#charlestaylor — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.europesays.com/people/181197/ Will Mississippi send a Black Democrat to the US Senate? Scott Colom says don’t count him out #AngelaAlsobrooks #CharlesSchumer #CharlesTaylor #ChuckSchumer #CindyHydeSmith #DonaldTrump #Elections #ethnicity #GeorgeSoros #JakeMonssen #JoeBiden #JudyWeiner #LaurenFrench #MikeEspy #Politics #Race #RonaldReagan #ScottColom #SteveRogers #TateReeves #ThadCochran #USNews #WashingtonNews #WilburColom

“ #CharlesTaylor, a #Canadian #Catholic #philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in #NorthAmerica these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page #book that really attracted attention and debate.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m... #books #BookSky #secularism #religion

Religion versus Secularism in ...

“ #CharlesTaylor, a #Canadian #Catholic #philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in #NorthAmerica these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page #book that really attracted attention and debate.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m... #books #BookSky #secularism #religion

Religion versus Secularism in ...

“ #CharlesTaylor, a #Canadian #Catholic #philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in #NorthAmerica these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page #book that really attracted attention and debate.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m... #books #BookSky #secularism #religion

Religion versus Secularism in ...

“ #CharlesTaylor, a #Canadian #Catholic #philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in #NorthAmerica these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page #book that really attracted attention and debate.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m... #books #BookSky #secularism #religion

Religion versus Secularism in ...

“ #CharlesTaylor, a #Canadian #Catholic #philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in #NorthAmerica these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page #book that really attracted attention and debate.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m... #books #BookSky #secularism #religion

Religion versus Secularism in ...

Charles Taylor's diagnosis of modern life still holds — and Aristotle, Benjamin, and Han all confirm it from different directions.

Worked through his three malaises of modernity in a new essay on Substack.

https://ronaldraadsen.substack.com/p/the-three-malaises-of-modernity?r=5lwmoo

#Philosophy #Authenticity #Modernity #CharlesTaylor

Charles Taylor's diagnosis of modern life still holds — and Aristotle, Benjamin, and Han all confirm it from different directions.

Worked through his three malaises of modernity in a new essay on Substack.

https://ronaldraadsen.substack.com/p/the-three-malaises-of-modernity?r=5lwmoo

#Philosophy #Authenticity #Modernity #CharlesTaylor

Charles Taylor's diagnosis of modern life still holds — and Aristotle, Benjamin, and Han all confirm it from different directions.

Worked through his three malaises of modernity in a new essay on Substack.

https://ronaldraadsen.substack.com/p/the-three-malaises-of-modernity?r=5lwmoo

#Philosophy #Authenticity #Modernity #CharlesTaylor

Charles Taylor's diagnosis of modern life still holds — and Aristotle, Benjamin, and Han all confirm it from different directions.

Worked through his three malaises of modernity in a new essay on Substack.

https://ronaldraadsen.substack.com/p/the-three-malaises-of-modernity?r=5lwmoo

#Philosophy #Authenticity #Modernity #CharlesTaylor

Charles Taylor's diagnosis of modern life still holds — and Aristotle, Benjamin, and Han all confirm it from different directions.

Worked through his three malaises of modernity in a new essay on Substack.

https://ronaldraadsen.substack.com/p/the-three-malaises-of-modernity?r=5lwmoo

#Philosophy #Authenticity #Modernity #CharlesTaylor

I tilted toward reading more #Canadian #books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore here, with some extremely favourable results. Here’s my piece on last year’s top #reads. doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five... #BookSky #CanadaSky #CharlesTaylor #VaclavSmil #Canada

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

I tilted toward reading more #Canadian #books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore here, with some extremely favourable results. Here’s my piece on last year’s top #reads. doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five... #BookSky #CanadaSky #CharlesTaylor #VaclavSmil #Canada

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

I tilted toward reading more #Canadian #books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore here, with some extremely favourable results. Here’s my piece on last year’s top #reads. doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five... #BookSky #CanadaSky #CharlesTaylor #VaclavSmil #Canada

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

I tilted toward reading more #Canadian #books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore here, with some extremely favourable results. Here’s my piece on last year’s top #reads. doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five... #BookSky #CanadaSky #CharlesTaylor #VaclavSmil #Canada

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

I tilted toward reading more #Canadian #books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore here, with some extremely favourable results. Here’s my piece on last year’s top #reads. doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five... #BookSky #CanadaSky #CharlesTaylor #VaclavSmil #Canada

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

- T.S. Eliot's East Coker

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

- T.S. Eliot's East Coker

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

- T.S. Eliot's East Coker

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

- T.S. Eliot's East Coker

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

“when we listen to a great #symphony, or #quartet, we are of course aware of passing from one movement to the next, but the whole has a kind of unity which makes of it a single experience. Its parts have a kind of quasi-simultaneity.” - #CharlesTaylor, Cosmic Connections #music

“when we listen to a great #symphony, or #quartet, we are of course aware of passing from one movement to the next, but the whole has a kind of unity which makes of it a single experience. Its parts have a kind of quasi-simultaneity.” - #CharlesTaylor, Cosmic Connections #music

My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc #books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc #books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc #books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc #books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

My #best reads list for 2025 was, well, hopelessly #eclectic: #CharlesTaylor, #ManueldeLanda, #VaclavSmil, #PhilipKDick, #IrisMurdoch, #AlisdairMacIntyre, #JamesCScott, #HPLovecraft, etc #books #BookSky #BestReads #fiction #nonfiction #reading doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Here it is - a couple of days late and a little wonkier than I'd planned. My list of the most notable #books I read in 2025. #BookSky #reading #fiction #nonfiction #novels #sciencefiction #PhilipKDick #IrisMurdoch #CharlesTaylor #ManueldeLanda #Canadianbooks doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Here it is - a couple of days late and a little wonkier than I'd planned. My list of the most notable #books I read in 2025. #BookSky #reading #fiction #nonfiction #novels #sciencefiction #PhilipKDick #IrisMurdoch #CharlesTaylor #ManueldeLanda #Canadianbooks doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Here it is - a couple of days late and a little wonkier than I'd planned. My list of the most notable #books I read in 2025. #BookSky #reading #fiction #nonfiction #novels #sciencefiction #PhilipKDick #IrisMurdoch #CharlesTaylor #ManueldeLanda #Canadianbooks doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Here it is - a couple of days late and a little wonkier than I'd planned. My list of the most notable #books I read in 2025. #BookSky #reading #fiction #nonfiction #novels #sciencefiction #PhilipKDick #IrisMurdoch #CharlesTaylor #ManueldeLanda #Canadianbooks doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

Here it is - a couple of days late and a little wonkier than I'd planned. My list of the most notable #books I read in 2025. #BookSky #reading #fiction #nonfiction #novels #sciencefiction #PhilipKDick #IrisMurdoch #CharlesTaylor #ManueldeLanda #Canadianbooks doncurren.blogspot.com/2026/01/five...

Five Most Notable Books I Read...

2 “ … we would cling to them like shipwrecked sailors to floating spars.” - #CharlesTaylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

2 “ … we would cling to them like shipwrecked sailors to floating spars.” - #CharlesTaylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

“We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. #Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” (June ‘24) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #CharlesTaylor

How the Philosopher Charles Ta...

“We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. #Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” (June ‘24) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #CharlesTaylor

How the Philosopher Charles Ta...

“We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. #Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” (June ‘24) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #CharlesTaylor

How the Philosopher Charles Ta...

“We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. #Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” (June ‘24) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #CharlesTaylor

How the Philosopher Charles Ta...

“We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. #Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.” (June ‘24) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #CharlesTaylor

How the Philosopher Charles Ta...

I quite enjoyed this short video from #Aeon magazine on #Heidegger. It features some observations from the #philosopher emeritus of #Canada, the great #CharlesTaylor, along with #HubertDreyfus and other #philosophers, and a musician, a carpenter and a chef. aeon.co/videos/i-am-...

