sofaconfessions

Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause … for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys

pleasure-in-filth [and] … the obsessively cleansing side of Plath … coincide - in this unique case: … nose-picking is the cleaning operation par excellence; that is to say, in it, we can have [both at the same instace] (cleaning our body, … enjoying the dirt)

These “minute joys” are definitely Plath’s sinthomes: there is no need to search for their “deeper” meaning - they are simply what they are, a certain “knot” around which varieties of jouissance circulate. …. Today, in our post-traditional “reflexive” societies, we encounter this enjoyment in its pure, distilled form in the guise of excessive, non-functional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life: a cruelty whose figures range from “fundamentalist” racist and/ or religious slaughter to “senseless” outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence that is not grounded in utilitarian or ideological reasons

[Sylvia Plath] celebrates “the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose

Cutters usually say that once they see the warm red blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, they feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is none the less a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown.

the death­ drive does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of Law, thereby, as it were, clearing the table, opening up the space for sublimation, which can (re )start the work of creation

Cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is none the less a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown.

cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to ground our ego firmly in our bodily, reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non­ existent

cutting should be contrasted with normal tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order - the problem with cutters is the opposite one: the assertion of reality itself

cutters - mostly women - … experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves. [Cutting is] strictly correlative to the virtualization of our surroundings: this is a desperate strategy to return to the Real of the body.

the subject reaches the level of a true ethical stance only when he or she moves beyond this duality of the public rules as well as their superego shadow

Christianity, in refusing to cover up this abyss with a determinate fantasmatic scenario (articulated in the obscene initiatory myth), confronts us, for the first time, with the paradox of human freedom. There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity of the Other’s desire. … Freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the Other’s desire­ I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover which tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of anxiety, when I know that the Other wants something from me, without knowing what this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the co-ordinates of my desire

the disavowed Jewish spectral narrative does not tell the obscene story of God’s impenetrable omnipotence, but its exact opposite: the story of His impotence concealed by the standard pagan obscene supplements. The secret to which the Jews remain faithful is the horror of Divine impotence - and it is this secret which is “revealed” in Christianity. This is why Christianity can occur only after Judaism: it reveals the horror first confronted by the Jews. It is therefore only through taking this line of separation between paganism and Judaism into account that we can properly grasp the Christian breakthrough itself

In ancient Greek and Roman religions, the public text was always supple­mented by secret initiation rituals and orgies; … what is revealed in Christianity is not just the entire content but, more specifically, the fact that there is nothing - no secret - behind it to be revealed. To paraphrase Hegel’s famous formula from his Phenomenology: behind the curtain of the public text, there is only what we put there. Or - to formulate it even more pointedly, in more pathetic terms- what God reveals is not His hidden power, only His impotence as such

like a child who, having believed in his father’s powerfulness, discovers with horror that his father cannot help him. (To evoke an example from recent history: at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, God the Father is in a position somewhat similar to that of the Bosnian father made to witness the gang rape of his own daughter, and to endure the ultimate trauma of her compassionate-reproachful gaze: “Father, why did you forsake me?” … 74) In short, with this “Father. why hast thou forsaken me?”, it is God the Father who actually dies, revealing His utter impotence