[M]elancholy (disappointment with all positive empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) is the beginning of philosophy. A person who, all his life, has been used to living in a certain city and is finally compelled to move elsewhere is of course saddened by the prospect of being thrown into a new environment - but what is it that makes him sad? It is not the prospect of leaving the place that was for years his home, but the much more subtle fear of losing his attachment to this place. What makes me sad is my creeping awareness that, sooner or later - sooner than I am ready to admit - I will integrate myself into a new community, forgetting and forgotten by the place that now means so much to me. In short, what makes me sad is the awareness that I will lose my desire for (wh... (查看原文)
human speech, never merely transmits a message it always also self-reflectively asserts the basic symbolic pact between the communicating subjects. 【12】 (查看原文)
Belonging to a society involves a paradoxical point at which each of us is ordered to embrace freely as the result of our choice what is anyway imposed on us (we all must love our country our parents, our religion). This paradox of willing (choosing freely) what is in any case compulsory, of pretending that there is a free choice although effectively there isnt one, is strictly co-dependent with the notion of an empty symbolic gesture, a gesture- an offer - that is meant to be rejected 【13】 (查看原文)
A chorus......means are involved here, emotional means, the chorus is people who are moved.
You are there in the form of a material to be made use of......that material is completely indifferent......you shouldn't give yourself too much credit......the emotional commentary is done for you 【22】 (查看原文)
To accept fully this inconsistency of our desire, to accept fully that it is desire itself that sabotages its own liberation, is Lacan's bitter lesson (查看原文)
What the hysteric expects from the subject supposed to know is to provide the solution that will resolve the hysterical deadlock, the final answer to Who am I?What do I really want?' This is the trap the analyst has to avoid: although, in the course of the treatment, he occupies the place of the one who is supposed to know, his entire strategy is to undermine this place and to make the patient aware that there is no guarantee for one's desire in the big Other (查看原文)
If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it. 【65】 (查看原文)
A man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and is allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. ‘My dear fellow,’ says his doctor, ‘you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.’ ‘Of course I know that,’ replies the patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’ (查看原文)
We can imagine a bourgeois subject attending a course in Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. Having finished the course, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him: ‘But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing
magical about them!’, to which the pupil replies: ‘Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!’ This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not ‘God doesn't exist’, but ‘God is unconscious‘. (查看原文)
Is not this need to find another who 'really believes' also that which propels us in our need to stigmatize the other as a religious or ethnic fundamentalist? In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function at a distance: in order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, some true believer, yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in person. (查看原文)
