February 2012
4 posts
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Melancholia: From "Mourning" to Suicide
In the light of our hypothesis of incorporation, is it possible to interpret the struggle of “love and hate” in a subject who, according to Freud, has in fact been disappointed in and mistreated by the love object? We find it crucial to affirm the prior existence of a love totally free of ambivalence, to insist on the undisclosable character of this love, and finally to show that a real and...
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The Intrapsychic Tomb
Even when denied introjection, not every narcissistic loss is fated to incorporation. Incorporation results from those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In this special cases the impossibility of introjection is so profound that even our refusal to mourn is prohibited from being given a language, that we are debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are...
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January 2012
11 posts
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Resources for the Study of Hegel's Phenomenology...
29. Science sets forth this formative process in all its detail and necessity, exposing the mature configuration of everything which has already been reduced to a moment and property of Spirit. The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without the means. But the length of this path has to be endured, because, for one...
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Love brings an end to the opposition between gift and property without surmounting and without sublating it: if i return to myself within love, I do not return to myself from love (the dialectic, on the contrary, feeds on the equivocation). I do not return from it, and consequently, something of I is definitely lost or dissociated in its act of loving. That is undoubtedly why I return (if at least...
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John’s habit (nothing similar is known to have been done by Jesus) of baptizing by immersion in water those drawn to his spirit is an important and symbolical one. No feeling is so homogeneous with the desire for the infinite, the longing to merge into the infinite, as the desire to immerse one’s self in the sea. To plunge into it is to be confronted by an alien element which at once...
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The whole world Abraham regarded as simply his opposite; if he did not take it to be a nullity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it. Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; everything was simply under God’s mastery. Abraham, as the opposite of the whole world, could have had no higher mode of being than that of the other term in the opposition, and...
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Over against commands which required a bare service of the Lord, a direct slavery, an obedience without joy, without pleasure or love, i.e., the commands in connection with the service of God, Jesus set their precise opposite, a human urge and so a human need. Religious practice is the most holy, the most beautiful, of all things; it is our endeavor to unify the discords necessitated by our...
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There is, however, a misanthropy (most improperly so called), the tendency towards which is to be found with advancing years in many right minded men, that, as far as good will goes, is no doubt, philanthropic enough, but as the result of long and sad experience, is widely removed from delight in mankind. We see evidences of this in the propensity to recluseness, in the fanciful desire for a...
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Thus, too, delight in the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas that in the beautiful is positive): that is to say, it is a feeling of imagination by its own act depriving itself of its freedom by receiving a final determination in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical employment. In this way it gains an extension and a might greater than that which it sacrifices. But the...
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And in the same way…there would be judging, synthesizing, independent of desire, whether it be empirical, as need or penchant, or transcendental, as pure will. That is to say, unlike every desire…a judgment not having ‘knowledge’ of it’s end. One could say, a blind judgment, quite blind, without even that ‘clairvoyance’ about what it hasn’t got which is necessarily...
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November 2011
20 posts
Today I’m leaving for two months of intensive vipassana at the Hse Main Gon forest meditation centre in Burma. I may not continue posting when I return, but if I do it will be fairy sparse, so I wanted to take this opportunity to thank those of you here who I don’t really interact with but have gained a lot from, both intellectually and emotionally, in the past year. To all the people I...
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34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” — that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite...
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“What does the value of primordial presence to intuition as source of sense and...”
– Jacques Derrida: Speech and Phenomena
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Playwrights often overdo the clever line or turn as the curtain’s about to fall. It shows lack of taste. You don’t find it in good plays.
The strange thing is that when people come together in a community for the purpose, simply, of production, or for reasons of geography, they start to hate each other and do one another down. Because each one only loves himself. Community is an illusion, as a...
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Beethoven: Concerto in D Major, Op. 61- I. Allegro...
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“As a child, Adorno would often visit the Frankfurt zoo, accompanied by his...”
– Robert Savage: Adorno’s Family and Other Animals
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Aesthetic truth was bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois society. Art really only exists as long as it is impossible by virtue of the order which it transcends. That is why the existence of all the great forms of art is paradoxical, and more than all the others that of the novel, the bourgeois art form par excellence which the film has now appropriated for itself. Today with the...
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“In the commodity fetishists of the new model, in the ‘sado-masochistic...”
– Theodor Adorno: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening
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“The change in the function of music involves the basic conditions of the...”
– Theodor Adorno: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening
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“The themes of the Judaeo-Christian heritage help to explain the cultural, but...”
– Jürgen Habermas: A Conversation About God and the World
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“This is Hegel’s reading of the actual significance and deep meaning of the...”
– Robert Brandom: A Spirit of Trust
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“The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is: the choice, freedom....”
– Kierkegaard: Journals
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October 2011
19 posts
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“Enlightenment depends upon myth, it depends upon the entire range of...”
– J.M. Bernstein: Adorno, Disenchantment and Ethics.
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“Enlightenment and myth each contain, at least, a double signification....”
– J.M. Bernstein: Adorno, Disenchantment and Ethics.
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“At this point in the positivistic confrontation with the new lineaments of...”
– Jürgen Habermas: Theory and Practice
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“…my presence was to him only the absence of black morass and snarled vine and...”
– William Faulkner- Absalom, Absalom!
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“Thus, for the question of knowing if virtue is possible, one can substitute the...”
– Pierre Bourdieu: Practical Reason
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“Human Desire must be directed toward another Desire. For there to be human...”
– Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
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“One may suppose that, to obtain the sacrifice of ‘self-love’ in...”
– Pierre Bourdieu: Pascalian Meditations
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“Now, the analysis of “thought,” “reason,”...”
– Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
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“With a Heideggerian play on words, one might say that we are disposed because we...”
– Pierre Bourdieu: Pascalian Meditations