On Giving Up

Joyce is clearly both exemplary and representative for Lacan for how we can do new things with words; and this has something to do with aliveness.

is there another and better solution to feeling left out than revenge? If we don’t retaliate, against others and against ourselves, what else can we do?

Why Freud? Because Freud shows us how the hide-and-seek of our modern lives works; and that hide-and seek may be an enlivening way of describing our lives. And that hide-and-seek may make us curious about other ways of describing our lives; and curious about why hide-and-seek has become such a compelling picture.

The ‘magic thing’ is to ‘make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment’; the second kind of attention ‘brought a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind’. Wide Attention re-enchants the world, Narrow Attention can diminish it. Narrow Attention creates a certain kind of person – is a way of overdefining oneself; Wi

It is worth considering the very real advantages, indeed the necessity, of being left out, and having the wherewithal to bear it, and even to make something of it.

As though, at least in these two examples, knowledge is a self-cure for some kind of anxiety (call it the anxiety about the desire not to know).

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.

there is always the temptation to turn back, to turn round: to go back, say, to the past, to the place from which one started, to retrace your steps; or simply to turn back to the time when you can choose to give up, or choose again what you really want to do; as though progress, or completion or commitment, depends on reaching the point from which

It was Freud’s contention that we are involved in the lifelong project of leaving ourselves out of our own lives, that we can only survive by exclusion.

Human beings, as Freud sees it, are radically at odds with who they take themselves to be. And in Lacan’s more radical reading of Freud, Freud is saying that ‘whatever we take ourselves to be we are not’.