10/12
Bersani’s chapter on the Jamesian lie
Zupančič - The Odd One In
Lawrence’s “The Revolutionary” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”
Revisit The Rainbow
More Modern Love
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”
Lacan on the Zhuang-zi dream?
Harpo Marx in Lacan’s “Das Ding”?
Indicative/declarative, aggressive, energetic, evidential, generic/gnomic, mirative
Deontic: Admirative (“Wow! She loves me!"), benedictive, commissive (promises, threats), directive, debitive, deliberative, dynamic, hortative (“let us love!"), imperative, injunctive, jussive (“everyone should be loved”), necessitative, permissive, precative (“will you love me?"), prohibitive, propositive (“Let’s go to the shop”), volitive (“would that you loved me!"), desiderative, imprecative (“fuck you!"), optative (“may you be loved!")
Epistemic: Alethic, assumptive, deductive, dubitative, hypothetical, inferential/renarrative/oblique, interrogative, potential, speculative, subjunctive
Dependent circumstances: Conditional, eventive (“I would love you if…")
What’s the relation between the Banfield material and the drive?
Can I say that ritual and fiction have a relationship analogous to the relationship between sadism and masochism, respectively?
What are the “problems” surrounding sadism?
What are masochism and sadism, esp. in relation to the drive?
Laplanche is concerned with (1) the problem of the endogeneity of the drive (2) the “profoundly erroneous” sequence in which “the ‘moral type’ [of masochism] sits on top of the ‘feminine,’ which in turn sits on the ‘erotogenic'.” (209)
Laplanche (and Freud): “there is no masochism without sexuality.”
This is supported by a passage he quotes from Freud: “in the case of a great number of internal processes sexual excitation arises as a concomitant effect, as soon as the intensity of those processes passes beyond certain quantitative limits” (“The Economic Problem of Masochism”).
Here’s how he reformulates Freud’s (confusing, problematic) notion of “a drive with a passive aim”: “I have attempted, for my part, to fill in this lacuna by furnishing a precise criterion: that of there being ‘more’ of representation on the active side (the adult with his conscious and unconscious representations) than on the passive (the infant, in the beginning). […] For it is the breaking in of an ‘excess of message,’ emanating from the other, which functions like pain, originating first from the outside, then coming from that internal other which is repressed fantasy.” (215)
There’s a kind of individual who is “morally inhibited to an excessive degree,” who is “under the domination of an especially sensitive conscience.” In this case, “the accent falls on the heightened sadism of the super-ego to which the ego submits.” In moral masochism, the accent “falls on the ego’s own masochism which seeks punishment, whether from the super-ego or from the parental powers outside.”
Conscience and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the desexualization, of the Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex. (Freud, "EPoM" 169)
Why are the drives “partial” drives?
“It is because of the reality of the homeostatic system that sexuality comes into play only in the form of partial drives. The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.” (Lacan 176, Seminar XI)
What’s the relationship between drive and desire?
“Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (Lacan 176)
“The legibility of sex in the interpretation of the unconscious mechanisms is always retroactive. It would merely be of the nature of interpretation if, at each moment of the history, we could be certain only that the partial drives intervened effectively in time and place.” (Lacan 176)
What’s the relation between the Jamesian past perfect and the thing it revolves around? What is the thing it revolves around? Is Lacan’s notion of das Ding relevant?
Gustatory fixations
I’d like to go to the new Paris Baguette on the commons.
I should cook the frozen tinda with tomatoes and some legume.
Perhaps I should cook it with tofu, which needs to be pressed.
Should go to Anabel’s for some kind of leafy green, other vegetables.
The moral masochism of failing to control the body
What happens when one watches over one’s guilt?
Sartorial fixations
Return Sézane skirt, continue evaluating the sweaters.
Compare wool& and ibex tights; compare wool& dresses
Patagonia wornwear: print label
Consider rainjackets (aspire, ascentshell, precip)
Toward a more femme winter: this is about texture, not just silhouette?
