allael

[allael]

What, then, is a mother’s love worth in humanizing her child?

...maternal devotion is worth more if the mother is not everything to him/her, and if she is also not located in an unfathomable elsewhere: it is still necessary for her love as woman to refer to a name.

As Lacan said, there is only the love of a name: here, the name of a man who could be any man, but who, from the sole fact of being nameable, will set a limit as much to the metonymy of the phallus as to the opacity of the absolute Other. Only on this condition can the child be inscribed in a particularized desire.

 📘 What Lacan Said About Women, Colette Soler, 2006.

[allael]

It is a terror of not knowing what to do with this living thing, this baby who does not speak, who is not yet subject to repression, and who therefore stands in greater proximity to the jouissance of life, a jouissance that is still unmarked in the child.

 📘 What Lacan Said About Women, Colette Soler, 2006.

What is mobilized here is the relation to living jouissance, a relation that, in all cases, is a function of the mother’s own repressions. I will note, furthermore, that such reactions toward babies extend well beyond mothers, and take forms that always stand in very lively contrast with each other: they go from taste to distaste, from an anxious malaise to a fascinated passion, from willed indifference to a sustained vocation, and so forth.

[allael]

But how may things look in his own head?

Just as he has led others astray, so he, I think, will end by going astray himself. He has led the others astray not in the external sense but in the interior sense with respect to themselves.

There is something shocking about a person’s directing a hiker, uncertain of his way, to the wrong path and then abandoning him in his error,

but what is that compared with causing a person to go astray within himself.

The lost hiker still has the consolation that the scenery is continually changing around him, and with every change there is fostered a hope of finding a way out. He who goes astray within himself does not have such a large territory in which to move; he soon perceives that it is a circle from which he cannot find an exit. I think that he himself will have the same experience on an even more terrible scale. I can think of nothing more tormenting than a scheming mind that loses the thread and then directs all its keenness against itself as the conscience awakens and it becomes a matter of rescuing himself from this perplexity. The many exits from his foxhole are futile; the instant his troubled soul already thinks it sees daylight filtering in, it turns out to be a new entrance, and thus, like panic-stricken wild game, pursued by despair, he is continually seeking an exit and continually finding an entrance through which he goes back into himself. Such a person is not always what could be called a criminal; he very often is himself frustrated by his own schemes, and yet he is stricken with a more terrible punishment than is the criminal, for what is even the pain of repentance compared with this conscious madness? His punishment has a purely esthetic character, for even the expression “the conscience awakens” is too ethical to use about him; conscience takes shape in him merely as a higher consciousness that manifests itself as a restlessness that does not indict him even in the profounder sense but keeps him awake, allows him no rest in his sterile restlessness. Nor is he insane, for his multitude of finite thoughts are not fossilized in the eternity of insanity.

📘 The Seducer's Diary, Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, John Updike, Demetrio Gutiérrez Rivero, Alastair Hannay, Joaquín Saint Aymour, 2013.

[allael]

This frustration arises because whiteness can never reconstitute being. In truth, whiteness functions only as the object a that merely promises wholeness by simultaneously masquerading as the phallus, the castrated object that manifests the illusory site of bliss in the Imaginary form of the subjective-self’.

George Sheldon, 📘 The Psychosis of Race : A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization, Jack Black, 2023.

[allael]

"...Freud’s ( 1950 ) theorization of screen memories. Such memories, typically vivid in nature even if they appear focused on an apparently trivial facet of experience, are a compromise between repressed elements and defenses against them. Part of what is so interesting about screen-memories is the amplification of formal features they present. Screen-memories entail a type of stasis: one scene within an associative train has been accentuated, made ‘extra-memorable’, so as to lock out a less acceptable memory or implication ( Freud, 1899 ). Such memories are over-compensations by means of form for what cannot be retrieved ."

"In the screen-memory, the cathexis ( libidinal investment ) is realized in embellishments of formal features. The secret of the function of such nostalgic architecture thus lies in its form: its very artificiality—vulgarity, some might say—holds the clue, evinces its role as simultaneously contrivance and shield. Such architectural features are there to distract out historical attentions, to disrupt the capacity of our historical imaginations, to hold back time ."

📘 Whiteness at the Abyss: A Lacanian Reading of ‘White Anxiety’, The Palgrave Lacan Series, Derek Hook; Donald Moss; Slavoj Žižek; Sheldon George, 2025.

[allael]

The TRANS theory of micropolitical superstrings follows two lines of inquiry: one concerns the ongoing transformations of biopolitical and necropolitical technologies in pharmacopornographic capitalism; the other refers to the ongoing mutations in that mode of existence hitherto called ‘subjectivity’, as well as the social techniques by which ‘symbionts’ gain access to old form of political representation.

📚 Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, 2022.

[allael]

He wanted more of the unconscious, more of the real, in order to avoid the pitfalls of the psychologization of existence that amounts to no more than the behaviourist domestication of consciences.

(Jacques Lacan on Psycbology versus Psychoanalysis) 📗 Six Moments in Lacan : Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Milton, Derek Hook, 2017.

[allael]

I had always daydreamed about having a threesome with two women. I asked my college girlfriend how she would feel about inviting her sister to join us. She wasn’t so sure at first, but eventually said she was willing and would ask her sister. Then, when she told me that her sister was also willing, I knew I’d never be able to do it. My manhood was in question. The whole fantasy came crashing down.

—An analysand

📘 Miss-Ing: Psychoanalysis 2. 0, Bruce Fink, 2024.

[allael]

As time went on, the animal lost its sacred character and the sacrifice lost its connection with the totem feast;

it became a simple offering to the deity, an act of renunciation in favour of the god. God Himself had become so far exalted above mankind that He could only be approached through an intermediary the priest. At the same time divine kings made their appearance in the social structure and introduced the patriarchal system into the state. It must be confessed that the revenge taken by the deposed and restored father was a harsh one: the dominance of authority was at its climax.

The subjugated sons made use of the new situation in order to unburden themselves still further of their sense of guilt. They were no longer in any way responsible for the sacrifice as it now was. It was God Himself who demanded it and regulated it.

Totem and Taboo, 📚 Freud's Completed Works , Ivan Smith 2007.

The original animal sacrifice was already a substitute for a human sacrifice - for the ceremonial killing of the father; so that, when the father-surrogate once more resumed its human shape, the animal sacrifice too could be changed back into a human sacrifice.

[allael]

Les Américains acquièrent dès l'enfance tout ce qu'il faut pour douter des histoires de sorcellerie, mais peu de choses dans notre enfance nous incitent à douter de la race.

📚 Racecraft, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, 2022.

Pour nous, comme pour les anciens croyants aux sorcières, la vie quotidienne produit une immense accumulation de preuves à l'appui de cette croyance. Il suffit de penser au mélange médiatique de choses classées « par race » – des constantes comme les grossesses précoces aux nouveautés comme la « sous-représentation » parmi les donneurs de sang. 69 et « représentation disproportionnée » sur Twitter, Ils produisent sans cesse des preuves factices de l'immensité américaine en constante expansion, la prétendue fracture raciale.

[allael]

"D'autres notions, prétendument nouvelles, sont tout aussi anciennes et profondément ancrées. Le discours actuel sur les personnes « biraciales » ou « multiraciales » réhabilite les mulâtres , les quarterons , les octorons , etc., termes d'hier désignant l'ascendance mixte . Bien qu’ils réapparaissent aujourd’hui sous le costume du progressisme post-racial, pour ne pas dire d’un mouvement vers « un avenir idéal sans race », Leurs origines sont racistes.

Le terme « mulâtre » est apparu pour la première fois dans le recensement américain en 1850..."

📚 Racecraft, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, 2022.

[allael]

Having initially described neurosis as the negative of perversion, Freud emphasizes

the savage, barbarous, polymorphous and instinctual nature of perverse sexuality; this is a raw sexuality that knows nothing of the incest taboo, repression or sublimation.

He will subsequently make a distinction between two types of perversion: perversions of the object and perversions of the aim. The former include sexual relations with a human partner (incest, auto-eroticism, paedophilia); the latter are divided into three types of practice: pleasure in seeing (exhibitionism, voyeurism), pleasure in pain and inflicting pain (sadism, masochism), and the pleasure that derives from the exclusive overestimation of a fetishized erogenous zone.

 📕 Our Dark Side : A History of Perversion, ROUDINESCO, Elisabeth, 2009.

With Freud, / the perverse disposition was seen as an essential moment in the transition to normality.

[allael]

El sistema no busca la coherencia: más bien, se nutre de la confusión. Esta ambigüedad estructural es lo que hace que la simulación total sea tan efectiva. Nunca se presenta como un régimen narrativo único sino como un universo de posibilidades. La realidad se ha atomizado en fragmentos que se superponen, se contradicen y, en última instancia, se anulan entre sí. Este flujo interminable no deja lugar a la crítica, porque no hay nada estable que criticar. Todo punto fijo se disuelve en el momento en que es identificado.

