Ghostlier Demarcations

[monasticcellphone]

With Habermas, we have the ethics of unbroken communication, the Ideal of the universal, transparent intersubjective community; the notion of the subject behind this is, of course, the philosophy-of-language version of the old subject of transcendental reflection. 

Zizek, introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology

and this is why Habermas is wrong and useless

[monasticcellphone]

It is not very difficult to detect how this Foucauldian notion of subject enters the humanist-elitist tradition: its closest realization would be the Renaissance ideal of the ‘all-round personality’ mastering the passions within himself and making out of his own life a work of art. Foucault’s notion of the subject is, rather, a classical one: subject as the power of self mediation and harmonizing the antagonistic forces, as a way of mastering the ‘use of pleasures’ through a restoration of the image of self. Here Habermas and Foucault are two sides of the same coin - the real break is represented by Althusser, by his insistence on the fact that a certain cleft, a certain fissure, misrecognition, characterizes the human condition as as such: by the thesis that the idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence.

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso 2008 (1989), xxiv

[slavojquotes]

Is making people ‘see what it is they do feel’ not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? (An elementary case of ‘seeing’ would be to discern the ambiguous hatred beneath which the analyst suspects there is hidden love [or vice versa].) The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I ‘see what it is that I feel’, I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind – why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (‘to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analysing, and just do it!’) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void. Therein resides the link between analysis and love: in love we really do know the other person in some profound sense – and also we really don’t. And you could think that the fantasy of knowing is spurred by or prompted by something like ‘this person has a powerful effect on me and it’s so overwhelming that I’m going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge’. For Proust, for example, knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one can’t control them.

(via slavoj–zizek)

[garadinervi]

Bruno Munari, Concavo-convesso, 1947

[geogthoughts-blog]

The only adequate conceptual framework for understanding the city is one which encompasses and builds upon both the sociological and the geographical imaginations. We must relate social behaviour to the way in which the city assumes a certain geography, a certain spatial form. We must recognise that once a particular spatial form is created it tends to institutionalise, and in some respects, to determine the future of social process.

David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (via socio-logic)

[belacqui-pro-quo]

The fact that moral masochism is unconscious leads us to an obvious clue. We were able to translate the expression ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ as meaning a need for punishment at the hands of a parental power. We now know that the wish, which so frequently appears in phantasies, to be beaten by the father stands very close to the other wish, to have a passive (feminine) sexual relation to him and is only a regressive distortion of it. If we insert this explanation into the content of moral masochism, its hidden meaning becomes clear to us. Conscience and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the desexualization, of the Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex. This is to the advantage neither of morality nor of the person concerned. An individual may, it is true, have preserved the whole or some measure of ethical sense alongside of his masochism; but, alternatively, a large part of his conscience may have vanished into his masochism. Again, masochism creates a temptation to perform ‘sinful’ actions, which must then be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience (as is exemplified in so many Russian character-types) or by chastisement from the great parental power of Destiny. In order to provoke punishment from this last representative of the parents, the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence.

Sigmund Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism (via belacqui-pro-quo)

[belacqui-pro-quo]

The turning back of sadism against the self regularly occurs where a cultural suppression of the instincts holds back a large part of the subject’s destructive instinctual components from being exercised in life. We may suppose that this portion of the destructive instinct which has retreated appears in the ego as an intensification of masochism. The phenomena of conscience, however, lead us to infer that the destructiveness which returns from the external world is also taken up by the super-ego, without any such transformation, and increases its sadism against the ego. The sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects. It is only in this way, I think, that we can understand how the suppression of an instinct can - frequently or quite generally - result in a sense of guilt and how a person’s conscience becomes more severe and more sensitive the more he refrains from aggression against others. One might expect that if a man knows that he is in the habit of avoiding the commission of acts of aggression that are undesirable from a cultural standpoint he will for that reason have a good conscience and will watch over his ego less suspiciously. The situation is usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary thing and the renunciation of instinct followed from them. This leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained. Actually, it seems to be the other way about. The first instinctual renunciation is enforced by external powers, and it is only this which creates the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands a further renunciation of instinct.

Sigmund Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism (via belacqui-pro-quo)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

guiding principles for any psychoanalytic act

Sixth principle

The duration of a treatment and the unfolding of sessions cannot be standardized. The duration of Freud’s treatments varied. There were treatments that lasted a single session, as in the psychoanalysis of Gustav Mahler. There were also analyses that lasted four months, as in the case of Little Hans, a year as in the Rat Man, several years as in the Wolf Man. Since then the variation and the diversification have not stopped growing. Moreover, the application of psychoanalysis outside the consulting room in mental health settings has contributed to the variation in the duration of psychoanalytic treatment. The variety of clinical cases and the variations in the age at which psychoanalysis has been applied make it possible to consider that the duration of an analysis is now, at best, defined as “tailor made.” An analysis continues to the point where the analysand is sufficiently satisfied with what he has experienced to end his analysis. The aim is not the application of a norm but an agreement on the part of the subject with himself.

Eric Laurent

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Jacques-Alain Miller:

“If you suppress the listener [of the unconscious], you silence the unconscious. You don’t suppress the unconscious, but, on the contrary, you nourish it by silencing it. I would say you intensify or exacerbate the drives. If you silence the unconscious, you exacerbate the drives. You exacerbate the death drive. “And the repetition, instead of being spoken, is acted out. And, we insist on that. We are in the world which is taken by a powerful death drive in the name of security and health.”

