A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

*slow handclap*

To be fair, I like the first part of the quote. It's the second part which confirms what i feel about the hideousness of Lacanian solipsism. But ok, yeah, I spoke out of prejudice.

But then you did the same when you assumed my post was some kind of anti-intellectual screed when it was just express dislike for one dude.

No, I didn't assume that. I assumed that it was a lazy zing instead of addressing the philosophical ramifications of the quote. Which it was.

No need to address non-existent ramifications of a quote from someone who's clearly started out from false premises. But that's ok, dude was a poet.
Also lazy zing =/= 'the sort of smug bullshit that you say to seem smart'.

That quote's a real firecracker!

How are the premises false? What proof (logical or real-world) do you have of the falsehood of the premises? Why are they 'clearly' false?

I actually don't have a stake in whether Lacan is correct or not, or even if he's worthwhile, I just have a stake in people discussing philosophy properly.

And: lazy zings are always smug, always bullshit. The 'seeming smart' element comes from a pretence at being familiar with the subject yet clearly not enough to actually be able to handle a real conversation about it.

when Lacan says "someone who doesn't exist" he's not being solipsistic, he's saying that the loved object doesn't correspond to the human subject it resembles

sorry if that wasn't totally obvious btw

it was totally obvious to me who has never read Lacan

why are we fighting

To post smug bullshit is human...

has anyone here read any of the bruce fink books on lacan and if so which one should i read first thx

Well that was the first thing I thought about the Lacan quote, but I don't know him well enough to say if that's the case. I took it at face value. And from what little else I know about him and his work that seemed a possibility.
Funnily enough, Im currently halfway through Shakespeare's sonnets where this theme - of the loved one being a creation of the lover and any virtues imputed to them being illusions - figures large.

i guess it wd be fairer to say that to Lacan, desire is solipsistic, but in psychoanalysis that's hardly an exclusively Lacanian idea

Some questions: if love is something you don't have, how can you give it? If you don't have it, who does? Is he denying the existence of love or simply that it can't be owned? If it can't be owned then where does it exist, if he posits that it does exist?

If we attempt to give something to someone who doesn't exist, why are we doing it? I'm guessing a highly solipsistic answer is the result.

And: lazy zings are always smug, always bullshit. The 'seeming smart' element comes from a pretence at being familiar with the subject yet clearly not enough to actually be able to handle a real conversation about it.

Well, this is ilx etc. I don't think I am pretending to be familiar with the subject (in the sense you are meaning 'familiar'), I'm expressing a prejudice. Considering the thread which involves quotes expressive of their authors digust, ennui, and prejudice about the world and humankind, I think that's fair enough.

Ok i get you want people to 'discuss philosophy properly', but I clearly wasn't doing that. Emotional feeling about philosophers is acceptable, i think.

my reading: "love" - maybe specifically romantic or sexual love but perhaps not - is an expression of a desire centred on absence, but this absence doesn't exist outside of the lover and therefore can't be filled by the loved one. the loved one that the lover desires is a projection of the lover's own sense of absence, which can't be said to ever be the "real" person loved because their status as loved one is only a projection of the lover's desire.

he's playing on conventional uses of romantic language and psychoanalytic interpretations of desire - the lover thinks they can give love but since love is really an expression of absence they have nothing to give (except maybe the belief that they're giving)

we attempt to give something to someone who doesn't exist because we mistake them for somebody who certainly does exist, so this isn't solipsism, it's mistaken identity.

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.

on a message board? how very dare you

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.

ty merdeyeux!

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.

"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

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".

that's awesome. i have never seen it before.

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"

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.

is there a correlation between paradisiacal childhoods and adult-onset extreme pessimism?

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.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/05f1200bdf1335f33b915fb5619b274d/tumblr_mqcvru8bfJ1qzywvpo1_500.png

lol @ cruel shoes in the corner

is that as close as we'll ever get to a nilmar honorato da silva wdyll

God, I need to read a Cioran book!

― Tape Store, Sunday, August 26, 2007 6:29 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

Bertand Russell

wow

oh hi july 2013

"For once you must face the facts / Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." - Brecht

*high-fives bertrand russell*

dr morbius that's only pessimistic if you're religious iirc

nevermind i may be misreading brecht

admittedly I don't exactly find it pessimistic; just the facts, ma'am

berkeley is way upthread talking about being an oyster, but he does not really belong here. He is cool with not being an oyster because he is immortal:

there is not any property or circumstance of my being that I contemplate with more joy than my immortality. I can easily overlook any present momentary sorrow, when I reflect that it is in my power to be happy a thousand years hence. If it were not for this thought, I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals, than a reasonable mind tortured with an extreme innate desire of that perfection which it despairs to obtain.

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille

ha! Nice one.

On that note came across a characteristically obscure one from Lacan:

"Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subjects desire."

Translation: wanting something is constitutive of not getting it.

:C

lacan is pretty brutally pessimistic but i think he is unfortunately right about dissatisfaction being built into the structure of desire.

lacan way overqualified for that idea

"the grass is always greener on the other side" - jacques lacan

the bataille quote is basically like we are only desire, we have nothing else to offer, and it melts us like the ark of the covenant in indiana jones. love bataille