UNPLEASURE

libidinal defences

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Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being. – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time … [T]ransgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadows or twilight, without that serpent ‘no’ that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core.

Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression

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The naturalist liberation of desire has failed

Now the naturalist liberation of desire has failed.  The more the theory, the more the work of social criticism, the more the sieve of that experience, which tended to limit obligation to certain precise functions in the social order, have raised in us the hope of relativising the imperative, the contrary or, in a word, conflictual character of moral experience .. The naturalist liberation of desire has failed historically. We do not find ourselves in the presence of a man less weighed down with laws and duties than before the great critical experience of so-called libertine thought. 

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

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"All the delights of the earth"

comblement / fulfillment

The subject insistently posits the desire and the possibility of a complete satisfaction of the desire implicated in the amorous relation and of a perfect and virtually eternal success of this relation: paradisiac image of the Sovereign Good, to be given and to be received.

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

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'Masochism is not a viable alternative to mastery, either practically or theoretically. The defeat of the self belongs to the same relational system, the same relational imagination, as the self’s exercise of power; it is merely the transgressive version of that exercise. Masochism consents to, indeed embraces that theft of being which mastery would remedy by obliterating otherness through a fantasmatic invasion of difference. To neglect self-defeat in sexual relations leads to that pastoralizing of sexuality that I have frequently criticized; but to privilege self-defeat in the relational field is to reduce that entire field to libidinal relationality.'

Leo Bersani, Sociality and Sexuality 

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With All My Lies.

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The Face of the Other

'From the start, the encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him.  That is the responsibility for my neighbour, which is, no doubt, the harsh name for what we call love of one's neighbour; love without Eros, charity, without concupiscence.  I don't very much like the word love, which is worn-out and debased.  Let us speak instead of the taking upon oneself of the fate of the other.'  

From: Emmanuel Levinas, Philosophy, Justice, and Love.

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Zizek on acting masochistically:

The total self­ externalization of the masochist’s most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become objects of contract…; the masochistic game, which suspends social reality, nonetheless fits into everyday reality. … Masochism confronts us with the symbolic order qua the order of ‘fictions’: there is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, in the ‘fiction’ we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask. … The Real of violence breaks out when the masochist is hystericized - when the he refuses the role of an object-instrument of the enjoyment of his Other, when he is horrified at the prospect of being reduced in the eyes of the Other to objet a; in order to escape this deadlock, he resorts to passage de l’acte, to the ‘irrational’ violence aimed at the other.

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Cover of 1797 pamphlet about the death of Frantisek Kotzwara and the trial for his murder. Earliest recorded case of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

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Rear naked choke

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Ground and pound

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Only known recording of Sigmund Freud’s voice. At the time, he was 81 and suffering from incurable jaw cancer, making each word agonizing.

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over.

[titbook-deactivated20120425]

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Shadow of a doubt

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Dipping

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by L. Erectus Mentalus

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Laplanche on sex and death

From An Interview with Jean Laplanche:

“For me, the sexual death drive is just sexuality, unbound sexuality, the extreme of sexuality.  And more than death, I would point to primary masochism.  I see more of a sense of the sexual death drive in masochism or in sado-masochism than in death.”