_The Humanistic Cinema Of Yasujiro Ozu, Where Frames, Sometimes, Speak Louder Than Characters. 

Myself

Heart eager for glimmer  belly stingy for caresses  false sun false eyes words carriers of plague

the earth loves cold bodies. 

Tears of frost ambiguity of eyelashes 

lips of a dead woman unatonable teeth

absence of life

nudity of death.

So it turns out that we’re not the answer to the dreams of centuries. Lope of the hunter from field to forest. “We have adapted wheat to grow on clouds and grain to fall like rain.” Laughed, then died, and the living guess at the joke. Mark Weiss

Capital (Abridged) in summary

Recently I formed with some friends a communist reading group, where we are currently making our way through Capital (Abridged).* To help the group members who are less experienced reading such theory, I have been preparing summaries of each chapter, which I have thought to begin sharing here as well!

Chapter I: Commodities, Prices, Profits

Chapter II: Profit and Value in Circulation

Chapter III: Value in Use and Exchange Value, the Socially Necessary Labor

Chapter IV: Purchase and Sale of Labor Power

Chapter V: How Surplus Value Arises

(Currently I have been writing these at a pace of 1–2 per week, but the posting schedule here will be a bit more frequent at the start, while I catch up)

*Ed. Julian Borchardt, 1919. Trans. Stephen L. Trask, 1932.

“In terms of a writerly ontology, I don’t even believe “story” exists — except as a convenient way to talk about an effect of writing; whereas readers and writers who are comfortable in that discourse are content with a concept of “writing” that makes it one with a notion of “style,” which they see as a variable aspect, like color, of a solid, visible, and locatable entity called a story. Whereas for me, words are the solid and locatable elements in a text, and meaning, story, style, and tone are all shifting and flickering aspects to various combinations of words that are, all of them, equally evanescent and intangible, intricately interrelated and inextricable — analyzable yes, but never simple or exhaustible.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “Zelazny/Varley/Gibson — and Quality”

