“It would be sane now to work out how we have become the only animals who can’t bear themselves, and how, if at all, we might become the animals who can. [xxi]
“When we really desire something, or someone, our resistance is likely to take the form of our thinking it too difficult, or not worth the trouble, or impossible.” [28]
“Like all forbidden objects of desire-like the man or woman of our dreams-it bring with it the fear that it may not exist, and the wish that it does not exist (after all, if it does exist, what are we going to do with it when we find it?)
“should we in short, think of our madness, our symptoms, as a toolkit we have evolved for dealing with reality, for getting by; or should we think of them as a kind of truancy from our lives, an evasion of what we need to do, a weakness?” [31]
“…be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting. Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life…” [48]
“as though knowing or acknowledging certain things that are going on around you might drive you mad….” [52]
“our belief in sanity may be the last enclave of our now age-old belief in progress and redemption.” [55]
“the contest between sanity and madness is therefore about the transparency of our intentions, about the extent to which our lives are our own-not subject to darker forces….”
‘the rhetoric of sanity and madness has to do with nothing less than what used to be called the ‘meaning of life’
‘both dawkins and atkins are wondering…what it might be like to be sane in the world discovered by modern physics.
It is sane to keep meaninglessness as bay
‘what dawkins doesn’t consider is why we need a sense of purpose, of meaning, of growth and progress, to feel that our lives are worth living.
‘we assume …that it must, by definition, be sane to believe that life is worth living or at the very least that it is sane to want to believe this.’
‘babies have many of the qualities associated with madness…’
Are adults people who are even better at being children than children are?
The pleasure of mastery replaces the pleasure of gratification; or rather, gratification becomes the mastery of appetite, the pride of self-overcoming’
And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites.’
Lacan calls desire as ‘that without which our lives feel null and void’
‘sanity then, is not something we are born with, but, in varying degrees, painfully acquire.
“all these myths of development and growth and transformation are ways of dealing with the basic fact that life doesn’t work, at least not in the way we want it to work.”
‘it is sane for the child-and as we shall see, for the adult-to go on wanting while being able to acknowledge and deal with the conflicts that wanting involves.’
‘strung out between romance and pornography it is no longer clear what men and women want to use each other for.’
It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are often driven lives.’
‘all the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places: in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death, in our vulnerability as organisms, in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, …in our fall, in our hubris.’
‘human sexuality is surprisingly, and sometimes shockingly, diverse in the forms it can take; and because it is human sexuality it is invested with a range of symbolic significances.
‘instead of asking whether everything (or just some things) is sexual, we should be asking, more pragmatically, how would our lives be better, more interesting, more amusing, more exiting-if we describe them as sexual?
The aggressive element in the sexuality of other animals is evident; but it is sadomasochism that differentiates what is human about human sexuality’
‘this is the double bind that the adolescent is initiated into: it is good to be law abiding, but if you abide by the laws, you will never get what you really want.
‘first, parents and children seem to want more from each other than is good for them. And second, the individuals want more from themselves than is good for them.
‘in short, our sexuality seems to make us unreliable to ourselves and others…’
“It is one of the characteristics of people we call insane that they do not have sufficient regard for life.
“there could be a version of sanity….that may be able to include the possibility that life may not be worth living….
“Like any addiction, our addiction to being alive is an attempt to narrow the albeit overwhelming complexity of our minds.”
Is sex, modern adolescents wonder, a good-enough cause; and if not, what, if anything is?
“the big problem about sex, the adolescent discovers, is that it is so pleasurable. And this pleasure is initially revealed in masturbation.”
“in both acts (suicide and masturbation) what is transgressive is their selfishness, the ruthlessness of their satisfactions.
“In both acts what is dispensed with is the need for other people, either permanently or temporarily.”
“it is this violence, and the violent truthfulness they contain, that has made both suicide and masturbation into such shameful, …absurdly horrifying acts.”
“the self-engrossed individual for whom the future is irrelevant-except the most immediate futures, the moment of release-is our negative ideal; is, in fact, our description of the madman.”
“perhaps it is our profoundest solitariness that is our most forbidden pleasure?
“the key question for the adolescent is: what connection can be made, or is worth making, between his or her masturbatory fantasy-romantic or pornographic-and sexual relations with another person?
‘is masturbatory fantasy the route to other people-a kind of trial action in thought-or a way of insulating one’s desires from others? Is it a refuge, or a way into the world? Sane sex, at its most minimal, may be a form of sociability; it is desire as a medium of contact.
“if there can be some notion of sane sex, it would have to refer to forms of sexuality that were not overly harmful.”
“is there such a thing as harmless sex? And if harmless sex is a contradiction in terms-if there is no sexual excitement without an aggressive intention, no sexual exchange without unpredictable and therefore disturbing consequences-erotic life is above all about damage limitation; about getting away with pleasure seeking, and also getting away from it.
‘the principal legacy of childhood that the adolescent has to work on …First, that sexuality always includes the possibility for harm; and second, that what is desired is forbidden.’
‘We don’t take our sanity for granted…we just prefer to locate our natural insanity at two discrete points; in infancy…and adolescence.’
‘one of our innate assumptions is that change is always crisis…’
‘sanity keeps alive the idea of stability…’
‘leaves the adolescent with one persisting question; can you follow a rule…without trying to break it?
‘adolescence is a crisis-a madness one could say-because the adolescent is trying to work out whether life is worth living…is it worth the trouble, is the pleasure worth the pain?’
‘sex and so called sanity don’t go well together because sexual excitement, whatever else it is, is always about the breaking of rules.’
‘at sex we are not dignified, and our limits can never be taken for granted.
‘if some kind of sanity is something we want but secretly do not desire in our erotic lives, it is because sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known.’
‘how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self?
‘so sanity also describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use as protection against catastrophic change.
‘at the most extreme our fantasies about sanity become our refuge from the new...
A sane choice, a choice that makes too much sense, spells fear of the uncertainty of the future.
‘sanity is a story told by survivors. Sanity, if it comes at all, comes afterward.
‘sanity meant finding ways of not knowing about all the things that might drive you insane were you to know of them.”
‘…sanity becomes a repertoire of avoidances-…it is surprisingly difficult for it not to become that. ‘
‘knowing ourselves and being sane may be mutually exclusive’…’these at least have become our modern suspicions’
‘development of a particular sort; development in the direction of revealing the benefits of the interdependence of human beings on each other. It is sane to believe in, and to live as if there are, good things and people in the world that can help us live our lives. It is sane to be capable of and to get pleasure from innovation, spontaneity, responsiveness, and change.
‘what the sane human cannot be is terrorized, desperate, and remote.
What keeps adults sane is proximity to something akin to the mother’s body. Once…god, Virtues…now it is likely to be a satisfying relationship.]
‘if sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible.
‘autism…schizophrenia…speak of a despair about the beneficence of human exchange.’
Sanity in its narrower definitions deprives us of some necessary tools. It allows us neither the full range of reactions…
‘what vitalizes life…what makes life worth living
‘the sane person has found, or been given, a way of loving life that has made the whole question of whether life is loveable seemingly irrelevant.
Depressed…may not want to die…but cannot always find good reasons for wanting to be alive…or indeed, muster an interest in reasons at all.
‘finding life itself-unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.
‘a capacity to be depressed means being able to recognize something that is true-that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need…depression makes us real, deepens us…
Kleinians…capacity for depression….feature of vision of sanity.
Sanity means loving oneself in the right way, or knowing exactly what about oneself is loveable…
Depression as pathology…illuminates vitality, passion, and engagement
Love of money…will be recognized for what it is….semi-pathological propensities…hand over with shudder to specialist in mental illness.
Keynes believed there had been a moral catastrophe….the mad are ruling the world….
Money, like sexuality, reveals to us something peculiarly disturbing, even pathological, about the nature of our desires.
‘in human beings…appetite can destroy the best things about appetite.
‘,…the primary desire for modern Westerners may simply be to go on desiring…’
‘money gives people an appetite for appetite.
No desiring is far more daunting a prospect than the unavailability of what one desires.’
“money we are reminded, has never stopped people from dying;
‘happiness….is the belated fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness’
‘the infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures.
‘the san adult is always smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests.
‘Freud intimates, that there are animals who do not know what they want; and that in all other creatures the continuity of their needs and wants from birth to death is self evident….it would be a kind of madness for needs to be in doubt
‘what the desire for money reveals to Freud is our hatred of happiness; or fear of satisfaction, our phobia of childhood.’
‘our love of material possessions is a hatred of what we love. Money is the betrayal of childhood.’
‘if the enigma of money is referred back to childhood, money was indeed…like shit…much desired but ultimately useless.
‘…were all preoccupied by the ways in which the appetite for money spoiled people’s appetite for each other.’
‘there is not natural state in which we can live, or to which we can return.’
‘designs for a good life, of which the whole notion of sanity must form a part, have been left to the political theorists.’
‘sanities should be elaborated in the way that diagnoses of pathology are; they should be contested like syndromes, debated as to their causes and constitutions and outcomes, exactly as illnesses are.’
‘for whom is this version of sanity?...for anyone who still wants to use the word; anyone who still gets some pleasure, some inspiration
How ambivalent we are about what we want sanity to mean.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Making Death Thinkable (De Masi)
“The awareness of the end of life is always present in us, and it faces us all the time with anxieties…”
“The idea of death does not only concern our biological destiny, but pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by issues of separation and morning”
“Our culture holds a linear notion of time, according to which individual life, delimited by birth and death, is unique and given only once.”
“As psychoanalysts…we should help every patient to develop their capacity to tolerate the thought of the transience of human life”
“The theoretical formulation of psychoanalysis, founded principally on child development, ….prevented us from appropriately thinking about the question of death”
“how could we enjoy success, love, the birth of a child, the pursuit of ideals, without freeing ourselves, at least temporarily, of the notion of death?
