#quote17

[monasticcellphone]

Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist.

Georges Bataille, “Materialism”

[monasticcellphone]

When Trump launched Tomahawk missiles on Syria, MSNBC host Brain Williams declared the images ‘beautiful.’ Just one week later, Trump went for more spectacle, dropping the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal on a cave complex in Afghanistan, an act of violence so indiscriminate and disproportionate that analysts struggled to find any rationale that could resemble a coherent military strategy. Because there was no strategy - the megatonnage is the message. Mass communication through bombs.

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough 

[monasticcellphone]

Moral order is established, according to psychoanalysis, not in obedience to some reasonable or compassionate command to sacrifice our pleasure to the state but because we recoil before the violence and obscenity of the superego’s incitement to jouissance, to a boundless and aggressive enjoyment. 

...

The sole moral maxim of psychoanalysis is this: do not surrender your internal conflict, your division.

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, “The Sartorial Superego”

[monasticcellphone]

America’s solution is, in analytic terms, hysterical: one elects a master who is demonstrably fallible - even, in some cases, incompetent. What may first appear to be a stumbling block turns out on closer inspection to be a solution: Americans love their masters not simply in spite of their frailties but because of them. We can put it this way: the puralism that characterizes American democracy depends on our devotion to an unvermögender [impotent] Other.

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire

[monasticcellphone]

The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. ... This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all desire teeter and fall victim to  the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire, while a the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. 

[monasticcellphone]

Very blinding memory like the sun seen through the lids of closed eyes, in red. My father himself, I imagine that, since he is blind, he also sees the sun in blinding red. ... My father slaps me and I see the sun.

Georges Bataille, [DREAM], Visions of Excess

[monasticcellphone]

We have argued that anxiety must not be interpreted, that we must not seek an external cause for it. This does not prevent us, however, from asking why there seems to have been so much anxiety in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for we can answer this question without recourse to any external phenomenon. It was the very definition of the subject as free that ensured this increase of anxiety.

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire

[monasticcellphone]

Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse.

Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe”