My new fancy

Ad-vent

I'm so looking forward to this vacation it's almost insane.
Just booked a hotel so close to the sea that if I am lucky I can see it through my room's window. How fantastic is that???
Just fucking have a look at what is awaiting me

Quote of the day

When Austin was being questioned at Royaumont on the necessity for types of research other than his own (psychological research, for example), he, as usual, responded with a joke: "I favor that sort of research, and I can only refer you to an article of mine in which I have formulated my credo on this point: an article very aptly entitled 'Excuses'; since my credo amounts in the end to excusing myself for not doing what I have no intention of doing."

Shoshana Felman The Scandal of the Speaking Body

Wie schön...

... dass es so viele Möglichkeiten und Gründe dafür gibt, sich schlecht zu fühlen.

Wie sagte so treffend Tolstoi? Alle glücklichen Familien gleichen einander, jede unglückliche Familie dagegen ist unglücklich auf ihre eigene Art.

Obviously

The problem when you're drunk is that you've still got to set your alarm for the next morning.

Quote of the day

The sentiment of being riveted to being is one of being in the forced company of our own being, whose ‘brutality’ consists in the fact that it is impossible either to assume it or to disown it. It is what we are in our most intimate core, that which singularizes us, that which cannot be vulgarized and yet also that which we cannot recognize. We do not comprehend or choose it, but neither can we get rid of it; since it is not of the order of objects […] it cannot be objectified, placed before us and confronted.

Joan Copjec - May '68, The Emotional Month

Lacan for Dummies

Slowenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek is (in)famously know for bringing popular culture film and Lacan together; a match many people don't consider one made in heaven. Though crowned by success both in academia and outside it, most academics frown at Zizek's brazen interlacing, judging that his particular creation of "Zizek-film" does neither eludicate Lacan nor say very accurate or brilliant things about film.

Indeed, reading Zizek will make you feel uneasy at best, sometimes annoyed about the way he supposedly illustrates Lacanian concepts with his mostly filmic examples. It does sometimes have a hint of condescension and paternalism; if images, as someone once tellingly said, are for idiots, it seems that Zizek's project is similar to the book series "... for Dummies". One might also argue that Lacan had some strong reasons to go all the way of abstraction and complexity; that there is a particular virtue in theory being about making things more complex rather than explaining you the world in an easy way.

On a second look though, trying not to be put off by Zizek's often nonchalant style, you might also realize that his examples only on a first look supposedly illustrate Lacanian theory. Or rather: there is no simple evidence in his examples, and it is not as if the complexity of Lacan would be reduced. Taking the examples seriously and analysing them in detail might very often make you side their complexity and, most importantly, their unillustrativeness - the fact that they do as much illustrate as not illustrate but complicate or even contradict.

Fundamental in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory alike is the question of Darstellbarkeit, presentability. Freud's point about dream analysis is that one should neither focus solely on the dream image, nor on the history; that there is something in between or emerging from the two that is neither the one, nor the other - the mechanisms of the unconscious. And those are, in the end, absolutely unrepresentable. I guess it would be highly and dangerously underestimating someone with the wits of Zizek to suppose that he hasn't read his Freud.

Growing up

I hope that one of these days - in the not so distant future - I'm going to stop feeling in some fundamental sense wrong about myself.

Summer plans

I had this most amazing idea this morning: I recently decided I was going to go on holidays after all this year, PhD or not. I wasn't sure, though, where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. But in today's inspirational morning mood it finally came upon me and a summer plan was born: I'm gonna go to Tel Aviv. I've wanted to go to Israel in general and Tel Aviv in particular for the longest time. Tel Aviv seems to have all I could ask for: beaches, night life, culture, architecture, a very particular history. I'm really excited about this.