Video

“In the early days of childhood, the child and the mother form a kind of libidinal symbiosis. The mother (primary caregiver) is always there. At first, she appears to be omnipotent (phallic, non-lacking, uncastrated). The baby’s body forms a perceived unity with the mother’s body, but time goes on and the baby isn’t tactilely unified with the mother as much and now finds unity with her through constantly being the object of her loving gaze, i.e., her desire. Even if the baby isn’t actually touching its mother, it maintains the feeling of unity by having the mother’s attention focused solely on it. But time goes on and the baby comes to realize that its mother’s gaze isn’t always directed towards it. The baby is now aware of the intentionality or directedness of the mother’s consciousness/desire. As Edmund Husserl put it, “In perception something is perceived, in imagination, something imagined, in a statement something stated, in love sorting loved, in hate hated, in desire desired etc.” (Logical Investigations: Volume 2, p. 95). The baby is not always the object of the mother’s desire. For the child, its experiences of the absent object of the mother’s desire (intentionality toward this “object”) are Sartrean négatités, i.e., concrete negations or experiences of nothingnesses. We can even term the mother’s intentional desire or directed attention her “misintentionality”, since her actual intentionality causes the child the misperceive its missing “object”. This phenomenon causes the baby to start wondering about what it is that the mother desires and its answer, its guess, will be the single object that has the power to completely satisfy mother’s desire. The child, then, decides that it must be this object for the mother so as to maintain the child-mother unity. As Lacan said, “If the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire” (‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Écrits, p. 582). The baby starts “asking” itself about her absence: “Where does mommy go when she’s not here with me and why does she leave?” “What is it that mommy truly wants?” And, of course, the obvious answer in most cases is the father. This is the first answer the baby can grasp, since it cannot yet comprehend the concepts of “work”, “hobbies”, “duties”, “errands”, “interests”, “responsibilities”, etc. These concerns are not yet part of the child’s world, they’re still unintelligible to it, but the actual father, for the most part, is part of it, since the child can actually perceive the father or hears about him through what the mother says about him. This, in turn, is what makes the father the child’s first rival regardless of its sex. This is reinforced in the mother’s speech: “Mom and dad are going out to dinner tonight”, “Mommy and daddy are going to bed now”, etc. Thus, the child comes to associate the disappearance of the mother with the father. This leads the child to hypothesize the following: “Daddy must have the powerful object, the perfect thing, that I lack and has the power to satisfy the desire of my mother”. And this “object” of the mother’s desire is what Lacan called the “Imaginary phallus” (Lacan’s matheme or “mathematical” symbol for the Imaginary phallus is φ [lowercase phi]). This Imaginary phallus is what I’ve been referring to as the “substantial” phallus (a negative “substance” insofar as it does not really exist). Long story short, Symbolic castration occurs in two steps. The child realizes that the mother is not omnipotent insofar as she herself lacks/desires something outside of the dyadic relation between herself and the child (she is missing something). The child posits the Imaginary phallus (perfect-powerful object) that satisfies the mother’s desire, which, then, the child wants to be. The second and most important moment of the castration complex, what brings the Oedipus complex to an end, is when the child accepts its own lack, that is, gives up trying to be the Imaginary phallus for the mother and realizes that the father is the one who has it. This realization is brought on by the installation of the privileged phallic signifier, that is, the Symbolic phallus (Lacan’s matheme for the Symbolic phallus is Φ [uppercase Phi]). The Symbolic phallus (phallic signifier) indicates the Imaginary phallus (“substantial” power). We could actually say that the Symbolic phallus is the signifier (index, stand-in, representation) of the Imaginary phallus (the elusive x of the mother’s desire, i.e., what women want). The phallic signifier can be any number of things, e.g., a word, a look, a gesture, an object, etc. It’s some feature or thing associated with the father that indicates that he has the “substantial” phallus, that he has the power. I think it’s correct to say that this “power” indicated by the phallic signifier is precisely what gives the name-of-the-father its authority. It’s because the phallic figure “has” the phallus that his “No!” has authority. The “name-of-the-father” is what Lacan calls the prohibitory function of the father, that is, the “No!” of the father. The French term nom du père is what gets translated as the “name-of-the-father” but there’s more going on with it. Dylan Evans writes, “From the beginning Lacan plays on the homophony of le nom du père (the name of the father) and le ‘non’ du père (the ‘no’ of the father), to emphasise the legislative and prohibitive function of the symbolic father” (An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p. 122). The pure function of the Symbolic father is to be a “No!”, that is, to embody the pure prohibition. Sartre, once again, is helpful here: “It is as a Not that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There are even men (e.g., caretakers, overseers, gaolers) whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth. Others so as to make the Not a part of their very subjectivity, establish their human personality as a perpetual negation” (Being and Nothingness, p. 87). But Sartre’s authority figures are only able to embody the “No!”, exercise their Symbolic power, because they are bearers of the Symbolic phallus (badge, uniform, gun, etc.). The embodied “Not”, the incarnated “No!”, first occurs in the Symbolic castration of the child via the Symbolic father. The Symbolic phallus and the name/no-of-the father form the assemblage of the father’s power and authority. Once the child has accepted its lack, once it has repressed its desire for the mother’s desire and substituted it with the father’s mandate (what Lacan calls the “paternal metaphor”), he or she has entered into the Symbolic order (Law) and become a desiring (neurotic) subject proper. The Symbolic phallus may seem to be a flat-out oppressive mechanism, and it definitely creates problems when it comes to sexual difference, but it also has a liberatory dimension to it. Despite all the negative issues surrounding the phallic signifier, it still serves to free the child from the prison of the mother’s desire. We can also call the Symbolic phallus the signifier of freedom. Let’s have a look at two very important quotes from Lacan: Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap. It is not, contrary, to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside. (Seminar X: Anxiety, pp. 53–4) The mother’s role is the mother’s desire. That’s fundamental. The mother’s desire is not something that is bearable just like that, that you are indifferent to. It will always wreak havoc. A huge crocodile in whose jaws you are — that’s the mother. One never knows what might suddenly come over her and make her shut her trap. That’s what the mother’s desire is. Thus, I have tried to explain that there was something that was reassuring. I am telling you simple things, I am improvising, I have to say. There is a roller, made out of stone of course, which is there, potentially, at the level of her trap, and it acts as a restraint, as a wedge. It’s what is called the phallus. It’s the roller that shelters you, if, all of a sudden, she closes it. (Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 112)”

— Lacan’s Concept of the Phallus by DangerousMaybe

Karim Aïnouz

- Mariner of the Mountains

2021

A Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours, francis bacon, 1961 inspired by Eadweard Muybridge photos of paralytic child.

"When I call you my love, is that I am calling you, yourself, or is it that I am telling my love? And when I tell you my love is it that I am declaring my love to you or indeed that I am telling you, yourself, my love, and that you are my love / I want so much to tell you and you, tell me I love all my appellations for you and then we would have but one lip, one alone to say everything. From the Hebrew he translates “tongue” if you can call it translating, as lip. They wanted to elevate themselves sublimely, in order to impose their lip, the unique lip, on the universe. Babel, the father, giving his name of confusion, multiplied the lips, and this why we are separated and that right now I am dying, dying to kiss you with our lip the only one I want to hear."

Jacques Derrida: The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

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