Jacques Lacan – Disrupt & Repair

“…the neuroses is a question that being poses for the subject, ‘from where it was before the subject came into the world’ (Freud’s phrase, which he used in explaining the Oedipal complex in little Hans).

….it [neuroses] poses it [a question] in place of the subject, that is to say, in that place it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a problem with a pen, or as Aristotle’s man thought with his soul.”—Jacques Lacan, “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” in Écrits: A Selection (168)

Take out all the psychoanalytic jargon, what is it that this quote is getting at? Simply put, Lacan’s psychoanalysis posits that there are elements of our being which lie beyond our direct control, which we access only indirectly through the ways those elements shape our life. Lacan isn’t being particularly magical here. He is describing those desires which constitute a personality as a locus of self-awareness.

Continue reading “[NB] Tracing the life” →

Today when I sat down with the ancestors, I started to get this mad little bug to tidy. That isn’t particularly surprising–the ancestors tend to like tidiness. But I found myself grabbing hold of this box that I have been carrying around for a few years without opening. As I finished sorting through it, I widened my efforts to its immediate neighbors.

That is when I came across the notebook that I thought lost. I can’t date it precisely, but it is from my first few years of college back in the mid-1990s. My best guess puts it somewhere in the 1995-1996 range. I had started it as a supplement to a philosophy course I was taking, but it became something very different the summer afterward.

Been thinking (as a note, the semester is over—the notebook was of limited usage)—seems that in much of the writings here I approached the thinkers in a far too confrontational manner; not only is this not useful (one does not water orchids with boiling water), but it is really antithetical to who I am. The attitude puts me outside myself, taking my ability to absorb and contemplate. Remember this.

Oh, yes, hello crazy little me. Whew, why did you think the academy was a good idea again?

Continue reading “[NB] Old Notebooks” →