Transitory

She’d been roaring a long rant then she rambled on. He snarled stubbornly and barely stopped himself from strangling her. Silence in the middle of the street. He saw the tears in her eyes as she saw his face reddened. The afternoon wind blew, Shh . . . He hesitantly, slowly held her hand. She

The Lacanian Subject (according to Fink): Further Beyond: Traversing Fantasy

[The psychoanalytic couch; An Associated Press photo by Bob Wands] [Continues "Another Bar"] As a preliminary formulation, Fink sums up the process by which the subject is “alienat[ed] by and in the Other [as language]” and then “separate[d] from the [m]Other [as desire]” through the prohibition of the fOther (as law (i.e. prohibitive/symbolizing/socializing language)) as

The Lacanian Subject (according to Fink): Another Bar: The Primordial Signifier / Phallic Function

[Continues "Beyond the Bar"] Central to the psychoanalytic schema is that which thwarts/frustrates/disillusions the alignment/overlapping/matching/filling of the two lacks/desires (by two subjects, e.g. the mOther and the child), what Lacan calls the paternal function—the father in Freud’s Oedipus—which is associated with the primordial signifier, i.e. that which signals the subject’s entrance into language, the Symbolic

The Economic System and the Demoralization of the Humanities

It has been a common thing in academic circles to talk about the travails of scholars-in-training (i.e. graduate students) in the field of the humanities, most notably in the “superfluous” concentrations of philosophy, literature, history, anthropology . . . (where scholars-in-training spend at least seven years of their “most productive lives” (their twenties) reading books

Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Signifier, Non-Signifying but Despotic

In delineating the unconscious as the (no longer merely psychic, as in Freud, but Symbolic (social?)) repository, as it were, of repressed elements, Jacques Lacan stresses that the rules (the Law) these elements are subject to (that determine the shape, as it were, of the unconscious, what it looks like, what’s in there, what happens

The Symbolic Cuts Into the Real (Creates the Imaginary)!

[A schema of (Real) being and the (Symbolic) Other from lacan.com] In a previous post I suggested that in contrast to Alexandre Leupin‘s ontological presentation of Jacques Lacan’s three orders, Bruce Fink in The Lacanian Subject offers a durational model, i.e. a model that portrays the relationship between the orders as historical configurations, i.e. as

“But I thought I Knew Who I Was . . .?”: Desiring-Machines and the Deleuzi(o)n Subject

So: Who am I? (Either) Ryan or Aless? (Or) Aless or Ryan? And, isn’t it: / ? As it turns out, I am constituted by parts that connect (especially with alien parts, in all different sorts of connection, ones no I can really claim), that is, when they’re not saying No!, when they could, when

Pessimism of Strength

[Image from Cartoonstock] In the preface (the “Attempt at Self-Criticism”) to The Birth of Tragedy, written more than ten years after the main text, Friedrich Nietzsche recapitulates the question he had broached in the work of his youth. He asks, “Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts [.

either No! or Couldn’t: The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording

[Rembrandt's Saint Paul in Prison] So, coming straight out of our last conversation (about their playfulness, their promiscuity, i.e. their connectivity), we’re still talking about desiring-machines. (Either) Ryan and I (or, more precisely: /). (Or) Aless and /. S/he asks me (one of them, ‘can’t remember who) (/ suspect after the Dionysian celebration that commenced,

My desiring-machines are Working!

["Cross-pollination" from Cartoonstock] I don’t know if it was once again the feel of the big city in Berlin, or the weekend in Amsterdam that did it, but, if I’ve been worried about becoming-lone-wolf, I think it is safe to say for now that I can put those worries to rest. I am not completely