A World of Fragile Things Quotes

“we are tempted to erase the unsettling elements of the other's alterity-the ways in which the other does not coincide with our fantasies-because we imagine that, by so doing, we manage to stabilize our lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be surprised by the other, rather than allowing the other to touch us in unforeseen and potentially enlivening ways, we resort to idealizations that seem to guarantee the reliability of our life-worlds. In this manner, we deprive ourselves of the kinds of transformations that can only ensue from a courageous encounter with the other's irreducible alterity.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“That is, it is my encounter with the other’s inimitable uniqueness that allows me to emerge—to come to my own—as a similarly unique entity: I define my singularity in part in relation to what I am not. This implies that the more I perceive and respect the other’s difference from me, the more I will be able to activate my own distinctiveness. The fact that the other remains a robust subject in its own right (rather than a hollow reflection of my ideals) enhances the existential viability of both of us.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Schopenhauer once put it, we insist on living our lives "with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Creativity facilitates the work of mourning.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“We discovered that existential authenticity has traditionally often been conceived as a matter of resisting collective complacency and of assuming responsibility for one’s beliefs, passions, and unique perspective. I would propose that the line of reasoning that Lacan advances regarding unconscious desire represents a specifically psychoanalytic answer to the question of authenticity. In other words, I would like to highlight the similarity between the philosophical conception of authenticity and the Lacanian conviction that actively listening to, and taking responsibility for, the “truth” of one’s desire—even (or particularly) when this “truth” seems alien or uncomfortable—allows one to distance oneself from the dominant dictates of the symbolic Other. Lacan in fact implies that only the subject who has been able to liberate itself from the Other’s desire retains the capacity for satisfaction. The flipside of this “unfettered” subject position is that the subject is less likely to expect the Other to compensate for the catastrophes of its desire. If the subject under the sway of fantasies tends to repeatedly re-create the same relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, loved, or admired, for instance—to the collective world of the Other, the shattering of fantasies allows it to gain a measure of self-sufficiency in relation to the Other. It grows to be less afraid of the world’s judgments, which suggests that it becomes increasingly capable of
independent deliberation and action. As Bruce Fink underscores, one of the aspirations of Lacanian analysis is to facilitate the subject’s departure from ideals and configurations of thought that have been inculcated within its psyche by the various authority figures that surround it from birth; the goal of Lacanian analysis is to allow the subject to think and act without being overly dependent on the views and opinions of others.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Perhaps even more fundamentally, it is possible to argue that there is no “reality” that is not always already a form of fantasy: that fantasy is all we have got. In other words, the very distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is in many ways an artificial one, reminiscent of an Enlightenment worldview—one that believed in the power of the rational mind to tell fact from fiction—that has been seriously undermined in recent decades of postmodern theorizing. That is, the belief that we could ever relate to the world objectively, as it “really is,” has itself been discredited as a fantasy that occludes the recognition that the ways we perceive and interpret the world always necessarily reflect the value systems within which we operate. In effect, while the Enlightenment worldview distinguishes between “reality” and our more or less successful efforts to represent it, contemporary theorists recognize—as Nietzsche already did—that our very attempts to represent reality invariably shape the form of this reality. By this I do not mean to say that there exists no reality independently of human representations, but merely that we do not possess any immediate or unmediated access to that reality; since we only understand the world around us through the conceptual frameworks, labels, and systems of thought that we impose on this world, there is no way to know what this world might be like outside of our endeavors to comprehend it.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Along similar lines, Stephen Mitchell points out that we need to pay close attention to what we mean when we assert that we “know” another person. There are obviously many different ways of knowing
someone, some utilitarian, others desire-driven, some superficial, others intensely intuitive, and there is little reason to assume that any one version of our image of the other—what we believe we know about the other—is the accurate one. In effect, the fact that the other can be viewed from various perspectives at once forces us to regard the other as a multifaceted and ever-shifting entity who is no less complicated,
no less dependent on context and setting, than we are ourselves. Most important, it asks us to recognize that the other does not possess transparent knowledge of itself either—that what we deem uncanny or
unknowable about the other is often experienced as such by the other as well. From this viewpoint, the idea that we could ever know the other in any certain fashion is a curiously arrogant assumption. And it
