On Giving Up

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

If, at least in dreams and unconscious thinking, insignificant ideas are the carriers of significance, if intensity and value and meaning can be found in the places one would least expect them, then what is being required of us is a different kind of attention to ourselves. And a different picture of what sociability might involve; of what might be

It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites, fundamentally unsettled and disturbed by their appetites despite and because of the pleasure they bring; despite and because of the fact that their survival depends upon their appetite.

we tend to value, and even idealize, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves; unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining r

Psychoanalysis – and psychoanalysts after Freud – has been divided over whether it is a curiosity profession or a knowledge profession, whether it is more essentially about cure or exploration; the curious, the explorers, can never settle; those who are keen on being knowledgeable and helping people want to settle when it is at all possible. Or to

Because of this disarray of wanting that modern development entails, they will always be tempted, out of anxiety, to want to find out what they think their wants are, settle them and settle into them (this is often called self-knowledge). And there will be no shortage of people around who are more than keen to tell them what they really want, and t

Aliveness may become an issue, culturally and historically, when we feel that there is so much in our private and political lives that we cannot bear to be alive to. If we have become, if we have made ourselves, great familiarizers and generalizers, we have been actively and determinedly narrowing our minds.

When one is left out, something else becomes available, even if what first becomes available are the difficult and dismaying feelings of being left out (as though feeling left out may sometimes be like stage fright). So the always ambivalent need to be left out, and the wish to be left out, has to be included in our repertoire. Exclusion may involv

To emphasize, to prioritize, to highlight, to stress, to insist, to foreground, to persuade – all states of conviction and certainty – are all forms of disguise, all decoys. All attempts at over-organization, at forcing meaning rather than allowing it