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Sacrifice, giving up, that is to say, is a form of prediction.
William Empson called ‘straddling the contradictions’. You can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides.
Language is a sometimes surprisingly flexible regime. Joyce is clearly both exemplary and representative for Lacan for how we can do new things with words; and this has something to do with aliveness. ‘One chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks,’ Lacan writes. ‘One creates a language in so far as one at every instance gives it a sense, one gives it a little nudge, without which language would not be alive.’ A little nudge seems a minimal thing; choosing and creating a language seems rather grandiose in its ambitions. And notably it is the idea of aliveness that Lacan has
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aliveness in language may be in short supply and so we may wonder what it is in ourselves that might want to deaden language;
And AI language models are the ultimate deadening force. . .
paradoxes of certainty; the ways in which certainty narrows the mind often in the name of truth and liberation.
religion, ‘is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.’
In the absence of any hard-and-fast information and advice – and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived – all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do.
Because anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse,
We should note, even though it is obvious, that all our so-called diagnostic categories are, whatever else they are, descriptions of forms of not wanting (it is always worth wondering what hysteria, obsessionality, phobias, anxiety, depression, and so on, are ways of not wanting).
It is like believing that our choice is between greed and anorexia. When in fact we can wonder, in any given situation, what we might want and not want and what else we might do in situations in which wanting or not wanting seem the most compelling options.
Wanting as an experimental project involves a lot of not wanting, not being overly eager to be told what you want;
(wanting as what John Stuart Mill called ‘an experiment in living’).
The essentialist wants knowledge, accomplices, and some kind of guarantee; the experimentalist wants experience, soci...
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the experimentalist will need to go on experimenting with the kind of safety she thinks she needs in any given situation. And in this way we should see the essentialist and the anti-essentialist as collaborators, and ac...
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experimentalist the risk is always merely more of the same: what is desired is a feeling of aliveness, and a sense of the unanticipated. The experimentalist, that is to say, wants to be surprised
We make ourselves up through our exclusion of ourselves.
Mourning may seem the most forlorn – even the most absurd, least promising – of self-cures if being and feeling left out is the problem.
When one is left out, something else becomes available, even if what first becomes available are the difficult and dismaying feelings of being left out
Exclusion may involve the awakening of other opportunities that inclusion would make unthinkable.
Being left out begins as tragedy, and tragedy, Freud suggests, is integral to development.
Exclusion, as both Hamlet and Paradise Lost show us, is the medium for self-recognition. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation.
The power of monotheism is that it is exclusionary: it exploits everyone’s terror of being left out.
No other kind of doctor includes as part of the treatment an analysis of the patient’s confidence in the doctor, of the history of the patient’s relationship to being helped; clearly a kind of foundational relationship. The
Always seduced by what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls ‘fascist states of mind’, the militant narrowing of the mind out of fear of the mind’s complexity.
the way in which knowledge, the will to knowledge, can itself be a defence against curiosity; and also that the will to cure and be cured can be a foreclosing of curiosity.
Psychoanalysis – and psychoanalysts after Freud – has been divided over whether it is a curiosity profession or a knowledge profession, whether it is more essentially about cure or exploration; the curious, the explorers, can never settle; those who are keen on being knowledgeable and helping people want to settle when it is at all possible. Or to put it another way, when we are not saying curiosity leads to knowledge, we can say curiosity leads to curiosity. That we are not wanting to come to conclusions but to come to beginnings.
To be interested in childhood, as I say, is to be ineluctably interested in curiosity. The child, who knows very little – and who is not known for his empiricism – is exorbitantly curious.
We suffer, Freud suggests, from being insufficiently curious about our suffering (and one of the aims of a psychoanalysis should be to get the so-called patient curious about his suffering and indeed about his pleasure).
He wants us to be curious about belief and disbelief, and indeed about the inability to believe. A curiosity about the malaise of his time. And of ours.
Belief without curiosity is stultifying.
Rebels, Sartre remarked, are people who keep things the same so that they can go on rebelling against them; revolutionaries change the world.
for a culture to exclude a possibility, and to have to change if that possibility is to be admitted, implies that it has depended on that exclusion in order to sustain its existence.
By wanting us to believe that censorship can be a dialogue – may, indeed, be the paradigm of dialogue; the fundamental double-act of the self and her censor – Freud
It is language, acculturation, that has given us loss – the ways in which we live it and recognize it – and its so elaborate elaboration. We have to remember, in other words, the complicity of language with absence: just to use a word is to acknowledge the absence of its referent, as though language itself, just using it, makes loss our theme and medium.
Words are also always a mourning, however blithe, for what they represent.
is even how culture works for us, what culture is for – to master loss.
When loss is not catastrophic loss, it is a form of stage fright.
Unlike our founding (sacred) texts, childhood as some kind of authentic or authenticating origin – or legitimating creation myth – is remarkably impoverished;
