On Giving Up

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

Freud was alert to the paradoxes of certainty; the ways in which certainty narrows the mind often in the name of truth and liberation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, what the individual is always suffering from, one way and another, is anxieties about exchange, and the dependence it inevitably entails.

The question, whenever we want to do anything, whenever we make a choice, is unavoidably: what will we have to give up? Choice is, by definition, exclusionary, and reveals preference. There is always, that is to say, some imaginary exchange at work; something is given up with a view to something being given back.

there can be a tyranny of completion, of finishing things, which can narrow our minds unduly.

Freud, in other words – like Musil and Mann, but in a different kind of language – is describing a loss of confidence in our knowledge of the good, of the good as something we can both recognize, and aspire to live by, whatever our versions of the good happen to be (after psychoanalysis, distinctions between good and evil become less tenable, less

We may not, say, need to think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss, as the phrase ‘giving up’ induces us to do, thereby reinforcing a much-cherished cultural norm. We may not need to lose our lives in order to find them; we may just be able to go on finding them (mourning may not be the thing we most want to do, or the onl

Freud is proposing – though he would never put it like this – that in Musil’s language, the greatest and most important thing is the unconscious, the greatest and most important thing is that we are largely unconscious of ourselves; that the only question, as the French philosopher Michel Serres puts it, is ‘What is it you don’t want to know about

Language is a sometimes surprisingly flexible regime.

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.