sofaconfessions

the hysteric, while asking herself what the other wants, avoids in part to confront that she herself is a wanting being too. The freedom that awaits her in her creativity needs to be expressed to not be a burdensome, avoided freedom. Only a confronted freedom is bearable. Schroeder writes: “That the Other is not natural means that it is a work of art - an artifact. … The hysteric can express her creative freedom by furthering [the progress of the Other as] a work in progress.” (Turning Law Inside-Out)

She can learn what the Other wants from her - what she needs to do or say to fit better into the symbolic. … A perfect fit is never possible - every normal subject remains split …. Consequently, … the hysteric can learn what is lacking in the symbolic - to identify its flaws and decide whether to cope or seek to change them. This can lead to the … knowledge that the big Other does not exist. … The big Other, the symbolic, is not a pre-existing ‘thing.’ It is a human creation, a work in process. … The reason the Big Other can never truly answer the hysteric’s question, ‘What do you want?’ is explained by its alternate version as the accusation, ‘You are wanting!’

Fantasy is … the imaginary proposition that the … subject … achieves a relationship with the object cause of her desire. … But the goal of satisfying desire is … impossible and, therefore, real [real is the order of the limits of the possible]. …

courtly love … is a … way of making up for the absence of the … relationship, by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle [to the relationship]

after all I am nothing but an empty void; for, still, I can affirm nothing about myself which would be really myself; nothing, either, which would be permanent; nothing which would be secure against criticism and the passage of time. Hence the craving to be confirmed from outside, by another; this paradox, by virtue of which even the most self-centred among us looks to others

The object of desire is always beyond the subject’s grasp, and anything within her grasp cannot function as an object of desire. Fantasy is an attempt to paper over the holes that the real rips into the symbolic.

In psychoanalysis, a trauma is not something horrible that happens to someone. Rather, it is whatever the subject cannot integrate into the social order of the symbolic. The traumatized subject is doomed to repeat her trauma … because she cannot exorcize it by speaking its name. … The trauma only retroactively appears at the moment of its iteration by the subject - in the subject’s very “re-living” of the trauma through her failure to articulate it in the symbolic. Psychoanalysis is … the attempt to integrate the trauma in the symbolic order through articulation. … Although the subject cannot articulate her trauma, trauma structures the subject.

If one were ever to attain one’s objet petit a, one would find that one still desires and would … immediately have to find another object to serve this role. This is why in the book is more disturbing that the movie. … Dorothy does not return to Kansas when the Wizard bestows the tokens because they do not bring the anticipated satisfaction to their recipients.

Kant’s concept of the noumenon or “thing-in-itself” is … an objet petit a: an attempt to give positive body to the radical negativity of essence. The subject seeks to identify an actual object to explain his desire. The subject attributes her desire to objet petit a, although the true desire of man is the desire of the Other - i.e. to be recognized in intersubjective relations. … The logic of desire … is retrospective - desire precedes its “cause.” The subject does not desire because he lacks an object. … She hypothesizes that, because desire is present, something must be absent. She therefore tries to identify a specific absent thing to explain desire. This fantasy is reassuring because it purports to give a simple account of … the universal sense of alienation …. [This fantasy] is the vain hope that the desire’s flame can be quenched.

Because the subject desires to be whole, he does not want to acknowledge that his split is constituent of his subjectivity. He wants to be an “unsplit” subject. He wants to believe that there must be some specific external thing that would explain his split. This hypothesized explanatory object - … is an attempt to positivize or to give body to negativity.

To Lacan, … masculinity is … created through the repression of the feminine. The masculine cannot listen to the feminine without losing his masculinity.

Traversing the fantasy … [means] assuming … responsibility towards … one’s fantasy, assuming the role of the cause of desire, accepting one’s desire as … bound to the desire of the Other and not attaching oneself to the illusory dream of attaining impossible lost jouissance ‘elsewhere’.

the very need for an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility.

The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. … Why does the Other remain Other? … It is hatred of … the particular way the Other enjoys. … Intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other … as he who … steals my own enjoyment. We know … that the … status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. … The problem is … unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior.