2rScDjO

the patriarchal erotic discourse creates the femme fatale as the inherent threat against which the male identity should assert itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854240630419202048 http://ift.tt/2qh4qEC

the femme fatale qua embodiment of the universe’s corruption is clearly a male fantasy, she materializes its inner antagonisms

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853882015841693696 http://ift.tt/2qevwfD

When borderline theorists deplore feelings of emptiness as major complaint of patients, recognize in emptiness another name for the subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853515858953605120 http://ift.tt/2qhcYe5

suspend the function of the ego, so that, once its control diminishes, the “dirt” of the analysand’s enjoyment comes to light

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853152201249873920 http://ift.tt/2raLBHk

woman enjoys insofar as her other (man) does not know

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852791070387601409 http://ift.tt/2qO21EL

the subject endorses the loss, re-inscribes it as its triumph. Reconciliation is thus simultaneously both less and more than the standard idea of overcoming an antagonism: less, because nothing “really changes”; more, because the subject of the process is deprived of its very (particular) substance.

http://ift.tt/2rrgTcQ

inner Spirit, certain of itself, “no longer needs to form/shape nature and to render it spiritual in order to fixate the divine and to make its unity with nature externally visible: insofar as the free thought thinks externality, it can leave it the way it is ( kann er es lassen wie es ist ).” This sudden retroactive reversal from not-yet to already-is (we never directly realize a goal—we pass from striving to realize a goal to a sudden recognition that it is already realized) is what distinguishes Hegel from all kinds of historicist tropes, including the standard Marxist critical reproach that the Hegelian ideal reconciliation is insufficient, since it leaves reality (real pain and suffering) the way it is, and that what is needed is actual reconciliation through radical social transformation. For Hegel, the illusion is not that of the enforced “false reconciliation” which ignores the persisting divisions; the true illusion resides in not seeing that, in what appears to us as the chaos of becoming, the infinite goal is already realized : “Within the finite order, we cannot experience or see that the goal is truly achieved. The accomplishment of the infinite goal resides only in overcoming the illusion [ Täuschung— deception] that this goal is not yet achieved.”15 In short, the ultimate deception lies in the failure to see that one already has what one is looking for—like Christ’s disciples awaiting his “real” reincarnation, blind to the fact that their collective already was the Holy Spirit

http://ift.tt/2pZMWR7

in Hegel’s philosophy, the fundamental stance of the subject towards objective reality is not that of practical engagement, of confrontation with the inertia of objectivity, but that of letting-it-be: purified of its pathological particularity, the universal subject is certain of itself, it knows that its thought already is the form of reality, so it can renounce enforcing its projects upon reality, it can let reality be the way it is. This is why my labor gets all the more close to its truth the less I work to satisfy my need, that is, to produce objects I will consume. This is why industry which produces for the market is spiritually “higher” than production for one’s own needs: in market-production, I manufacture objects with no relation to my needs. The highest form of social production is therefore that of a merchant : “the merchant is the only one who relates to the Good as a perfect universal subject, since the object in no way interests him on behalf of its aesthetic presence or its use value, but only insofar as it contains a desire of an other.”12 And this is also why, in order to arrive at the “truth” of labor, one should gradually abstract from the (external) goal it strives to realize. The parallel with war is appropriate here: in the same way that the “truth” of the military struggle is not the destruction of the enemy, but the sacrifice of the “pathological” content of the warrior’s particular Self, its purification into the universal Self, the “truth” of labor as the struggle with nature is also not victory over nature, compelling it to serve human goals, but the self-purification of the laborer itself. Labor is simultaneously the (trans)formation of external objects and the disciplinary self-formation/education ( Bildung ) of the subject itself. Hegel here celebrates precisely the alienated and alienating character of labor: far from being a direct expression of my creativity, labor forces me to submit to artificial discipline, to renounce my innermost immediate tendencies, to alienate myself from my natural Self

(via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2qGe0UM

Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formula from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should “recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present”; or, to put it in Marx’s terms: in reconciliation one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner “truth” of the miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel merely proposes a new interpretation of it, thus in a way misses the point—it is knocking on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it.

http://ift.tt/2rE3xX3

Lacan is actually much closer to Kafka than to the poststructuralists. It has become a cliché to see Kafka as the “writer of absence” who described a world whose structure remained religious, but where the central space reserved for God is empty. … “the Other does not exist” (Lacan),… it does not exist as Guarantor of truth

http://ift.tt/2r1wmAp

“Absolute Knowledge” is divisive AK is in no way a position of “total knowledge,” a position from which, at long last, the subject could finally “know everything.” We must take into account the exact place at which the idea of AK emerges, the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the point when the consciousness “de-fetishizes” itself and thus gains the ability to access true knowledge, knowledge instead of truth, and therefore “science” in the Hegelian sense. As such, AK is just a “scilicet,” a “you can know” that opens the space for the development of science (logic, etc.). What does the fetish represent at its core? An object that fills the constitutive lack in the Other, the empty space of the “original repression,” the place where the signifier must be missing in order for the signifying network to articulate itself. In this sense, “de-fetishization” is equivalent to the experience of the constitutive lack in the Other, the Other as barred. Perhaps de-fetishization is even more difficult to accomplish because the fetish reverses the traditional relationship between the “sign” and the “thing.” We normally understand the “sign” as something that represents, replaces, the missing object. When the fetish is an object, it is a thing that replaces the missing “sign.” It is easy to detect absence, the structure of co-referential signifiers, where we thought there was the full presence of a thing, but it is much harder to detect the inert presence of an object in the place where we thought there were only “signs,” an interplay of representations referring back to each other, nothing more than traces. This is why we must take care to differentiate Lacan from any so-called “poststructuralist” tradition whose objective is to “deconstruct” the “metaphysics of presence,” to deny the possibility of full presence, to see only the traces of absence, to dissolve fixed identity into a cluster of references and traces … Lacan is actually much closer to Kafka than to the poststructuralists. It has become a cliché to see Kafka as the “writer of absence” who described a world whose structure remained religious, but where the central space reserved for God is empty. But this is not where it ends; it remains to be shown how this Absence itself conceals an inert, nightmarish presence, an obscene superego object, the “Supremely-Evil-Being.” It is from this perspective that we must reinterpret the two features of AK that initially seem to possess a certain kind of “idealistic” resonance: AK as the “abolition of the object,” in which it does away with objectivity as outside the subject and opposed to it, and AK as the abolition of the Other, removing the dependence of the subject on an instance that is external and de-centered. Hegelian “sublation of the Other” is in no way equivalent to a fusion of the subject with its other, in which the subject appropriates the substantial contents. Rather, we should understand it as a specifically Hegelian way of saying “the Other does not exist” (Lacan), that it does not exist as Guarantor of truth, the Other of the Other, and that therefore we must posit a lack in the Other, that the Other is barred.

http://ift.tt/2qC2R7d

Would it not be possible to determine the final moment of the analytical process, the pass, as the experience of the positive character of the loss, of the initial emptiness filled by the dazzling and fascinating phantasy object – experiencing the realization that the object as such is fundamentally the positivization of an emptiness? Isn’t this experience of the primacy of the place over the phantasy object the traversal of the phantasy, the moment in which, to quote Mallarmé, “nothing takes place except the place”? This is why it is so important to completely differentiate the pass from “resignation,” from “giving up”; from this perspective, analysis would be finished when the analysand “acquiesced to his symbolic castration,” resigning himself to the fact that radical Loss is part of the condition of the being-of-language [parlêtre]. This kind of interpretation turns Lacan into some kind of “wise guru” who preaches “total renunciation.” It may initially seem as if there is a lot of evidence for this interpretation. Isn’t the Phantasy fundamentally the Phantasy of the sexual rapport finally become possible, finally fully realizable? And isn’t the end of the analysis, the traversal of the Phantasy, simply experiencing the realization of the impossibility of the sexual rapport, and therefore the irreconcilably blocked, knotted, failed nature of the “human condition”? But nothing of the kind is true. If we posit as the fundamental ethical principle of analysis “not to give up on one’s desire” – from which it follows that the symptom is, as Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out, precisely a specific mode of “giving up one’s desire” – we must determine the pass as the moment in which the subject takes on his own desire in its pure, “non-pathological,” form, beyond its historicalness/hystericalness. The best example of a “post-analytic” subject is not the dubious figure of a “wise guru,” but rather Oedipus at Colonus, a grumpy old man who asks for everything, who does not want to give up anything. If the traversal of the phantasy is tied to the experience of some kind of lack, this lack is the Other’s and not that of the subject himself. In the pass, the subject undergoes the realization that the agalma, the “hidden treasure,” is already missing from the Other, the object separates itself from the I – the signifying trait in the Other. After the subject has been placed in relation to the object a, “the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and has never been approached. Up to now, it has been approachable only at the level of the analyst, in as much as it would be required of him to have specifically traversed the cycle of the analytic experience in its totality”. (Lacan 1998a: 273) Isn’t the incessant drive of Hegelian “Absolute Knowledge [AK]” [“savoir absolu [SA]”], the infinitely repeated journey down the already traveled path, the ultimate example of how to “live one’s drive” once history/hysteria are gone? It is no surprise, then, to see Lacan, in Chapter XIV of Seminar XI, articulating the circuit of drive in terms that directly evoke the Hegelian distinction between the “finite” end and the “infinite” end. Lacan makes use of a distinction in the English language between aim and goal (cf. 1998a: 179). The circuit of drive can be determined specifically as the back and forth between aim and goal. Drive is, initially, a path toward a particular goal, and then it becomes the experience that its true goal is the same thing as the path itself, that its “goal is nothing more than turning around in circles”

http://ift.tt/2qCeOb1

the Hegelian “loss of the loss” is in no way a return to full, lossless, identity. Far from it, the “loss of the loss” is precisely the moment when the loss stops being the loss of “something” and becomes the inauguration of an empty space in which the object (“something”) can survive, the moment when the empty space is recognized as pre-dating its contents – the loss opens the space for the arrival of the object. In the “loss of the loss,” the loss remains a loss; it is not “abolished/canceled” in the ordinary sense of the term. The recuperated “positivity” is that of the loss as loss, the experience of the loss as a “positive” – perhaps even “productive” – condition

http://ift.tt/2rwyZqP

It is through the very thing that initially seemed to exclude us from the Other – our question through which we came to see the Other as enigmatic, inaccessible, transcendent – that brings us together with the Other, because this question is the Other’s question, because the substance is the subject (let us not forget that the thing that defines the subject is the very question itself). Would it not therefore be possible to base Hegelian “dis-alienation” on Lacanian separation? Lacan defined separation as the superimposition of two lacks (cf. Lacan 1998a: 214); when the subject encounters the lack in the Other, he responds with a pre-existing lack, his own lack. In the process of alienation, the subject is confronted with a full, substantial Other, in whose depths there supposedly lies a “secret,” an unreachable treasure. “Dis-alienation,” therefore, has nothing to do with appropriating this secret; the subject never finally pierces into the Other’s hidden core – far from it, the subject simply experiences that this “hidden treasure” (agalma, the object-cause of desire) is already missing from the Other herself. “Dis-alienation” can be reduced to the act through which the subject perceives that the Other’s substantial secret is also a secret for the Other, in other words, the experience of a separation between the Other and its “secret,” the object little a.

http://ift.tt/2rsNQ5G

truth is the same thing as the path to itself. A Pole and a Jew are sitting in the same carriage in a train. Something is bothering the Pole and he keeps fidgeting in his seat. Finally, he can’t hold it in any longer and blurts out: “Tell me how it is that you Jews are able to get so rich by bleeding people down to their last cent?” The Jew answers: “Okay, I’ll tell you, but I won’t do it for free. Give me five zlotys.” After pocketing the coins, he begins: “First, you have to take a dead fish, cut off its head, and pour its guts into a glass of water. Then, when the moon is full, you bury this glass in a graveyard.” “And,” the Pole asks greedily, “if I do that I’ll be rich?” “Not so fast,” the Jew replies; “there is more to it, but if you want to hear the rest you’ll need to give me five more zlotys.” The money is exchanged and the Jew continues his story, soon asks for more money, etc., up until the Pole finally explodes: “You cheat! You think I’m not on to you? There’s no secret, you just want to take all my money!” The Jew calmly replies: “There you go, now you understand how the Jews …” Every aspect of this little story is worth interpreting, starting with the very beginning. The fact that the Pole can’t stop looking over at the Jew means that he is already in the process of transferring onto the Jew; for him the Jew embodies the subject who supposedly knows (the secret of how to extract every last cent from people). The fundamental lesson is that ultimately the Jew did not trick the Pole: he kept his word, he fulfilled his part of the deal by showing him how Jews, etc., etc. The decisive twist takes place in the gap between the moment in which the Pole gets angry and the Jew gives his final answer. When the Pole explodes, he is already speaking the truth, he just doesn’t know it yet. He sees how the Jew took his money from him, but he only considers this to be some kind of Jewish trick. To put this in topological terms, he does not yet see that he’s already passed onto the other surface of the Möbius strip, that the trick itself contains the answer to the initial question, given that the reason he paid the Jew was precisely to teach him the way in which Jews … The mistake lies in the Pole’s perspective; he was waiting for the Jew’s secret to be revealed at the end of the story. He thought that the story the Jew was telling was just a path toward the final secret. His fixation on the hidden Secret, the final point of the narrative chain, blinded him as to the true secret, which was the way in which he was tricked by the Jew’s story about said secret. The Jew’s “secret” lies in the Pole’s desire, and therefore our own desire; it lies in the fact that the Jew knows how to make use of our desires. This is why the conclusion of this little story corresponds perfectly to the final moment of analysis, the exit from the transfer and the traversal of the phantasy, the two stages of which are split between the final two moments of the joke’s denouement. The Pole’s explosion of anger marks the point where he exits the transfer, where he realizes that “there is no secret” and thus the Jew ceases to be the “subject who supposedly knows.” The Jew’s final comment articulates the traversal of the phantasy. Isn’t the “secret” that causes us to follow the Jew’s story so attentively the object a, the chimerical “thing” of phantasy that provokes our desire, all while being retroactively posited by the desire itself? In this sense, the traversal of the phantasy coincides precisely with the experience that the object, the pure semblant, does nothing more than positivize the hole in our desire. In addition, this story is also a perfect illustration of the unique and irreplaceable role of money in the analytical process. If the Pole was not paying the Jew for his story, he would not reach the level of anger necessary for him to exit from the transfer. It is puzzling that, as a general rule, we do not recognize the structure of this Witz in another, much more famous, story. I am talking, of course, about the Witz of the entrance to the Law in Chapter IX of Kafka’s The Trial and its final reversal when the man from the country who is waiting asks the guard: “Everyone seeks the Law,” the man says, “so how is it that in all these years no one apart from me has asked to be let in?” The doorkeeper realizes that the man is nearing his end, and so, in order to be audible to his fading hearing, he bellows at him, “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.” (Kafka 2009b: 155) This reversal is quite analogous to the twist at the end of the story of the Pole and the Jew. The subject finally understands that he was included in the game from the beginning, that the door was already designed for him alone – in the same way that in the story of the Pole and the Jew, the point of the Jew’s story is, ultimately, just to catch the Pole’s desire. And, I should add, it is the same as in the story from Arabian Nights I mentioned earlier in which the hero’s accidental entrance to the cave turns out to have been long-awaited by the wise men. We could even rework Kafka’s story about the entrance to the Law in a way that would make it all the more similar to the Witz of the Pole and the Jew. Let us imagine that, after a long wait, the man from the country suddenly exploded in anger and started to scream at the guard: “You dirty liar! Why are you pretending to guard the entrance to unknown secrets, when you yourself know that there is not a single secret behind that Door, because that entrance was designed for me alone, it serves only to capture my desire?” – to which the guard would calmly reply: “There you go! You’ve finally discovered the true secret of the entrance to the Law.” In these two cases, the logic of the final twist is strictly Hegelian, functioning similarly to what Hegel called the “sublation of the bad infinity.” Both cases start out the same way: the subject is confronted with an inaccessible, transcendental, substantial truth, a forbidden secret that is infinitely deferred. In one case there is the inaccessible Heart of the Law that lies beyond the infinite series of entrances, in the other there is the inaccessible final answer to the question of how Jews manage to get people to give them all their money down to their last cent (because it is clear from the narrative that the Jew could keep going forever). In both stories, the denouement, the solution, is the same – instead of finally succeeding in lifting the final curtain and unveiling the ultimate secret, the Heart of the Law/the way in which the Jews extract people’s money, the subject realizes that he was included in the game from the very beginning, that his exclusion from the Secret and his desire to learn the Secret were already included in the very way the Secret operated. This reveals the dimension of a certain type of reflexivity that is missed by the classical philosophical conception of reflexivity. Philosophical reflexivity consists in the mediating movement through which the One comes to include its alterity, the Subject appropriates the substantial content opposed to it by positing itself as the unity of itself and its other. But this idea of the positivation of impossibility necessarily implies a whole different kind of reflexive reversal, whose key moment occurs when the subject recognizes that the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject

http://ift.tt/2rg7kgs

the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject. This twist constitutes a radical change in perspective. It is this very failure – the frustration of the subject’s attempt to appropriate the opposed substantial contents in order to penetrate into the Heart of the Other – that includes the subject in the substance, in the Other. This reflexive shift is exactly what we see at the end of Kafka’s “parable” about the Doors of the Law: the man finally understands that the Door that supposedly hid an inaccessible substantial contentwas destined for him alone, that from the very beginning the unreachable Other of the Law was addressed to him, that it had accounted for him from the outset. The other’s lack It would therefore be a mistake to think that the dialectical relationship between Knowledge and Truth is a progressive approach guided by knowledge of the Truth, in which the subject recognizes the “falseness” and insufficiency of some figure of his knowledge, and so progresses to another figure that is closer to the Truth, etc., until finally Knowledge and Truth come together in Absolute Knowledge. In such a perspective, Truth is a substantial entity, an in-Itself, and the dialectical process takes the form of simple asymptotic progress, a gradual approach to the Truth, something along the lines of Victor Hugo’s famous quote: “Science is asymptotic to truth. Ever approaching but never touching it.” The Hegelian conjunction of the truth with the path toward the truth implies, on the contrary, that we are always already in contact with the truth. When knowledge changes, truth itself must change, which is to say that when knowledge does not correspond to the truth, we don’t simply need to accommodate the truth, but in fact transform the two poles – the insufficiency of knowledge, its lack in relation to the truth, indicates that there is always a lack, an incompleteness at the very core of truth itself. We must therefore toss out the traditional conception of the dialectical process as moved forward by particular, limited, and “unilateral” elements that push it toward a final totality. The truth at which we arrive is not “whole,” the question always remains open, it simply becomes a question we ask of the Other

http://ift.tt/2roBRpR

The hysterical subject is above all the subject who asks himself a question while at the same time presupposing that the Other has the answer, that the Other holds the key. In the dialectical process, this question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer

http://ift.tt/2rnkeFV

identify with your symptom. Desire means betraying your symptom. Death drive is accepting your symptom, circulating around your symptom.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852435002528804864 http://ift.tt/2pQsFIP

the big Other is itself inconsistent, structured around a lack; the subject finds a niche in the Other by identifying with this very void.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852066342018719745 http://ift.tt/2rguGA1

Each identity is thwarted from within by the other. Each sex is not something whose identity is established through difference to the other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/851708967738896384 http://ift.tt/2pLQ7aZ

The world remains religious in its structure, the central place belonging to God is empty, conceals a nightmarish presence of a Superego.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/851340273342967808 http://ift.tt/2qfiO2R

Defence of absolute passionate love will be important.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/850979116421713921 http://ift.tt/2pJHqNH

[The Other of our speech] speaks ‘autonomously’, produces an effect of meaning in senseless contingency, beyond our conscious intention.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/850620517333839872 http://ift.tt/2pHfN7R

Kafka’s Castle’s spectacle is staged to fascinate who endeavour to penetrate its mystery: power feigns indifference to attract us in misery.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/850253123641671682 http://ift.tt/2qB9k2Z

The symbolic ultimately hides that there is nothing to hide, that there is no terrifying mystery.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/849895758274940929 http://ift.tt/2r5Gc0a

To liberate from consumer society, liberation is not simply I feel my identity threatened & so I oppose. You must sacrifice part of yourself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/849529586421551104 http://ift.tt/2poUQ6q

Moral Law is fierce, does not admit excuses, is of mischievous neutrality, of mean in­difference.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/849168451453243397 http://ift.tt/2r1Nhyy

The whole question was to know whether gods desired something. Sacrifice consisted in behaving as if gods desired like us

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/848803564067618816 http://ift.tt/2r0W2sJ

In melancholia a phantasy of dispossession..is at work …linked to the impossibility of future-significant action.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/848442398887862272 http://ift.tt/2phRHFf

The “melancholy disease” appears … when the subject is closed off from meaningful expression.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/848081276183744513 http://ift.tt/2qoaSxn

Kafka’s protagonist is trapped through the desire for a ‘secret supposed to be hidden in the Other’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/847720406127595520 http://ift.tt/2qTXMUG

The trick is to present oneself as a mask that conceals the secret.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/847360308607762432 http://ift.tt/2qTLQ64

The modern name for this Other who is “supposed to believe” in our stead is the “people”. …When Golda Meir was asked whether she believed in God, she said: “I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” This statement …does not imply that the majority of the Jews believe in God. [Meir’s] statement …implies …a certain fetishization of the “people”: even if (to go the extreme) no individual Jewish citizen of Israel believes, each of them presupposes that the “people” believes, and this presupposition is enough to make her act as if she believes. (In Defense of Lost Causes, p227)

http://ift.tt/2pRjFq3

“I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do-it’s my duty!” The more pertinent example is that of a Stalinist politician who loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it’s his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity… What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it’s not my responsibility, it’s not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity… The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I’m not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other’s Will…this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. …at its most radical, Kantian ethics is NOT “sadist,” but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadean executioner.

http://ift.tt/2pVrN7l

Unlike desire deathdrive is identification with your symptom You desire so as to avoid your symptom. Identify with the very lack of identity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846994116240117761 http://ift.tt/2pO4WMM

The destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. “A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,” was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident

http://ift.tt/2plFhZ3

Crucial to Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself: first, we isolate the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering; then we change not the object but ourselves, the way we relate to (what appears to us as) the cause of our suffering: “What was extinguished was only the false view of self. What had always been illusory was understood as such. Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer.” This shift involves great pain; it is not merely a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous “oceanic feeling”; it is also the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being. This is why the path towards Buddhist Enlightenment begins by focusing on the most elementary feelings of “injured innocence,” of suffering an injustice without cause (the preferred topic of narcissistic, masochistic thoughts: “How could she do this to me?I don’t deserve to be treated that way”). The next step is to make the shift to the Ego itself, the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status—the aggression directed against the object causing the suffering should be turned against the Self itself. We do not repair the damage; rather, we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. …On the one side, reality remains as it is, nothing changes, it is just fully perceived as what it is, a mere insubstantial flow of phenomena that does not really affect the void at the core of our being; on the other side, the goal is to transform reality itself so that there will be no suffering in it, so that all living beings will enter nirvana.

http://ift.tt/2peTaY8

I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions here. No. What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that’s my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story … protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people’s money… . Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace the system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn’t serve money. Money should serve people.”

http://ift.tt/2pJS5ex

not only you cannot use your pathological longings as an excuse why you can’t do your duty, for example 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 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. This is how I read the categorical imperative — it has the structure of what Kant calls aesthetic judgment. Lyotard developed this very nicely: An aesthetic judgment is not simply an application of pre–existing norms to the situation, in the aesthetic judgment you posit the norms yourself and it is your responsibility. Apropos of a particular situation, you have to reinvent the universality which covers the situation, and as such you are fully responsible for it. When you say: “That is my duty”, you cannot say: “What can I do, it’s my duty.” You fully have to stand behind what your duty is. Now, going back to the materiality of the act. Of course, this definition of the authentic act has an aspect of being almost non–historical, I agree with that. But believe me I am an old–fashioned Marxist, so what I claim is that this notion of act is of special actuality today in our so–called post–modern era, where the predominant ethic, across the entire spectrum of ethical positions, from narcissistic hedonism to neo–fundamentalism or whatever, is an ethic precisely against the ethical act. All these problems of ethical committees, of ethical rules, are always about how to prevent an excess which is precisely the excess of the act. In this sense I claim that it is only today, in today’s so–called permissive society, that society is regulated as no society in history ever was, that such notion of an act was ever elaborated.

http://ift.tt/2pbeRbm

the choice is never simply the one between doing my duty or following my striving for “pathological” pleasures and satisfactions; this elementary choice is always redoubled by the one between elevating my striving for pleasures itself into my supreme Duty, and doing my Duty not for the sake of Duty but because it gives me satisfaction to do it. In the first case pleasures are my duty: the “pathological” striving for pleasures is located into the formal space of Duty; in the second case duty is my pleasure: doing my duty is located in the formal space of “pathological” satisfactions

http://ift.tt/2qEMpAL

when I recognize myself as the addressee of the call of the ideological big Other (Nation, Democracy, Party, God, and so forth),…I automatically misrecognize that it is this very act of recognition which makes me what I have recognized myself as-I don’t recognize myself in it because I’m its addressee, I become its addressee the moment I recognize myself in it. This is the reason why a letter always reaches its addressee; because one becomes its addressee when one is reached.

http://ift.tt/2q0ed5H

identify with the very…lack of identity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846630475762360324 http://ift.tt/2qzHJvU

You are social as u identify with values? No, society is inscribed not through identification. The way we are split connects us with others.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846270862567313408 http://ift.tt/2puhhW5

we look for the missing part in the other. The other fills our own gap.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845909550364573696 http://ift.tt/2qvqLPx

The subject is interior to the Other as it is identified with an obstruction in the Other, with the impossibility of achieving its identity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845561140159660032 http://ift.tt/2ppCeBp

the Other does not exist as the Guarantor of Truth

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845198871676444673 http://ift.tt/2poKwth

Drive as such is death-drive, the “spontaneous” life-flow of generation and corruption getting “stuck” onto some accidental particularity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/844834892437348354 http://ift.tt/2oNfhJS

The vagina is impossi­ble, but it is not simply an illusion. …You think the vagina is the Thing itself, but really it’s not

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/844477589230116864 http://ift.tt/2oVtX4U

it is only the imperceptible “something,” a pure appearance which cannot be grounded in a substantial property, that makes something divine.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/844108861867016194 http://ift.tt/2pt1TYn

The difficulty isnt to get rid fetishizing god but to grasp the inner necessity of the incarnation of our purely spiritual selfrelationality

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/843751534374674432 http://ift.tt/2oWgPgr

is it possible to live in our daily experience the fact that Self doesn’t exist?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/843386772788838400 http://ift.tt/2qobVco

Is (what we usually refer to as) religion not a defence against this abyss, this void, imagining a supreme Being ‘which guarantees meaning’?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/843022942917287938 http://ift.tt/2oQMHT0

All attempts to thoroughly ‘defetishize’ religion are condemned to fail.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/842665625654890496 http://ift.tt/2qdqVxx

We should read “Moses and Monotheism” as precisely Freud’s answer to anti–Semitism. He doesn’t defend Jews, he strikes against Jews themselves. He deprives Jews of one of the most important parts of their legacy — his point was that Moses was not one of us. Which is why some of his friends were utterly shocked, “Oh my god, in these difficult times, you are taking from us one of our last pillars of hope.” I think Freud did the right thing. The Nazis believed that Jews were something special, albeit in a negative way. The true way to combat anti–Semitism is to do as Freud did, to say that “We are not what you secretly think that we are.”

http://ift.tt/2qcoMlv

domination: antagonism is its very source, so it has to be there, although ideologically obfuscated. In the case of sexual difference, it is, of course, women who pay the price for this operation: as we can see in an exemplary way in Muslim fundamentalism, the enforced harmony of the sexes is based on the containment of women to their ‘proper place’, i.e. a liberated, sexually active woman is seen as a main threat to social stability. In the case of class difference, the antagonism is obfuscated through metaphors of society as an organism whose unity can be disturbed by intruding enemies.

http://ift.tt/2pAQEzW

‘Absolute Otherness’ is ‘the subject beyond subjectivization’: 'the 'point of failure of every identification’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/842301989329469440 http://ift.tt/2q6Z4fr

The freedom of the modern subject: …Prohibition re-emerges in the guise of the ferocious superego that fills the subject with guilt.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/841935789911097345 http://ift.tt/2oHXEpM

The treasure in the beloved is just a deceiving fetish, the true treasure is the fragile beloved

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/841573415899299841 http://ift.tt/2q3Qot1

NATO is intervening in order to protect the Kosovar victims, it is at the same time well taking care that THEY WILL REMAIN VICTIMS, not an active politico.military force capable of defending itself. The strategy of NATO is thus perverse in the precise Freudian sense of the term: it is itself (co)responsible for the calamity against which it offers itself as a remedy

http://ift.tt/2pf4EOO

The precautionary principle is thoroughly ingrained in the self-conception of Germany and a disregard for it is often met with a general feeling of incomprehension and emotional outrage. what bothers me apropos of the recent comeback of human rights is that they rely on what Nietzsche identified as the moralistic ressentiment and envy: they imply the fake gesture of the disavowed politics, of assuming a ‘moral’, depoliticized stance in order to make a stronger political case. We are dealing here with a perverted version of what, in the good old days of dissidence, Vaclav Havel called the 'power of the powerless’: one manipulates one’s powerlessness as a stratageme in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in our politically correct times, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimize oneself as being some kind of a (potential or actual) victim of power.

http://ift.tt/2ooNsHI

What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/840846124860731392 http://ift.tt/2ojjOmQ

‘How should we fight racism?’ I said with progressive racism. We should adopt racism. They looked at me like - ‘Are you crazy?’ There is a way to practise - I wouldn’t say racist jokes because precisely they are no longer racist take my own country: till the 80s in ex-Yugoslavia, we all the time exchanged dirty jokes about one and the other nation. And I loved them. But this didn’t function as racist jokes but as a kind of a shared obscenity which meant a way of solidarity. …I meet a guy from Montenegro. …We immediately start to tell to each other dirty jokes about the other and about ourselves. …The standard Montenegro story, Montenegrins are supposed to be lazy and they are an earthquake country. So how does a Montenegro guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts the penis in and waits for the earthquake. Because he is too lazy even to - but what I want to say is that this …absolutely wasn’t racism, it was solidarity. The message was: we are not just this, you know, cold, politically correct - ooh, what nice food you have, what nice ethnic dances. I don’t care about your stupid, ethnic dances! I want dirty jokes, you know!

