Zizek Studies:

“Within psychoanalysis, this knowledge of drive, which can never be subjectivized, assumes the form of knowledge about the subject’s ‘fundamental fantasy’, the specific formula which regulates his or her access jouissance. That is to say: desire and jouissance are inherently, even exclusive: desire’s raison d’etre (or ‘utility function’, to use Richard Dawkin’s term) is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire. So how is it possible to couple desire and jouissance, to guarantee a minimum of jouissance within the space of desire? It is the famous Lacanian objet petit a that mediates between the incompatible domains of desire and jouissance. In what precise sense is objet petit a the object-cause of desire? The objet petit a is not what we desire, what we are after, but, rather, that which sets our desire in motion, in the sense of the formal frame which confers consistency on our desire: desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another, through all these displacements, however, desire none the less retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object -objet petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than the formal frame of consistency. In a slightly different way, the same mechanism regulates the subject’s falling in love: the automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent, (libidinal) object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy-place.” -from Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies

I am, of course, doing as Deleuze encourages me: writing at the edge of what I know. And I mainly bring that up in case I manage to totally fuck this up. That said:

The main thing that inspired me to copy this paragraph, word for word, from the book is that it has brought me closer to an understanding (or rather crystallized my instincts about it (of the objet petit a (translated as the small object (as I have ever gotten before. This mainly has to do with Zizek’s association of it with the metonymical: or the way one isolated object can set off a whole chain of associations: a process often driven by desire. And I hate to be perverse here (but then how does one not when talking about Zizek or Lacanian Jouissance without doing so? (but consider the foot fetish. A foot, in itself, is awkward and ungainly. But the foot of a woman arched and slicing the air (the objet petit a (as if actually rubbing against it, is everything to the man making love to her since it is a sign of her jouissance. We can see the same dynamic at work in a hardened nipple on the breast which is also known to be a sexual cue.

In fact, as Desmond Morris pointed out in his largely forgotten The Naked Ape, women tend to be experts in the objet petit a in the way they make themselves up before going out: the red lipstick that suggests a swollen vagina as well as rouge which suggests the flushed regions that emerge when a woman is sexually attracted to a man.

(Of course, women since Morris’ time have responded by painting their lips black (Goth chicks don’t smile; but I’m guessing they still have jouissance (but that only points to the semiology involved by rejecting it.)

The main point I am trying to get to here is that the objet petit a can only set one out on a journey to fulfillment that can never be truly fulfilled. And it is fantasy that drives that journey forward. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the main problem with porn. It veers from the subtlety of jouissance (that subtle mix between pleasure and displeasure (by heavy-handedly representing what is, ultimately, an internal experience through what can be externally seen (the climax (through the money shot which, via the grossness of it, alienates men as much as it might women. The money shot leaves men feeling disgusted with themselves.

Granted, porn does exploit women. But it alienates men as well by moving beyond the signs (the objet petit a’s (and failing to see the real turn on: the way the woman responds: the metonymical circuit of signs.

Zizek, in the intro to The Plague of Fantasies, brings up three expressions of the objet petit a: subtraction, protraction, and obstruction. So for today’s rhizome, I want to fumble around with the three (play with what I understand (or what I think I understand (in the hope of playing it against what Zizek is actually saying and, via a dialectic between the two, come closer to what Zizek is actually saying (the scholarly route (while maintaining my own sense of it: the creative route. But I would first point out the role that jouissance plays in this and my own understanding of it. While the term is often associated with sexual climax, I associate it with sexual pleasure (the ecstasy (and the kind of push/pull nature of it: that subtle mix of pleasure and discomfort that constitutes the way we experience pleasure in general. Alright then:

Subtraction:

This to me, in a genealogical sense, lays at the core of the objet petit a (that which our present understanding of Jouissance is rooted in (and was best described by the Freudian fetish. For instance, in the foot fetish, the foot is seen as an object in itself with properties that refer to sexual experience: an awkward thing with veins (pulsing with life (that curls and slices the air during the sexual act. The important thing to understand here (as Zizek describes later in the book (is that this particular expression of the objet petit a is especially (or most obviously (metonymical in nature: it points to something it can never truly fulfill in itself. It leads to a nothingness that always pulls the subject back to the object that can never truly fulfill what it points to. Hence: the push/pull nature of Jouissance.

Protraction:

Here I’m reminded of an installment of the Hell Raiser series in which the protagonist is led through the various chambers of Hell. In one chamber, a couple is seen engaging in an eternal sexual act that will never reach climax. Now think about what a pleasant Hell that would be –that is defined by Jouissance. Jouissance, in our world, is defined by working towards a threshold that will take us out of a place we are really enjoying at the time. Still, we eventually work our way to that threshold. And after we do, it always becomes a matter of lowering our expectations: the role of efficiency in Jouissance. Now imagine the eternal suffering of never actually being able to reach that threshold.

Obstruction:

The best example to use here is Sam Raime’s movie A Simple Plan. A group of men find a crashed plane that, owned by drug dealers, holds a great deal of money. Their plot to keep it without being revealed leads to an escalation that results in all but the main couple being killed through a series of blocked attempts at reaching the final goal. We can see a similar dynamic at work in Macbeth.

But the classic expression of this lies in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: the ultimate expression of Jouissance. Orpheus almost gets there (almost gets Eurydice out of Hades (only to succumb (to be blocked (by his desire to see her yet again. It is Orpheus (the musician (that defines the role that Jouissance (that longing: that push/pull effect (plays in music: that moment when a song makes you want to fold into yourself.

“The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: ‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is THE VERY FORM OF IDEOLOGY, of its ‘practical efficiency’” –from Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies

In other words, even when we THINK we’re breaking from the status quo, we’re too often playing right into its hands. Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road not Taken”, is prescient on this matter. In it, the narrator comes to a fork in the road in which he imagines, in a romantic manner (the poem is basically a criticism of romanticism), having a choice between a more well -worn path and the more rebellious route of the one less so. Of course, they’re both roads (paths laid out), but he chooses the road seemingly less traveled by and deludes himself into believing he has done something that makes all the difference.

And we see the same dynamic at work in the way Capitalism (via marketers (assimilates all resistance to Capitalism: all attempts to distinguish one’s self from it. This can be seen in a recent SUV TV ad that, in the voice-over, utilizes a refrain poem in which every line starts with “Don’t you dare”, all of which can be summarized with:

“Don’t you dare break away from the common crowd.”

:that is as if to say that buying the SUV would somehow place you outside of the common crowd and status quo. It’s a lot like the corporate mantra of “thinking outside of the box” when no thought arrived at for the sake of a corporate culture could possibly think outside of the perimeters of producer/consumer Capitalism. It’s simply not possible. But it sounds cool, doesn’t it? And this problem, as described in Dan Lyon’s book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Tech Start-Up Bubble, is only accelerating with the emergence of the tech industry. This is because a lot of these start-ups are created not so much to make a profit or produce a useful product (many work at a loss (as to attract venture capital. Their primary gains come from an increase in share prices. But it has to be sold by tech guru rock-stars (like Steve Jobs (who are always offering some kind of “revolutionary” vision that supposedly “thinks outside of the box”.

But, as Zizek points out, it goes even deeper into the so-called liberal media conspiracy that the right embraces. Take Bill Maher and John Oliver’s series on HBO. Now there is no doubt in my mind about the sincerity of their desire to differentiate their selves’ from the general ideological system. And I would argue as much about HBO. But they’re still making money. And you have to look at the role they play in the general ideological system of Capitalism. Should we confront it as being oppressive, it always has the option of saying:

“How can you say that? You have Bill Maher and John Oliver (as well as Samantha Bee) criticizing us like they do: our very core values.”

What this fails to acknowledge is that it one thing to be able to criticize an ideological system to its core; but it’s quite another to be able to change that ideological system at its core.

“One cannot claim that they [the Nazis] were grey, dispassionate bureaucrats blindly following orders in accordance with German authoritarian tradition of unconditional obedience [think Arendt’s Banality of Evil here] : numerous testimonies bear witness to the excess of enjoyment the executioners found in their enterprise (see the numerous examples of ‘unnecessary’ supplementary inflicting of pain or humiliation –urinating on an old Jewish Lady’s head, etc.)….

….So although the book [Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners] may be problematic in some of its historical research, its basic premise is simply undeniable: the executioners did have a choice, they were on average fully responsible, mature, ‘civilized’ Germans.” –From Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies

The former paragraph was an extraction from a paragraph that was too long to type out in full in this sitting, one in which Zizek engages in a list poem strategy where every sentence starts with the refrain “One cannot claim” then follows it with a disclaimer. The reason I picked out this one is that it acts as a logical segue to another dynamic of cruelty that seems to be at play, that which fits into Zizek’s push/pull jouissance in the context of human cruelty, but seems to be neglected.

I thinking here of Kierkegaard’s Continuation of Sin. This dynamic results from the subject, having given in to an evil impulse, defers guilt by, in a sense, leaning into the evil. For instance, there was an instance in America in which two teenage boys, after a lot of mutual fantasizing about it, killed one of the boy’s parents. Then, instead of accepting the guilt of what they had done, they decided to just lean into it: become pure evil. They then went to their school and started shooting.

And in the spirit of Zizek, we can see this dynamic as well in the movie I love You to Death in which a couple of stoners (played by William Hurt and Keanu Reaves) are hired by a betrayed wife to kill her philandering husband. After shooting the husband in his sleep, they take pause wondering if they had actually managed accomplish what they were hired to do. And they’re clearly not comfortable with it. Then one of them makes a joke like one might hear in the movies when one character kills another and break into forced goonish chuckles as if to pretend they were perfectly comfortable (sociopathic enough (with what they had done.

We can also see this in the movie Platoon in which Charlie Sheens’ character (the moral center of the story) berates a young Vietnamese male during a raid on a village –one that happens to be physically ugly because of some unknown birth defect. The important thing to note is how Sheen plays it as if he is completely uncomfortable with what he is doing, but attempts to get beyond that discomfort by leaning into the act for the sake of allegiance to his platoon.

"What ideology offers is the symbolic construction of reality -the ultimate fantasy- as a way to escape the traumatic effects of the Real. Reality is is always a ‘virtual’ take on the real; a virtualization that can fully overcome the Real or achieve homeostasis. In the language of Laclau and Mouffe, this means that Society as an integrated unity is universally impossible precisely because of the constitutive excess of the Real qua the unmasterable negativity upon which every positivication finally depends.

And it is here that ideology performs its supreme conjuring trick. What ideology aims at is a fantasmatic re-staging of the encounter with the Real in such a way that the impossibility of Society is translated into the theft of society by some historical Other [the Jews, welfare queens, immigrants, etc., etc.]." -from Glyn Daly’s introduction to Conversations with Zizek

The first thing I would note is the crystallization this involves as concern’s Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies. Being in about the 5th, 6th, maybe 7th (I’ve lost count (reading of the book, my experience has generally been one of not being able to see the forest for the trees. I have always been able to relate to and use individual points he makes throughout the book. But what always eluded me was the general point outside of what I could gather from the title: that our human interactions are generally haunted by fantasy.

(And I would compare this to Rorty with whom you always have a general sense of what he is getting at while always struggling with the particulars. I am, to this day, still struggling with the significance of the antipodeans in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.)

