Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976)

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976)

Phillipe Van Haute, Against Adaptation (2002)

It is as if the neurotic shrinks back before the radicality of the lack; she cannot accept that the loss of the object cannot be remedied, or, more precisely, she cannot bear the ultimate indeterminacy and indeterminability of the desire of the Other. She defends herself with the object of the phantasy by reinterpreting the object of the phantasy according to the logic of the unconditional demand. In this way, the lack continues to exist, but it acquires a purely factical character. The neurotic can only accept the lack to the extent that she can also believe that it can in principle be remedied.

According to Lacan, this last point means that the neurotic understands her suffering in terms of frustration—she has been denied or deprived of something that she should have (and could have) had in order to lead a successful life. The neurotic patient elevates this frustration to the status of the truth of her existence and her desire. She hopes that the analysis can help her to remedy this frustration, which is to say, help her find the object that she believes can put an end to her suffering. And as we already know, the neurotic is not alone in this. Earlier we pointed out that psychoanalytic theorists also have often been (and still are) inclined to understand neurosis as the simple result of early childhood frustrations. We now see why Lacan claims that they have made the neurotic phantasy the guiding thread of theory, instead of interpreting it— they are blind to the problematic of desire, against which the neurotic tries to defend himself at any cost.

Phillipe Van Haute, Against Adaptation (2002)

We thus cannot understand human existence in terms of an exclusive reference to the order of signifiers, and even less can we do so in terms of an exclusive reference to jouissance. We live out our existence, rather, in terms of an essential tension between these two poles. Precisely for this reason, we continually attach special significance to new objects, in a perennial dream of existence complete and without lack; on the other hand, we are confronted again and again with the limitedness of these objects of desire, and with the futility of our hope to be anything other than stretched between those poles—the equiprimordial determinants of our existence. Humans are in this sense an “in-between-being” whose existence is carried on in a dialectical relation between two antithetical terms: jouissance and castration. Human being is desire.

Phillipe Van Haute, Against Adaptation (2002)

Žižek on Jacques-Alain Miller

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

There is a joke which tells us more about what Lacan means with regard to the “divided subject” than pages and pages of theoretical elaboration (though, in order to understand what it tells us, of course we need pages and pages of theoretical elaboration …): Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.” The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!” The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.

Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012)

When the subject takes the place of the lack, a loss is introduced in the word, and this is the definition of the subject. But to inscribe it, it is necessary to define it in a circle, what I call the otherness, of the sphere of language. All that is language is lent from this otherness and this is why the subject is always a fading thing that runs under the chain of signifiers. For the definition of a signifier is that it represents a subject not for another subject but for another signifier. This is the only definition possible of the signifier as different from the sign. The sign is something that represents some­ thing for somebody, but the signifier is something that represents a subject for another signifier. The consequence is that the subject dis­appears exactly as in the case of the two unitary traits, while under the second signifier appears what is called meaning or signification; and then in sequence the other signifiers appear and other significa­tions.

Jacques Lacan, Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever (1971)

The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness. Before this political civilization came to its power and opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp down great continents of the earth, we had wars, pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent miseries, but never such a sight of fearful and hopeless voracity, such wholesale feeding of nation upon nation, such huge machines for turning great portions of the earth into mince-meat, never such terrible jealousies with all their ugly teeth and claws ready for tearing open each other's vitals.

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917)

But while trying to free our minds from the arrogant claims of Europe and to help ourselves out of the quicksands of our infatuation, we may go to the other extreme and blind ourselves with a wholesale suspicion of the West. The reaction of disillusionment is just as unreal as the first shock of illusion. We must try to come to that normal state of mind by which we can clearly discern our own danger and avoid it without being unjust towards the source of that danger. There is always the natural temptation in us of wishing to pay back Europe in her own coin, and return contempt for contempt and evil for evil. But that again would be to imitate Europe in one of her worst features, which comes out in her behaviour to people whom she describes as yellow or red, brown or black. And this is a point on which we in the East have to acknowledge our guilt and own that our sin has been as great, if not greater, when we insulted humanity by treating with utter disdain and cruelty men who belonged to a particular creed, colour or caste. It is really because we are afraid of our own weakness, which allows itself to be overcome by the sight of power, that we try to substitute for it another weakness which makes itself blind to the glories of the West. When we truly know the Europe which is great and good, we can effectively save ourselves from the Europe which is mean and grasping. It is easy to be unfair in one's judgment when one is faced with human miseries,—and pessimism is the result of building theories while the mind is suffering.

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917)

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In a foreign University we see the branching wildernesses of its buildings, furniture, regulations, and syllabus, but the monkey, which is a difficult creature to catch and more difficult to manufacture, we are likely to treat as a mere accident of minor importance. It is convenient for us to overlook the fact that among the Europeans the living spirit of the University is widely spread in their society, their parliament, their literature, and the numerous activities of their corporate life. In all these functions they are in perpetual touch with the great personality of the land which is creative and heroic in its constant acts of self-expression and self-sacrifice. They have their thoughts published in their books as well as through the medium of living men who think those thoughts, and who criticise, compare and disseminate them. Some at least of the drawbacks of their academic education are redeemed by the living energy of the intellectual personality pervading their social organism. It is like the stagnant reservoir of water which finds its purification in the showers of rain to which it keeps itself open. But, to our misfortune, we have in India all the furniture of the European University except the human teacher. We have, instead, mere purveyors of book-lore in whom the paper god of the bookshop has been made vocal.

Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (1922)

A most important truth, which we are apt to forget, is that a teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge, but merely repeats his lessons to his students, can only load their minds; he cannot quicken them. Truth not only must inform but inspire. If the inspiration dies out, and the information only accumulates, then truth loses its infinity. The greater part of our learning in the schools has been wasted because, for most of our teachers, their subjects are like dead specimens of once living things, with which they have a learned acquaintance, but no communication of life and love.

Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (1922)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781) [tr. Guyer & Wood]

“I don’t much like hearing that we have gone beyond Hegel, the way one hears we have gone beyond Descartes.

We go beyond everything and always end up in the same place.”

Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Beautiful music, no matter how you play it, will still be beautiful. Any prelude or fugue by Bach can be played at any tempo, with any dynamic nuances or without them, and it will still be beautiful. This is how music should be written, so that no scoundrel can spoil it.

From a letter by Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman. Moscow, August 28, 1955