“If death were always present, the awareness of human finite nature would lead to a passive and melancholic acceptance of one’s fate and, ultimately, to a destructive view of life.”
“Although death provokes anxiety, it is precisely the thought of the temporal limit of our life that gives meaning to it.”
“The first concerns the presence or absence of the representation of death in the unconscious; the second links up with the wider theme of separation, loss of objects and loved ones; the third concerns the part played by annihilation anxiety in causing mental suffering.
“The occurrence of death is not exhausted simply by the pain of the separation from our loved ones; it also carries with it an anxiety about our own disappearance into nothingness, about the dissolution of our own identity and personal history.
“whilst in the course of life we can come to terms with our personal losses through the work of mourning, there does not seem to be an equally viable solution when faced with the problem of death.”
“try to understand why death anxiety might be inevitable”
“a subjective self, devoid of the notion of development in time, is inconceivable”…”an essential constituent of our core self, is thrown into question by the inevitable realization of our temporal finiteness.”
“This ineliminable conflict between the psychological illusion of infinite development and the necessarily transient nature of our biological structure is at the root of the anxiety and existential crisis we go through in the course of our lives.”
“The principal hypothesis of this work is that death, as a natural occurrence, is inscribed in our internal world as a psychotic disaster, a state of disintegration of one’s personal identity which is not easy to conceptualise or tolerate.
“The poet (Rilke) admires the beauty of nature, yet he does not derive any pleasure from it; as he is perturbed by the thought that all that beauty is doomed to disappear.”
“Freud concludes that a difficulty in tolerating the transience of things can only have two possible outcomes; one is the melancholia affecting the poet, which prevents him from enjoying beauty, the other leads to a state of endless revolt and dissatisfaction.”
“Freud maintains that the inability to enjoy and appreciate the transience of beauty is due to an inability to mourn.”
“Those who cannot mourn, unconsciously reproach their love object for not being perfect, but only finite as humans are”
“A true capacity to love should entail an appreciation of the object, without the demand that it should always be present or timeless.’
“Life is closed by death, but it is always open to hope, which may be experienced as a denial of the necessary occurrence of death.”
“As human beings, not only do we know what we do not know, but also when we do know something, and we cannot dismiss such knowledge.”
“there have been times in history when the notion of life after death and immortality was an unquestionable assumption”
“Our world would thus strive to bring the repression of death, rooted in life itself, to an institutionalized perfection, pushing the notion of transience to the margins of our collective awareness’
“Ours is probably the first culture that endeavors to provide an answer to the question of death, yet, in reality, it seems to be nothing but an attempt to erase and repress the question itself.”
"...it is necessary to distinguish fear of death, a feeling common to all human beings, from panic, which, instead, torments only some of us."
"at times...those who suffer from excessive death anxiety and panic attacks have been children precociously perturbed by a fear of death.:"
"It would seem that those who experience the most acute death anxiety are those individuals whose early childhood anxieties have not been contained and processed by their primary object."
"in meditation, one is totally absorbed in a pleasurable state, which...calls narcissism, ...regards as a regression to a primitive pre-object phase."
"It follows, however, that if the death instinct and pleasure converge, Freud's hypothesis...becomes untenable.
“The idea of death does not only concern our biological destiny, but pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by issues of separation and morning”
“Our culture holds a linear notion of time, according to which individual life, delimited by birth and death, is unique and given only once.”
“As psychoanalysts…we should help every patient to develop their capacity to tolerate the thought of the transience of human life”
“The theoretical formulation of psychoanalysis, founded principally on child development, ….prevented us from appropriately thinking about the question of death”
“how could we enjoy success, love, the birth of a child, the pursuit of ideals, without freeing ourselves, at least temporarily, of the notion of death?
“If death were always present, the awareness of human finite nature would lead to a passive and melancholic acceptance of one’s fate and, ultimately, to a destructive view of life.”
“Although death provokes anxiety, it is precisely the thought of the temporal limit of our life that gives meaning to it.”
“The first concerns the presence or absence of the representation of death in the unconscious; the second links up with the wider theme of separation, loss of objects and loved ones; the third concerns the part played by annihilation anxiety in causing mental suffering.
“The occurrence of death is not exhausted simply by the pain of the separation from our loved ones; it also carries with it an anxiety about our own disappearance into nothingness, about the dissolution of our own identity and personal history.
“whilst in the course of life we can come to terms with our personal losses through the work of mourning, there does not seem to be an equally viable solution when faced with the problem of death.”
“try to understand why death anxiety might be inevitable”
“a subjective self, devoid of the notion of development in time, is inconceivable”…”an essential constituent of our core self, is thrown into question by the inevitable realization of our temporal finiteness.”
“This ineliminable conflict between the psychological illusion of infinite development and the necessarily transient nature of our biological structure is at the root of the anxiety and existential crisis we go through in the course of our lives.”
“The principal hypothesis of this work is that death, as a natural occurrence, is inscribed in our internal world as a psychotic disaster, a state of disintegration of one’s personal identity which is not easy to conceptualise or tolerate.