At the same time, the clarification came as clarifications usually do with philosophy: the feeling of confirming vague instincts about it. And this, of course, comes with the risk of misinterpretation. But if we worry too much about getting something wrong, we risk never getting anything right. Therefore, all I can do is bounce off of it and hope I’m getting closer:

As I understand it, the Real, being that which overflows or eludes the Symbolic, must lead to a kind of negativity (that which is a kind of nothingness (that defines what we can positively identify. This dynamic, for instance, is what underlies the objet petit a or fetish. The object in question acts metonymically in that it represents the Thing that is not there (in terms of sex: the Breast, the curve of the thigh, the O-shaped form of the mouth, the way the foot curves (but seems to draw one to something based on fantasy. This can lead to a kind of violence. Think, for instance, of the caress which is a kind of tenderness that verges on violence in its futile attempt (in some sense or other (to penetrate the skin and actually get inside the other. It is that absence involved in the act that leaves a space for fantasy to fill.

And we see a similar dynamic (a kind of frustration supplemented by fantasy (at the social and political level. And here we see the silver lining in America’s greatest failure of democracy: the election of Donald Trump as president. I’m guessing that it will serve as a catalyst for Zizek’s career as a theorist. We only need look at the extent to which fancy played in his success –not just that of the right, but the left as well. I mean didn’t his whole campaign feel like some Quentin Tarentino revenge fantasy in which all those people fucking with the white working-man’s privilege were finally going to get their just deserts?

It’s going to be really interesting to see what Zizek has to say post-Trump.

100% masculinity is pure evil. Men need a feminine side or else they are pure logic and reason and no emotion. Without femininity they will feel no guilt.

100% femininity is pure delusion. Without any masculinity, a woman will put up her walls, and feel pain at any truths she encounters, rather wishing to bathe in her own essence. A god who cannot be reasoned with, is yet another form of pure evil.

Both the the 100% man and the 100% woman are pure evil.

Hermaphrodism, the only viable solution.

Either that or always being in a state of becoming other than you are.

Were I to read this on FaceBook, I would give it a “like”, Ultimate.

The only problem with perpetual becoming is, that one can never really be.

Hey d63, long time hearing, how is your watering hole, what relationships have you become aware of between Deleuze et.al.and Zizek? Can you share?

False.

Hi Ha merry xmas.
How false?

I’m finding it really productive to go back to my graphic guide on Zizek, especially after having spent time on some of his more theoretical texts, in that it is crystallizing and elaborating on many of my instincts as concerns Zizek. But in all fairness, part of the experience involves being able to apply my own insights to it. And, IMHO, studying difficult text always seems like a process of self flattery in the way it tends to confirm instincts. At the same time, that exposes the understanding to the suspicion of reading one’s self into the text and, consequently, misinterpretation. But it’s the only process we have. And the only way I see beyond it is to act like we know what we’re talking about and keep playing it against the reality of the text.

That said, what I want to play with today is Zizek’s concept of the mandate to enjoy. According to the Freudian myth, it started with a father figure that had control over all the females in the group (the jouissance (until the sons rebelled, killed the father, only to resurrect gods to replace the order he once established: the Big Other. This led to the Freudian Oedipal complex that could be applied to further power relationships. And that led to the repressive/paternal nature of those relationships: those rooted in the original father figure’s prohibitions on the sons’ desire for HIS women.

However, as Zizek points to, the new paternal figure is using a new, but equally effective, repressive strategy. In this case it is the command to enjoy: sex, alcohol, vanity, and whatever else TV commercials are telling you to enjoy. And it might feel like freedom until the credit card bill comes. But the feel of that freedom is always more of an attractor than the pain of the credit card bill. It’s no wonder our super-structure has become so infiltrated by the very fancy that made Trump’s campaign so successful.

The cost of that “feeling of freedom” (that which we find ourselves pursuing while never truly feeling it( if Capitalism is good at selling anything, it is possibility: Who Wants to be a Millionaire!!! (is a kind of land of the lotos eaters in which we feel our lives are exactly where they should be (hence the rationalization of our self indulgence (while basically self destructing and submitting ourselves to a kind of slavery. And unlike the land of the lotos eaters, we never get the full feeling of sedation. We, rather, struggle to get back to it.

Now to get to a more concrete example of what I am (via Zizek (talking about, we only need look back at what Bush Jr. implored us to do after 9/11: get back to consuming. That was his fatherly assurance: the justification for his paternal status: to enjoy. It was as if the only real confirmation of the American spirit, all notions of freedom and democracy, were centered around our ability to produce for the sake of consuming.

“Two words are revealing here: abstracted and control— in order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, and this system is by definition hidden from users. The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’ in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous, transparent, the more it is regulated and controlled by the invisible network of state agencies and large private companies that follow their secret agendas….

“In this sense, the US is even more dangerous than China insofar as its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed. That is to say, while, in a country like China, the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone— there are no illusions about it, the state is an openly oppressive mechanism— in the US formal freedoms are officially guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms.” -Zizek, Slavoj. Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (p. 68). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

Once again, we return to the way people can feel free while actually being enslaved: the piece of jouissance stolen by the slave from the master. One only need step into a time machine and go back to a pub in Germany in the early 30’s (one that looks a lot like contemporary sports bars (but where everyone (males at least (have sharp uniforms on. One only need look at the way people obsess over the newest technology like primates discovering fire. One only need look at how a primate might react were fire taken from it, to what extent they would bow before the leader that brought it back and all their resentments.

But what is important to understand here is that it is not so much a matter of what state is doing as corporate power. It is, rather, the misdirect towards state (propped up by old 70’s and 80’s reactions to the War on Drugs (propagated by corporate agendas that want us stuck on buzz phrases like “big government” –that is when state and government is the only real check and balance we can hope to have against corporate power. And unlike corporate power (and provided we are still living in a democracy (we can still influence government.

That said, while I do have issues with Zizek (primarily because of his propensity for theoretical over-reach and his contrarian tendency, his taste for the radical strictly for the sake of the radical (what always draws me back to him is his ear for spin and ability to dismantle it.

“As Zizek makes clear in The Ticklish Subject, what German Idealism accomplishes is a displacement of the usual opposition between the idea of the savage ‘pre-human’ self and the symbolic universe of ‘civilized’ human subjectivity (where in the Enlightenment tradition the latter is identified with the Light of Reason and as something which affects an ultimate mastery, or pacification, over the former). Instead, what is affirmed is a view of subjectivity that can only come into being as a passage through madness; as an ongoing attempt to impose a symbolic integrity against the ever-present threat of disintegration and negativity (Zizek, 1999;31-41). –from Glyn Daly’s introduction to Conversations with Zizek

What I’m seeing here is a description of the Hegelian dialectic laid out for me in my audio book on Hegel as explained by Chuck Hesston -that is as compared to the more static model laid out by the triad of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. In the more subtle form, it is a matter of taking a given situation, breaking it down to its more atomistic elements (think Russell here), and putting them back together in new ways. And it is in the art of that atomistic phase that we breach and traverse madness.

I would note here the similar dynamic described by Ian Buchanan in his reader’s guide to The Anti-Oedipus: the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive. Now we only need feel the words to get at what Buchanan is getting at: things start with a certain order that is disrupted via the connective process. This results in a disjunctive order similar to the atomistic one described above. And what this results in is a conjunctive synthesis very similar to Kierkegaard’s unstable synthesis: that which seems like stability while retaining the old instabilities.

What I would like to add to this dynamic (my dialectic (is what I consider the Dantean archetype, based on The Divine Comedy but in a mirror form. First consider the process: Inferno (the process of going deeper: and think chaos here (purgatory: the process of rising out of it (and paradismo: the fulfillment of getting there. Now imagine a real world situation similar to a common plot line: one that rises in intensity until comes to a denouement above the Dantean plotline.

And in the spirit of Zizek, I would humbly back my point with the example of the movie Blue Velvet. It was as if the deeper we went into the human condition the more the action rose in the traditional plot line way, that is until it imploded into a kind of reordering that still showed traces of instability such as when the two old women were watching a bird eat a bug.

