An Attempt at Something

An Adorable Nuance

“Read it first for joy. Shut up your head’s claptrap and open yourself to fall in love with it. Treat it like a first date, which should begin with ignorance but also hope. Only if you fall in love do you make a study of the beloved, for only passion lets us inquire into other people’s mysteries with the vitality borne of conviction. With enough ardor, your date’s off-putting manner of dismantling chicken becomes an adorable nuance. So it is with “The Waste Land.”

Mary Karr on “The Waste Land”

An evil thing to say to people

Now, you know, the thing that makes playing a college room different than playing an, er, old-people-room, is how I’ll look out on a crowd full of old people—not that they are all old, but some are old, like myself—and I will say to them that I know a fair number of them are divorced; I’d lay money that very few of you are divorced. But I would lay as much money to say that some of you, some day, are going to be. What an evil thing to say to people. You are going to fall in love. It’s going to be so awesome. Some of your friends are going to say to you, “you know, I don’t think this is going to work out so good.” And you’ll say, “What the fuck kind of a friend are you? Hey, fuck you. If you’re not for me and my boo over here, then you can go to hell, all right? Because we are like one. I have never felt this way about somebody like I feel about this person, so it’s me and her or him—or them, I suppose, you know—against all y’all, so go to hell.” That’s what you might say to yourself and to your friends and retreat into the solitude of the house that will become the crypt of your finer feelings. You will say to yourself, when that crypt-like scent begins to ease through the house, “that one dude told me about this. He said that this marriage would come to nothing.” And I will feel bad that that happened to you, but about one-in-ten of you, it’s going to happen—I want to you to have a song to sing when the time comes.

John Darnielle, Live at the Gargoyle, St. Louis, prelude to Baboon, Oct 23, ‘06

Monkeys in Suits

There is something about yourself that you don’t know. Something that you will deny even exists until it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s the only reason you get up in the morning, the only reason you suffer the shitty boss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. “Fear or revere me, but please think I’m special.” We share an addiction. We’re approval junkies. We’re all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The “hip, hip, hoo-fucking-rah.” Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Because we’re just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.

Revolver

Crazy, party of one.

shitmystudentswrite:

Most of the people doesn’t have sanity, maybe there are big group of persons that say that they have it, but it is because sanity is decided by a majority of one.  Those people  are always trying to convince others so they won’t be alone, and because the more persons they get to believe in that idea, more and more people are going to believe in their sanity too.

When all is said and done, consistency is the engagement of one’s singularity (the animal ‘some-one’) in the continuation of a subject of truth. Or again: it is to submit the perseverance oh what is known to a duration peculiar to the not-known.

Lacan touched on this point when he proposed his ethical maxim: ‘do not give up on your desire.’ For desire is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious; it is the not-known par excellence, such that ‘do not give up on your desire rightly means: ‘do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.’ We might add that the ordeal of the not-known is the distant effect of the evental supplement, the puncturing of ‘some-one’ by a fidelity to this vanished supplement, and that ‘do not give up’ means, in the end: do not give up on your own seizure by a truth-process.

But since the truth-process is fidelity, then if ‘Do not give up’ is the maxim of consistency,—and thus of the ethic of a truth—we might well say that it is a matter, for the ‘some-one’, of being faithful to a fidelity. And he can manage this only by adhering to his own principle of continuity, the perseverance in being of what he is. By linking (for such, precisely, is consistency) the known by the not-known.

It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: ‘Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.’

Alain Badiou, Ethics

“Who believes what today? I think this is an interesting question, much more complex than it may appear. The first myth is to be abandoned, I think, is that we live in a cynical era where nobody believes, no values, and so on, and that there were some times, more traditional, where people still believed in some light, some substantial notion of belief, and so on, and so on. I think it is today that we believe more than ever, and as Fuller develops it, in a nice ironic way, the ultimate belief for him is deconstructionism. Why? Again, I am going to that question of, quote, Marx, no? Look how it functions, deconstructionism, in its standard version, already in the textual style. Like, you cannot find one text of Derrida without, a). all of the quotation marks, b). all of this rhetorical distantiation. Like, I don’t know, to take an ironic example: if somebody like Judith Butler were to be asked, “what is this?” she would’ve never said, “it’s a bottle of tea.” She would have said something like, “if we accept the metaphysical notion of language identifying clearly objects and, taking all this into account then may we not”—she likes to put it rhetorically—“risk the hypothesis that, under the conditions of our language game this can be said to be a bottle of tea,” and so on, and so on. So it’s always this need to distantiate. It goes even for love. Nobody, almost, dares to say, “I love you.” It has to be, “as a poet would have put it, ‘I love you,’” or some kind of a distance. But what’s the problem here? The problem is that why this fear? Because I claim that when the ancients directly said, “I love you,” they meant exactly the same. All these distantiations were included. It’s we today who are afraid that if we were to say directly, “I love you,” it would mean too much. We’d believe in it.”

Slavoj Žižek, Columbia University