Fantastic Fungi (2019) Myths & Monsters, “The Wild Unknown” (2017) “Adam and Eve with the Tree of Knowledge as Death” (1587)
“For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth.”
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII (1966)
“We inherit from Greek philosophy the belief that knowledge is liberating, but the biblical myth of the Fall is closer to the truth.” — Heresies (2004) “[Lev] Shestov came to faith by way of radical doubt. But sceptical doubt, however radical, cannot bring the unlimited freedom Shestov demanded. What he wanted was to return to things as they were before the Fall, when all things seemed possible. But the Fall is the price of consciousness. There is no way back.” — Seven Types of Atheism (2018)
— John N. Gray
“God is not free to enact the law that renders Adam and Eve free. God’s name carries with it the prohibition, which is why it is impossible to envision a Garden of Eden with God and without prohibition. But the necessity of law disrupting the image of paradise is not a fact to be lamented. Genuine freedom is not compatible with a Garden of Eden lacking the prohibited tree. We can imagine the harmony of the prelapsarian world where there would be no negation, but we cannot even sustain this image. The moment we imagine how life would transpire in this world, we introduce negation. The prohibition simply makes us aware of the power of the negative and the freedom that it grants us. The prohibition opens up freedom because it introduces “no” into the signifying structure. […] The difficulty of confronting the nonsense of the prohibition in modernity is that a basic premise of modernity involves the rejection of non-sensical imperatives. Modernity craves sense. To modern ears, the primordial signifier sounds like a holdover from traditional society that has no place in the modern universe. But modernity cannot, any more than traditional society, do without its point of nonsense.”
— Todd McGowan, “The psychosis of freedom: Law in modernity” in Lacan on Psychosis (2018)
“A perverse subject desires to see any lack in the Other as one which can be filled. … Sade negates God, who is a metonymy for the limits of the Other of knowledge, by way of disavowal. André referred to Annie Le Brun’s book, Sade: A Sudden Abyss (1990), in his discussion of the function of Sade’s negation of God. Andre concluded that Sade’s “proliferation of blasphemy” functions to fill the “gaping hole that God, as signifier, leaves in reason.” From this conclusion it is apparent that Sade’s words of blasphemy function as a fetish to plug the lack in the Other.”
— Stephanie S. Swales, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (2012)
“In the master’s discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can produce something else, only so long as it can be put to work for the master; yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master. In the university discourse, knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the academic’s very existence and activity.”
— Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (1995)
“[A]ny decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.” — Technopoly (1992) “Knowledge ..is only organized information. It is self-contained, confined to a single system of information about the world. One can have a great deal of knowledge about the world but entirely lack wisdom. That is frequently the case with scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, academics, even theologians.” — Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (1999)
— Neil Postman
