sofaconfessions

Sometimes, it is necessary to abandon all hope. … This approach is … something sacred. … So much happens outside of the will. … You must hold on until the very end. … You can do nothing else.

one should try to bypass this phallic obstacle in order to reach this dreamt-of other jouissance. Well, insofar that this is possible, … in this region beyond the phallic, we do not meet with the searched-for … sexual relationship between the man and the woman. We meet with “a jouissance of the body beyond the phallus

The truth discovered by Kant that we can only be ethical if we do not rely on any pre-given ideas of what is Good is given full weight only when one makes the leap to give up perversion and disavowal of its precarious task, and take the risk of doing good beyond any Good already established. Without perversion, making oneself a duty that is not someone else’s, would possibility avoid the Sadean perversions of Stalinism, Zizek argues. Kant is perversion as long as it is Kant with the pseudo-outlet of merely breaking taboos in the manner of the Sadean excess. The compulsion towards excess is a result of the deadlock of not fully taking one’s discovery for being one’s own cause into account. Being cause of myself, doing things because they are a duty that is caused not from outside is a burden and the temptation to seek relief from this burden through perversion was Sade’s temptation.

The melancholics are rightfully sad, but they worsen their sadness, they disavow that who they think they mourn was always lacking, was always already almost gone, was always destined to be gone one day.

When one retells a detective mystery in linear form, it loses its appeal, since what gets lost is precisely the element of mystery; this excess, produced by the shift from the linear narrative of a crime to the reconstruction of this crime via the deduction based on interpreting the traces, is not merely ‘rhetorical’, it reveals a ‘truth’ which disappears in the linear retelling. Incidentally, this holds not only in the case of mystery, where our interest is kept alive by the fact that we do not know what happened in the past, but perhaps even more in the opposite case of a tragic course of events which is rendered even more tragic when its ultimate catastrophic impact is presented to us in advance.

We misrecognise ourselves in the image of the other and through this misrecognition come to constitute an idea of ourselves .…