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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.

Could anything become normal?

“Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job.” A line from the novel Permafroat by Alastair Reynolds. So far, this is one of the most interesting time travel novels I’ve ever read. (The most interesting time travel book I’ve ever read was The Time Traveler’

Psychoanalysis as "Cure"

Jacques-Alain Miller says in The Experience of the Real in Psychoanalysis: It has been for many years now that health insurance companies have enforced a standard called “managed care” (soins organisés). Under such an organization controlling reimbursements, psychoanalytic treatment cannot be validated. Likewise the mandate of the health industry leads

Quoditian stuides?

Another fragment of an idea: I've started to think of (a lot of) what I'm trying to do as "quotidian studies." As soon as that term jumped into my mind, I thought someone else must have already thought of this. I typed the term

Some thoughts on how people orient in the present quotidian

Earlier today, I was thinking about how people have a sort of "home base" in time. 💡A working definition of home base in time: – A time period that a person lives through that establishes (for better or for worse) the working model of what is "normal."

The drive to transcend all limits

From Pynchon’s Prophecy, by Gus Mitchell: Pynchon shows us that the drive to transcend all limits has constructed systems of another order. These systems, though based first on human networks of power and control, eventually exceed our individual and collective grasp, and take on a life, or rather an

The body is an instrument we play when we speak

This morning, I was reading The Pinning of Someone Unplaceable by Dominique Holvoet in The Lacanian Review #9: Still Life? (pp. 81-86), and I read the following sentence that highlights something that Jacques-Alain Miller said in the text Habeas Corpus. J.-A. Miller [said] "man, unlike the subject, has

Gil Caroz on Psychosis v. Neurosis.

From the text, The Degree Zero of Madness, by Gil Caroz: The psychotic, however, distinguishes himself in that he recognizes the foreign presence of this Other who speaks through him, who occasionally speaks to him and intrudes. In contrast, the neurotic ignores the fact that the Other speaks within him,

The Convivial Society | On Language & the Symbolic Today

Writing in his email newsletter, The Convivial Society, L.M. Sacasas gives us the following: Close to the start of the year, I reflected on the plight of language under digital conditions. I was motivated by the sense that “something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of

Freud, Lacan & the importance of linguistic analysis

On page 47 of the English edition of Seminar X: Anxiety (Amazon), Lacan says, Even from a superficial reading [of Freud], the first thing that leaps to yoru attention is the importance Freud attaches to linguistic analysis. I think psychotherapy often misses the importance of the language, the words, and