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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.

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

Dark Matter

From this thread on Reddit: Basically all we know about dark matter is that it is responsible for binding galaxies together despite their high rate of rotation. If it were just the gravity from visible matter holding galaxies together, they would fly apart at their current rate of rotation. There’

A new “Hello world!”

From The Journal 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau. Oct. 22 [1837] "What are you doing now?" he asked. "Do you keep a journal?" So I make my first entry to-day. I propose this become the standard first blog post instead of “Hello world!”