Symptoms
Slavoj Zizek, Sublime Moments of Solidarity with the Other
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: Absent Centre of Political Ontology (2000)
Forwarded from Symptoms (Divya Ranjan)
What a life! True life’s gone missing. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he rages at me, me, poor soul. The Demon! He is a demon, you know, he’s not a man. “He says: ‘I don’t love women. Love must be reinvented, that’s plain to see. They desire nothing more than a secure position. Security in their grasp, heart and beauty are set aside: nothing remains but cool disdain, dished up daily in modern marriages. Or else I see women with signs of happiness, whom I could have made my fine playmates, devoured all at once by brutes as sensitive as a fencepost… ’
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Forwarded from Symptoms
The logic of a life may be in excess of the distinctions we can make about it. Or to put it another way, how does one know when someone is being self-destructive? To think of oneself as one's own best enemy implies an omniscient knowledge of what is good for one. Passion, as Green eloquently reiterates, leads people to apparently ruin their lives - 'acts which can compromise an entire life' - and yet from which of the many points of view in oneself is it ruin? 'Beyond the wish to recover, Freud says, the analysand clings to his illness,' Green writes, 'and I say that he prefers the object of his passion.' A good life may entail the destruction of all that one apparently values; this is what Green intimates, this is the loophole he adds to our story of the passions. Passion always makes action morally equivocal. The passionate life is a good life because its goodness is always in question.
Adam Phillips, "The Pragmatics of Passion" in Promises, Promises.
Adam Phillips, "The Pragmatics of Passion" in Promises, Promises.
Psychoanalysis, as this book tries to show, teaches us the meaning – the sublimity – of our ignorance; it teaches us that we don’t often know what we are saying (which is another way of describing the demonic: my word is my bond despite me, I always say more than I have agreed to). No amount of scientific research will diminish the waywardness of our words; there will always be the clamour of the incongruous. And psychoanalysts are well placed to take a strong stand against the enemies of ambiguity. But when psychoanalysts spend too much time with each other, they start believing in psychoanalysis. They begin to talk knowingly, like members of a religious cult. It is as if they have understood something. They forget, in other words, that they are only telling stories about stories; and that all stories are subject to an unknowable multiplicity of interpretations. The map becomes the ground beneath their feet; and maps are always a smaller ground. Psychoanalysts need to be attentive to the fascination of fictions, and the morals of words. But they are always tempted to become the experts on the canon of plausible interpretations, of what should be said when. Giving the unconscious elocution lessons is unpromising. In so far as psychoanalysis merely traffics in new proprieties, in fresh forms of respectability, it betrays something of its radical legacy as a conversation in which people cannot help but experiment with themselves.
When psychoanalysis loses its unusual capacity to both comfort and unsettle – and its modern sense that you can’t have one without the other – it becomes either a form of compulsory radicalism or a new way to learn an old obedience. It was, after all, to the subtleties of compliance that Freud addressed himself. If psychoanalysis is not the means to a personal style, it merely hypnotizes people with a vocabulary.
The psychoanalyst and her so-called patient share a project. The psychoanalyst, that is to say, must ask herself not, Am I being a good analyst (am I wild enough, am I orthodox enough, have I said the right thing)? But, What kind of person do I want to be? There are plenty of people who will answer the first question for her. Faced with the second question, there may be terrors but there are no experts.
Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (1995)
When psychoanalysis loses its unusual capacity to both comfort and unsettle – and its modern sense that you can’t have one without the other – it becomes either a form of compulsory radicalism or a new way to learn an old obedience. It was, after all, to the subtleties of compliance that Freud addressed himself. If psychoanalysis is not the means to a personal style, it merely hypnotizes people with a vocabulary.
The psychoanalyst and her so-called patient share a project. The psychoanalyst, that is to say, must ask herself not, Am I being a good analyst (am I wild enough, am I orthodox enough, have I said the right thing)? But, What kind of person do I want to be? There are plenty of people who will answer the first question for her. Faced with the second question, there may be terrors but there are no experts.
Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (1995)
Symptoms
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Joyce_McDougall_Plea_for_a_Measure_of_Abnormality_1993,_Routledge.pdf
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Joyce McDougall, Plea For A Measure of Abnormality (1978)
Forwarded from Symptoms
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Alexander Pope, Ode on Solitude (Wrote by him at 12 years of age)
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Alexander Pope, Ode on Solitude (Wrote by him at 12 years of age)
You have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country [England]; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator: that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lies in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one virtue is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valour, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1735)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1735)