“The poet (Rilke) admires the beauty of nature, yet he does not derive any pleasure from it; as he is perturbed by the thought that all that beauty is doomed to disappear.”
“Freud concludes that a difficulty in tolerating the transience of things can only have two possible outcomes; one is the melancholia affecting the poet, which prevents him from enjoying beauty, the other leads to a state of endless revolt and dissatisfaction.”
“Freud maintains that the inability to enjoy and appreciate the transience of beauty is due to an inability to mourn.”
“Those who cannot mourn, unconsciously reproach their love object for not being perfect, but only finite as humans are”
“A true capacity to love should entail an appreciation of the object, without the demand that it should always be present or timeless.’
“Life is closed by death, but it is always open to hope, which may be experienced as a denial of the necessary occurrence of death.”
“As human beings, not only do we know what we do not know, but also when we do know something, and we cannot dismiss such knowledge.”
“there have been times in history when the notion of life after death and immortality was an unquestionable assumption”
“Our world would thus strive to bring the repression of death, rooted in life itself, to an institutionalized perfection, pushing the notion of transience to the margins of our collective awareness’
“Ours is probably the first culture that endeavors to provide an answer to the question of death, yet, in reality, it seems to be nothing but an attempt to erase and repress the question itself.”
"...it is necessary to distinguish fear of death, a feeling common to all human beings, from panic, which, instead, torments only some of us."
"at times...those who suffer from excessive death anxiety and panic attacks have been children precociously perturbed by a fear of death.:"
"It would seem that those who experience the most acute death anxiety are those individuals whose early childhood anxieties have not been contained and processed by their primary object."
"in meditation, one is totally absorbed in a pleasurable state, which...calls narcissism, ...regards as a regression to a primitive pre-object phase."
"It follows, however, that if the death instinct and pleasure converge, Freud's hypothesis...becomes untenable.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Irigaray: The Way of Love
“the book outlines another philosophy, in a way a philosophy of the feminine, where the values of intersubjectivity, of dialogue in difference, of attending to present life, in its concrete and sensible aspects, will be recognized and raised to the level of wisdom” [vii]
“until today, what we have found is, at best, to integrate the other: in our country, our culture, our house.”
“That does not yet signify meeting with the other, speaking with the other, loving with the other.”
“The book is in search of gestures, including gestures in language, which could help on the way to nearness, and in order to cultivate it.”
“This implies another relation with language, a relation which favors the act of speech in the present, and not language already existing and codified.”
“And such an experience of speech, which is irreducible to any other, is related to an experience of listening-to”
“We have to listen to the present speaking of the other in its irreducible difference with a view to the way through which we could correspond to it in faithfulness to ourselves.”
“…Heidegger did not venture, those of the meeting with an other, another who is different while being the nearest to ourselves; the clearing for the advent of a dialogue or conversation between the two parts of humanity in the respect of their otherness to one another.”
“Such a human “Being” is always in becoming even if it exists, or ought to exist, in every instant.”
“a becoming oneself which does not stay in suspension in immutable truths or essences but which provides a faithfulness to oneself in becoming. Such faithfulness is indispensible for a meeting with the other, a dialoguing with the other, a loving with the other. Without it we fall back into fusion, or into couples of opposites whose relation will be governed by hierarchy, submission of one to the other, sadomasochism.”
“objective is to stage a relation of love and of dialogue between two subjects regardless of any object…”
“…to outline the frame of a loving encounter, particularly an encounter able to dialogue in difference, the most paradigmatic and universal difference being sexual difference.”
“the wisdom of which these technicians of the logos are enamored is sometimes a knowing how to die, but seldom the apprenticeship to a knowing how to live.”
“A learned professor from the Sorbonne proves to be a very mediocre life companion: a little boy in love and a lover of boys rather than women. It was already true at the time of Plato’s Banquet.
“Our rational tradition has been much concerned with ‘speaking about’ but has reduced ‘speaking with’ to a speaking together about the same things.”
“…diversity takes place not only between cultures but between subjects, and in a paradigmatic manner between man and woman.”
“…the ability to say oneself to the other without for all that forcing upon the other one’s truth. “
“what henceforth represents the absolute to be attained is the perfection of the relation-never accomplished. Without confusing it once, once again, with some horizon defined by death. Or submitting it to a past plenitude or an ideal future, which amounts partially to the same thing.”
”For the vertical transcendence of the absolute-of the Truth, of the Idea, of the Other-is in a way substituted a respect toward the horizontal transcendence of the other which calls for a different discourse, a different logic, a different relation to perfection. “
“The mastery of nature and of the world is transformed into the elaboration of a shared universe.”
“until today, what we have found is, at best, to integrate the other: in our country, our culture, our house.”
“That does not yet signify meeting with the other, speaking with the other, loving with the other.”
“The book is in search of gestures, including gestures in language, which could help on the way to nearness, and in order to cultivate it.”
“This implies another relation with language, a relation which favors the act of speech in the present, and not language already existing and codified.”
