On Giving Up

what the nudge of language – the choosing and creating of our language – and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean.

The point from which there is no more turning back suggests, of course, that there has already been a certain amount of turning back, or a certain amount of wanting to turn back. As though a desire to turn back is what we always have to contend with – as a temptation, or simply as a choice. As though we are also driven by a desire for uncompleted a

In a now familiar binary, it seems as though the only alternative to wanting (and its discontents) is not wanting (and its discontents). It is like believing that our choice is between greed and anorexia. When in fact we can wonder, in any given situation, what we might want and not want and what else we might do in situations in which wanting or n

The idea that life has an aim, or that happiness is what we want, may be simply a way of narrowing one’s mind, of oversimplifying oneself.

we can say that we are so disturbed by the proliferation and variety and diversity and unpredictability of our desire that we are always tempted to actively narrow our minds by claiming to know what we want, and sticking to it; there may, that is to say, be nothing more defensive, nothing more distracting, nothing more omniscient, than believing yo

A psychoanalyst is someone who is, above all, curious, and curious about curiosity; and psychoanalysis itself may be more of a curiosity profession than a helping profession, while keen to work out the connections between the two. A psychoanalyst is not someone who needs to know, not someone who needs to be right, or needs to be believed. He is som

Psychoanalysis will tell us that we can no longer seek the conventional consolation of believing that we are exempt from what appals us, or from what frightens us. That we are complicit with what we are undone by. The enemy is always a part of ourselves, and never quite so unequivocally simply the enemy.

she is ‘troubled with thick-coming fancies/that keep her from her rest’.

Just as our shame keeps us in an intimate relationship with our shamers, exclusion tends to keep us in touch with our excluders.

the developmental transition from wanting as certain and knowable to wanting as provisional and experimental. Both kinds of wanting are necessary in different situations, and as means to different ends.