–“Lecture at the ‘Rally of the Impossible Professions

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

What is psychoanalysis?

“A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it. Usually, you discover just how conditioned you had been by apparently minute elements encountered in hazardous circumstances: things from childhood, meetings, certain words said to you, and we keep coming back to them until the malevolent charge of these elements softens. Each case is different.”

Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Response to the Anti-Freudians’, Le Point, 22.09.05.

[lointaine-3]

[dailymarx]

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

Marx - Speech 1856 (via dailymarx)

[thegoodenoughblogger]

Thirds

When I was about 4, my mum got together with my step-dad - and although I don’t remember feeling jealous or threatened by this new man in my infant life, I always thought,

“Isn’t it strange how I was a little boy who had no rivals for his mother’s life, and then suddenly when this funny man with a bald head and glasses and a son of his own turned up, I didn’t seem too bothered?  In fact, I seemed to kinda like him.  Wouldn’t you have thought I’d be a bit put out that I no longer had my mum to myself?”

But I think that’s the misconception of the Oedipus situation - that the child, the male child especially, feels the third person who intrudes upon the relationship with the mother as a threat.  I think the child feels the third person as a relief - because a relationship with one other person is just a bit too much.

My analyst told me that one of the most disturbing things he ever heard a patient say was, “I am going to try to masturbate only to thoughts of my wife.”  It is essential to have a fantasy object or objects who are not your wife or husband or partner, however monogamous you are.  The role of the (fantasy) third in an adult relationship is the same as that of the (real) third in a childhood relationship.  A great many problems are caused by adults who feel they can’t have a fantasy third - and a great many connected problems occur when adults think that a real third will cure their anxieties.

[beholdingslut]

I fell asleep in a river, I woke in a river, of my mysterious  failure to die I can tell you nothing, neither who saved me nor for what cause—

Louise Glück, Landscape from Averno (via mythaelogy)

[thegoodenoughblogger]

Algorithm of the transference

In a paper delivered on 9 October 1967, Lacan boils down the start of a psychoanalysis into a single formula - the formula above.

The top line shows a subject (S) placing a demand on another subject (Sq).  The other subject is called Sq, because q = quelque chose, which means that from the beginning she is supposed to hold something, some knowledge.  Put crudely, the patient seeks out the analyst because he wants to be happy and he believes she knows something about getting happy and he wants to find out what it is.

Actually, she doesn’t know much at all.  She may know a lot about psychoanalysis, but she knows nothing about him, nothing about his happiness.  He tells her about his pain, but she doesn’t understand it at all, because it is not her pain.  She is without knowledge, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise - and yet she must occupy the position of holding something hidden, because it is this that keeps his desire alive.

The bottom line of the formula is what, having established the transference, the analyst must point the patient towards - a signifier, another signifer, speech, more speech, an infinity of speech.  This is the difficult, stodgy, unmagical terrain of analysis, which we can express via slightly different Lacanian algebra, which amounts to the same thing: it is the movement from S1 (the assumption that the analyst is the master signifier, the oracle from whom enigmatic prophecies flow) to A (the barred Other, or the Other who - like the subject - is fundamentally lacking).

The second picture above is of Sandrine Bonnaire in the film Intimate Strangers - her character, Anna, goes to see an analyst in Paris.  She knocks on his door, walks in, sits down and starts talking about the problems with her marriage.  The man listens, says little, does not confess that she has knocked on the wrong door and that he is, in fact, an accountant. 

Later on, Anna finds out that William is not really an analyst and that the real analyst works next door.  But the next week, she returns to William.  Like it or not, William is her analyst - he has (unwittingly) occupied that symbolic position which gets her talking.  Between them has emerged a transference, and transference is borne out of the very supposition - which was, and always is, based on a fiction, an illusion, a desire - that Anna had when she walked in, sat down and started talking.

[the thoughts that were spinning round my head this afternoon at CFAR whilst listening to Alastair Black talk about the beginning of analytic treatment]

[bustakay]

Lenin’s naive materialist philosophy fails to include and account for the place and role of the mental observer of the non-mental objective facts and realities revealed by scientific siftings of cognitive representations of states of affairs in the world. According to the Žižekian indictment, with which this author agrees, one cannot be an authentic materialist if one presupposes the being of a mind distinct from matter without delineating the material production of this very distinction itself.

Adrian Johnston - ’Hume’s Revenge: A Dieu, Meillassoux.‘ (via bustakay)

[sinthematica]

…a single paradox….underlies every aspect of Lacan’s theory, the “sexual impasse.” At first blush, this phrase invokes naive feminism, condemning “phallocentrism” and embracing idealized womanly values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lacan’s concept is divorced from both anatomy and “gender.” The terms masculine-feminine do not refer to persons either biologically or socially identified as male or female. Rather, they refer to incompatible ways of confronting alienation and contradiction. The “masculine” attitude is denial. It attempts to resolve contradiction in order to create a complete and closed social universe. The feminine attitude is acceptance of contradiction’s inevitability. …The masculine does not merely fail to hear, it affirmatively refuses to acknowledge the feminine. Indeed, the masculine side of personality creates itself through repression of the feminine. Based on these definitions, no individual could be exclusively masculine or feminine.

Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder, Turning Law Inside Out (via sinthematica)