#cf.love

[kafkabooks]

I slept part of the afternoon away. While I was awake I lay on the sofa, thought about several love experiences of my youth, lingered in a pique over a neglected opportunity

FRANZ KAFKA

[bookowlnews]

I don't want any more to do ..with jealously, competition. When the bugle blows I want to go home quietly, lock the door, take off the telephone. Yeh, right, I'll wash my hair, watch the saturday night movie and go to bed with a plate of cornflakes, I can do that most efficiently, I can vanish.

Mia Farrow trying not to fall in love with Dustin Hoffman in the film JOHN AND MARY

[bookowlnews]

To know that one does not write for the other, that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not - this is the beginning of writing.

ROLAND BARTHES ON GETTING OUTSIDE OF ONESELF THROUGH WRITING

[bookowlnews]

It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing?

“..Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: ..That scar was part of his character.. ..Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar.” - atomos.tumblr.com/

[alterities]

“What kind of bird are you?” he asks before he leaves.

Her friend then says: “He likes you”.

In such a situation I am discovering that I am something for the Other and from this point onwards I can never undo this recognition, and want to find out what I am for the Other. This is why we fall in love as if falling, why we feel as if our falling in love happens involuntarily, beyond our control. Because, as Zizek says: “you are saying this but by saying this what is it you are really saying” about me. 

- Andre Vantino

With ‘Che vuoi?’, Lacan means this moment of being seen by someone and wondering how one is seen.

[bookowlnews]

“Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way.

Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.
 Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.” — Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love  

[bookowlnews]

I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.

Diaries - FRANZ KAFKA