Harold Bloom

" Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp- followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists--all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of "cultural studies." For just a little while longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic. "

"The change, all but catastrophic, instead afflicted our intellectual, cultural, educational, and aesthetic spheres, in a kind of Creation-Fall. Robert Hughes has termed what was born "the Culture of Complaint," whose hucksters--academic, journalistic, pseudo-artistic--I've named "the School of Resentment," a rabblement of lemmings leaping off the cliffs into the waters of oblivion."

"If what Walter Pater called "Aesthetic criticism" dies, then what he termed "Aesthetic poetry" must in time die also, since we will cease to know good from bad poetry. By "Aesthetic" in regard both to poetry and to criticism, Pater simply meant "authentic" or "good", since he kept in mind always the Greek meaning of aesthesis: "perceptiveness." If we lose all sense of the aesthetic, then we scarcely will see the difference between Emily Dickinson and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, or between John Ashbery and his weaker imitators."

"So absurd have the professors become that I can see no way to salvage literary study except to abolish tenure. Tenure is an archaic survival anyway, but it becomes pernicious when faculties are crowded by thousands of ideologues, who resent Wordsworth even as they resent Shakespeare. "

"Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect."

"Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader,"

"It was inevitable that the School of Resentment would do its destructive damage to the reading, staging, and interpretation of Shakespeare, whose eminence is the ultimate demonstration of the autonomy of the aesthetic. Cultural poeticians, ostensible feminists, sub-Marxists, and assorted would-be Parisians have given us French Shakespeare, who never wrote a line but instead sat in a tavern while all the "social energies" of early modern Europe pulsated into his quill and created Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, and Cleopatra, with little aid from that mere funnel, the Man from Stratford. It has not been explained (at least to me) just why the social energies favored Shakespeare over Thomas Middleton or John Marston or George Chapman or whoever, but this remarkable notion totally dominates today's academic study of Shakespeare. First, Paris told us that language did the thinking and writing for us, but then Foucault emerged, and Shakespeare went from being language's serf to society's minion. "

"Shakespeare, precisely because he is the only authentic multicultural writer, demonstrated that our modish multiculturalism is a lie, a mask for mediocrity and for the thought-control academic police, the Gestapo of our campuses"

"The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed."

Cavell on Philosophy

"If philosophy is esoteric, that is not because a few men guard its knowledge, but because most men guard themselves against it." -Cavell

Adam Phillips

From 'On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored"
"Psychoanalysis is a story-and a way of telling stories, that makes some people feel better"

"Psychoanalysis-as a form of conversation-is worth having only if it makes our live more interesting, or funnier, or sadder, or more tormented, or whatever it is about ourselves that we value and want to promote; and especially if it helps us find new things about ourselves that we didn't know we could value."

"people have traditionally come for psychoanalytic conversation because the story they are telling themselves about their lives has stopped, or become too painful, or both."

"It is of course difficult to conceive in psychoanalytic terms of an absence that is not, in some way, anticipatory."

From "The Beast in the Nursery"
"All our stories are about what happens to our wishes"

"How do we decide what a good story about wanting is?"

"even to want death you have to be alive. Morality is the way we set limits to wanting; the way we redescribe desiring so that it seems to work for us."

"Desire without something that resists is insufficient, wishy-washy, literally immaterial; it meets with nothing-nothing but itself...but a world that too much resists my desire is uninhabitable, unlivable."

"the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept."

"The child, it seemed to Freud, was the virtuoso of desire, for whom the meaning of life could only be its satisfactions."

"that imaginative hunger called curiosity, which is part of what I'm calling the love of life."

"Freud implies there are three things we have to be able to do (to go on making and taking our pleasures): involve other people, make good our losses, and enjoy (or at least tolerate) conflict."

"inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us."

"And as children take for granted, lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities...and so be delighted by hope."

"psychoanalytic theory....is a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire."

"So how do we become sufficiently interested in our lives to want to go on living them if...interest is something we make?"

"under what condition is interest made, and how do we manage, or plot, to lose it."

"the fact that we are interested at all-and our preconditions for being interested-are every bit as telling as what we happen to be interested in."

"psychoanalysis is the art of making interest out of interest that is stuck"

"every object of desire is an obscure object of desire; leading us to ask both, why this rather than that, and why anything at all?

"It is assumed that there is regret built into desire, because it is imagined by the infant as an act of robbery and damage..."

Lacan: Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Lacan's maxim of psychoanalytic ethics:
"ne pas céder sur son désir"
(Do not give up your desire)

Arendt Human Condition

"men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves"

"It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which freedom would deserve to be won."

'plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.'

"the presence of others who see what we see and hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a full developed private life...will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men."

"There are relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.'[never seek to tell thy love/love that never told can be.]

"without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality ,no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible. "

"through many ages before us-but now not any more-men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives."

"there is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in modern age....than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity."