[S][J][P]

Topic

Notebook

This category is stuff that I come across in stuff I read, or watch, or listen to, and don’t want to forget. It’s also a record of thoughts that make up my head noise.

AI & Kids

This paragraph from Peter Coy's essay in the (paywalled) New York Times opinion section is just great. Computer scientists are continually surprised by the creativity displayed by new generations of A.I. Consider that lying is a sign of intellectual development: Children learn to lie around age 3,

Conversation

In The Conversation section of the New York Times (alas, paywall), Bret Stephens reflects on "the efforts on college campuses to revive the dying art of conversation, as a remedy against angry campus politics." He says: conversation for the purpose of learning rather than scoring points isn’t

Beshear’s words

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, wrote the following in an op-ed published by the New York Times (the article is paywalled) When most Americans wake up in the morning, they are not thinking about politics. Americans wake up thinking about their jobs and whether they make enough money to

The Dems as HR department

I've been reading a lot about the election and why the results were what they were. Many of the articles say the same thing. Today, I read this article by Mike Pesca in The Atlantic, and I think it had a very well-put observation. I’ve been thinking

Repetition & Isolation of a Symptomatic Element.

From Analysis Laid Bare, By Jacques-Alain Miller. Let us introduce her a little dialectic [...] It is because there is the obstacle that there is repetition, but it is because there is repetition the obstacle is perceived and isolated. (p. 14) What I think Miller is getting at is that when

An interesting though on method

From A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière by Jacques Rancière. A method means a path: not the path that a thinker follows but the path that he/she constructs, that you have to construct to know where you are, to figure out the characteristics of the territory

Time & Wounds

From this review of the film Eden, written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love. Time does not heal all wounds, but it does change our relationship to painful events. Ture.

Psychoanalysis & Teaching

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément: Teacher of what? Psychoanalysts have never gotten beyond this naïve question, rehashed time and time again ever since Freud. What can a psychoanalyst teach his colleagues? Nothing. That is, "normally" nothing, for psychoanalytic practice can only be

Nin on writing

From The Novel of the Future by Anaïs Nin. I think we should always write about what we know, or what we wish to know. Hell yeah!

More on the void

I found the passage below in this paper by Éric Laurent. In the seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis, he took up the first sentences from his first Seminar on the action of the Zen master: “Everyone knows, though one does not know what it means, that a Zen exercise