“And such an experience of speech, which is irreducible to any other, is related to an experience of listening-to”
“We have to listen to the present speaking of the other in its irreducible difference with a view to the way through which we could correspond to it in faithfulness to ourselves.”
“…Heidegger did not venture, those of the meeting with an other, another who is different while being the nearest to ourselves; the clearing for the advent of a dialogue or conversation between the two parts of humanity in the respect of their otherness to one another.”
“Such a human “Being” is always in becoming even if it exists, or ought to exist, in every instant.”
“a becoming oneself which does not stay in suspension in immutable truths or essences but which provides a faithfulness to oneself in becoming. Such faithfulness is indispensible for a meeting with the other, a dialoguing with the other, a loving with the other. Without it we fall back into fusion, or into couples of opposites whose relation will be governed by hierarchy, submission of one to the other, sadomasochism.”
“objective is to stage a relation of love and of dialogue between two subjects regardless of any object…”
“…to outline the frame of a loving encounter, particularly an encounter able to dialogue in difference, the most paradigmatic and universal difference being sexual difference.”
“the wisdom of which these technicians of the logos are enamored is sometimes a knowing how to die, but seldom the apprenticeship to a knowing how to live.”
“A learned professor from the Sorbonne proves to be a very mediocre life companion: a little boy in love and a lover of boys rather than women. It was already true at the time of Plato’s Banquet.
“Our rational tradition has been much concerned with ‘speaking about’ but has reduced ‘speaking with’ to a speaking together about the same things.”
“…diversity takes place not only between cultures but between subjects, and in a paradigmatic manner between man and woman.”
“…the ability to say oneself to the other without for all that forcing upon the other one’s truth. “
“what henceforth represents the absolute to be attained is the perfection of the relation-never accomplished. Without confusing it once, once again, with some horizon defined by death. Or submitting it to a past plenitude or an ideal future, which amounts partially to the same thing.”
”For the vertical transcendence of the absolute-of the Truth, of the Idea, of the Other-is in a way substituted a respect toward the horizontal transcendence of the other which calls for a different discourse, a different logic, a different relation to perfection. “
“The mastery of nature and of the world is transformed into the elaboration of a shared universe.”
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Intimacies: Bersani/Phillips
Intimacies
psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy..."
"new story...that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past."
"the question then becomes, what would it be like to expect nothing to take place?"
"lacan places the unconscious as between perception and consciousness, an intriguing alternative to the more orthodox view of the unconscious in depth psychology as behind or below the consciousness.
possibility of de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of analytic exchange.
Only now, with their impersonal intimacy divested of sexual longings and anxieties, will they perhaps be able "to think and feel and speak freely."...a special talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk....it is conversation suspended in virtuality....as never more than potential being.
"In the analytic exchange, the self-hypotheses of the unconscious is realized-more exactly, suspended in the real-only in talk. And this talk may be the only imaginable form of nondestructive jouissance, the jouissance of giving and receiving, through embodied language, the subjecthood of others.
"we may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to account for our inability to love others, and ourselves...its greatness may lie in its insistence on a human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever."
FReuds most profound originality...is to propose not only that satisfied aggression is accompanied by an erotic excitement, that it produces narcissistic jouissance, but also, and more radically, that the sexualizing of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego."
"What is uniquely psychoanalytic...is the notion that the pleasurable power of satisfied aggression is itself a threat to the agent of aggression."
"Thus, sadistically motivated narcissism is also masochistically satisfying."
psychoanalysis is certainly not-at least not in its most original and profound discoveries-an ego-psychology; and yet it recognizes the indispensable function of the ego's capacity to reason and judge in the subject's efforts to protect himself or herself from the drives-in particular, the drive toward destructive juissance-that are the distinctive discovery of psychoanalysis."
"The self-purifying move is the super-ego's 'morality'.
"There is very little evidence of a rational will effectively controlling the ego's expansions, arresting it at the size or stage of human sense of individual dignity and the equally humane respect for the worth of other, similarly restrained egos. Psychoanalysis has decisively discredited any such rationalistic dream"
"might the excitement of the hyperbolized ego be forestalled not by the rational will but by a nondestructive eroticizing of the ego? I will attempt to describe a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other."
"every theory of love is, necesssarily, a theory of object relations"
"Love is transitive; to conceptualize it is to address not only the question of how we choose objects to love, but also, more fundamentally, the very possibility of a subject loving an object...from the very beginning psychoanalysis has been skeptical about that possibility."
"the resurrected object may really be the loving subject, a self we lovingly recover at the very moment we may wish to celebrate our openness to the world..."
"The person who will re-present this woman....is typically the object of an overestimaization, and idealization. "
"Freud traces the overvaluation of the loved one back to the subject's infantile narcisism."
Thus even in the case presented as the closest to pure object love, the loved one carries the burden of being identified with two other love objects that have nothing to do with her: the man's mother and his own idealized infantile ego.
"What, then, can it mean, from a Freudian point of view, to say that we should or even can love others 'for themselves'?