Textual fixations
Jerome McGann: Swinburne, an Experiment in Criticism
“Swinburne’s break with the poetry of quest, effort, and personal advancement” (35)
“Antiperfectibilian Attitudes”
“The gate is straight; I shall not be there (“The Triumph of Time”)
“that spiritual calenture of Christianity” (36)
“non-directional poetry” (40)
Basically I’m interested in
Chapter two (on the antiperfectibilianism), see above
Chapter four - which has the reading of Erechtheus, Atalanta in Calydon, “Itylus,” “Sapphics,” and “Anactoria.”
Chapter five - more on language, “charges of vagueness and unintelligibility.”
Chapter six - on sleep-trance in “The Lake of Gaube” and “A Nympholept.”
Chapter eight - “Swinburne as moralist. […] Swinburne and Sade. The message of The FLogging Block. Its comic spirit. Abstraction and sexuality.”
Want to write about the moment of rapture this afternoon
Which occurred w/ Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism”
What have I said about the destitution of realizing that there is nothing under “being a woman”? When one feels one is “not a woman” or “not a man” one is nothing—how do I explain this to someone who believes that subjective experience isn’t fundamentally sexed?
Illustration in the form of an allegory: men and women on the street immediately recognize a single desire in each other and arrive at truth through fucking—such an automatic and perfect world of complementarity can at least be imagined as a flipside of what we do (perverse acts of writing, working, crafting, finding other pursuits)
Reading and wanting to read is not about filling up a progress bar.
Eukaryote means good kernel: this is how I feel about sexual experience, desire to turn a small bounded moment into something that keeps on being spoken through the body but also through language
Joke about stamping Z’s name on every page to ensure something
The comedy of the five anti-abortion picketers with no audience
Recognition that father’s flaccid penis must’ve been legible to me as something that wasn’t erect, hence fetishistic childhood investment in arthropods and insects over furry soft-bodied mammal, hence desire for the elegance of the symbol, the gram, the glyph, the letter, the diagram, in mathematics and in literature.
Mind repelled from what I know, avoidance is magnetic levitation
Sézane: I really like this fuzzy kid mohair / wool sweater, and the merino one.
Wool&: Dresses are folded into flat squares with a wide paper band. I got the Rowena swing dress, Renata bell sleeve dress, and the Axis midweight legging: everything in black. I’m keeping the swing dress and the leggings. The bell sleeves are a little too long. I think the dress would look better if it were a little more fitted.
Ibex: 24 hour long sleeve in beetroot is excellent. Lizzi tight is a bit too thick, slightly itchy, compressive—seems like I’d use it only in 30 or below weather. This is 19.5 micron wool, 345 gsm, whereas the Wool& axis leggings are 300 gsm, 17.5 micron wool.
9/30
Analysis (12-12:45) ✓
Send out 1134 announcement - Whitman, Hass ✓
Office Hours with Eleni (2:30) ✓
Print “Anactoria” ✓
Submit NeMLA abstract ✓
Scan Glück and Hass and Lawrence (by Monday) ✓
Stop by Anabel’s ✓
Run ✓
Watch L’ábécédaire de Deleuze with Eray ✓
10/1
Write more about Banfield, the “I,” and Lawrence ✓
What questions would you ask Tracy about the drive?
Do the scanning, printing, package returns ✓
Get Sade’s Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings ✓
Run ✓, go to Applefest ✓, go to Microtones
10/2
Reflect on interaction with K, and on any dreams ✓
What’s the relation between the Banfield material and the drive?
Get Applefest doughnuts by 10 AM (or pastry from Gimme Coffee) ✓
Cook beans, ✓ pick up more pulses from Nirvana / Ren’s
Make perilla kimchi ✓
Send out announcement to students about reopened submission ✓
Actually do the scanning ✓, package returns ✓
Submit Essay 1 grades ✓, update Essay 2 assignment ✓
10/3
What’s the relation between the Banfield material and the drive?
What are masochism and sadism, esp. in relation to the drive?
Send email to Tracy asking to meet ✓
Scan Hass and Glück ✓, update Essay 2 ✓, send out 1134 announcement ✓
Pick up Sade ✓, return packages ✓
10/4
Return packages ✓
Analysis (10:15) ✓