A Septic Sceptic

[sinthematica]

The quality of erotic pleasure does not depend on conscious verbal communication; it depends on fantasies, on an interplay between unconscious minds, from which stem the strangeness and fragility of this pleasure.

Didier Dumas, Sons, Lovers, and Fathers: Understanding Male Sexuality, p. 10 (via sinthematica)

[asepticsceptic]

[asepticsceptic]

[asepticsceptic]

[asepticsceptic]

[blackestdespondency]

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself. The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, P. 104 (via blackestdespondency)

[bookowlnews]

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

ANDRE DUBUS (via alterities)

[tom-isaacs]

Any true feeling cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it. To express it, however is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits. … For this reason an image, an allegory, a form disguising what it means to reveal, has more meaning to the mind than the enlightenment brought about by words or their analysis.

from The Theatre and its Double by Antonin Artaud (via a-garden-of-forking-paths)

[allezenbateau-deactivated201903]

[heteroglossia]

Chronology of L’Année dernière à Marienbad, as drawn on graph paper by Alain Resnais

[asepticsceptic]

In other words, Husserl wanted to explore how thinking can be thinking of thoughts - and, to extend this style of questioning, how perceiving can be perception of perceived objects, how imagination can be imagination of imagined objects, and so forth. [...] these are precisely the questions that drive phenomenological enquiry. In each case, the same 'mystery' announces itself: that consciousness is consciousness of something transcendent to itself.

Russel Matheson - Husserl: A guide for the perplexed

[asepticsceptic]

All of them in a a sense. That's the basic gesture of reading Marx through Hegel through Lacan. Lacan=all subjective experience is accessed through fantasy which is the result of the structure of the unconscious (more or less), understood as an elaborate deadlock. Hegel=The attempt by consciousness to resolve its own fundamental inner contradictions fundamentally structures human reality. Marx=Political economy is the result of inherent conflicts, understood in terms of class conflict. The current manifestation of which is capitalism. Zizek=The relationship between deadlock, drive, and fantasy in Lacan can be used to unpack how capitalism fundamentally structures current social reality if the function of capital itself is understood in Hegelian terms of constitutive contradiction. All of his major books are applications of this sort of gesture. In Lacanian terms, it is the nature of drive to both generate and undermine the form of the constitutive contradiction, which manifests as the unconscious structuring of fantasy. In Marxist terms this is called ideology.

reddit

[metaphorformetaphor]

Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

— D. H. Lawrence, from “The Evening Land,” Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (William Heinemann, 1957)

[conscientious-deactivated202207]

The Internet threatens final confirmation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dictum that the culture industry allows the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” Champions of online life promised a utopia of infinite availability: a “long tail” of perpetually in-stock products would revive interest in non-mainstream culture. One need not have read Astra Taylor and other critics to sense that this utopia has been slow in arriving. Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive. Search engines guide you away from peculiar words. (“Did you mean … ?”) Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.

Alex Ross (via conscientious)

[asepticsceptic]

Trashcans (rubbish bins) in Japan seem about as rare as Mexican food. You buy a drink from the vending machines but before you know it, there is no trashcan in sight. Or maybe you decided to eat your bento from the supermarket before you got home, and all you could find was the bottle-shaped holes on the train platform. Well, this lesson is a hard one to learn, but all veterans of Japan have had to do it. You will learn that most konbini stores have trash cans, as does McDonald’s, or you do what the Japanese do and carry your trash home.

http://blog.gaijinpot.com/seven-habits-living-japan/

[kafkasapartment]

Les Moyens d’Existence, 1969. René Magritte. Color etching on Japon nacré

[asepticsceptic]

Kramskoi's Christ in the Desert

Don't care much for Christian imagery, but the lighting here is so perfect: the melancholic blue of the sunset, the sharp light on the ragged desert rocks, backlit Christ with his worn yet resolute expression with all the weight of the world on his hunched shoulders.

[asepticsceptic]

That idea was one of Winnicott’s most radical, because what he was saying was that solitude was prior to the wish to transgress. That there’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can “forget yourself ” and absorb yourself, in a book, say. Or, for the child, in a game. It must be one of the precursors of reading, I suppose. I think for Winnicott it would be the definition of a good relationship if, in the relationship, you would be free to be absorbed in something else.

Adam Phillips for the Paris review

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6286/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-7-adam-phillips