Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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  • p.20-21: And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, – what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthlly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
  • p. 53: Yes, there is death in this business of whaling – a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth in my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the less of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
  • p. 90: And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at north, been led to think untraditionnally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language – that man makes one in a whole nation’s census – a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or by other circumstances, he have what seems a half willful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
  • p. 98: I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects.  There was Queequeg, now, certainly, entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; – but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say; and Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
  • p. 243: There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. Ands as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
  • p. 299: “as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play – this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

Blame Your Unconscious Mind For Your Own Actions

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“Don’t blame your unconscious mind for your own actions” is a very interesting paper, my thanks go to the author, Tania Lombrozo. I cite her last paragraph: “It’s tempting to think that unconscious beliefs reflect what others “really” believe, that they reveal the true self. But why should unconscious beliefs be considered any more genuine than conscious beliefs, the ones over which we have more control? Is it reasonable to hold people responsible for their implicit beliefs, or their brain activity, even if it doesn’t translate into action?”

Of course your unconscious beliefs do not reflect what others or what you yourself really belief. Say for example someone comes to consult me because he can’t work, he has to do writing work and he doesn’t do anything but watching tv-series whole day long. After probably a long process, it may appear that he himself unconsciously very much wants to do nothing, wants to actively boycott his work. But this is not the “real” truth: the truth is as much that he consciously wants to work and that unconsciously part of him does not want to work; the truth is the subject is divided, continuously and changeably internally divided.

Moreover, we probably have more control on the conscious beliefs than on the unconscious, but we are not in control of them neither. But, the most important point to make is: yes it is reasonable – and more than that – necessary, ethically necessary, to hold people responsible for their implicit belief. Even if they can’t control directly neither their brain activity, nor their societal influences, yes, we should ask people to respond for their actions – because, fundamentally, asking them to respond, in and by itself, is enabling them, structurally, to take a part of control.

 

 

 

La fin des coupables?

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Il s’agit, me semble-t-il, vraiment de l’idée de responsabilité dans un nombre de débats éthiques et politiques très actuels. L’idée serait qu’avec la modernité s’instaure l’accès à l’autonomie individuelle (l’intériorité) et avec ce changement aurait opéré au début du XXieme siècle une aspiration à un contrôle et une maîtrise de soi (et de ses pulsions). Donc dans un premier temps cet accès à l’autonomie – la possibilité du sujet de se penser autonome – serait allé de pair avec une (hyper-)culpabilisation (Freud, la religion). Peut-être dans un espèce de contre-coup du balancier on aurait alors évolué au XXième siècle, jusqu’à maintenant, à une déresponsabilisation (mais en maintenant l’idée de l’individu), sur le double versant du “ce n’est pas moi, c’est mon corps” et “ce n’est pas moi, c’est la société” (je suis victime de mes gènes, mes organes, mon temps, la société etc.).
Je pense, pour ma part, qu’il y a responsabilité singulière, quel que soit le corps et quelle que soit la société – et qu’on doit pouvoir être amené à répondre, même pour ce qu’on ne contrôle pas linéairement ou exhaustivement. Et je pense qu’une responsabilisation singulière est possible sans que ça ne mène structurellement à une hyperculpabilisation (ou à de l’obsessionalité comme le propose Pierre-Henri Castel ci-dessous). Mais je pense aussi que pour qu’il y ait possibilité d’assumer son implication subjective, on doit avoir accès aux outils qui permettent de la penser – ce qui n’est pas (encore) le cas, me semble-t-il.

voir: Pierre-Henri Castel à propos de “La fin des coupables” et du “Cas Paramord”

 