http://ift.tt/2p6G00W

Towards the beginning of the film,“Speed”, Keanu Reeves confronts the terrorist blackmailer played as usual by Dennis Hopper. This blackmailer holds a gun to Keanu Reeves’ partner. What does Reeves do? He doesn’t shoot the terrorist in order to liberate his partner as you would expect. He shoots his partner in the leg. This unexpected gesture of, shooting at your own side totally perplexes the terrorist and Reeves saves the day. …ways have this dimension of sacrificing the most precious part of yourself. This is the generative moment of subjectivity.

http://ift.tt/2p4f55Q

rituals of social institutions do not suffice, the subject has to presuppose the symbolic institution, an ideal structure [to imbue them]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/840483738928701440 http://ift.tt/2pR6TIZ

The essence that we search for is nothing more than apearance as appearance.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/840121359514521600 http://ift.tt/2odt6AP

Justine in Lars von Triers Film ‘Melancholia’ ist kein schützender Herr, der eine schöne Lüge zur Verfügung stellt. Was sie bereitstellt, ist eine symbolische Fiktion, die selbstverständlich keine magische Wirkung hat, die aber auf der Ebene der Panikvermeidung funktioniert. Justines Ansatz ist es uns nicht angesichts der nahenden Katastrophe zu blenden: Die »Zauberhöhle befähigt uns, das Ende freudig hinzunehmen

http://ift.tt/2oy8T45

we should unconditionally resist the temptation to “understand” Arab anti-Semitism (where we really encounter it) as a “natural” reaction to the sad plight of the Palestinians; or to “understand” the Israeli measures as a “natural” reaction against the background of the memory of the Holocaust. There should be no “understanding” for the fact that, in many — if not most — Arab countries, Hitler is still considered a hero

http://ift.tt/2orSw9X

“officially”, he strives desperately for certainty, for an unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous answer; which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate, oscillating status

http://ift.tt/2oOXKiW

The task is to drop the form of religion that persists in secular humanism… Only in Christianity god himself ceases to believe in himself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/839762943696850944 http://ift.tt/2pDWvkI

in Buddhist enlightenment the Self directly, in its self-experience, assumes its own nonbeing, i.e. recognizes itself as a ‘simulated self’.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/839401635591909376 http://ift.tt/2pgIigS

The Real is the appearance as appearance, it appears WITHIN appearances, it is also NOTHING BUT its own appearance, a GRIMACE of reality.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/839036686290010112 http://ift.tt/2oJNZCq

Desire is a prohibition against going beyond a limit in jouissance, against a turmoil of excessive jouissance of a consummated relationship.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/838673065076789248 http://ift.tt/2oKrQm0

The neurotic (mis)perceives the Other as amassing jouissance, and steals little crumbs of jouissance from the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/838313316904751104 http://ift.tt/2nWMUIN

Kafka’s works stage a search for the divine in our deserted secular world

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/837949514799534080 http://ift.tt/2oF5m5y

insofar as the speaking subject is always already spoken, i.e., insofar as he cannot master the effects of what he is saying: he always says more than he “intended to say,” and this surplus of what is effectively said over the intended meaning puts in to words the repressed content-in it, “the repressed returns.” What are symptoms qua “returns of the repressed” if not such slips of the tongue by means of which “the letter arrives at its destination,” i.e., by means of which the big Other returns to the subject his own message in its true form? If instead of saying “Thereby I proclaim the session open,” I say “Thereby I proclaim the session closed,” do I not get, in the most literal sense, my own message back in its true, inverted form? So what could, at this level, the Derridean notion that a letter can also miss its destination mean? That the repressed can also not return-yet by claiming this, we entangle ourselves in a naive substantialist notion of the unconscious as a positive entity ontologically preceding its “returns,” i.e., symptoms qua compromise formations, a notion competently called in question by Derrida himself.

http://ift.tt/2pna8rw

Hitchcock’s benevolent-sadistic playing with the spectator…makes the spectator shrink back by confronting him with the full consequence of the realization of his desire (“you want this evil person killed? OK, you will have it-with all the nauseating details you wanted to pass over in silence..”). In short, Hitchcock’s “sadism” corresponds exactly to the superego’s “malevolent neutrality:” he is nothing but a neutral “purveyor of truth,” giving us only what we wanted, but including in the package the part of it that we prefer to ignore. This reverse of the subject’s message is its repressed; …Here, we cannot but repeat after Lacan: there is no repression previous to the return of the repressed; the repressed content does not precede its return in symptoms, there is no way to conceive it in its purity undistorted by “compromises” that characterize the formation of the symptoms.

http://ift.tt/2oLvmhX

He gets back from the other his own message in its inverted, true form, i.e., when the true dimension of his own “letter” (teaching) reaches…himself-he is shaken and shrinks back from the consequence of his words, unprepared to recognize in them his own truth.

http://ift.tt/2oyDyjv

the sender always receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form,“ "the repressed always returns,” “the frame itself is always being framed by part of its content,” “we cannot escape the symbolic debt, it always has to be settled,” which are all ultimately variations on the same basic premise that “there is no metalanguage.” So let us begin by explaining the impossibility of metalanguage apropos of the Hegelian figure of the “Beautiful Soul,” deploring the wicked ways of the world from the position of an innocent, impassive victim. The “Beautiful Soul” pretends to speak a pure metalanguage, exempted from the corruption of the world, thereby concealing the way its own moans and groans partake actively in the corruption it denounces. In his “Intervention on Transference,” Lacan relies on the dialectic of the “Beautiful Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination? / Soul” to designate the falsity of the hysterical subjective position: “Dora,” Freud’s famous analysand, complains of being reduced to a pure object in a play of intersubjective exchanges (her father is allegedly offering her to Mister K. as if in compensation for his own flirtation with Miss K.), i.e., she presents this exchange as an objective state of things in the face of which she is utterly helpless; Freud’s answer is that the function of this stance of passive victimization by cruel circumstances is just to conceal her complicity and collusion-the square of intersubjective exchanges can only sustain itself insofar as Dora assumes actively her role of victim, of an object of exchange, in other words, insofar as she finds libidinal satisfaction in it, insofar as this very renunciation procures for her a kind of perverse surplus enjoyment. A hysteric continually complains of how he cannot adapt himself to the reality of cruel manipulation, and the psychoanalytic answer to it is not “give up your empty dreams, life is cruel, accept it as it is” but quite the contrary “your moans and groans are false since, by means of them, you are only too well adapted to the reality of manipulation and exploitation:” by playing the role of helpless victim, the hysteric assumes the subjective position which enables him to “blackmail emotionally his environs,” as we would put it in today’s jargon. This answer, in which the “Beautiful Soul” is confronted with how it actually partakes of the wicked ways of the world, closes the circuit of communication: in it, the subject/sender receives from the addressee his own message in its true form, i.e., the true meaning of his moans and groans. In other words, in it, the letter that the subject put into circulation “arrives at its destination,” which was from the very beginning the sender himself: the letter arrives at its destination when the subject is finally forced to assume the true consequences of his activity. This is how Lacan…interpreted the Hegelian dictum about the rationality of the real (“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational”): the true meaning of the subject’s words or deeds-their reason-is disclosed by their actual consequences, so the subject has no right to shrink back from them and say “But I didn’t mean it!

http://ift.tt/2oghLLG

The true lost object in melancholy is..desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/841211007510953984 http://ift.tt/2ovmz1A

We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles because we are finite and inconsistent. In other words, what the subject engaged in a struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the materialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the struggling subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so much so that his (eventual) victory amounts to his own defeat or disintegration. As Hegel likes to put it, in fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence. So, far from celebrating engaged struggle, Hegel’s point is rather that every embattled position, every taking of sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being). This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization)—the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly with fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form of ideology—one is even tempted to say: as ideology as such, kat’ exochen . The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, the foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishistic objectivization, a stand-in, for the “inconsistency” of the social order itself, for the immanent antagonism (“class struggle”) which generates the dynamic of its instability. Hegel’s interest in the “conflict of the opposites” is thus that of the neutral dialectical observer who discerns the “Cunning of Reason” at work in struggle: a subject engages in struggle, is defeated (as a rule, in his very victory), and this defeat brings him to his truth . We can clearly measure here the distance that separates Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to resuscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat—these are all absent; the “truth” of the struggle emerges only in and through defeat.

http://ift.tt/2pz2Kp6

For such an approach, Hegel remains a profoundly Christian thinker, a nihilist whose basic strategy is to repackage a profound defeat, the withdrawal from life in all its painful vitality, as a triumph of the absolute Subject. That is to say, from the standpoint of the Will to Power, the effective content of the Hegelian process is one long story of defeats and withdrawals, of sacrifices of vital self-assertion: again and again, one has to renounce vital engagement as still too “immediate” and “particular.” Exemplary is here Hegel’s passage from the Revolutionary Terror to the Kantian morality: the utilitarian subject of civil society, the subject who wants to reduce the State to being the guardian of his private safety and well-being, has to be crushed by the Terror of the revolutionary State which can annihilate him at any moment for no reason whatsoever (the subject is not punished for something he has done, for some particular content or act, but for the very fact of being an independent individual opposed to the universal)—this Terror is his “truth.” So how do we pass from Revolutionary Terror to Kant’s autonomous and free moral subject? By way of what, in more contemporary language, one could call a full identification with the aggressor: the subject should recognize in the external Terror, in this negativity which constantly threatens to annihilate him, the very core of his (universal) subjectivity; in other words, he should fully identify with it. Freedom is thus not freedom from a Master, but the replacement of one Master with another: the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all “pathological” particular content—duty should be accomplished “for the sake of duty.” …when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually concrete I, since I am caught up in an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one way to understand what Lacan called “symbolic castration”: the price the subject pays for its “transubstantiation” from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions. A Nietzschean reading easily discerns in this reversal of Terror into autonomous morality a desperate strategy of turning defeat into triumph: instead of heroically fighting for one’s vital interests, one pre-emptively declares total surrender and gives up all content. Lebrun is here well aware how unjustified the standard critique of Hegel is according to which the dialectical reversal of utter negativity into a new higher positivity, of catastrophe into triumph, functions as a kind of deus ex machina , precluding the possibility that the catastrophe might be the final outcome of the process—the well-known common-sense argument: “But what if there is no reversal of negativity into a new positive order?” This argument misses the point, which is that this is, precisely, what happens in the Hegelian reversal: there is no real reversal of defeat into triumph but only a purely formal shift, a change of perspective, which tries to present defeat itself as a triumph. Nietzsche’s point is that this triumph is a fake, a cheap magician’s trick, a consolation prize for losing all that makes life worth living: the real loss of vitality is supplemented by a lifeless specter. In Lebrun’s Nietzschean reading, Hegel thus appears as a kind of atheist Christian philosopher: like Christianity, he locates the “truth” of all terrestrial finite reality in its (self-)annihilation—reality reaches its truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that there is no Other World in which we will be repaid for our terrestrial losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, what is “beyond” finite reality is nothing but the immanent process of its self-overcoming . Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence is “absolute negativity,” as he makes clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of Master and Servant: the Servant’s secure particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets a whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self… …What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing —in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only “greatness” here is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with their “pathological” desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality. This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: “One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous.”7 It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become “universal citizens” by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality—in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. The obverse of Hegel’s “nihilism” (all finite/determinate forms of life reach their “truth” in their self-overcoming) is its apparent opposite: in continuity with the Platonic metaphysical tradition, he is not ready to give negativity full rein, that is, his dialectics is ultimately an effort to “normalize” the excess of negativity. For late Plato already, the problem was how to relativize or contextualize non-being as a subordinate moment of being (non-being is always a particular/determinate lack of being measured by the fullness it fails to actualize; there is no non-being as such, there is always only, e.g., “green” which participates in non-being by not being “red” or any other color, etc.). In the same vein, Hegelian “negativity” serves to “proscribe absolute difference” or “non-being”:8 negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determinations. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/maintained/elevated, posited in their “truth” as ideal notional determinations. What remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no : the no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, the no of struggle which aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation

http://ift.tt/2owrT6o

Acting out…attempts to attest once ‘innocence…’ to ‘shed the intolerable burdon of guilt’.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/837585876565770242 http://ift.tt/2oEoX85

The ideal of the Ego is replaced by the narcissistic “big Ego”; it is no longer the case of an individual forced to integrate the demands of the environment constituted in the symbolic element of the ideal of the Ego, but of a “Narcissus” who “does not experience the game with sincerity” and who takes the rules of the environment as the external “rules of the game”. He experiences “social pressure” completely differently, not in terms of the ideal Ego but in terms of the “anal”, “sadomasochistic” Superego.

http://ift.tt/2pabqD0

In 2009, a government-backed tv advertising campaign urged Israeli Jews to report relatives abroad who were in danger of marrying non-Jews

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/837226260283609088 http://ift.tt/2o77XDv

according to a poll from 2007, more than half of all Israeli Jews believe that intermarriage should be equated with “national treason.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/836866159253286912 http://ift.tt/2oqlfPb

“pathological Narcissus” is literally “somebody else” in relation to himself, or in terms of his symbolic identity or identification.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/836501442059972608 http://ift.tt/2oVcluq

somebody who is socially fully “adjusted” and fully “functional” can, in fact, be psychotic.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/836140113444941824 http://ift.tt/2okRTBJ

Borderline is a step towards normalisation, a hysterisation, the subject loses all distance, caught up in the paradox of desire/the symbolic

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/835775179791949824 http://ift.tt/2ok0kx0

Borderline is not the breakdown of the mask of the “pathological” Ego, which supposedly maintained the appearance of unity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/835411541495250945 http://ift.tt/2ony7WG

[In religion] ‘God’ is ..this Other’s gaze returned by objects, an imagined gaze.. ..This gaze exists only for a desiring subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/835049163452710915 http://ift.tt/2omXWWP

In love ..‘the gaze of the Other remains even if the Other ..ceased to exist.’ The Other’s gaze ‘sees in me more than myself’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/834688026966126592 http://ift.tt/2obvMf1

How would you defend yourself against charges that you are promoting terrorism or violence? Žižek: Such charges may be a below-the-belt blow

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/834324392599547904 http://ift.tt/2oTTcFQ

no era did more to undermine so-called family and community values than the Reagan era

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/833963247267151872 http://ift.tt/2oSfqbs

death drive is this idea of beyond the pleasure principle, self-sabotaging, etc.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/833603445282193408 http://ift.tt/2nmXEzR

The ongoing disorder should be treated as the true face of the New World Order

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/833243605527564289 http://ift.tt/2niyRwE

narcissus can be found almost exclusively in families where the “father has been absent” (did not perform his paternal “role”)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832920165843079168 http://ift.tt/2p6rogN

The way we are split connects us with others; we look for the missing part in the other. The other fills our own gap.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832876123935604737 http://ift.tt/2obJil2

This is why moments of crisis are so dangerous, in them appears the obscure violence which sustained [the times fre… https://t.co/8eybHscAhR

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832857143464312832 http://ift.tt/2p24Uh3

A modest plea for enlightened catastrophism https://t.co/Dz62JgVAyq

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832853819780452352 http://ift.tt/2nBVXcT

the pathological narcissus is convinced that life is a game, everybody wears a mask and is a criminal hiding behind a conformist appearance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832658717736857601 http://ift.tt/2oFIMJJ

individuals can only desire insofar as they become victims of an illusion: they think they desire another person because of him or her

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832648625192734720 http://ift.tt/2nQTIEh

the impossibility of sexual relationship is covered up by the sexualized cosmo-ontology of masculine and feminine principle

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832648517021736960 http://ift.tt/2nPVCVI

The true site of my beliefs is not my conscious acts, but the unconscious.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832512449408598016 http://ift.tt/2n2BgLO

They are not aware that their desire is caused by the essence/odour which has nothing to do with the person as such. Since Grenouille can bypass the person and directly target the object-cause of desire, he can avoid this illusion - this is why eroticism is for him a ridiculous game of lures. The price he pays for it, however, is that he cannot ever accept the inverse illusion that someone loves him: he is always aware that it is not him but his perfume that makes people adore him

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on the film The Perfume http://ift.tt/2o034zO

One should avoid the trap of putting the blame on patriarchal authority as such, seeing in Fritzl’s monstrosity the ultimate consequence of paternal Law, as well as the opposite trap of putting the blame on the disintegration of paternal Law.

http://ift.tt/2ov2vvw

it is misleading, even outright wrong, to describe Fritzl as ‘inhuman’ - if anything, he was, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, 'human, all too human’. No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been 'ruined’ by the discovery of his secret family. What makes his reign so chilling is precisely the way his brutal exercise of power and his usufruit Fritzl claimed that he noted Elisabeth wanted to escape her home - she was returning home late, looking for a job, had a boyfriend, was possibly taking drugs, and he wanted to protect her from all that The contours of the obsessional strategy are clearly recognizable here: 'III protect her from the dangers of the outside world even if it means destroying her’. According to the media, Fritzl defended himself thus: If it weren’t for me, Kerstin wouldn’t be alive today, f m no monster. I could have killed them all. Then there would have been no trace. No one would have found me out’ What is crucial here is the underlying premiss: as a father, he had the right to exercise total power

http://ift.tt/2nuFVm1

Capitalism is structurally always in crisis - this is why it is expanding all the time: it can only reproduce itself by way of ‘borrowing from the future’; by way of escaping into the future. The final settling of accounts when all debts would be paid cannot ever arrive. Marx had a name for the social point of impossibility: 'class struggle’. And, perhaps, one should extend this to the very definition ofhumanity: what ultimately distinguishes man from animal is not a positive feature (speech, tool-making, reflexive thinking, or whatever), but the rise of a new point of impossibility designated by Freud and Lacan as das Ding, the impossible-real ultimate reference point of desire.

http://ift.tt/2nsnXAo

claptrap that even if I try to deny God, deep in myself I continue to believe; the unconscious is not in me, it is out there in interactions

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832150064810303488 http://ift.tt/2nTocaW

Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucauldian ‘body’ as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian ‘psyche’: paradoxically, ‘body’ is Foucault’s name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul’s domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the ‘prison of the body’, Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the ‘prison of the soul’, what he calls ‘body’ is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught in some kind of presubjective psychic apparatus. Consequently, don’t we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls ‘immortality of the soul’ is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, ‘undead’ body? This redoubling of the body into the common mortal body and the ethereal undead body brings us to the crux of the matter: the distinction between the two deaths, the biological death of the common mortal body and the death of the other ‘undead’ body; it is clear that what Sade aims at in his notion of a radical Crime is the murder of this second body.

Disparities, 2016 - SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2oeytPG

“officially”, he strives desperately for certainty, for an unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous answer; which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate, oscillating status … There is a kind of reflective reversal at work here: the subject persists in his indecision and puts off the choice not because he is afraid that, by choosing one pole of the alternative, he would lose the other pole (that, in the case of Lina, by opting for innocence, she would have to accept the fact that her husband is a mere small-time crook, devoid of any inner strength, even in the direction of Evil). What he truly fears to lose is doubt as such, the uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible the second death is prior to the first, and not after, as de Sade dreams it.’

http://ift.tt/2odOqp6 http://ift.tt/2om4pi9

What is so menacing about the femme fatale is not the boundless enjoyment that overwhelms the man and makes him woman’s plaything or slave. It is not Woman as object of fascination that causes us to lose our sense of judgment and moral attitude but, on the contrary, that which remains hidden beneath this fascinating mask and which appears once the masks fall off: the dimension of the pure subject fully assuming the death drive.

http://ift.tt/2nBrWxo

I don’t want to be present in the events that I participate in. I try to become invisible. I perceive myself as someone who shouldn’t exist

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831791459753922561 http://ift.tt/2nk7ApD

“I’m not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other’s Will"…- this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. …At its most radical, Kantian ethics is NOT “sadist,” but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadean executioner.

http://ift.tt/2nvF1GU

get rid of the stupid superego of enjoyment: embrace deathdrive in its disruptive traversing of fantasy Beat deathdrive by deathdrive itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831426550071451648 http://ift.tt/2o4k9c8

the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is “Spirit” at its most elementary? The “wound” of nature: subject is the immense – absolute - power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity

http://ift.tt/2o3pKzM

Hegel, the philosopher who made the most radical attempt to think the abyss of madness at the core of subjectivity, is also the philosopher who brought to its “mad” climax the philosophical System as the totality of meaning. This is why, for very good reasons, “Hegel” stands in the eyes of the common sense for the moment at which philosophy gets mad, explodes into a crazy pretense at “absolute knowledge.” However, Hegel’s point is here a much more refined one: not that everything is madness, but that “normality,” the reign of reason, is a self-sublation of madness

http://ift.tt/2na9U1D

Some demand grounds its existence in complaints: ”I am insofar as I make the Other…guilty for my misery”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831065599073714176 http://ift.tt/2o7eu2n

Woman ‘‘reads’’ man’s deep dreams, returns them to him as his symptom, his own message, his Other Thing, which he isn’t ready to acknowledge

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/830706808851406848 http://ift.tt/2okzqSY

we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness— but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance

http://ift.tt/2o4qLEP

man as such is “derailed”, it eats more than “natural”, it is obsessed with sexuality more than “natural”, i.e. it follows its drives with an excess far beyond “natural” (instinctual) satisfaction, and this excess of drive has to be “gentrified”

http://ift.tt/2nR5pNS

the enemy is..overidentification. The fundamental move is that of assuming distance.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/830344435229683712 http://ift.tt/2of9vMh

So, we have a subject who dedicates his life to pleasure and becomes so deeply involved in the preparatory activities (jogging, massages, tanning, applying cremes and lotions…) that the attraction of the official Goal of his efforts fades away; the narcissistic “care of the Self,” and not the “repressive” network of social prohibitions, is the ultimate enemy of intense sexual experiences. The utopia of a post-psychoanalytic subjectivity engaged in the pursuit of new, idiosyncratic bodily pleasures beyond sexuality has reverted into disinterested boredom; and the direct intervention of pain (sado-masochistic sexual practices) seems the only remaining path to the intense experience of pleasure.

http://ift.tt/2nlgHsD

seeking a trait with which to identify, Kafka’s protagonist does not understand the meaning of the call of the Other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829980786719936512 http://ift.tt/2mVstqd

Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829707891498160128 http://ift.tt/2nKHaBb

Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living through the self-movement of the concept

http://ift.tt/2mR4o3M

the “object small a” is the pure form of a curve, this sinthome discernible in multiple guises that are echoed in each other—the uncanny curved shapes from the credits, the curve in Madeleine’s hair (copied from the same curve in the hair of Carlotta Valdes from her portrait), the winding streets of San Francisco where Scottie is tailing Madeleine, the spiral of the descending staircase in the tower

in the film Vertigo http://ift.tt/2nxXzbO

Although sexual jouissance is inherently masturbatory and idiotic, isolating me—the core of my subjectivity—from my partner, reducing the partner to an instrument (of my jouissance ), it does not hold that, for this reason, I must renounce sexual jouissance to assert my love for the other. On the contrary, it is precisely such a renunciation that is, as a rule, a fake, a stratagem masking some unacknowledged jouissance (there is nothing more elementary than the jouissance provided by renouncing pleasures in sacrificing oneself for the other). For that reason, perhaps the ultimate proof of love for the other is that I am ready to share with the other the very heart of my masturbatory idiotic jouissance

http://ift.tt/2ng506X

Fantasy constructs…the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829619707091283968 http://ift.tt/2mm9rOp

Instead of being bothered by what I am for others I no longer look for a guarantee in another’s desire & assume the contingency of my being.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829257289085370368 http://ift.tt/2nBfzTd

“Woman is a symptom of man” seems to be one of the most notoriously “antifeminist” theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity as to how we are to read it: this ambiguity reflects the shift in the notion of the symptom within the Lacanian theory. 10 If we conceive the symptom as it was articulated by Lacan in the 1950s—namely as a cyphered message—then, of course, woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man “gave way as to his desire.” For Freud, the symptom is a compromise formation: in the symptom, the subject gets back, in the form of a cyphered, unrecognized message, the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront, that he betrayed. So, if we read the thesis of “woman as a symptom of man” against this background, we inevitably approach the position that was most forcefully articulated by Otto Weininger, Freud’s contemporary, a notorious Viennese antifeminist and anti-Semite from the turn of the century, who wrote the extremely influential bestseller Sex and Character 11 and then commited suicide at the age of twenty-four. Weininger’s position is that, according to her very ontological status, woman is nothing but a materialization, an embodiment of man’s sin: in herself, she doesn’t exist, which is why the proper way to get rid of her is not to fight her actively or to destroy her—it is enough for man to purify his desire, to rise to pure spirituality, and, automatically, woman loses the ground under her feet, disintegrates. …We have thus the male world of pure spirituality and undistorted communication, communication without constraint (if we may be permitted to use this Habermasian syntagm), the universe of ideal intersubjectivity, and woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall—she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation. …If, however, we conceive the symptom as it was articulated in Lacan’s last writings as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed: if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, “woman is a symptom of man” means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is “externalized” in his symptom. men are “active,” they take refuge in relentless activity in order to escape the proper dimension of the act. The retreat of man from woman (the retreat of the hard-boiled detective from the femme fatale in film noir, for example), is thus effectively a retreat from the death drive as a radical ethical stance: the opposite of Weininger’s image of woman as incapable of a proper ethical attitude.

http://ift.tt/2nb6uj0

neutrality of the symbolic order functions as the ultimate guarantee for the so-called “sense of reality”: as soon as this neutrality is smeared, “external reality” itself loses the self-evident character of something present “out there” and begins to vacillate, i.e., is experienced as delimited by an invisible frame: the paranoia of the noir universe is primarily visual, based upon the suspicion that our vision of reality is always already distorted by some invisible frame behind our backs

http://ift.tt/2mHvsDz

the noir universe is characterized by a radical split, a kind of structural imbalance, as to the possibility of narrativization: the integration of the subject’s position into the field of the big Other, the narrativization of his fate, becomes possible only when the subject is in a sense already dead, although still alive, when “the game is already over"

http://ift.tt/2mUROCd

In ego-psychology the aim of the analytical cure is to get rid of the dirty water (symptoms, pathological tics, etc., i.e., everything that appears as a disturbance) in order to keep the child (ego) as unspoiled as possible, cleansed of all dark spots, whereas the aim of the Lacanian cure is to throw out the child (to suspend the analysand’s ego), so that the analysand is confronted with his “dirty water,” with symptoms and fantasies which organize his/her enjoyment.

http://ift.tt/2nwQ0me

Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy wears a mask concealing a distorted, amorphous face, i.e., also plays the role of “anal father”. …“Anal father” points in a more appropriate way toward the obscene nature of the father qua presymbolic “partial object.”

http://ift.tt/2mE3GaI

The cynical dismissal of semblances as “mere semblances” : The true illusion consists in substantializing the Real itself, in taking the Real as a substantial and reducing the symbolic to a mere texture of semblances. — Cynics …dismiss the symbolic texture as a mere semblance and are blind to …to the way we can intervene into the Real through the symbolic.

http://ift.tt/2mUNPap

Is (what we usually refer to as) religion not precisely…an attempt to obfuscate this void of infinity by way of imagining a personalized supreme Being, …‘which guarantees the meaning of our life’? …What if our ‘return to ourselves’ resides precisely in our fully assuming this fact, in the spiritual stance which expresses …the awe apropos of the infinity of the universe? Such a stance …involves a profound ‘mystical’ experience of the abyss in which we dwell – in it, we effectively ‘lose the ground under our feet’

http://ift.tt/2mxcIFN

Note Gabriel’s ambiguity: god, the divine, is for him ‘our assuming a maximal distance towards ourselves’ and at the same time the ‘return to ourselves from a maximal distance’. So what if we simply do not return to ourselves but fully accept that we are just a ‘vanishing point in infinity’, ‘an insignificant speck of dust on a small planet’?

http://ift.tt/2mus9iY

When a wife is afraid that her husband is sick, she may well worry that he is not sick (desiring him to be sick). And could we not say exactly the same about the Left liberals horrified by Trump? Ils ont peur qu’il ne soit une catastrophe. What they really fear is that he will not be a catastrophe. One should get rid of the false panic, fearing the Trump victory as the ultimate horror, which made us support Hillary in spite of all her obvious shortcomings. Trump’s victory created a totally new political situation with chances for a more radical Left. Today’s liberal Left and populist Right are both caught in the politics of fear: fear of the immigrants, of feminists, etc., or the fear of fundamentalist populists, etc.

http://ift.tt/2mPwjEz

Any resemblance with the old anti-Nazi story of how we first passively observed when the Nazis in power took away the Communists, then the Jews, then the moderate Left, then the liberal center, then even honest conservatives… is purely accidental. …First, the radical Left had to be sacrificed as out of touch with our new postmodern times and its new “paradigms.” Then, the moderate Social-Democratic Left was sacrificed as also out of touch with the necessities of the new global capitalism. Now, in the last epoch of this sad tale, the moderate liberal Right itself (Juppé) was sacrificed as out of touch with conservative values which have to be enlisted if we, the civilized world, want to beat Le Pen.

http://ift.tt/2n7TP0g

Zupančič put it succinctly, “the extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as it was clear in the election of Trump. And the Left does little else than scold and insult them.”

Zizek citing Alenka Zupancic http://ift.tt/2mGDVaV

Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”

Zizek citing Stephen Marche http://ift.tt/2nhoMjb

Trump reminded some of his voters of the half-forgotten reality of class struggle, although, of course, he did it in a distorted populist way. Trump’s anti-establishment rage was a kind of return of what was repressed in the moderate liberal Left’s politics focusing on cultural and PC issues. This Left got from Trump its own message in its inverted true form. That’s why the only way to reply to Trump would have been to fully appropriate the anti-establishment rage, not to dismiss it as white trash primitivism.

http://ift.tt/2nmPKCM

pain in nature itself, the pain which gets expressed/resolved in human speech – the Freudian Unbehagen in der Kultur thus gets supplemented by an uncanny Unbehagen in der Natur itself: imagine all of nature waiting for the gift of speech so it can express how bad it is to be a vegetable or a fish. Is it not the special torment of nature to be deprived of the means of conveying its pent-up aggravation, unable to articulate even the simplest lament, ‘Ah me! I am the sea’? And does not the emergence on earth of the speaking being effectively release this terrible organic tension and bring it to a higher level of non-resolution? While there are some intriguing passages in Lacan’s seminars where he speculates on the infinite pain of being a plant, raising the possibility of an Unbehagen in Der Natur, for the most part he conceives the relationship between nature and culture to be one of radical discontinuity.

http://ift.tt/2mAiw33

The Symbolic tortures/derails life, it subordinates life to a foreign compulsion, depriving it forever of its homeostasis – the move from instinct to drive, from need to desire. Within this perspective, the symbolic order is ‘always-already here’ as our unsurpassable horizon, every account of its genesis amounts to a fantasmatic obfuscation of its constitutive gap. In this Lacanian–structuralist version of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, all we can do is to circumscribe the void/impossibility which makes the Symbolic non-all and inconsistent, the void in which external limit coincides with the internal one (the void delimitates the Symbolic from the real; however, this limitation cuts into the Symbolic itself).

http://ift.tt/2mQ1osg

God doesn’t exist, but its inexistence leaves traces in our reality. More precisely, God qua Cause is a retroactive effect of its own traces-effects, in the same way that a political cause only exists in the series of its effects: communism only exists insofar as there are individuals fighting for it (or attacking it), motivated by it in their activity. So the idea that something exists because something else doesn’t/cannot exist could be read at two levels: first, god ex-sists (or inexists) because there is no sexual relationship; then, our ordinary reality exists because god doesn’t exist. There is a God-Woman because there is no sexual relationship, and this God-Woman doesn’t exist but merely inexists.

http://ift.tt/2mdqoWe

“Celebration” tells us a lot about how today, in the false memory syndrome of remembering being molested by one’s parents, Freud’s Ur–Father is resuscitated. “Celebration” tells us this precisely through its artificial character. The ultimate paradox of the film is that it’s the ultimate nostalgia. This horror of the rapist father, instead of shocking us, it articulates a kind of nostalgic longing for the good old times when we had fathers who really had force, and when it was really possible to experience such traumas. This is the paradox I want to address. One would expect that fantasies are defenses against traumas. We have a traumatic experience, we cannot endure it so we build up a protective fantasy web of fictions. I claim that we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that concentration camp life would be the trauma and we build a fantasy to shield ourselves from it. But perhaps the trauma is the fantasy we construct to protect ourselves from something else. But what can be worse than concentration camp life itself? Let me return again to the opposition of the two fathers, imaginary and symbolic. I claim that what these horrifying figures fill in is the gap of symbolic authority. These two fathers, protective and rapist, have nonetheless something in common although they are opposed. They both suspend the agency of symbolic law, or symbolic prohibition, the proper paternal agency of authority whose function is to introduce the childhood into the universe of social reality with its harsh demands. The reality to which the child is exposed without any maternal protective shield. …Vinterberg’s rapist father is also a father outside the constraints of the symbolic law, with access to full enjoyment. …Vinterberg’s father is this very violence outside symbolic law, and again what is missing is simply the father as symbolic authority. So what happens with the functioning of subjects when symbolic authority loses its efficiency? I claim we get subjects who are strangely de–realized, deprived of their psychology as if we are dealing with robotic puppets that are obeying some strange blind mechanism.

http://ift.tt/2nrmWZ6

we are not directly immersed into the Real. …The Real appears as something absolutely foreign/repellent – this fact already implies that we are already subjected to symbolic castration which entails the loss of the immediate identification with life. Once we are in the Symbolic the ultimate trauma is life itself. Lacan’s name for finitude is (symbolic) castration, and his name for immortality is death drive. They are the two sides of the same operation, i.e. it’s not that the substance of life, the immortal Jouissance-Thing, is ‘castrated’ by the arrival of the symbolic order. …The undead Thing is the remainder of castration, it is generated by castration, and vice versa, there is no ‘pure’ castration, castration itself is sustained by the immortal excess which eludes it.

http://ift.tt/2mNGLga

omnipotency overlaps with impotence, or, even more radically,…the ‘thrust of life’ overlaps with death drive: the phallic signifier stands for potency, live thrust, but potency within the domain of the signifier, which means: of the symbolic death, of the subordination of life to a dead symbolic machine: This articulation by Freud of the death instinct is the articulation of a position essential to an animal being who is caught up and articulated in a signifying system which permits him to dominate his immanence as a living being, and to perceive himself as already dead… …Not, as it may appear, simply the experience of some presymbolic primordial Real Thing but already the obverse, the other side, of symbolic castration – and vice versa, we do not experience ‘signifier in the pure state’ when we encounter a pure symbolic formation like a mathematic formula but precisely when we confront the Real at its most raw.

http://ift.tt/2mtah8R

the God of the real – is like the Lady in courtly love, it is das Ding, a capricious, cruel master who simply has no sense of universal justice. God-the-Father thus quite literally doesn’t know what he is doing, and Christ is the one who does know it, but is reduced to an impotent, compassionate observer, addressing his father with ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ – burning together with all the victims of the father’s rage.

http://ift.tt/2nblI53

Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals in contrast to the inner sense of guilt and the pressure of authenticity that characterize Protestantism; in Catholicism we are allowed to just follow the ritual and ignore the authenticity of our inner belief

http://ift.tt/2mkq21O

Catholicism over Protestantism: Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals… …This playfulness should not deceive us: Catholicism is resorting to such subterfuges to save the divine big Other in his goodness, while the capriciously ‘irrational’ Predestination in Protestantism confronts us with a god who is ultimately not good and all-powerful but stained by the indelible suspicion of being stupid, arbitrary, or even outright evil. The dark implicit lesson of Protestantism is: if you want god, you have to renounce (part of the divine) goodness.

http://ift.tt/2mCZMlJ

class antagonism is the Real which is obfuscated by the multiplicity of social conflicts.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/828182171089268736 http://ift.tt/2n7J5vu

the subject is always ‘decentred’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827949635176165376 http://ift.tt/2mINTv2

the Unconscious is not a deep-seated wisdom but a big mess, a bricolage of symptoms and fantasies which deal with or cover up this deadlock.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827946870060236800 http://ift.tt/2mqnfqq

partial drives emerge as attempts to obfuscate the basic antagonism (to supplement the absence of sexual relationship

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827869408009805827 http://ift.tt/2lF3EhN

The whole project in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is “let’s paint the ultimate outcome of the administered world as unavoidable, as catastrophe, for this is the only way to effectively counteract it.”

http://ift.tt/2lF1gs7

Perverse self-instrumentalization (positing oneself as the instrument of the big-Other) necessarily 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/2lVdlM7

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

art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit’: even if excellent works are produced, ‘we bow the knee no longer’.2 This thesis of Hegel’s acquired new content with the rise of what he couldn’t forecast: the secular capitalist civilization which elevates scientific reason into the highest form of reason