is also peculiar in the sense that it is often precisely the other’s mysterious opacity that elicits our desire—that makes the other of interest to us—in the first place. Why, then, are we so devoted to solving the other’s secret?”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Lacan implies that learning to live without the kinds of fantasies that protect us from our lack entails an epistemological leap to a vastly different existential attitude. In particular, Lacan invites us to acknowledge that regardless of all the busy and clamorous activity that we habitually undertake in order to suppress or ignore our lack, deep down we know that there will always be moments when it breaks out into the open with the piercing clarity and sadness of a foghorn. No matter how many layers of fantasy we wrap around this hollow in our hearts, it reverberates through us like a muted but persistent echo that carries the uncanny messages of what most terrifies us about ourselves. From a Lacanian viewpoint, our existential assignment is to heed that echo, to withstand moments when nothing fills the void, and to work through the realization that neither we nor the world —nor any of the objects of this world— can ever live up to the perfection of our fantasies. Our task, in other words, is to learn to endure the sharp points of existence without being irrevocably devastated.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Although psychoanalysis recognizes that the past shapes both the present and the future, we have seen that an excessive faithfulness to the past can prevent us from gracefully entering the art of living. In this context, every new delight, every novel allegiance, induces us toward this art to the degree that it empowers us to develop a more discerning relationship to our past. This is not a matter of repressing the past, for as I previously indicated, this would merely convert what is traumatic about this past into symptoms and repetition compulsions. Rather, it is a way to go on with our lives without letting the ordeals of the past diminish our aptitude for aliveness in the present. Though the present is always imbued by the dissatisfactions and wounding aggressions of the past, we can learn to hold ourselves open to the myriad existential opportunities that emerge in the course of our ongoing process of fashioning a singular identity. We can, for example, feel deep sorrow or regret about past betrayals, abandonments, lost loves, or missed chances, yet still know how to welcome new loves and interpersonal alliances. Even if it is the case that the best we can accomplish at any given moment is to get one step closer to living the life that we want to live, we can activate our particular art of living to ensure that the step we take is a feisty one.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“There are hence more or less productive, more or less imaginatively inspired, ways to idealize. An idealizing elaboration of qualities that the other to some degree possesses—and enjoys possessing—is less damaging than worshipping (and insisting on) qualities that do not in any way correspond to how the other views itself. And even with idealizations that reflect the other’s self-image, it is vital to allow ample room for disappointment. An expectation of consistency—an expectation that the other will always meet our ideal—is disastrous in robbing the other of the capacity to be less than perfect. It is, in other words, important to recognize the transient nature of all idealizations. Even though the other’s adored features may not be wholly illusory—even though they may connect to something deeply meaningful in the
other’s being—the expectation that they are entirely dependable inevitably is. In the same way that we need to be able to tolerate multiple and conflicting readings of ourselves, we need to come to terms with the manifold and ever-evolving realities of the other. The worst we can do is to fix the other into a static ideal, or to measure it against an inflexible external standard. As Stephen Mitchell explains, whether
fantasies “are enriching or depleting depends on the way they are positioned in relation to actuality. Do they encourage an episodic selectivity and elaboration of the beauty of the partner? Or do they foster the illusion that there are other potential partners in the world who are only beautiful and never disappointing?”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“In other words, there is an important difference between idealizations that are ignited by some (visible or invisible) detail of the other’s being that we find appealing, and ones that arise from, and faithfully cater to, the self-serving circuit of our fantasies of interpersonal gratification. It is, moreover, crucial to keep in mind that our idealized vision of the other is merely one way of approaching the other—that it does not sum up or capture the other’s entire being—because the moment we equate our idealized vision with the other’s “essence,” we desecrate the other’s status as a creature of open-ended becoming.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“The matter might be summed up as follows: creativity calls for a disorderly and passionate element that is capable of breathing life into the imaginative process, yet it also demands a measure of discipline, for without discipline the disorderly and passionate element—however powerfully enlivening it might be—might not amount to anything concrete. Nietzsche in fact maintains that what we ordinarily conceive of as creative “freedom” is always in the final analysis a function of “unfreedom,” for it is only when the artist subjects herself to a strict regimen of rules and regulations that inspiration in any tangible form can take place. From such restraint, Nietzsche proposes, “there always emerges and has always emerged in the long run something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth, for example virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, refined, mad and divine.”