Rundskop en Geweld/Tête de Boeuf

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We zagen “Rundskop” dit weekend in het kader van een weekend in Oostende over psychoanalyse en film van de Belgische School voor Psychoanalyse. Het komt me voor, in het bijzonder door mijn drie jaren als psychologe aan het psychiatrisch centrum van Beernem, dat de wereld van de hormonenmaffia en de illegale nebuleuze gewelddadige praktijken die ermee gepaard gingen (gaan?), een (onderkende, wellicht nog ongeduide) werkelijkheid is. Zo had ik toen als boutade dat ‘wat de Vlamingen zot maakt’ – voorbij het singuliere – in de eerste plaats te maken heeft met de twee wereldoorlogen, in de tweede met de kerk, maar ik zou daar wellicht in de derde plaats een weefsel van min of meer georganiseerde, vaak onopgeloste misdaadfeiten aan toe kunnen voegen. Ik herinner me één dierenarts – als patiënt opgenomen op latere leeftijd – die een heel dossier had over de moord op Van Noppen, en ook zijn eigen levensverhaal had neergepend, met o.a. een heel treffend ‘castrerend’ moment in de kindertijd. Maar ik herinner me ook een jongeman die al dan niet delirerend leek te getuigen over ‘beerputmoorden’ alsof hij iets daarvan rechtstreeks had waargenomen. Het onopgeloste van geweld, het geweld dat niet in de geschiedenis als dusdanig kon worden geduid, is wat verder gist, en tot krankzinnigheid en nieuw geweld leidt. Veel meer dan je zou denken. Er hoeft geen aanduidbaar onmiskenbaar beestachtig moment te zijn, zoals de Reële castratie van Jacky in de film, om mensen zot en/of ziek te maken. In de werkelijkheid bestaat het drama wel eens vaker zonder aanwijsbaar inauguraal moment van geweld, in zekere zin is in de werkelijkheid het drama van het dramatische dat er geen aanwijsbaar uniek causaal moment is.

Wat ik wil zeggen is dat die alom gelauwerde film stoelt op een Reële castratie als ‘evenement’, terwijl het evenement er inderdaad is, hoewel het elders is en op een minder spectaculaire, maar niet minder effectieve wijze (de misdadige onderwereld en de onopgeloste misdaadfeiten). De paradoxale vraag is: klaagt de film de hormonenmaffia aan of trekt die op zeer handige (wellicht niet bewust kwaadwillige) wijze een rookgordijn op?

Ik vond dat ook het communautair thema in de film een soortgelijke paradoxale behandeling kreeg: de grappige karikaturalisering ervan (‘Vlaams gezang’ etc) kan lijken op een soort van aanklagen (“wij weten wel beter”, “we doorprikken dit hier eventjes”) maar het lijkt meer op het opstrijken van een pluim voor openheid en progressiviteit dan over om het even wat anders, wat iets in beweging zou kunnen zetten (bv. een scherpstellen, een vertragen, een analyse, een bewerking, een investering van het denken, …) Enfin goed, hoe meer ik erover nadenk,  hoe meer ik vind dat ‘Rundskop’ ook doorspekt is van makkelijkheid. Maar in de algemene bewieroking van de film is het moeilijk het denken vrij te houden.

Ça m’a encore beaucoup travaillé dans l’après-coup et mon opinion s’est finalement arrêté à: je n’ai pas trouvé ‘Rundskop’  aussi impressionnant que ce que les critiques en ont dit. Je le trouvais, en fin de compte, probablement très ‘fait’, voire ‘sur-fait’, ajoutant du réel à la réalité, avec l’effet paradoxal qu’il est supposé dénoncer une réalité — la violence d’une certaine maffia — tout en couvrant complètement cette violence par un événement qui la masque, du fait de son aspect surfait, en résultat de quoi l’assassinat de l’inspecteur vétérinaire est finalement réduit à une anecdote (voire même à un attribut: une balle perdue dans une carcasse de voiture).

 

A tale of two cities, Charles Dickens (1859)

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04.04.2013

  • .p. 74: “Notwithstanding Miss Pross’s denial of her own imagination, there was a perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea, in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to her possessing such a thing.”

Ari: Why this quote touched me is difficult to understand without the context. What touched me is that Dickens indicates that he infers from the way Miss Pross speaks, from the form of her speech (“repetition of the phrase, walking up and down”) some knowledge about Miss Pross – even if she denies this. The strict formal way of our speech betrays us, and there is no way around it: even in denial, even in lies, we can not do without choosing words to deny or to lie: and in these choices we can not but tell about ourselves…. That’s why psychoanalysis is possible: we don’t need conscious knowledge to grasp things, we just need the subject to speak. When he/she speaks, he/she betrays him/herself, can not but betray him/herself…

  • p.81: “Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur.”

 Ari: If we recognize a sign of o u r times in this, this might mean that what we are living at the moment is more due to the fact that, like in 1789 when this scene is taking place, we are at the eve of a paradigm change (and the disinvestment from an old system) more than to the specificities of the system in and by itself.  DvB: You sound like a true Nietzschean, my dear: “What is great in man, declares Zarathustra, “is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.”

 

  • p. 143: “All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.”.

Ari: The motor programs of hands and mouth are very close spatially in the motor cortex (Broca area) – together with the eye movement control, these three systems are the most elaborate motor systems on which we have fine motor control: mouth, hands and eyes. Eminently, these are the motor systems which generate consciousness. KH: Ariane, volgens mij was dat een erotische scene waar alle erotische fijngevoelige tactiele subtiele observaties en aanrakingen vertaald en gesublimeerd worden. The knitting of worthless things maakt net de erotische lading hoger juist omdat het worthless is. Ook eten en drinken, steken met de naald, opslokken en penetreren zijn erotische handelingen en zeker de verwijzing naar de maag die staat voor de vertering wat de totale overgave symboliseert.

The Circle; Our Betters; The Constant Wife, William Somerset Maugham

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These three plays talk about love. They spare nothing or nobody, neither the men (stupid, hypocritical, quite unloving) nor the women (stupid also, strategic, idle). Utterly refreshing!

The Circle (1921)

17.03.2012

  • p. 71: “But you know men are very funny. Even when they are in love, they’re not in love all day long.”
  • p. 73: “One sacrifices one’s life for love and then one finds that love doesn’t last. The tragedy of love isn’t death or separation. One gets over them. The tragedy of love is indifference.”

 

Our Betters (1917)

17.03.2012

  • p. 103:  “My dear fellow, the degree of a nation’s civilization is marked by its disregard for the necessities of existence. You have gone so far as to waste money, but we have gone farther; we waste what is infinitely more precious, more transitory, more irreparable – we waste time.”
  • p. 129: “Pearl: “(…) As if anyone remembered an emotion when he no longer felt it!” Duchesse: “It’s true. I’ve been in love a dozen times, desperately, and when I’ve got over it and look back, though I remember I was in love, I can’t for the life of me remember my love.”

 

Ari: This last point is very well taken by WSM. Freud (1915) tells us in ‘The Unconscious’ that an experience is a complex of separable components, one of which is a representational component and the other one is an affective component. (This is  very much in line with the neurophysiological description of the ‘high road’ and the ‘low road’ of Joseph LeDoux.) The essential difference between both, Freud further tells us, is that the representational component leaves a ‘memory trace’ while the affect, being a mere ‘discharge process’, does not. I have proposed in my book (‘Des fantômes dans la voix’, 2007 – but probably others have proposed similar ideas) that the representational and the affective component essentially differ in the nature of their discharge or execution system. The representations have the voluntary striated muscles (the limbs, the articulation system etc.) as their execution system, the affects have the involuntary smooth muscles (delineating the inner body) as their execution system. The voluntary muscles system being so much finer organized than the smooth muscle system, this enables a finer inscription. This is why, while we can remember that we have felt a feeling, we can not remember the feeling, unless we live the feeling again – but then is it truly a memory?

 

The Constant Wife  (1927)

17.03.2012

This is a hilarious play, it is ferociously truthful.

  • p. 222. “Constance:”Now listen. If I think he’s awful we’ll just talk about the weather and the crops for a few minutes and then we’ll have an ominous pause and stare at him. That always makes a man feel a perfect fool and the moment a man feels a fool he gets up and goes.”. Mrs Culver: “Sometimes they don’t know how to, poor dears, and the earth will never open and swallow them up.”
  • p.  262: Constance: “My dear, any sensible man would rather play bridge at his club than with his wife, and he’d always rather play golf with a man than with a woman. A paid secretary is a far better helpmate than a loving spouse. When all is said and done, the modern wife is nothing but a parasite.”:
  • p. 287: John: “If you think what they call free love is fun you’re mistaken. Believe me, its the most overrated amusement that was ever invented.”
  • p. 289: Mrs Culver: “(…) Men were meant by nature to be wicked and delightful and deceive their wives, and women were meant to be virtuous, and forgiving and to suffer verbosely. (…)”

Cakes and ale, William Somerset Maugham (1930)

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(novel inspired by the life of Thomas Hardy)

01-03.02.2012

  • p. 90-91: “We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry.”

Ari: I know nobody who is so deliciously politically incorrect as WSM.

Prose will save our souls, not poetry.

  • p. 93:  “I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of tis sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy, it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s ‘Entombment of Christ’, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to  beauty – sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love – because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection [such is human nature] holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: ‘Qu’est-ce que ça prouve?‘ was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.
  • p. 93: ‘From what I hear she was absolutely promiscuous.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, ‘She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.’ ‘Do you call that love?’ ‘Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice, it wasn’t lasciviousness, it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character, she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.’ Mrs Driffield looked as though she had taken a dose of castor oil and had just been trying to get the taste of it out of her mouth by sucking a lemon. (…) ‘She was like a clear, deep pole in a forest glade into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.’. Roy laughed again, and this time Mrs Driffield without concealment smiled thinly. ‘It’s comic to hear you so lyrical,’ said Roy. I stiffled a sigh. I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”

The sorrows of an American, Siri Hustvedt (2008)

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14.05.2010

  • p.51-52: “History is made by amnesia. In the American Civil War, they called it soldier’s heart, and over time it changed its name to shell shock, then war neurosis. Now it’s PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, the most antiseptic of the terms of what can happen to people who witness the unspeakable. During World War I, in the barracks of field hospitals French and British doctors saw them coming in droves – men blind, deaf, shaking, paralyzed, aphasic, catatonic, hallucinating, plagued by recurring nightmares and insomnia, seeing and re-seeing what no one should see, or feeling nothing at all. Clearly, they weren’t all suffering from brain lesions, so the physicians began to tag their patients NYD (not yet diagnosed) or GOK (God only knows) or Dieu seul sait quoi (God only knows what this is).”
  •  p. 278: “I thought about (…) my father and grandfather and about the earlier generations who occupy the mental terrain within us and the silences on that old ground, where shifting wraiths pass or speak in voices so low we can’t hear what they are saying.”

“Des fantomes dans la voix”

Train de nuit pour Lisbonne, Pascal Mercier (2008)

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02.08.2011

Quelques passages frappants

-p. 329:  “Et qu’est-ce que vous faites ici? (…) -C’est difficile à expliquer (…). Très difficile. Vous savez ce que sont les rêves diurnes. C’est un peu comme ça. Mais c’est aussi très différent. Plus sérieux. Et plus fou. Quand le temps qu’il vous reste à vivre se réduit, il n’y a plus de règles qui tiennent. Et ensuite on a l’impression que l’on est devenu cinglé et mur pour la maison de fous. Mais au fond c’est l’inverse: ceux qui doivent aller à l’asile, ce sont ceux qui ne veulent pas comprendre que le temps raccourcit. Ceux qui continuent comme si de rien était. (…)”

