That quote's a real firecracker!
― Iago Galdston, Sunday, 8 January 2012 16:41 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― emil.y, Sunday, 8 January 2012 16:43 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Poppy Newgod and the Phantom Banned (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 8 January 2012 16:52 (twelve years ago) link
sorry if that wasn't totally obvious btw
it was totally obvious to me who has never read Lacan
― nah (crüt), Sunday, 8 January 2012 16:53 (twelve years ago) link
why are we fighting
― carpy deems (darraghmac), Sunday, 8 January 2012 16:55 (twelve years ago) link
To post smug bullshit is human...
― Frobisher (Viceroy), Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:00 (twelve years ago) link
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 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― glumdalclitch, Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:07 (twelve years ago) link
i guess it wd be fairer to say that to Lacan, desire is solipsistic, but in psychoanalysis that's hardly an exclusively Lacanian idea
― Poppy Newgod and the Phantom Banned (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:10 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― glumdalclitch, Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:12 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― glumdalclitch, Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:16 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Poppy Newgod and the Phantom Banned (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:23 (twelve years ago) link
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 (twelve years ago) link
on a message board? how very dare you
― carpy deems (darraghmac), Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:22 (twelve years ago) link
― 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 (twelve years ago) link
ty merdeyeux!
― markers, Sunday, 8 January 2012 23:44 (twelve years ago) link
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 (twelve years ago) link
"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 (twelve years ago) link
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 (eleven years ago) link
that's awesome. i have never seen it before.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 15 May 2012 03:16 (eleven years ago) link
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 (eleven years ago) link
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 (eleven years ago) link
is there a correlation between paradisiacal childhoods and adult-onset extreme pessimism?
― 乒乓, Tuesday, 23 October 2012 20:15 (eleven years ago) link
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 (eleven years ago) link
http://24.media.tumblr.com/05f1200bdf1335f33b915fb5619b274d/tumblr_mqcvru8bfJ1qzywvpo1_500.png
― 乒乓, Tuesday, 23 July 2013 06:14 (ten years ago) link
lol @ cruel shoes in the corner
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 23 July 2013 17:18 (ten years ago) link
is that as close as we'll ever get to a nilmar honorato da silva wdyll
― mundane peaceable username (darraghmac), Tuesday, 23 July 2013 17:31 (ten years ago) link
God, I need to read a Cioran book!
― Tape Store, Sunday, August 26, 2007 6:29 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Le Bateau Ivre, Tuesday, 23 July 2013 17:54 (ten years ago) link
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
― click here to start exploding (ledge), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 13:21 (ten years ago) link
wow
― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:16 (ten years ago) link
oh hi july 2013
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:18 (ten years ago) link
"For once you must face the facts / Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." - Brecht
― playwright Greg Marlowe, secretly in love with Mary (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:19 (ten years ago) link
*high-fives bertrand russell*
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:20 (ten years ago) link
dr morbius that's only pessimistic if you're religious iirc
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:21 (ten years ago) link
nevermind i may be misreading brecht
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:23 (ten years ago) link
admittedly I don't exactly find it pessimistic; just the facts, ma'am
― playwright Greg Marlowe, secretly in love with Mary (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:25 (ten years ago) link
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.
― woof, Tuesday, 30 July 2013 19:33 (ten years ago) link
“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.” ― Georges Bataille
― am0n, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:14 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:23 (ten years ago) link
:C
― am0n, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:27 (ten years ago) link
lacan is pretty brutally pessimistic but i think he is unfortunately right about dissatisfaction being built into the structure of desire.
― Treeship, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:34 (ten years ago) link
lacan way overqualified for that idea
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:41 (ten years ago) link
"the grass is always greener on the other side" - jacques lacan
― Treeship, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:43 (ten years ago) link
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
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:45 (ten years ago) link
i love the phrasing of it: "you perhaps now know..."
― Treeship, Thursday, 8 August 2013 22:46 (ten years ago) link
"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
-- Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 25 August 2013 04:56 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE5tVOGYnmI
― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Wednesday, 16 October 2013 22:08 (ten years ago) link
ahahahaha
― HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Please don't hesitate (imago), Wednesday, 16 October 2013 22:09 (ten years ago) link
nilmz yer a bloody poet
― HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Please don't hesitate (imago), Wednesday, 16 October 2013 22:10 (ten years ago) link