'the problem is how their can be love for another person'
"from the psychoanalytic perspective....a theory of love can't help but be a demystification of love. Other theories of all the different types of love share one assumption: in love, the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness."
"The theory of love adumbrated in Freud and Lacan is demystifying in the sense that it subverts the premise about being on which love is founded, the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness. WE love only ourselves
"if we think about love seriously, by which I mean if we seriously take love to be a narcissistic extravagance, then we will acknowledge that, first of all, simply willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact, and, secondly, that they myth of love can become its truth only if we reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself'
"...no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system."
"Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?"
"...profound continuity, despite the great difference, between the modern and ancient concepts of love. In both cases, love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination."
"the soul that pursues "that which really is what it is" is, then, not pure lack, ....it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation. The lover seeks to make the lover like himself, but this has nothing to do with the specularity of personal narcissism"
"He chooses a boy...who already has the lover's type of being....and then...'pours into the boy's soul more of the particular god's inspiration'....Lovers are at the same time attempting to make the boy more like himself.
"the lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share.
far from suppressing the other, the Socratic lover's narcissims suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served.
"...anomaly in Greek love: erotic reciprocity. The beloved becomes a lover as the result of being loved"
"The boy loves a soul that he both is and is becoming, the latter as a result of the lover's pouring more and more into him the qualities of the god whose nature the lover had already seen in the boy"
"the miracle in all this is that when we describe this love as narcissistic, we must also say that it is pure object-love."
What both the beloved and the lover love are 'secrets' about themselves and the truth about the other.
"narcissistic love in both the lover and the beloved is exactly identical to a perfect knowledge of otherness."
"I call this love impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism"
"In the generous narcissism of the exchange between Socratic lovers, each partner demands of the other...that he reflect the lover's type of being, his universal singularity (and not his psychological particularities, his personal difference), by recognizing and cultivating that singularity as his own most pervasive, most pressing potentiality.
If we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissim, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized , or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.
experience of belonging to a family of singularity...might make us sensitive to the ontological status of difference...I called the nonthreatening supplement of sameness in Homos.
Socratic ideality is more cultivated than it is contemplated.
cultivated through dialogue-intrinsically unending dialogue, for we are always either moving toward or falling away from the being it is our greatest happiness to 're-find' in others.
"Transference love, as Freud says, 'consists of reissuing old components and repeating infantile reactions. But that is always the essence of falling in love."
"most striking...the violence entailed in the move from narcissism toward a so called object"
"there is, one might say, a tragic flaw in this absurdly self-defeating story. In promoting the developmental necessity of overcoming narcissism, object relations theorists have been, as it were, encouraging the greatest possible violence between people."
"in talking against narcissism...psychoanalysts have created the problem they have been trying to solve."
"why is self-destructiveness equated with self-hatred? why is self-love equated with hatred of reality?
As a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard won (i.e., defensive) self knowledge; so called self knowledge become....becomes the stark reversal of traditional priorities, becomes the obstacle rather than the instrument of the individual's satisfaction.
"masochism...as a developmental achievement-that for Bersani through Freud, is the way to go."
What massochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to."
"freud, like lacan, is struck by how difficult it is for the modern individual to maintain his appetite for appetite; that the acquisition of (modern) identity involves the sacrificing of desire, and identity without desire is a futile passion."
"knowing what one wants is an incitement to violence"
"Bersani famously remarked in his 1987 essay, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' 'There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.'
If selfhood is your object of desire, sexuality will be definition become a persecution; it will make a mockery where there should have been satisfaction.
So there is selfhood or jouissance: the (sadistic) ego with its developmental achievements, its masterful plausibility, or the self-shattering (masochistic) ego....
the ways in which we are invited to 'resists projects of subjection' are likely to subject us to something.
"if sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of non violence."
"we have to imagine a social world...as Bersani intimates...in which the fundamental question, the abiding concern is, 'do you want to have sex with me?' everything follows from that answer.
once the sexual is staged as the losing of self rather than its assertion or consolidation or indeed triumph, the obsession with sex becomes an obsession with a certain kind of love."
Bersani want to imagine forms of desire that are not forms of revenge.
The primary loss to be mourned is for the violence necessitated by the protection of selfhood....we would have to learn to stop taking sex personally.
the fears to be faced, are inextricable from the losses to be mourned. The fear of jouissance, ...not to mention the dread of 'modes of ascesis'...is not to be underestimated....
Bersani seems to suggest....that we tend not to be sufficiently narcisistic.'
"To have the courage of one's narcissism-to find a version of narcissism that is preservative ate once of survival and pleasure-would be to have the courage of one's wish for more life rather than less.
what bersani calls 'willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others' may not be a commitment to others-to the so called otherness of others, to other people as so-called ends in themselves- but a commitment to our own hatred. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.
psychoanalysis may have relieved us of the ridiculous demand to love others for themselves, and at the same time demanded that we do nothing less. Bersani wants to keep ope....the question of what we might love others for, what in others we might love that would curb the violence in our human-all-too-human personal relations.
