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RainyCoast

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Everything posted by RainyCoast

  1. “In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.” — Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  2. I used to consider absence a lack. And I ignorantly regretted that lack. Today I have nothing to regret. There is no lack in absence. Absence is a presence in me. And I feel it, a perfect whiteness, so close and cozy in my arms that I laugh, dance, and invent glad exclamations, since absence, this embodied absence, can’t be taken away from me. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, tr. by Mark Strand, from “Absence,”
  3. The fantasy the neurotic makes use of is what serves him best in defending himself against anxiety, in keeping a lid on it. -Lacan
  4. Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t! —Anne Boyer, ‘What resembles the grave but isn’t’, 2015
  5. To everything which a man allows to become visible, one is able to demand: what does he wish to hide? -Jean Copjec
  6. “the subject is always implied in his objects” -Lacan
  7. “Everything that shelters behind the dignity of any profession, is always this central lack which is impotence.” -Lacan
  8. “There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.” — George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation
  9. “[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.” — Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (translated by Alphonso Lingis)
  10. The melancholic not only maintains the lost object in hallucinatory persistence, but congeals language itself into a corpselike thing: words and even the diacritical accents punctuating these become magical fetish objects, stripped of symbolic efficacy - no longer a substitute for the thing but perversely identified with it- which hover in the mouth as frozen, inassimilable remainders. Is Hegel a mourner or a melancholic? - Rebecca Comay
  11. There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense. -Miguel Unamuno
  12. it's both the worst and best thing i have heard in a while. literally choking on my tears laughing. [video=youtube;o_-HIxXRfOY]
  13. "It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are." - Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire
  14. Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible. — Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
  15. “Work (in the form of leisure as well) invades all of life as a fundamental repression, as control, and as a permanent job in specified times and places, according to an omnipresent code. People must be positioned at all times: in school, in the plant, at the beach or in front of the TV, or in job retraining — a permanent, general mobilization. But this form of labor is no longer productive in the original sense: it is now merely the mirror of society, its imaginary, its fantastic principle of reality. A death instinct perhaps.” — Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
  16. “You get used to a condition of longing. Live with it over time and it becomes part of your household—“ – Laurie Colwin
  17. “A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.” — Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
  18. “If the fathers of capitalist theory (Hobbes, Smith, Locke) had chosen a mother instead of a single bourgeois male as the smallest economic unit for their theoretical constructions they would not have been able to formulate the axiom of the selfish nature of human beings the way they did.” — Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy
  19. “I am empty of everything and there is nothing left in my mind,” said the monk to Joshu. “What do you say to that?” Joshu said, “Cast that away.” But the monk persisted. “I have told you, there is nothing left in me. I am completely empty. What can I cast away?” “In that case,” replied Joshu,”keep on carrying it.”” — Joshu
  20. ideology always produces a “fullness”, not an absence, or void or lack. If there happens to be something like a void, we therefore have to be prepared to find it covered up by a fullness” - Robert Pfaller
  21. In Winnicott’s late writings on transitional phenomena, the deepest attachment is to loss itself. — Mary Jacobus
  22. Campaigns to destigmatize so-called “mental illness” often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been “different”, their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability. Darian Leader, What Is Madness?
  23. People invent, and reinvent, concepts like zero and nothing and species and organism just as they “invented” the so-called imaginary numbers now essential for dealing with everything from electric circuits to four-dimensional space-time. They aren’t a “given” any more than shapeless space or a “second” as a measure of time. Or as physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say, frustrated when people would warn him to accept the limitations of the “real world”: “It’s not the real world; it’s a world we made up.” -K.C. Cole
  24. Depressive anxieties are often so unbearable that attempts are made to obviate them by means other than genuine mourning and reparation; or, to put this slightly differently, reparation can take different forms, some of them more genuine than others: for instance, it can become mechanistic and obsessional, or, alternatively, assume a manic character, which carries a note of omnipotent triumph over the object. Segal enriches the conception of art as reparation by associating different ways of attempting to make reparation with qualitatively different aesthetic outcomes. Thus, in the event that reparation is not genuine but rather masks a manic denial of loss, it can give rise to “a constant make-believe that all was well with the world”; translated into art, this can produce an “effect of superficiality and prettiness”. -Dimitrios Mellos
  25. We desire because the Other never looks at us in the way that we want to be seen, and it is the failure of the Other to see us properly that sustains desire. -Todd McGowan
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