Not-all

Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?

[feminineforms]

"Violante" (ca. 1515) by Titian

[not-all]

"We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else."

Sigmund Freud. Letter to Ludwig Binswanger. Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition. 1917.

[not-all]

"Lacan said that when an interpretation was right, one felt it pass through your gut. An interpretation is neither right nor wrong. It is not judged by the response of the analysand deeming it right or wrong. It is judged on the effects it produces, i.e. the return of memories, of events pinned down by master signifiers; or else the interpretation can disturb enjoyment enough for the subject to perceive his complacency towards it all the while suffering from it. When the interpretation causes a real stir, the subject can draw a series of consequences and construct the axes of a fantasy which imposes its iron law on the symptoms. Speaking is within everyone’s reach. But for the analyst, the use of speech is unparalleled. It is unique."

~Agnès Aflalo

[mothwood]

To the extent that we hold our gaze still, things move. Thought, as well, exists only with regard to a halt which is empty. Joë Bousquet wrote, this paralysis has carved a hole in space. To write is to carve that hole in space. Everything takes off from immobility, from the effort of attention that is also a corporeal effort…a matter of knowing when to stop, of starting out aware that there is no beginning. Writing is a craft of ignorance.

silence is a form.

— Claude Royet-Journoud (trans. Keith Waldrop), The Whole of Poetry is Proposition 

[zolo1917]

[chrisengel]

“Generally speaking, it must be said that the first symptom that the subject brings to analysis is his ego - his delusion of his identity.” Jacques-Alain Miller, Donc, Therefore, 1994

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false. It is a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight.”

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Jay Parini in Borges and Me

[not-all]

“In the beginning of his Gospel, Saint John says ‘In the beginning was the Word’ – I completely agree. But where was it before the beginning? This is the truly impenetrable mystery, for this beginning was completely enigmatic. What this means is: Things only begin for this repugnant creature of the flesh that we still call the everyday man, things only begin for him, I mean the drama only begins when the Word gets involved, when the Word becomes as religion (the true religion) says, Incarnate. It’s only after the Word is made flesh that things start to really take a turn for the worse. Man no longer looks like a dog wagging its tail or a courageous masturbating monkey. He doesn’t resemble anything anymore. The Word devastates him.” Jacques Lacan, Rome Press Conference, 1974

[not-all]

"the neurotic never makes much of his fantasy. It succeeds in defending him against anxiety... His difficulty belongs to the realm of receiving. …What you have to teach the neurotic to give is the thing he doesn’t imagine, it is nothing, it is precisely his anxiety" ~Lacan

[not-all]

[not-all]

[not-all]

“Psychoanalysis is a symptom – one that reveals the discontents of the civilisation in which we are living. Psychoanalysis is not a faith, and I don’t like calling it a science. Let’s say it’s a practice, and that it’s concerned with what’s not working out (ce qui ne va pas).” ~Jacques Lacan

[beatricecenci]

Guillaume Seignac (French, 1870-1929)

Le réveil de Psyché

[not-all]

Francesco Hayez - Portrait of Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso

[not-all]

“That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.” ~Lacan

[jacobwren]

“Freud speaks in the closing pages of his ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909) of the neurotic patient’s need for uncertainty and doubt and of the elaborate manoeuvres that he is often compelled to adopt in order to remain uncertain in a world where accurate measuring devices and reliable sources of information exist. Secure knowledge would bring him unspeakable terror.”

— Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan

[chrisengel]

“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.” Paul Valéry