Sublime

At first we can’t speak, and then we speak, and one of the things we use language to do, once we have it, is to exclude. And yet, as in Kafka’s formula, because we couldn’t speak initially, we can’t really speak. Or, as Freud puts it, when we speak we never really quite know what we’re saying. We say more than we intend, and we omit more than we

he’s a phenomenologist,

into our own multifarious and superdeterminate depths. We could stop fighting against the irresistible currents of a world in which things, despite our sternest ethical injunctions, refuse to simply be what they are – ourselves included.

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me? That was the question that crept into my mind even as I stared into his eyes those last few

It is not incidental historically that both Lacan and James, in their very different ways, and from very different cultures and personal histories, are speaking up for what we have learned to call individualism (or more benignly, idiosyncracy, or eccentricity).

Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?

No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.