'essentially it is the function of judgment to make two kinds of decision. It has to decide whether or not a thing posseses a certain property, and whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality.
"do I love it because it is inside me, or is it inside me because I love it?
the original version of the question do you want to have sex with me? would be the question do I want to eat you or spit you out?
for something to be loveable it must be already inside one, or we must want it to be inside.
it is as though the ego already knows its own mind. Nothing can be unrecognizable, nothing can be paradoxical, nothing can be a mixed bag, nothing can be both inside and outside.
...our preferred model of love relations, this loving of the other for their difference. It is a picture we cannot afford not to do without....
love as recovery-love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother-is bound to be a furious project.
what we call love is our hatred of the future, and it is because other people represent our future objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.
the ego, for its very survival, has to seek out new (i.e. other) objects that it cannot bear because they are new; and it is prohibited by incest taboo from seeking out the old object that it desires, and cannot bear because they are forbiddden.
if the ego's project is (psychic) survival, rage is going to be the order of the day.
we need a new vocabulary, new ways of putting what can go on between people that do not presume a lethal antagonism.
psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy..."
"new story...that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past."
"the question then becomes, what would it be like to expect nothing to take place?"
"lacan places the unconscious as between perception and consciousness, an intriguing alternative to the more orthodox view of the unconscious in depth psychology as behind or below the consciousness.
possibility of de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of analytic exchange.
Only now, with their impersonal intimacy divested of sexual longings and anxieties, will they perhaps be able "to think and feel and speak freely."...a special talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk....it is conversation suspended in virtuality....as never more than potential being.
"In the analytic exchange, the self-hypotheses of the unconscious is realized-more exactly, suspended in the real-only in talk. And this talk may be the only imaginable form of nondestructive jouissance, the jouissance of giving and receiving, through embodied language, the subjecthood of others.
"we may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to account for our inability to love others, and ourselves...its greatness may lie in its insistence on a human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever."
FReuds most profound originality...is to propose not only that satisfied aggression is accompanied by an erotic excitement, that it produces narcissistic jouissance, but also, and more radically, that the sexualizing of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego."
"What is uniquely psychoanalytic...is the notion that the pleasurable power of satisfied aggression is itself a threat to the agent of aggression."
"Thus, sadistically motivated narcissism is also masochistically satisfying."
psychoanalysis is certainly not-at least not in its most original and profound discoveries-an ego-psychology; and yet it recognizes the indispensable function of the ego's capacity to reason and judge in the subject's efforts to protect himself or herself from the drives-in particular, the drive toward destructive juissance-that are the distinctive discovery of psychoanalysis."
"The self-purifying move is the super-ego's 'morality'.
"There is very little evidence of a rational will effectively controlling the ego's expansions, arresting it at the size or stage of human sense of individual dignity and the equally humane respect for the worth of other, similarly restrained egos. Psychoanalysis has decisively discredited any such rationalistic dream"
"might the excitement of the hyperbolized ego be forestalled not by the rational will but by a nondestructive eroticizing of the ego? I will attempt to describe a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other."
"every theory of love is, necesssarily, a theory of object relations"
"Love is transitive; to conceptualize it is to address not only the question of how we choose objects to love, but also, more fundamentally, the very possibility of a subject loving an object...from the very beginning psychoanalysis has been skeptical about that possibility."
"the resurrected object may really be the loving subject, a self we lovingly recover at the very moment we may wish to celebrate our openness to the world..."
"The person who will re-present this woman....is typically the object of an overestimaization, and idealization. "
"Freud traces the overvaluation of the loved one back to the subject's infantile narcisism."
Thus even in the case presented as the closest to pure object love, the loved one carries the burden of being identified with two other love objects that have nothing to do with her: the man's mother and his own idealized infantile ego.
"What, then, can it mean, from a Freudian point of view, to say that we should or even can love others 'for themselves'?
'the problem is how their can be love for another person'
"from the psychoanalytic perspective....a theory of love can't help but be a demystification of love. Other theories of all the different types of love share one assumption: in love, the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness."
"The theory of love adumbrated in Freud and Lacan is demystifying in the sense that it subverts the premise about being on which love is founded, the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness. WE love only ourselves
"if we think about love seriously, by which I mean if we seriously take love to be a narcissistic extravagance, then we will acknowledge that, first of all, simply willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact, and, secondly, that they myth of love can become its truth only if we reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself'
"...no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system."
"Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?"
"...profound continuity, despite the great difference, between the modern and ancient concepts of love. In both cases, love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination."
"the soul that pursues "that which really is what it is" is, then, not pure lack, ....it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation. The lover seeks to make the lover like himself, but this has nothing to do with the specularity of personal narcissism"
"He chooses a boy...who already has the lover's type of being....and then...'pours into the boy's soul more of the particular god's inspiration'....Lovers are at the same time attempting to make the boy more like himself.
"the lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share.
far from suppressing the other, the Socratic lover's narcissims suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served.