I am, therefore I think – how ...

I quite enjoyed this short video from #Aeon magazine on #Heidegger. It features some observations from the #philosopher emeritus of #Canada, the great #CharlesTaylor, along with #HubertDreyfus and other #philosophers, and a musician, a carpenter and a chef. aeon.co/videos/i-am-...

I am, therefore I think – how ...

I quite enjoyed this short video from #Aeon magazine on #Heidegger. It features some observations from the #philosopher emeritus of #Canada, the great #CharlesTaylor, along with #HubertDreyfus and other #philosophers, and a musician, a carpenter and a chef. aeon.co/videos/i-am-...

I am, therefore I think – how ...

I quite enjoyed this short video from #Aeon magazine on #Heidegger. It features some observations from the #philosopher emeritus of #Canada, the great #CharlesTaylor, along with #HubertDreyfus and other #philosophers, and a musician, a carpenter and a chef. aeon.co/videos/i-am-...

I am, therefore I think – how ...

I quite enjoyed this short video from #Aeon magazine on #Heidegger. It features some observations from the #philosopher emeritus of #Canada, the great #CharlesTaylor, along with #HubertDreyfus and other #philosophers, and a musician, a carpenter and a chef. aeon.co/videos/i-am-...

I am, therefore I think – how ...

If you're into #music, the #RoyalInstitute is publishing some of their seminal #ChristmasLectures series from #CharlesTaylor, all about music, strings, symphonies, trumpets, synthesizers, and more.

From 1989.

- https://youtu.be/p-960zzAa78
- https://youtu.be/OOK-j_Y3U_A
- https://youtu.be/YlPTasQsPo8
- https://youtu.be/yq0nbMxITEQ
- https://youtu.be/221Y6XlV1qA

If you're into #music, the #RoyalInstitute is publishing some of their seminal #ChristmasLectures series from #CharlesTaylor, all about music, strings, symphonies, trumpets, synthesizers, and more.

From 1989.

- https://youtu.be/p-960zzAa78
- https://youtu.be/OOK-j_Y3U_A
- https://youtu.be/YlPTasQsPo8
- https://youtu.be/yq0nbMxITEQ
- https://youtu.be/221Y6XlV1qA

If you're into #music, the #RoyalInstitute is publishing some of their seminal #ChristmasLectures series from #CharlesTaylor, all about music, strings, symphonies, trumpets, synthesizers, and more.

From 1989.

- https://youtu.be/p-960zzAa78
- https://youtu.be/OOK-j_Y3U_A
- https://youtu.be/YlPTasQsPo8
- https://youtu.be/yq0nbMxITEQ
- https://youtu.be/221Y6XlV1qA

If you're into #music, the #RoyalInstitute is publishing some of their seminal #ChristmasLectures series from #CharlesTaylor, all about music, strings, symphonies, trumpets, synthesizers, and more.

From 1989.

- https://youtu.be/p-960zzAa78
- https://youtu.be/OOK-j_Y3U_A
- https://youtu.be/YlPTasQsPo8
- https://youtu.be/yq0nbMxITEQ
- https://youtu.be/221Y6XlV1qA

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an #identity, through our acquisition of rich human #languages of #expression.” - #CharlesTaylor, The Malaise of Modernity

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an #identity, through our acquisition of rich human #languages of #expression.” - #CharlesTaylor, The Malaise of Modernity

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an #identity, through our acquisition of rich human #languages of #expression.” - #CharlesTaylor, The Malaise of Modernity

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an #identity, through our acquisition of rich human #languages of #expression.” - #CharlesTaylor, The Malaise of Modernity

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an #identity, through our acquisition of rich human #languages of #expression.” - #CharlesTaylor, The Malaise of Modernity

Happy #CanadaDay! I’m going to spend some of the day reading The Malaise of Modernity by a national treasure, the #philosopher #CharlesTaylor. I’m also going to try to avoid posting about #US #politics …

Happy #CanadaDay! I’m going to spend some of the day reading The Malaise of Modernity by a national treasure, the #philosopher #CharlesTaylor. I’m also going to try to avoid posting about #US #politics …

Happy #CanadaDay! I’m going to spend some of the day reading The Malaise of Modernity by a national treasure, the #philosopher #CharlesTaylor. I’m also going to try to avoid posting about #US #politics …

Happy #CanadaDay! I’m going to spend some of the day reading The Malaise of Modernity by a national treasure, the #philosopher #CharlesTaylor. I’m also going to try to avoid posting about #US #politics …

Lacan on the anxiety of love

From On Anxiety by Renata Salecl, loc 1320:

Love is linked to the fact that in the end we know nothing about the object that attracts us in the Other, and that at the same time the Other knows nothing about this object that is in him more than himself, i.e. what makes someone attracted to him. But today it looks as if we try to alleviate this essential anxiety that comes as part of love. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, so either become more and more enclosed (i.e. are able to maintain mostly only cyber-relationships which allow them to never actually meet the partner) or want a very precise answer from the Other (and are buying tons of self-help books which will supposedly help them to figure out the desire of the Other).

What I find so provocative about the Lacanian approach is how this recognition is tied up in a broader picture of relationality. It is radically different to the rather optimistic account of intersubjectivity found in thinkers like Charles Taylor and Pierpaolo Donati* which deeply shaped my thinking. Our own trajectory is driven by the gnawing incompleteness lurking behind the account we give of who we are and what we want, with our demands always failing to satiate our ceaseless desire. The manner in which we grapple with ourselves, with our place in the world and our experience of it, has always already failed. This leaves us prone to fantasising about the completeness we imagine in the Other, access to the fullness we crave which they might under certain conditions invite us into. Or perhaps the Other has stolen this fullness from us in a dastardly scheme to deprive us of what we are due.

I was struck when writing this post how powerfully Morpheus’s question in the original Matrix film captures the ubiquity of this experience, with the red pill being a symbolic fantasy which offers us the possibility of resolution:

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The reality insists Lacan is that our mind was splintered from the outset, with the alien machinery of language violently inserting itself into our being, in a wound we only become even dimly aware of once our personhood has constitutively formed around it. The problem is that it is not only we who must also grapple with troumatisme (the trauma caused by the hole we find in the Other)… the concrete others we share our lives with are constantly engaged in the seem arduous fumbling towards a sense of wholeness that will forever elude them. They are imputing wholeness to us, or seeing us as a means through which they might get to where they distantly sense they need to be. They are just as incomplete and fragmented, driven mad by the splinter in their mind in a way so familiar as to fade into the horizon of quotidian experience.

The dazzlingly depressing element of Lacan practice, as I understand it, is that there’s no resolution to this dilemma. We can’t escape the trap of desire but we can approach that trap with greater poise. To the extent there seems to be a normative philosophy underpinning the theory and the practice, it involves how we comport ourselves through the process: how lightly or heavily we stumble through it, how orientated we are to the satisfactions or fixated on the outcome. The same is true of love, I think, though I’m still not hugely confident in my interpretation despite two years of trying to teach myself Lacan. There’s no way around, or even through, troumatisme because that implies a resolution. Can we instead inhabit the anxiety Salecl talks about in the opening quote? Furthermore, can we do that together? Can we see the anxiety as anchoring a space of authenticity, as much as Lacanians would cringe at the term, marking a neurotic mirror image to the humanistic vision of encounter found in a thinker like Taylor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pNhrlPU-fA

Romance is dead and done
And it hits between the eyes on this side
The grass is dead and barren
And it hurts between my thighs on this side
See me here, meet me here
I don't care if it's not repeated
I wanna know who you are
For every second we outrun the moon, dread the sun come up
I wanna know who you are
So I don't have to check my stuff's still here when you're gone
I wanna know who you are
I wanna know who you were