http://ift.tt/2jSsoTi

[There is a] secret solidarity between: […] the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized ‘humanitarian’ operations (humanitarian protection of human and civil rights and aid to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda,…) [and] the violent emergence of depoliticized ‘pure Evil’ in the guise of ‘excessive’ ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence. Zizek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics” ‘postmodern racism’ emerges as the ultimate consequence…of the reduction of the state to a mere police-agent servicing the…needs of market forces ======== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Notiz bei Position 104 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 17:38:38 The thing to do is to distinguish between objects which are..desired..and the object..which functions as a ‘negative magnitude’..desired as the stand in for Nothingness. SLAVOJ ZIZEK Absolute Otherness’ is 'the subjct beyond subjectivization,’ beyond the 'big Oter’: 'the subject not bound by the symbolic pact and as such identical to the Other’s gaze’. The subject is the 'point of failure of every identification’ Absolute Otherness is 'epitomized by the Other’s gaze into camera’ by the villain in Hitchcock’s films Zizek says. ========== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Markierung bei Position 105-105 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 17:51:26 difference ========== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Notiz bei Position 105 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 17:52:37 Absolute Otherness is 'epitomized by the’ villain’s 'gaze into camera’ in Hitchcock’s films Zizek says. ========== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Notiz bei Position 105 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 18:16:43 By making us accomplices with the villaine, Hitchcock makes us experience the absolute Otherness of the unrerentable as such, in short, the experience of the object gaze, brought about by being looked at as viewes directly by the villain’s gaze to camera. Normally the chance to look someone directly into their eyes facilitates a deeper understanding ofwho they are. That we cannot fathom the villain in this way at all despite being given the opportunity to see into his eyes is what makes the unsymbolizability of wat goes on in the film even more traumatic. The place 'of the unrepresentable’ coincides with 'the viewer reduced to pure gaze’. Even from the seemingly allknowing and allseeing position of pure objective access to gazing from the nearest deepestseeing positions which one would normally never have access to is not giving insigts and symbolizations at all and this is why seeing the villain head on is traumatic. His gaze separates the viewer from the symbolic community and makes’ the viewer an accomplice, Zizek says ========== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Markierung bei Position 105-105 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 18:16:43 name ========== zizek on how the one becomes one in recognizing its split - Ihre Notiz bei Position 105 | Hinzugefügt am Montag, 16. November 2015 19:09:01 'Becase I think it is only’ a 'self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful’, Zizek says. The void as core 'of our subjectivity’ is 'filled in by appearances,’ Zizek says. women often are more aware of the emptiness at the core of s was so much alone as a child that I enjoy too much being alone. Loving for me is a way to keep hiding from the rest of the world.†— Andre Vantino enjoy your symptom or as Oscar Wilde says, the way to get rid of a desire is to follow through with it and grant oneself small pleasures. Fantasies are desired differently than small pleasures. We avoid following our fantasies to the end of the fantasy because if we didn’t the emptiness of the fantasy would become too obvious. 'Through disregard for our gaze,’ something asserts its divine character’ even when not at all intending to 'hide anything from us’, Miran Bozovic writes. experienced as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of the multiplicity of ethnic, religious or life-style communities. Modernism in Reverse This gradual collapse—or, rather, loss of substance—of the ‘American dream’ bears witness to the unexpected reversal of the passage from primary to secondary identification described by Hegel: in our ‘postmodern’ societies, the ‘abstract’ institution of secondary identification is increasingly experienced as an external, purely formal frame that is not really binding, so that one is more and more looking for support in ‘primordial’, usually smaller (ethnic, religious) forms of identification. Even when these forms of identification are more ‘artificial’ than national identification—as is the case with the gay community—they are more ‘immediate’ in the sense of seizing the individual directly and overwhelmingly, in his specific ‘way of life’, Slavoj - Multiculturalism or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism in contrast to the ‘nationalization of the ethnic’—the de-ethnicization, the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) of the ethnic into the national—we are now dealing with the ‘ethnicization of the national’, with a renewed search for (or reconstitution of) ‘ethnic roots’. Slavoj - Multiculturalism or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority. My father is a Schindler Jew by Les White If Schindler is an enigma, if his actions as he evolves from carpetbagger to savior cannot be explained - as many including Spielberg contend - why then does the film give reasons for the Nazis’ behavior? The Nazis are portrayed as alcoholics, often partying and orgiastic (all Schindler has to do to gain another concession is present a bottle of wine). Anton Goeth usually kills when drunk. Because his status as antagonist serves to represent the Nazis as a whole, we are led to surmise that the Holocaust can he blamed on alcohol abuse. Perhaps the Holocaust would have never happened had Goeth and company accepted their addiction and gone to AA. (In contrast, Schindler has to goad the Jewish accountant into having a drink.) The movie reflects certain mores in today’s United States: a popular acceptance of victimization and an AA philosophy of “powerlessness,” with its presumption that alcoholism is one of the main causes of society’s ills. The film depicts the Nazi movement as disorderly and confused, not highly organized: e.g., it does not execute genocide with cool efficiency. SCHINDLER’S LIST ascribes reasons to the Holocaust. Goeth seems to kill only those who are infirm, not willing to follow orders, or sitting down on the job: i.e., the one-armed man, the woman architect whining about faulty construction, the slow hinge maker, and the boy failing to scrub out a stain. These are reprehensible reasons to kill but reasons nonetheless. Even when Goeth takes a practice shot from his balcony, he kills a fat babushka taking a break and sitting down outside a line of hard workers. Yet my father is by accident the only survivor from his family. His mother and sister were shot, his father and youngest brother were gassed, and his other brother was hung indiscriminately. My father is a Schindler Jew by Les White comparisons of SCHINDLER’S LIST to Spielberg’s other movies cannot he overlooked. Schindler does come off like a super-human Indiana Jones or the archaeologists in Jurassic Park. The Nazis can he compared to the dinosaurs running loose in JURASSIC PARK or to the shark in JAWS: nature that cannot be wholly controlled, but nature that can be explained as primitive. The Jews-the pitiful Jews showing fear - represent the child in us, like the Indian children rescued by Indiana Jones or the children scared by dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK. SCHINDLER’S LIST backs off from showing us starving concentration camp inmates who, if lucky to remain alive had to release their souls from their bodies in order to survive as emotionless robots. To have thought about the surrounding horrors would have killed one’s will to live. To have reacted to the horrors would have called undue attention to oneself and more than likely have resulted in being shot on the spot. The audience’s horror is mitigated because the faces shown mirror our own fear. How differently we would react if we were watching the concentration camp inmates remain impassive, expecting their treatment. We would be outraged that people can treat other people so senselessly, and we might face the painful truth that all of us have within ourselves the capacity to accept such treatment or be killed or even work in the camps in such a way that we partake in killing our own. SCHINDLER’S LIST puts a face on the Holocaust which makes it more comfortable for the audience. David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia The Amber Time Machine. David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia The Ascent of Man David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia , Civilisation David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia series Eastwards with Attenborough, David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia The Tribal Eye, ) David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia The Explorers, ). David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Fabulous Animals (), David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Attenborough has continued as one of the presenters of BBC Radio ’s “Tweet of the Day”, David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia David Attenborough’s Life Stories David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’. David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’. David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Darwin and the Tree of Life. In reference to the programme, Attenborough David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia it is not a theory. Evolution is as solid a historical fact as you could conceive. Evidence from every quarter. What is a theory is whether natural selection is the mechanism and the only mechanism. That is a theory. But the historical reality that dinosaurs led to birds and mammals produced whales, that’s not theory.“[] David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia The licence fee is the basis on which the BBC is based and if you destroy it, broadcasting… becomes a wasteland.[] David Attenborough - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia "David Attenborough: My tears for my dear old brother”. Mail Online Slavoj - What can psychoanalysis tell us about cyberspace What we get here is another version of the kingdom of Tarzan or She: in Rider Haggard’s She, Freud’s notorious claim that feminine sexuality is a “dark continent” is realized in a literal way: she-who-must-be-obeyed, this Master be- yond Law, the possessor of the Secret of Life itself, is a White Woman ruling in the midst of Africa, the dark continent. This figure of She, of a woman who exists (in the unexplored Be- yond), is the necessary fantasmatic support of the patriarchal universe. With the advent of modern science, this Beyond is abolished, there is no longer a “dark continent” which generates a Secret—and, consequently, Meaning is also lost, since the field of Meaning is by definition sustained by an impenetrable dark spot in its very heart. Slavoj - What can psychoanalysis tell us about cyberspace for Heidegger, modern sci- ence stands for the metaphysical “danger”: It poses a threat to the universe of meaning. There is no meaning without some dark spot, without some forbidden/impenetrable domain into which we project fantasies which guarantee our horizon of meaning. Perhaps, this very growing disenchantment of our ac- tual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space: It is as if, in it, we encounter again a Limit beyond which the mysterious domain of the fantasmatic Otherness opens up, as if the screen of the interface is today’s version of the blank, of the unknown region Slavoj - What can psychoanalysis tell us about cyberspace universe is thus in a sense more “open” than the universe of science: It implies the gateway into the indefinite Beyond, while the direct global model of the mod- ern science is effectively “closed,” i.e., it allows for no Beyond. The universe of modern science, in its very “meaninglessness,” involves the gesture of “going through fantasy,” of abolishing the dark spot, the domain of the Unexplained which harbors fantasies and thus guarantees Meaning: Instead of it, we get the meaningless mechanism.

cgccg5dqewk http://ift.tt/2knqv4M

It is as if Richard is driven to such an extreme of painful madness with this music that, for him, the only way to get rid of this unbearable pressure of music is to directly identify with it … In one of the episodes of the 1945 British horror omnibus Dead of the Night, Michael Redgrave plays the ventriloquist who becomes jealous of his dummy, gnawed by the suspicion that it wants to leave him for a competitor; at the episode’s end, after destroying the dummy by way of thrashing its head, he is hospitalized; after reawakening from psychic coma, he identifies with his symptom (the dummy), starting to talk and contorting his face like it. …Richard enacts a properly psychotic identification with the symptom, with the musical rhythm as the cipher of his destiny: like an alien intruder, music parasitizes, colonizes him… …Since it is structurally impossible for him to get rid of the symptom, the only way out of it, the only way to resolve the tension, is to directly identify with the symptom, to become one’s own symptom – in exact homology to Hitchcock’s Psycho at the end of which the only way for Norman to get rid of his mother is to identify with her directly, to let her take over his personality and, using his body as a ventriloquist uses his dummy, speak through him

http://ift.tt/2jOJamw

one of the most disturbing TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, ‘The Glass Eye’ (the opening episode of the third year). Jessica Tandy (again – the very actress who was the original Mouth!) plays here a lone woman who falls for a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi (a reference to the author of Pinocchio). When she gathers the courage to approach him alone in his quarters, she declares her love for him and steps forward to embrace him, only to find that she is holding in her hands a wooden dummy’s head; after she withdraws in horror, the ‘dummy’ stands up and pulls off its mask, and we see the face of a sad older dwarf who starts to jump desperately on the table, asking the woman to go away … The ventriloquist is in fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist. …The partial object, which is effectively alive, and whose dead puppet the ‘real’ person is: the ‘real’ person is merely alive, a survival machine, a ‘human animal’, while the apparently ‘dead’ supplement is the focus of excessive Life.

http://ift.tt/2jnyqiZ

This enigma of the Other’s desire is an enigma for the Other itself. Only at this level do we reach ‘symbolic castration’ which does not stand for the subject’s ‘castration’, for his/her being at the mercy of the big Other, for his/her depending on its whims, but for the ‘castration’ of this Other itself. The barred Other is thus not just the depersonalized Other but also the bar which cracks this depersonalized Other itself.

http://ift.tt/2kLcnTy

Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity

http://ift.tt/2k6Noqq

What is enigmatic for the Other is myself, i.e. I am the enigma for the Other, so that I find myself in the strange position (like in detective novels) of someone who all of a sudden finds himself persecuted, treated as if he knows (or owns) something, bears a secret, but is totally unaware what this secret is. The formula of the enigma is thus: ‘What am I for the Other? What for an object of the Other’s desire am I?’ Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title

http://ift.tt/2kFvDBV

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/2jpb07Q

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

Psychoanalysis does not aim at replacing the false or cyphered self-knowledge with the real one, but at getting rid of the need for self-knowledge, at enabling the patient to act without self-knowledge. Does this bring us back to the ancient wisdom, ‘Just do it, don’t think about it!’ Does it amount to a return to naiveté? The (negative) answer is provided by Phillips’s second point about suffering: Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally, in the process of doing the analysis, they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified, but also they might discover there are more important things than to alleviate one’s suffering.

http://ift.tt/2j9Dgju

By deceiving others through politeness and social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic, polite behaviour into virtuous behaviour.

http://ift.tt/2kkQEyl

What is usually referred to as ‘borderline’ is precisely hysteria in our time of permissiveness, and the time when the traditional figure of the Master is more and more replaced by the neutral expert legitimized by his (scientific) knowledge

http://ift.tt/2j2mliZ

The hysteric is horrified at being ‘reduced to an object’, at being invested with the agalma which makes him or her the object of other’s desire.

http://ift.tt/2kkPW7w

Every neighbour is ultimately creepy. What makes a neighbour creepy is not his weird acts but the impenetrability of the desire that sustains these acts.

http://ift.tt/2jGighq

We cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance – the ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and another’s jouissance, but between myself and my own intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance.

http://ift.tt/2jCh7av

Loving the illusion of the good in others may make us be polite in order to become lovable, which, in turn, exercises our self-mastery, leads us to control our passions and, eventually, to love the good for its own sake.

http://ift.tt/2iUjl3b

the love of the illusion of the good can lead to the love of the good itself: if one loves the illusion of the good and enacts this illusion in social intercourse, one might come to appreciate its worth and to love the good itself for its own sake

http://ift.tt/2jdDB0J

There is no domain left unseen, ignored by the PC law – its law tolerates no unwritten rules, there is no space here for a transgressive behaviour which violates explicit rules and is precisely as such not only tolerated but even solicited by the law.

http://ift.tt/2iT0VDh