Latest Posts by cantastoriedimorte - Page 2
uh so i never do this but maui is quite literally on fire and there isn't nearly enough care or consideration for. you know. Native Hawaiians who live here being displaced and the land (and cultural relevance) that's being eaten up by the fire. so if ya'll wanna help, here's some links:
maui food bank: https://mauifoodbank.org/
maui humane society: https://www.mauihumanesociety.org/
center for native hawaiian advancement: https://www.memberplanet.com/campaign/cnhamembers/kakoomaui
hawai'i red cross: https://www.redcross.org/local/hawaii/ways-to-donate.html
please reblog and spread the word if you can't donate.
“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
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.
_The humanistic cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, where frames, sometimes, speak louder than characters.
Sacrifice
‘me’, I exist—suspended in a realized void—suspended from my own dread— different from all other being and such that the various events can reach all other beings and not 'me’ cruelly throw this 'me’ out of total existence. But, at the same time, I consider my coming into the world—which depended on the birth and on the conjunction of a given man and woman, then on the moment of their conjunction. There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears.
•Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939
"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
_
who can ever dare a 'we' without trembling
who can ever dare a ‘we’ without trembling? who can ever sign a 'we'– in english, 'we subject’ in the nominative, or an 'us’, in the accusative or the dative? […] we met (each other), we spoke, wrote (to one-another), we loved (one another), we agreed (with each other) – or not. to sign a 'we’, an 'us’ may already seem impossible, far too weighty or light, always illegitimate amongst the living.
—Parallax 6(4) (2000): 28
A Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours, francis bacon, 1961 inspired by Eadweard Muybridge photos of paralytic child.
Edvard Munch, 1885, Asta Nørregaard
"On March 2nd, as you came again, "the middle" occurred, bringing what had been into what endures. Time gathered into the fourth dimension of intimacy, as if we had stepped directly out of eternity—and returned into it. But, closest one, you should know this: "intending and delicate"—nothing forgotten, with every contrary added to it whole—all your pain, scarcely measured, and all my absence, without denying it to myself, rang in a long ringing of the bell of the world in our hearts. It rang in the morning light, and for days afterward that moment of the distant hearing of the now dawned for us. You—Hannah—you Your Martin" Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, Messkirch, May, 1950
May 18, 1978
Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me. Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes
IX — Oh to be idle loving idleness!
Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair, My will to act binds with excess my action, Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair, And acting rage doth paint despair distraction. Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand, Each gesture to deliver sinks the more; The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand, Though hut more slowly useless, we’ve no power. Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring, Repurposed for next day’s repurposing. Fernando Pessoa
“You are the void and the cinder Bird without head with wings beating the night The universe is made of your slight hope
The universe is your sick heart and mine Beating to skim death To the cemetery of hope
My pain is joy And the cinder is fire.” Georges Bataille
The Cold Mountain Poems
Always it’s cold on this mountain!
Every year, and not just this.
Dense peaks, thick with snow.
Black pine-trees breathing mist.
It’s summer before the grass grows,
Not yet autumn when the leaves fall.
Full of illusions, I roam here,
Gaze and gaze, but can’t see the sky. Hanshan
Aquarium
“And I know it must die, for its hour is o'er; Folding its impotent hands at last, Hands too weary to pluck any more The flowers of the past!”
Maurice Maeterlinck
The Passions
Narrow paths my passions tread: Laughter rings there, sorrow cries; Sick and sad, with half-shut eyes, Thro' the leaves the woods have shed, My sins like yellow mongrels slink; Uncouth hyenas, my hates complain, And on the pale and listless plain Couching low, love's lion's blink.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
NIETZSCHE AND THE THEORY OF THE DRIVES
“Suppose we were in the market place one day, and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us—and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world—and in each case, a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance, or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey. Why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudice of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche. 1881
Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint
“ Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night. I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair. If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master, never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.” Federico García Lorca
Where is it coming from, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you, silent as the folds of the yellow curtains
Margaret Atwood, from “Up”, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 (via known-stranger)
Doctor, that is kind of you
– Nothing is harmless anymore. The small joys, the expressions of life, which seemed to be exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have a moment of defiant silliness, of the cold-hearted turning of a blind eye, but immediately enter the service of their most extreme opposite. Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. •Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno
… And I – weak, languid, obscene, digesting, tossing about dismal thoughts – I too was superfluous. Fortunately I didn’t feel this, above all I didn’t understand it, but I was uneasy because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I am afraid of that – I’m afraid that it might take me by the back of my head and lift me up like a ground-swell). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself, do destroy at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death itself would have been superfluous. Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these pebbles, between these plants, in the depths of this charming park. And the decomposed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would have received it, and my bones, finally, cleaned, stripped, neat and clean as teeth, would also have been superfluous; i was superfluous for all time.
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1