My understanding is that Lacan would insist that such a meeting is fundamentally impossible. I wonder however how this might reflect the individualising technology of the clinic, as well as constituting an overcorrection to the psychic naivety of humanist accounts of intersubjectivity. The fact there is always a missed understanding between people does not mean there can be no understanding. There is a deeper being-with-others made possibly in recognition of that gap, rather than seeking to overcome it. The gap is a condition of that depth, an anchor, in which a moment of meeting is marked by anxiety. It’s a practice rather than an outcome, a precarious achievement rather than a project that can be completed. It necessitates living in confrontation with one’s own lack, in the process of encountering the lack in the other. While Lacan says “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you”, I wonder if the mutilation can be suspended (at least some of the time) in that moment of encounter.

This Lacanianism with Taylorian (or Archerian!) characteristics which I’m awkwardly gesturing towards suggests a notion of authenticity which I suspect Donati could, perhaps slightly reluctantly, endorse. Authenticity consisting in navigating lack and anxiety together rather than seeking to foreclose it. The authenticity moment as in jointly holding and inhabiting the ontological gap, however precariously, rather than the imagined moment of having transcended it. There’s a possibility for new meaning and insight to arise in this encounter, the partial integration and symbolisation made possible when the fantasy of symbolically mastering the Real is dispensed with. There’s a register of partial success and partial failure, which is sociologically and psychologically generative, which I think Lacan forecloses too hastily. These partial successes and failures might themselves elicit fantasy responses but these can in turn be held, to varying degrees, in order to be integrated in partially sucessful or failing ways.

*Though Donati certainly confronts what he terms ‘relational evils’, it is still fundamentally optimistic about the relational potential of human beings.

#charlesTaylor #desire #donati #Lacan #love #margaretArcher #relationality #RenataSalecl #romance #sex

Lacan on the anxiety of love

From On Anxiety by Renata Salecl, loc 1320:

Love is linked to the fact that in the end we know nothing about the object that attracts us in the Other, and that at the same time the Other knows nothing about this object that is in him more than himself, i.e. what makes someone attracted to him. But today it looks as if we try to alleviate this essential anxiety that comes as part of love. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, so either become more and more enclosed (i.e. are able to maintain mostly only cyber-relationships which allow them to never actually meet the partner) or want a very precise answer from the Other (and are buying tons of self-help books which will supposedly help them to figure out the desire of the Other).

What I find so provocative about the Lacanian approach is how this recognition is tied up in a broader picture of relationality. It is radically different to the rather optimistic account of intersubjectivity found in thinkers like Charles Taylor and Pierpaolo Donati* which deeply shaped my thinking. Our own trajectory is driven by the gnawing incompleteness lurking behind the account we give of who we are and what we want, with our demands always failing to satiate our ceaseless desire. The manner in which we grapple with ourselves, with our place in the world and our experience of it, has always already failed. This leaves us prone to fantasising about the completeness we imagine in the Other, access to the fullness we crave which they might under certain conditions invite us into. Or perhaps the Other has stolen this fullness from us in a dastardly scheme to deprive us of what we are due.

I was struck when writing this post how powerfully Morpheus’s question in the original Matrix film captures the ubiquity of this experience, with the red pill being a symbolic fantasy which offers us the possibility of resolution:

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The reality insists Lacan is that our mind was splintered from the outset, with the alien machinery of language violently inserting itself into our being, in a wound we only become even dimly aware of once our personhood has constitutively formed around it. The problem is that it is not only we who must also grapple with troumatisme (the trauma caused by the hole we find in the Other)… the concrete others we share our lives with are constantly engaged in the seem arduous fumbling towards a sense of wholeness that will forever elude them. They are imputing wholeness to us, or seeing us as a means through which they might get to where they distantly sense they need to be. They are just as incomplete and fragmented, driven mad by the splinter in their mind in a way so familiar as to fade into the horizon of quotidian experience.

The dazzlingly depressing element of Lacan practice, as I understand it, is that there’s no resolution to this dilemma. We can’t escape the trap of desire but we can approach that trap with greater poise. To the extent there seems to be a normative philosophy underpinning the theory and the practice, it involves how we comport ourselves through the process: how lightly or heavily we stumble through it, how orientated we are to the satisfactions or fixated on the outcome. The same is true of love, I think, though I’m still not hugely confident in my interpretation despite two years of trying to teach myself Lacan. There’s no way around, or even through, troumatisme because that implies a resolution. Can we instead inhabit the anxiety Salecl talks about in the opening quote? Furthermore, can we do that together? Can we see the anxiety as anchoring a space of authenticity, as much as Lacanians would cringe at the term, marking a neurotic mirror image to the humanistic vision of encounter found in a thinker like Taylor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pNhrlPU-fA

Romance is dead and done
And it hits between the eyes on this side
The grass is dead and barren
And it hurts between my thighs on this side
See me here, meet me here
I don't care if it's not repeated
I wanna know who you are
For every second we outrun the moon, dread the sun come up
I wanna know who you are
So I don't have to check my stuff's still here when you're gone
I wanna know who you are
I wanna know who you were

My understanding is that Lacan would insist that such a meeting is fundamentally impossible. I wonder however how this might reflect the individualising technology of the clinic, as well as constituting an overcorrection to the psychic naivety of humanist accounts of intersubjectivity. The fact there is always a missed understanding between people does not mean there can be no understanding. There is a deeper being-with-others made possibly in recognition of that gap, rather than seeking to overcome it. The gap is a condition of that depth, an anchor, in which a moment of meeting is marked by anxiety. It’s a practice rather than an outcome, a precarious achievement rather than a project that can be completed. It necessitates living in confrontation with one’s own lack, in the process of encountering the lack in the other. While Lacan says “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you”, I wonder if the mutilation can be suspended (at least some of the time) in that moment of encounter.

This Lacanianism with Taylorian (or Archerian!) characteristics which I’m awkwardly gesturing towards suggests a notion of authenticity which I suspect Donati could, perhaps slightly reluctantly, endorse. Authenticity consisting in navigating lack and anxiety together rather than seeking to foreclose it. The authenticity moment as in jointly holding and inhabiting the ontological gap, however precariously, rather than the imagined moment of having transcended it. There’s a possibility for new meaning and insight to arise in this encounter, the partial integration and symbolisation made possible when the fantasy of symbolically mastering the Real is dispensed with. There’s a register of partial success and partial failure, which is sociologically and psychologically generative, which I think Lacan forecloses too hastily. These partial successes and failures might themselves elicit fantasy responses but these can in turn be held, to varying degrees, in order to be integrated in partially sucessful or failing ways.

*Though Donati certainly confronts what he terms ‘relational evils’, it is still fundamentally optimistic about the relational potential of human beings.

#charlesTaylor #desire #donati #Lacan #love #margaretArcher #relationality #RenataSalecl #romance #sex

Lacan on the anxiety of love

From On Anxiety by Renata Salecl, loc 1320:

Love is linked to the fact that in the end we know nothing about the object that attracts us in the Other, and that at the same time the Other knows nothing about this object that is in him more than himself, i.e. what makes someone attracted to him. But today it looks as if we try to alleviate this essential anxiety that comes as part of love. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, so either become more and more enclosed (i.e. are able to maintain mostly only cyber-relationships which allow them to never actually meet the partner) or want a very precise answer from the Other (and are buying tons of self-help books which will supposedly help them to figure out the desire of the Other).

What I find so provocative about the Lacanian approach is how this recognition is tied up in a broader picture of relationality. It is radically different to the rather optimistic account of intersubjectivity found in thinkers like Charles Taylor and Pierpaolo Donati* which deeply shaped my thinking. Our own trajectory is driven by the gnawing incompleteness lurking behind the account we give of who we are and what we want, with our demands always failing to satiate our ceaseless desire. The manner in which we grapple with ourselves, with our place in the world and our experience of it, has always already failed. This leaves us prone to fantasising about the completeness we imagine in the Other, access to the fullness we crave which they might under certain conditions invite us into. Or perhaps the Other has stolen this fullness from us in a dastardly scheme to deprive us of what we are due.

I was struck when writing this post how powerfully Morpheus’s question in the original Matrix film captures the ubiquity of this experience, with the red pill being a symbolic fantasy which offers us the possibility of resolution:

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The reality insists Lacan is that our mind was splintered from the outset, with the alien machinery of language violently inserting itself into our being, in a wound we only become even dimly aware of once our personhood has constitutively formed around it. The problem is that it is not only we who must also grapple with troumatisme (the trauma caused by the hole we find in the Other)… the concrete others we share our lives with are constantly engaged in the seem arduous fumbling towards a sense of wholeness that will forever elude them. They are imputing wholeness to us, or seeing us as a means through which they might get to where they distantly sense they need to be. They are just as incomplete and fragmented, driven mad by the splinter in their mind in a way so familiar as to fade into the horizon of quotidian experience.

The dazzlingly depressing element of Lacan practice, as I understand it, is that there’s no resolution to this dilemma. We can’t escape the trap of desire but we can approach that trap with greater poise. To the extent there seems to be a normative philosophy underpinning the theory and the practice, it involves how we comport ourselves through the process: how lightly or heavily we stumble through it, how orientated we are to the satisfactions or fixated on the outcome. The same is true of love, I think, though I’m still not hugely confident in my interpretation despite two years of trying to teach myself Lacan. There’s no way around, or even through, troumatisme because that implies a resolution. Can we instead inhabit the anxiety Salecl talks about in the opening quote? Furthermore, can we do that together? Can we see the anxiety as anchoring a space of authenticity, as much as Lacanians would cringe at the term, marking a neurotic mirror image to the humanistic vision of encounter found in a thinker like Taylor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pNhrlPU-fA

Romance is dead and done
And it hits between the eyes on this side
The grass is dead and barren
And it hurts between my thighs on this side
See me here, meet me here
I don't care if it's not repeated
I wanna know who you are
For every second we outrun the moon, dread the sun come up
I wanna know who you are
So I don't have to check my stuff's still here when you're gone
I wanna know who you are
I wanna know who you were

My understanding is that Lacan would insist that such a meeting is fundamentally impossible. I wonder however how this might reflect the individualising technology of the clinic, as well as constituting an overcorrection to the psychic naivety of humanist accounts of intersubjectivity. The fact there is always a missed understanding between people does not mean there can be no understanding. There is a deeper being-with-others made possibly in recognition of that gap, rather than seeking to overcome it. The gap is a condition of that depth, an anchor, in which a moment of meeting is marked by anxiety. It’s a practice rather than an outcome, a precarious achievement rather than a project that can be completed. It necessitates living in confrontation with one’s own lack, in the process of encountering the lack in the other. While Lacan says “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you”, I wonder if the mutilation can be suspended (at least some of the time) in that moment of encounter.

This Lacanianism with Taylorian (or Archerian!) characteristics which I’m awkwardly gesturing towards suggests a notion of authenticity which I suspect Donati could, perhaps slightly reluctantly, endorse. Authenticity consisting in navigating lack and anxiety together rather than seeking to foreclose it. The authenticity moment as in jointly holding and inhabiting the ontological gap, however precariously, rather than the imagined moment of having transcended it. There’s a possibility for new meaning and insight to arise in this encounter, the partial integration and symbolisation made possible when the fantasy of symbolically mastering the Real is dispensed with. There’s a register of partial success and partial failure, which is sociologically and psychologically generative, which I think Lacan forecloses too hastily. These partial successes and failures might themselves elicit fantasy responses but these can in turn be held, to varying degrees, in order to be integrated in partially sucessful or failing ways.

*Though Donati certainly confronts what he terms ‘relational evils’, it is still fundamentally optimistic about the relational potential of human beings.

#charlesTaylor #desire #donati #Lacan #love #margaretArcher #relationality #RenataSalecl #romance #sex