According to this account, it is the artist’s self-discipline that establishes the confines within which the asocial and disordered elements of the creative process can be transformed into something spectacularly appealing. At the same time, too ruthless a repression of these elements would result in insipid and purely derivative art. This is to contend that discipline alone is not enough to engender sublime art, for even though it often manages to give rise to highly cultured and graceful forms of beauty, it lacks the raw energy and vitality to generate something truly inspired. Likewise, the asocial aspects of our subjectivity alone are not enough to produce transcendent art, for though they possess raw energy and vitality, they lack the element of restraint that is indispensable to transform this energy and vitality into a stirring work of art. In this sense, it is the delicate balance between the tamed and the untamed aspects of existence that ignites the embers of awe-inducing creativity. Art that does not welcome the asocial, like rationality that does not contain a dose of irrationality, will shrivel up and die of its own indolence.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Most of us are used to the idea that our relationships with others induce the psyche to prosper. But I would say that solitude holds its own particular promise of psychic rekindling. This is the case because when the external world fades into the background, when our desire for the world is subdued, we have room for the kind of self-reflexivity that can, retroactively, make sense of the opacity of our social networks. As a matter of fact, if solitude sometimes appears selfish, it may well be because the solitary subject hauls the spoils of sociality into the secret labyrinth of its seclusion. Yet, in the long run, there is also a hospitability to solitude in the sense that it recharges us to better meet the worries and vulnerabilities of others. If the longing for solitude indicates that we are tired of talking, the (voluntary) breaking of solitude, like the breaking of a fast, indicates that we are once again hungry for words.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“The imagination is wary of interruptions, of those affairs of the world that break its delicate threads and destroy its elusive edifices. Indeed, it may well be that solitude is not only necessary for the successful execution of creative projects but, more broadly speaking, one of the prerequisites of the type of psyche that is capable of conceiving such projects in the first place. By this I do not intend to suggest that all modes of creativity require solitude, or that solitude is the only way to intensify the psyche, but merely that the habitual celebration of sociality and interpersonal relationships that characterizes our culture overlooks the generative (and regenerative) dimensions of solitude. And it hinders our ability to adequately appreciate the possibility that “intersubjectivity” can take on the form of relating to people who are—for the moment or for all eternity—absent from our lives.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“It would be difficult to ignore the impression that there exists a connection of some sort between creativity and solitude, that creativity commonly involves a more or less prolonged retraction of psychic energies from the external world.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Stephen Mitchell remarks that one of the bitter paradoxes of love is that our desperate efforts to render it secure destroy the very passion on which it is premised; when we seek to minimize the risks of love and guarantee the safety of our relationship, we by definition under- mine “the preconditions of desire, which requires robust imagination to breathe and thrive.” What is more, we tend to try to reduce the treat of love by aspiring to possess the beloved other even when we know full well that the possibility of losing the other is an inherent component of eros. In the previous chapter, I analyzed the manner in which fantasies limit our existential options by making our lives seem more coherent and predictable than they actually are. Along similar lines, Mitchell suggests that our fantasies of having “ownership” over the other—as well as the related idea that we can take steps to protect the future of the relationship against the tug of the unanticipated—in the long run slay passion, for it is only insofar as the other is not possessed, that the other retains an independent identity and existential space, that it remains of interest to us. Our endeavor to secure what is, by its very nature, insecure therefore suffocates the very thing that we are attempting to preserve.