-p. 369: “Tu as réalisé sur moi un tour d’adresse, Mamã, et j’écris maintenant ce que j’aurais dû te dire depuis longtemps: c’était un tour d’adresse perfide, qui a pesé sur ma vie comme rien d’autre. En effet, tu m’as fait savoir – et le moindre doute sur le contenu de ce message n’était pas possible – que tu n’attendais de mon ton fils – ton fils -, rien de moins que ceci: qu’il soit le meilleur. Le meilleur en quoi, ce n’était pas là l’important, mais les prestations qu’il me faudrait réaliser devraient surpasser celles de tous les autres, et non seulement les surpasser d’une manière quelconque, mais les dominer de très haut. Ta perfidie, c’est de ne me l’avoir jamais dit. Ton attente ne s’est jamais formulée de manière à me permettre de prendre position, d’y réfléchir et de me confronter aux sentiments que cela m’inspirait. Et pourtant je le savais, car cela existe: un savoir que l’on instille à un enfant sans défense, goutte après goutte, jour après jour, sans qu’il remarque le moins du monde ce savoir silencieux toujours grandissant. Le savoir invisible se répand en lui comme un poison sournois, s’infiltre dans les tissus du corps et de l’âme et détermine la couleur et les nuances de sa vie. A partir de ce savoir agissant incognito, dont la puissance résidait dans son caractère secret, naquit en moi un réseau invisible, indétectable, fait d’attentes inflexibles et impitoyables envers moi, tissé par les cruelles araignées d’une ambition née de la peur. Combien de fois, avec quel désespoir et dans quel comique grotesque me suis-je plus tard débattu en moi pour me libérer – rien que pour m’emmêler plus encore! Il était impossible de me défendre contre ta présence en moi: ton tour d’adresse était trop parfait, un chef-d’œuvre sans défaut, d’une perfection écrasante, à couper le souffle. Dans sa perfection, entrait le fait que non seulement tu laissais inexprimées tes attentes étouffantes, mais que tue les cachais sous des paroles et des gestes qui exprimaient le contraire. Je ne dis pas qu’il s’agissait là d’un plan conscient, rusé, sournois. Non, tu as toi-même accordé foi à tes paroles trompeuses et tu as été la victime d’un travestissement dont l’intelligence dépassait de loin la tienne. Depuis lors, je sais combien les êtres humains peuvent être jusqu’au pus profond d’eux-mêmes liés les uns aux autres et présents les uns dans les autres, sans s’en douter le moins du monde.”

-p. 408:  “Les contours de la volonté des parents et de la crainte qu’ils inspirent s’inscrivent avec un crayon de feu dans les âmes des petits, qui sont pleins d’impuissance et pleins d’ignorance sur ce qui leur arrive. Nous avons besoin de toute une vie pour trouver le texte gravé au fer rouge et pour le déchiffrer, et nous ne pouvons jamais être sûrs de l’avoir compris.”

-p. 410: “Car c’est un fait: on ne sait pas ce qui manque à quelqu’un, jusqu’à ce qu’il l’obtienne, et alors d’un seul coup, c’est très clair, c’était cela.”

-p. 427: “Quand nous parlons de nous-mêmes, d’autres personnes ou simplement d’objets, nous voulons (…) nous révéler dans nos paroles: nous voulons faire connaître ce que nous pensons et sentons. Nous laissons les autres jeter un regard dans notre âme. (…) Selon cette conception, nous sommes les metteurs en scène souverains, les dramaturges autodéterminés de notre ouverture aux autres. Mais peut-être cela est-il totalement faux? Une illusions que nous nous créons nous-mêmes? Car nous ne faisons pas que nous révéler par nos paroles, nous nous trahissons aussi. Nous livrons beaucoup plus que ce que nous voulions révéler, et parfois c’en est exactement le contraire. Et les autres peuvent interpréter nos paroles comme des symptômes dont nous ignorons peut-être la cause. Comme des symptômes de la maladie d’être nous. Cela peut être amusant si nous considérons les autres ainsi, cela peut nous rendre plus tolérants, mais aussi nous donner des munitions. Et si, à l’instant où nous commençons à parler, nous pensons que les autres en font autant avec nous, le mot peut nous rester coincé dans la gorge et l’effroi nous rendre muet pour toujours.”

 

Essays in love, Alain de Botton (1993)

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15.01.2012

See my comments to some striking excerpts:

  • p. 68-69: “There is usually a Marxist moment in most relationships [the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated] and the way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved [on some excuse or other] is not good enough for them [not good enough by virtue of association with no-goods]. But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.”
  •  p. 99: “Beauty was to be found in the area of oscillation between ugliness and classical perfection. A face that launches a thousand ships is not always architecturally formal: it can be as unstable as an object that is spinning between two colours and that gives rise to a third shade so long as it is moving. There is a certain tyranny about perfection, a certain exhaustion about it even, something that denies the viewer a role in its creation and that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of an unambiguous statement. True beauty cannot be measured because it is fluctuating, it has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those areas that will also lend themselves to ugliness. Beauty may need to take a calculated risk with ugliness.”
  •  p. 152-154: “1. Language flatters our indecisions with its stability. It allows us to hide under an illusory permanence and fixity while the world changes minute by minute. ‘No man steps into the same river twice’, said Heraclitus, pointing to the inevitable flux yet ignoring the fact that if the word for river does not change, then in an important sense, it is the same river we appear to have stepped into. I was a man in love with a woman, but how much of the mobility and inconstancy of my emotions could such words hope to carry? Was there room in them for all the infidelity, boredom, irritation, and indifference that often found themselves knitted together with this love? Could any words hope to accurately reflect the degree of ambivalence to which my emotions seemed fated? 2. I call myself a name, and the name stays with me throughout my life – the ‘I’ that I see in a picture of myself at the age of six and that I will perhaps see in a picture of myself at sixty will both be framed by the same letters, though time will have altered me almost unrecognizably. I call a tree a tree, though throughout the year, the tree changes. To rename the tree at every season would be too confusing, so language settles on the continuity, forgetting that in one season there are leaves that in another will be absent. 3. We hence proceed by abbreviation, we take the dominant feature [of a tree, of an emotional state] and label as the whole something that is only a part. Similarly, the story we tell of an event remains a segment of the totality the moment comprised; as soon as the moment is narrated, it loses its multiplicity and ambivalence in the name of abstracted meaning and authorial intent. The story embodies the poverty of the remembered moment.

Ari: This is what Freud calls the ‘primary process’, or probably what Lacan calls the ‘Imaginary’. During a psychoanalytic session it is often an ‘easy’  (but nonetheless important) intervention of the analyst to pay attention to these moments when the analysand uses this kind of ellipses or labels and to invite him or her to deconstruct the ellipses ‘back’ to the complexity of the experiences.

  • Chloe and I lived a love story stretching over an expanse of time during which my feelings moved so far across the emotional scale that to talk of being simply in love seems a brutal foreshortening of events. Pressed for time and eager to simplify, we are forced to narrate and remember things by ellipsis, or we would be overwhelmed by both our ambivalence and our instability. The present becomes degraded, first into history, then into nostalgia. […]

Ari: ‘psychotics’ have another position in language, language functions differently in the total mental system, and indeed ‘they’ are more easily “overwhelmed by both ambivalence and instability”.

  • 5. Perhaps we can forgive language its hypocrisy because it enables us to recall a weekend in Bath with one word, pleasant, hence creating a manageable order and identity. Yet at times one is brought face to face with the flux beneath the word, the water flowing beneath Heraclitus’ river – and one longs for the simplicity things assume when letters are the only guardians of their borders. I loved Chloe – how easy it sounds, like someone saying they love apple juice or Marcel Proust. And yet how much more complex the reality was, so complex that I struggle against saying anything conclusive of any one moment, for to say one thing is automatically to miss out on another – every assertions symbolizing the repression of a thousand counter-assertions.“

see Bazan, A. (2012). From sensorimotor inhibition to Freudian repression. Frontiers in Psychology.

  •  p. 161: [We could perhaps define maturity – that ever-elusive goal – as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.]
  •  p. 194: “At the basis of all sulks lies a wrong that might have been addressed and disappeared at once, but that instead is taken by the injured partner and stored for later and more painful detonation. Delays in explanation give grievances a weight that they would lack if the matter had been addressed as soon as it had arisen. To display anger shortly after an offense occurs is the most generous thing one may do, for it saves the sulked from the burgeoning of guilt and the need to talk the sulker down from his or her battlement.”

Ari: This is major point both in life and in analysis: the ability to display anger and finding ways (forms) to do so. And very rightly so, it is a token of respect, and even of love, to ‘give’ the ‘honor’ of one’s anger to the other: it signals the fact that the other one is considered having the ability to receive the anger and it gives him or her the chance to reply. It is often more violent, both for oneself and for the other, to keep the anger for oneself. In fact, it is not seldom a sign of a far greater aggressiveness than would be the anger displayed. Only displayed anger opens a way to something beyond anger. Now, of course, not all situations are the same and there are inherent situational limits to displaying anger which one has to take into account.

  • p. 174: ,”The strength of the accusations we made, their sheer implausibility, showed that we argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much – or, to risk confusing things, because we hated loving one another to the extent we did. Our accusations were loaded with a complicated subtext, I hate you, because I love you. It amounted to a fundamental protest, I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this. The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralysing fears that such dependence involves. Our occasionally fierce and somewhat inexplicable arguments during our trip through Valencia were nothing but a necessary release of tension that came from realizing that each one had placed all their eggs in the other’s basket – and was helpless to aim for more sound household management.”
  •  p. 213: “I was labouring under the curse of fate, not an external one, but a  psycho-face: a fate from within. 6. In an age of science, psychoanalysis provided names for my demons. Though itself a science, it retained the dynamic [if not the substance] of superstition, the belief that the majority of life unfolds without adherence to rational control. In the stories of manias and unconscious motivations, compulsions and visitations, I recognized the world of Zeus and his colleagues, the Mediterranean transported to late-nineteenth-century Vienna, a secularized, sanitized view of much of the same picture. Completing the revolution of Galileo and Darwin, Freud returned man to the initial humbleness of the Greek forefathers, the acted-upon rather than the actors. The Freudian world was made of double-sided coins one of whose sides we could never see, a world where hate could hide great love and great love hate, where a man might try to love a woman, but unconsciously be doing everything to drive her into another’s arms. From within a scientific field that had for so long made the case for free will, Freud presented a return to a form of psychic determinism. It was an ironic twist to the history of science, Freudians questioned the dominance of the thinking ‘I’ from within science itself. ‘I think, therefore I am,’ had metamorphosed into Lacan’s ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.’.”
  •  p. 217: “11. The essence of a curse is that the person labouring under it cannot know of its existence. It is a secret code within the individual writing itself over a lifetime, but unable to find rational, preemptive articulation. Oedipus is warned by the Oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother – but conscious warnings serve no purpose, they alert only the thinking ‘I’, they cannot defuse the coded curse. Oedipus is cast out from home in order to avoid the Oracle’s prediction, but ends up marrying Jocasta nevertheless: his story is told form him, not by him. He knows the possible outcome, he knows the dangers, yet can change nothing: the curse defies the will. 12. But what curse did I labour under? Nothing other than an inability to form happy relationships, the greatest misfortune known in modern society. Exiled from the shaded grove of love, I would be compelled to wander the earth till the day of my death, unable to shake of my compulsion to make those I loved flee from me. I sought a name for this evil, and found it contained in the psychoanalytic description of repetition compulsion, defined as: ….an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its actions, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determine by the circumstances of the moment. (The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche, J.B. Pontalis, Karnac Books, 1988). 13. The comforting aspect of psychoanalysis [if one can talk so optimistically] is the meaningful world it suggests we live in. No philosophy is further from the thought that it is all a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing [even to deny meaning is meaningful]. Yet the meaning is never light: the psycho-fatalist’s spell subtly replaced the words and then with the words In order that, thereby identifying a paralysing causal link. I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that, she leave me. The painful tale of loving her appeared as a palimpsest, beneath which another story had been written. Buried deep in the unconscious, a pattern had been forged, in the early months ors years. The baby had driven away the mother, or the mother had left the baby, and now baby/man recreated the same scenario, different actors but the same plot, Chloe fitting into the clothes worn by another. Why had I even chosen her? It was not the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind. It was because the unconscious, the casting director of the inner drama, recognized in her a suitable character to fill the role in the mother/infant script, someone who would oblige the playwright by leaving the stage at just the right time with the requisite wreckage and pain. 14. Unlike the curses of the Greek gods, psycho-fatalism at least held out the promise it could be escaped. Where the id was, ego might be – if only ego had not been so crushed by pain, bruised, bleeding, punctured, unable to plan the day let alone the life.

 Ari: The compulsion to repeat is of course another major point of psychoanalysis. It is close to Lacan’s concept of ‘jouissance’. I will come back to it.