Thanks. Your reading is convincing as an explanation of what he means, and it's what I assumed in the first place. I think it's unsophisticated and romantic - in the brutally anguished late 18c/early 19c meaning of the word.Wertherism, really. I would hope a psychoanalyst of the 20c would have a more subtle and nuanced perception of love and relationships between persons. Maybe he wasn't very good at his job. The angle he considers it is certainly solipsistic I think, it takes no consideration of what the other person involved in an exchange of love is giving, getting, or thinking.
Hey this is all decontextualised I know...it's only one quote. Just shooting the shit.
― glumdalclitch, Sunday, 8 January 2012 19:39 (1 year ago) Permalink
on a message board? how very dare you
― carpy deems (darraghmac), Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:22 (1 year ago) Permalink
has anyone here read any of the bruce fink books on lacan and if so which one should i read first thx
― markers, Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:05 (5 hours ago)
'The Lacanian Subject' is good, doesn't skimp on the details but still manages to be pretty readable.
― sunn :o))) (Merdeyeux), Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:31 (1 year ago) Permalink
ty merdeyeux!
― markers, Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:44 (1 year ago) Permalink
No weight could be heavier to bear than the possibility that everything we want is possible. If that is true, then there really are things at stake in this life, things to be truly won or lost.If we could bring ourselves to believe, to really feel, the possibility that we are invincible and can accomplish whatever we want in this world, it wouldn't seem out of our reach at all to correct such absurdities. What I am begging you to do here is not to put faith in the impossible, but have the courage to face that terrible possibility that our lives really are in our own hands, and to act accordingly: to not settle for every misery fate and humanity have heaped upon us, but to push back, to see which ones can be shaken off. Nothing could be more tragic, and more ridiculous, than to live out a whole life in reach of heaven without ever stretching out your arms.
If we could bring ourselves to believe, to really feel, the possibility that we are invincible and can accomplish whatever we want in this world, it wouldn't seem out of our reach at all to correct such absurdities. What I am begging you to do here is not to put faith in the impossible, but have the courage to face that terrible possibility that our lives really are in our own hands, and to act accordingly: to not settle for every misery fate and humanity have heaped upon us, but to push back, to see which ones can be shaken off. Nothing could be more tragic, and more ridiculous, than to live out a whole life in reach of heaven without ever stretching out your arms.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 22 March 2012 08:23 (1 year ago) Permalink
"Humans must again be destroyed." A sentence of Goethe's, which would be worthy of the harshest sentence by St. Augustine about Predestination. How easily this sentence forms in the spirit of a man, when he says the names Napoleon and Mozart in the same breath." - Elias Canetti
― tanuki, Sunday, 8 April 2012 03:44 (1 year ago) Permalink
doesnt quite fit here but this quote of beckett's i just read in a piece about him in el pais is hilariously negative: "i have a clear memory of my fetal existence. it was an existence in which no voice, no movement could free me from the agony and darkness that i was subjected to".
― zverotic discourse (jim in glasgow), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 02:22 (1 year ago) Permalink
that's awesome. i have never seen it before.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 15 May 2012 03:16 (1 year ago) Permalink
I always had a soft spot for Cioran's "I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him"
― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 07:22 (1 year ago) Permalink
Such despairing pessimism had, as is often the case, profound roots in childhood. The prosperous country town of Rasinari in Saxon Transylvania seemed like an earthly paradise to the little boy. His father was the orthodox priest of the place, and Cioran loved the cemetery where he made friends with the gravedigger who would give him skulls to play football with.
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Tuesday, 23 October 2012 20:13 (6 months ago) Permalink
is there a correlation between paradisiacal childhoods and adult-onset extreme pessimism?
― 乒乓, Tuesday, 23 October 2012 20:15 (6 months ago) Permalink
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. For hours and hours I would walk the night’s deserted streets, or, sometimes, those haunted by my fellow-insomniacs, the prostitutes, the ideal companions in moments of supreme distress. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture . . . It was during those infernal nights that I came to understand the inanity of all philosophy. The hours without sleep are at bottom an interminable rejection of thought by thought itself . . . an infernal ultimatum of the mind delivered to the mind.
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Tuesday, 23 October 2012 20:21 (6 months ago) Permalink