This, of course, was the point of the movie drawing into the ear that the protagonist found then withdrawing from it towards the denouement.

“As I sat thinking of why this might be so I remembered a passage from Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ where, in the frst chapter discussions of free will he says, “That which is termed “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: “I am free, ‘he’ must obey”- this consciousness is inherent in every will…”. The entire liberal democratic edifice requires the confidence of the masses, confidence in our freedom, etcetc. So the powers that would maintain this edifice require us to think we are free, thats why from their point of view we “need” countries like China to resuscitate their fake Marxism, we need the bogeymen of socialism and communism so that we can point our fingers and say “they must obey, but we are free,” thereby maintaining our very un-freedom within the liberal democratic edifice. “ –Cody Warren

First of all, Cody, while I would have to check deeper into how it is that America is specifically funneling money into China’s resurrection of Marxism, I still agree with the point in general. I would also add another profound point (for me at least (in Zizek’s repertoire: the argument that we shouldn’t be so concerned with China being an authoritarian country as the fact that, as an authoritarian country, it has managed to beat us at the game of Capitalism and, in the process, compromised the always erroneous notion that Capital and freedom have some kind of exclusive and intimate relationship. And let’s just hope we realize that before the rich do. That said, as luck or coincidence would have it, your post coincides with something I read today in Glyn Daly’s intro to Conversations with Zizek:

“"In the language of Laclau and Mouffe, this means that Society as an integrated unity is universally impossible precisely because of the constitutive excess of the Real qua the unmasterable negativity upon which every positivization finally depends.

"And it is here that ideology performs its supreme conjuring trick. What ideology aims at is a fantasmatic re-staging of the encounter with the Real in such a way that the impossibility of Society is by some historical Other. In Nazi ideology, for example, it is the contingent figure of the Jew who is made directly responsible for the theft/sabotage of social harmony –thereby concealing the traumatic fact that social harmony never existed and that it is an inherent impossibility.”

Now, getting back to and in support of your point, Cody: it is clear that the FreeMarketFundamentalists miss the good old days when all they had to do, when some progressive suggested a policy that might ACTUALLY help people: such as the very universal healthcare system that every other western industrialized nation has (that is as compared to the rising tide raises all boats approach of the Republicans (was scream “socialism” at which point everyone was suppose to (and often did( hear psycho-shrieks: REEK!!! REEK!!! REEK!!! In fact, we saw FreeMarketFundamentalists resorting to these cold war strategies well into the new millennium. So it makes perfect sense that they would want the loaded term “Marxism” associated with China so they can have their cake and eat it too. That way they can make big money off of China while presenting them as the “Marxist Boogeyman” you suggest.

I have, for some time now, claimed that, philosophically, my holy triad consists of Deleuze, Rorty, and Zizek. At the same time, I have been a little neglectful of Zizek in that Deleuze and Rorty seems to have taken priority through more immersions. However, today, having finished Conversations with Zizek (w/ Glyn Daly (and gone back to a study point at the “library”, I have found several quotes that remind me of why he is included –most of which my window today will not allow me to write out. The interesting thing about it (for today at least (is that it is not so much about his philosophy in itself or his critical stance towards Capitalism and the semiotic by which it sustains power (that which drew me to him (but a connection with his method and how he experiences it. So I warn the Zizek string ahead of time that this will come off as more of a journal entry than an actual exposition on Zizek’s philosophy. But if nothing else, you will get some telling quotes from the interview.

He says at one point:

“My reference here would be Stephen King’s The Shining. What people tend to forget is that this novel is basically about writer’s block. In the film version the Jack Nicholson character always types the same sentence, cannot start his text, and then the situation explodes into axe killings.”

Scarily enough, this seems vaguely relatable to me. Zizek then goes on to say:

“But I think the true horror is actually the opposite one: that you have the compulsion to write on and on. That’s much more horrifying than writer’s block I think…

…That is my horror –I simply cannot stop.”

Guys, I have been at this for a while. I’m talking years. The same thing every workday: I get off work, read whatever book I’m on, then go to the “library” and go back to an earlier study point and look for whatever quote I can bounce off of here via music, beer, and jager. And the problem with such a repetition is that while it gets you closer to what it is you are after (via difference), you go from the ecstasy that drove you in the first place to a kind of plateau that gives you tastes of that ecstasy (enough to keep you coming back for more (while rarely giving you that full experience again. So I’m empathetic when Zizek follows with:

“And I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing –I cannot tell you how much.”

And writers are notorious for this kind of thing: hence the rituals they develop in order to get their selves to sit down and write. And in my experience it comes from an experience of tedium and the dread that the words will not come. But I’m not sure I’m sympathetic…. Or am I? I mean every night I go to work, I’m going from task to task (with that sour aftertaste of alcohol in the back my throat), and almost consistently, as thoughts are rushing through my head, the words slip out of my mouth:

“I’m tired of writing.”

Still, here I am again: exhausted as usual and well over my daily 500 word limit; and just to see what my mind can do with a little beer, jager, and music, and a little footwork as well.

"That position was best represented, perhaps, by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s essays on the affective and intentional fallacies (so called), essay’s that pled a successful case for the text by arguing, on the one hand, that the intentions of the author were unavailable and, on the other, , that the responses of the reader were too variable. Only the text was both indisputively there and stable. To have recourse either to the causes of a poem or its effects is to exchange objectivity for “impressionism and relativism.”The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically judgment, tends to disappear.” -from, yet again, Fish’s Is There a Text in this Class…

I quote this for two main reasons: first to describe (or rather detail (the environment of literary criticism that Fish was responding to; and secondly (and more relevant to my purposes here), to re-emphasize the overlap between Fish and Rorty and Deleuze in that Fish is responding to what I tend to think of as neo-classicism. (Thanks, Dad! -just to give you sense of the Oedipal issues at work here.) We again see Fish rejecting the notion of something stable to be found for the sake of something that is dynamic while stable (or better to say: stabilized or (even better( anchored.

(This, as D & G elaborate on, is rooted (in a mythological sense( in the mythology of the Oedipal in which the son is the fragmented result of the orderly (therefore authoritarian( father. The solution to the problem, of course (at points in our history), has been the neo-classicist prescription (think Freud and psychoanalysis here( which can reorder the fragmented ego of the son.)

Fish’s response to this is, at first, to elevate the reader to the same privilege as the text, then, for reasons I will try to describe later, makes the reader beholden to the “interpretive community” they are working in –the very same one the writer is working in. In this way (and much like Deleuze and Rorty), he positions it all (reader, the readers around them, text, and writer (in a kind of de-centered feedback loop in which the text doesn’t act like a privileged center as much as an anchor (a stable reality (that guards against the frivolous interpretations that more neo-classical critics were so resistant to.

To put it in Oedipal terms: Fish (much like me (breaks (fragments even (before the Oedipal father figure while retaining certain elements of Him: the big Other. And while Deleuze seems to depart from this (that is with Guatarri (in Anti-Oedipus, he still retains certain Neo-classicist elements. Rorty’s a given with his bourgeoisie/academic approach.

Sorry about that confessional digression, guys.

Hi again. Reading the last two essays I can honestly observe you remind me of Sartre’ s ’ self thought man’.

You mean Sartre’s self taught man in Nausea. And please don’t take that as condescending -we all have typos. I agree with that description in both its positive and negative edges. It seems pathetic, I agree, in that it is not likely to go anywhere. Still, it is about a man who has found out how they want to spend their point A to point B, no matter what they have to sacrifice for it.

I actually consider that a compliment. Thanks for recognizing it, Jerkey.

I am really relieved for that, and it proves you have substantial recognition of major themes enveloping minor ones. Keep it up!

If we were on Facebook, that would get a like. Look forward to further discourses.