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“This means that, along with our specific losses, we need also to learn to mourn the very notion of permanence. By this I of course do not wish to argue that there is no value in long-term commitments. And I am also not suggesting that we should not retain deep psychic attachments to our past. I am merely saying that an awareness of transience makes loss—and the life-giving transformation that loss facilitates—tolerable. We might in fact do well to enter into intimate relationships with the understanding that, no matter how important or meaningful a given relationship is to us, the death of the relationship is in some ways with us from its very beginning; the ending of each of our relationships is built into its composition from the start. The capacity to recognize this is not a matter of cynicism, but rather an invitation to esteem each moment for what that moment can yield, without worrying unduly about whether or not the relationship comes to an end. Indeed, this insight might allow us to give up our attempts to control what resides beyond our capacity to master. An attempt to control things is often an effort to make something last beyond its natural lifespan: to pro- long love that has outlived its ardor; to sustain relationships that have lost their radiance; to resuscitate a spark that has long been extinguished. In the long run, such attempts lead to wooden psychic lives and equally wooden relationships.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Phillips posits that what makes us suffer—what makes us bad and bitter losers, as it were—is precisely
the fact that we expect permanence out of things that are by their very nature transient. “It is as though,” he asserts, “we have added to the ordinary suffering of biological life the extraordinary suffering of our
immortal longings, of our will to permanence. As though our equating of value with duration over time—good relationships, like great art, are the ones that last: truths are eternal essences amid the ruinous wastes of time, and so on—straightforwardly turns a blind eye to all the evidence.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Accordingly, separation is an indispensable component of character building, of the process of becoming a person that I have described in this book, in the sense that our identity by necessity reflects the history of our losses. I would in fact go so far as to propose that we cannot evolve as creatures of psychic strength and versatility without repeated experiences of loss—that although our inner lives are obviously fostered by our various interpersonal relationships, the loss of such relationships may be equally important in shaping our individuality. This argument goes further than the Lacanian proposition that subjectivity comes into being as a consequence of separation, for it implies that object loss is conducive to psychic multidimensionality.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“One way to understand the matter is to recognize that when we mourn, we not only grieve the vanishing of treasured objects, but also those versions of ourselves that thrived within a particular (now lost) relational dynamic. In this manner, loss compels us to discard outmoded facets of the self. While this may give rise to bouts of regret and nostalgia, in the final analysis it serves to replenish the self in that it engenders new inner intensities and unforeseen psychic possibilities.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as “boundary-creating” experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“In this context, it is worth evoking Nietzsche’s distinction between self-negating (ponderous) and cheerful (affirmative) forms of asceticism. If self-negating asceticism characterizes the mortified existence of the individual who is ruled by defensive and self-defeating ressentiment, cheerful asceticism—the kind of self-limitation that enhances the individual’s sense of power—is a precondition of innovation. In both instances, the subject’s “will to power”—the elemental energy that drives its actions in the world—is being tamed and restrained, but while self-negating asceticism wears down the spirit, cheerful asceticism distills and strengthens it. Self-negating asceticism, then, is a pathological formation that depletes the subject’s energy, whereas cheerful asceticism channels it into vigorously life-enriching avenues. Likewise, in more Freudian vocabulary, the symptom arrests the subject’s desire, whereas sublimation displaces it indefinitely, enhancing the subject’s appetite for uncharted (and therefore potentially vitalizing) forms of life. If the symptom ensues from, and lends expression to, a blockage of unconscious energies, sublimation ensures that these energies flow in an unencumbered manner. This is why Freud asks us to work our way from symptoms to creative expression; creativity, for him, is a means of fluently releasing energies that would otherwise be sacrificed to painful symptoms.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“One reason that Freud views creativity as a valuable antidote to symptoms—and let us recall that symptoms are, by definition, indicators of psychic inflexibility—is that he believes it to be an active means of mourning loss.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Psychoanalysis could be argued to be a practice of negotiating the inevitable tension between being a subject (being subjected to the symbolic order) and being a unique individual (having a singular identity that somehow surpasses the parameters of that order). We are of course always both at once, but it is only as individuals that we feel fully engaged in our lives. What I have tried to demonstrate is that, in Lacanian terms, the more we are able to liberate ourselves from the spell of fantasies—the more we are able to accept lack as constitutive of our identity—the better our chances for singularity. The act of disbanding
fantasies—and of developing a degree of self-reflexivity with regard to the Other—empowers us to move from unconscious (passive) repetition of inert existential patterns to a more poetic and imaginative (active) connection with the world; it allows us to transition from unconscious fantasies that encumber our existence to the kinds of life-enriching (imaginative) fantasies that I previously linked to psychic aliveness. Strangely enough, although the Other does not possess answers to our life-defining questions, the significatory resources that the Other makes available to us enable us to devise the kinds of answers that we can—always tentatively and provisionally—live with. One could in fact say that the process of becoming a person, from a distinctively Lacanian point of view, is first and foremost a matter of knowing that even though the question of the “sovereign good” is from the outset closed, questions that sustain us as singular creatures—questions pertaining to desire, creativity, and the passion of self-actualization, for example—are ones that can only be closed by our own (non)actions.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“On this view, it is not only how we die—or face the prospect of our mortality, as phenomenologists like to say—but also how we inhabit language that singularizes us, that gives our identities a distinctive resonance.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“It may of course seem counterintuitive to posit language (however poetic) as a mode of attaining singularity given that, as we have learned, it is precisely language that causes the kind of foundational lack that deprives us of psychic cohesion (and thus of uncontested personal integrity) in the first place. But I believe that it is useful to recognize the distinction between the formative experience of being subjected to a preexisting order of meanings on the one hand, and our subsequent capacity to participate in the shaping of that order on the other. The fact that we begin our lives in a position of helplessness with regard to the symbolic Other should not be taken to mean that we will never be able to gain agency in relation to it. This is why I have sought to demonstrate that even if our initial encounter with the signifier is devastating in that it causes lack and alienation, the signifier at the same time grants us access to structures of meaning-production that we can subsequently use to cope with this alienation. And I have tried to show that the fact that we cannot fill our inner void once and for all—that we cannot undo alienation—is precisely what sustains us as creatures of psychic potentiality.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“Lacan therefore concedes that although language functions as an impersonal structure into which we are introduced at birth, we are nevertheless capable of giving it a little “nudge” that transforms it into something that is uniquely ours. Indeed, the fact that each of us has the power—in however limited a degree—to push aside congealed forms of meaning gives us a measure of creative freedom. That is, although being compelled to participate in a common symbolic system on one level deprives us of personal distinctiveness, on another level it offers us the possibility of carving out a singular place within that order, of claiming language for our own purposes; we can particularize or personalize the discourse that we are asked to inhabit. This is one way to comprehend what it might mean to insist on the possibility of agency—on the fact that we are not merely subservient to hegemonic social structures, but can and do have an impact on these structures; it clarifies why we manage from time to time to rearticulate and reorganize social reality.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“I have proposed that lack gives rise to ever-renewed feats of symbolization. The fantasmatic attempt to deny lack, in contrast, prevents the subject from riding the signifier in innovative ways, for it limits meaning-production to those forms that accord with the worldview promoted by the subject’s foundational fantasies. This implies that it is only by embracing lack that the subject can begin to weave the threads of its life into a psychically supple tapestry. The subject who affirms lack understands—in however inchoate a manner—that lack is not merely a daunting or sterile void, but the precondition of its capacity for imaginative living, including its ability to ask constructive questions about itself and the world. Such questions do not give the subject access to the ultimate meaning of its existence—and even less to that of the world—but, as I have attempted to illustrate in this book, this does not lessen the value of being able to ask them.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“When it comes to fantasy formations, it is therefore essential to distinguish between (1) unconscious fantasies that curb our existential options and (2) imaginative and creative fantasies that allow us to observe the world from novel angles. Lacan’s assault on narcissistic fantasies is directed at the former, whereas his commentary on the poetic potentialities of language could be argued to relate to the latter.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living