📘 Ipnocrazia, Hypnocracy, Hipnocracia, Jianwei Xun, Andrea Colamedici, 2025

[allael]

Donde los sistemas anteriores operaban en momentos y espacios definidos –el templo, la catedral, el ritual, el programa de televisión– la Hipnocracia Digital trabaja veinticuatro horas al día, siete días a la semana, penetrando cada aspecto de la vida diaria. No hay más espacios ni tiempos fuera de la manipulación: el trance es el estado normal de la existencia. La omnipresencia temporal se traduce en omnipresencia espacial: como un gas que ocupa todo el volumen disponible,

la influencia hipnocrática se infiltra en los intersticios más minúsculos de la sociedad.

Ya no se limita a rituales o momentos preestablecidos, esta fuerza invisible impregna cada gesto, cada pensamiento, cada respiración. El poder ya no reside en un lugar específico, un palacio o una institución: está en todas partes y en ninguna al mismo tiempo, como una niebla que envuelve silenciosamente cada aspecto de la existencia.

📘 Ipnocrazia, Hypnocracy, Hipnocracia, Jianwei Xun, Andrea Colamedici, 2025

[allael]

For as soon as he is in language, the subject has only language available to try to refind the object that was lost by virtue of language.

This, then, is the paradox: it is at the moment of its loss that the object appears as such. It accedes to existence only by being lost, and its status is conferred retroactively. Before this, it was not separate from what was not yet the subject. And so it is all the more lost for being something that falls away in the operation that constitutes the subject. And each attempt to refind it will define it as a bit more missing.

📘 Lacan, Alain Vanier; 2020.

How did the concept of the object develop in psychoanalysis? Freud uses the term to speak in general of a person of the opposite sex, for example, as that which one wants to have: the mother, or the woman for the man; in this case, it is a whole, libidinally invested object. Then there is also the object in relation to the drive, and this is not unrelated to the other object, the whole person. The object of the drive serves to attain a goal; according to Freud, it is indifferent but necessary. Here, too, the object is invested with libido. Now, this object has a unique attribute in psychoanalysis, Freud states, and that is to be a radically lost object. As the fort-da game shows, the cut made in the real by symbolization makes the mother into a lost object of which objet a is just a remainder, a fragment. This object is lost not because it has gone away but because of the process of symbolization that, substituting its symbol for her, has “absented” her. At the same time—and this is one of the impasses of psychoanalysis if it is conducted only with reference to the symbolic, if it is conceived as only a process of symbolization—this object orients the life of the subject into a quest for the refinding of what was lost. For as soon as he is in language, the subject has only language available to try to refind the object that was lost by virtue of language.

[allael]

It is in the choice of a love partner that the hysterical woman will sustain her adherence to the ideal of perfection as long as she possibly can.

This is why defiance plays such an essential role.

The hysteric tries to get the man who is guaranteed in advance to respond to all her demands. In this strategy she unknowingly fails to realize that this is the way never to meet any man who can rise to the occasion. Hence the excessive tendency of certain hysterical women to choose an unattainable partner; the further out of reach he is, the longer she can sustain the illusion that the object of her love will not be disappointing.

The Hysterical Woman and Sex, 📚 Clinical Lacan, Joel Dor, 2013.

Experience shows how readily some hysterics entice away their friends’ male partners, and all the more so because the other woman’s partner is always “better equipped” than her own. The question of making the right choice comes back again—the other man always has something more, something better, than her current one. The other man is just like the garment or the shoes she didn’t select; he turns out to be infinitely more satisfactory than the one she decided on. And so what follows is the same scenario, the same lament, and the same disillusionment.

[allael]

If the hysteric is so easily enthralled by another woman taken as a model, it is because this other woman is presumed to hold the answer to that question that is so crucial for the hysteric:

What is it to be a woman?

It is because of this central issue that hysterical homosexuality is not concerned with choosing a woman as an ideal love object. On the contrary,

in her homosexual promiscuity the hysteric is above all seeking to be like her, to think like her, to live like her, to make love like her, to have the same men, and so on.

In other words, what is happening here is that the hysteric is basically vampirizing the other woman who, she assumes, has brought her feminine identity to a state of perfection.

The Hysterical Woman and Sex, 📚 Clinical Lacan, Joel Dor, 2013.