"...anomaly in Greek love: erotic reciprocity. The beloved becomes a lover as the result of being loved"
"The boy loves a soul that he both is and is becoming, the latter as a result of the lover's pouring more and more into him the qualities of the god whose nature the lover had already seen in the boy"
"the miracle in all this is that when we describe this love as narcissistic, we must also say that it is pure object-love."
What both the beloved and the lover love are 'secrets' about themselves and the truth about the other.
"narcissistic love in both the lover and the beloved is exactly identical to a perfect knowledge of otherness."
"I call this love impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism"
"In the generous narcissism of the exchange between Socratic lovers, each partner demands of the other...that he reflect the lover's type of being, his universal singularity (and not his psychological particularities, his personal difference), by recognizing and cultivating that singularity as his own most pervasive, most pressing potentiality.
If we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissim, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized , or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.
experience of belonging to a family of singularity...might make us sensitive to the ontological status of difference...I called the nonthreatening supplement of sameness in Homos.
Socratic ideality is more cultivated than it is contemplated.
cultivated through dialogue-intrinsically unending dialogue, for we are always either moving toward or falling away from the being it is our greatest happiness to 're-find' in others.
"Transference love, as Freud says, 'consists of reissuing old components and repeating infantile reactions. But that is always the essence of falling in love."
"most striking...the violence entailed in the move from narcissism toward a so called object"
"there is, one might say, a tragic flaw in this absurdly self-defeating story. In promoting the developmental necessity of overcoming narcissism, object relations theorists have been, as it were, encouraging the greatest possible violence between people."
"in talking against narcissism...psychoanalysts have created the problem they have been trying to solve."
"why is self-destructiveness equated with self-hatred? why is self-love equated with hatred of reality?
As a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard won (i.e., defensive) self knowledge; so called self knowledge become....becomes the stark reversal of traditional priorities, becomes the obstacle rather than the instrument of the individual's satisfaction.
"masochism...as a developmental achievement-that for Bersani through Freud, is the way to go."
What massochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to."
"freud, like lacan, is struck by how difficult it is for the modern individual to maintain his appetite for appetite; that the acquisition of (modern) identity involves the sacrificing of desire, and identity without desire is a futile passion."
"knowing what one wants is an incitement to violence"
"Bersani famously remarked in his 1987 essay, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' 'There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.'
If selfhood is your object of desire, sexuality will be definition become a persecution; it will make a mockery where there should have been satisfaction.
So there is selfhood or jouissance: the (sadistic) ego with its developmental achievements, its masterful plausibility, or the self-shattering (masochistic) ego....
the ways in which we are invited to 'resists projects of subjection' are likely to subject us to something.
"if sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of non violence."
"we have to imagine a social world...as Bersani intimates...in which the fundamental question, the abiding concern is, 'do you want to have sex with me?' everything follows from that answer.
once the sexual is staged as the losing of self rather than its assertion or consolidation or indeed triumph, the obsession with sex becomes an obsession with a certain kind of love."
Bersani want to imagine forms of desire that are not forms of revenge.
The primary loss to be mourned is for the violence necessitated by the protection of selfhood....we would have to learn to stop taking sex personally.
the fears to be faced, are inextricable from the losses to be mourned. The fear of jouissance, ...not to mention the dread of 'modes of ascesis'...is not to be underestimated....
Bersani seems to suggest....that we tend not to be sufficiently narcisistic.'
"To have the courage of one's narcissism-to find a version of narcissism that is preservative ate once of survival and pleasure-would be to have the courage of one's wish for more life rather than less.
what bersani calls 'willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others' may not be a commitment to others-to the so called otherness of others, to other people as so-called ends in themselves- but a commitment to our own hatred. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.
psychoanalysis may have relieved us of the ridiculous demand to love others for themselves, and at the same time demanded that we do nothing less. Bersani wants to keep ope....the question of what we might love others for, what in others we might love that would curb the violence in our human-all-too-human personal relations.
'essentially it is the function of judgment to make two kinds of decision. It has to decide whether or not a thing posseses a certain property, and whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality.
"do I love it because it is inside me, or is it inside me because I love it?
the original version of the question do you want to have sex with me? would be the question do I want to eat you or spit you out?
for something to be loveable it must be already inside one, or we must want it to be inside.
it is as though the ego already knows its own mind. Nothing can be unrecognizable, nothing can be paradoxical, nothing can be a mixed bag, nothing can be both inside and outside.
...our preferred model of love relations, this loving of the other for their difference. It is a picture we cannot afford not to do without....
love as recovery-love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother-is bound to be a furious project.
what we call love is our hatred of the future, and it is because other people represent our future objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.
the ego, for its very survival, has to seek out new (i.e. other) objects that it cannot bear because they are new; and it is prohibited by incest taboo from seeking out the old object that it desires, and cannot bear because they are forbiddden.
if the ego's project is (psychic) survival, rage is going to be the order of the day.
we need a new vocabulary, new ways of putting what can go on between people that do not presume a lethal antagonism.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)