It is not then a story about giving something up, it is a story about extending a repertoire; or about what the poet William Empson called ‘straddling the contradictions’. You can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides.

Self-doubt, and doubting itself, has to be attacked – attacked through mockery – to create the conditions in which a change of plan or a giving up (‘We will proceed no further in this business’) are rendered impossible, inconceivable.

My wanting and my certainty go together. Wanting is the enemy of improvisation.

Everything depends on what you refuse to be left out of, and why; or – since you are left out – everything depends on what you do about your exclusion, and do with it. The question is how you interpret your left-outness and exile,

belief without curiosity is one of the forms the death instinct takes. Belief without curiosity is stultifying. And that may be its point.

The eloquence of inadequacy is richly comforting, entoiling the futile man in beglamouring postulations of the impossible. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot

There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us – man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language – and now, in late Lacan, there is the language we can create and choose. Lacan should have said at this moment, if he wasn’t so determined to be fascinating, that we can h

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

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