Status Updates From Missing Out: In Praise of t...

Slavoj Zizek: "To be or not to be, that's the question", becomes something like, "What's bothering me now is; shall I kill myself or not?"

'the attitude of overinterpretation'

'closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us'

"It is not an increase in self-knowledge that Freud describes, but its limits. He tells us a story about the need to grow out of a need for understanding and being understood. <...> We make sense of our life in order to be free, not to have to make sense."

"Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia."

'íf other people frustrate us the right amount they become real to us, that is, people with whom we can exchange something; if they frustrate us too much they become too real, that is, persecutory, people we have to do harm to; if they frustrate us too little they become idealised, imaginary characters, the people of our wishes; if they frustrate us too much they become demonised, the people of our nightmares.'

'What we do to our frustration to make it bearable - evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on - takes the sting out of its tail.'

Four kinds of frustration:
-the frustration of being deprived of something that never existed;
-the frustration of being deprived of something one has never had (whether or not it exists);
-the frustration of being deprived of something one has had;
-the frustration of being deprived of something one once had, but can't have again.

'Lacan, in the hyperbolic version of this said love is giving something you haven't got to someone who doesn't exist,'

'Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.'
'we may never have had this object in the first place, and we can't recover it. That the object, the person we are looking for, and can never refind because it never existed, was the wished-for one.'

'You recognise them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.'

'All love stories are frustration stories. As are all stories about parents and children, which are also love stories, in Freud's view, the formative love stories. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn't know you had (of one's formative frustrations, and of one's attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there.<...>

'The demand for love is always a doubt about love; and all doubt begins as a doubt about love.'

'Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.'
'To frustrate, then, is to, in one way pr another, make void a demand made on oneself; to avoid it or to make it as nothing; and it is to deceive the other person either if you have what they want and won't give it, or if you can create an illusion that you have what they want but are merely refusing to give it.'