#mariruti — Public Fediverse posts

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Why we need to read more #women #scholars : Here is the late #MariRuti positioning herself against Žižek, Edelman, Foucault, Agamben who argue for subjective destitution = dead souls. Ruti acknowledges this approach, but reinterprets #Lacan constructively: our singularity can be social, too.

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

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

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

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

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

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

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

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

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

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,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

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,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

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,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.

A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the other’s being

From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192:

Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the others’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYDeZpIZvk

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end and you begin

And I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end and you begin
I am up in the clouds
I am up in the clouds

And I can't, and I can't come down
I can watch and not take part
Where I end and where you start
Where you, you left me alone
You left me alone

X will mark the place
Like the parting of the ways
Like a house falling in the sea
In the sea

I was suddenly struck by how the ‘X’ here reminds me of The Motive for Metaphor by Wallace Stevens:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

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,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.⁠

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X that marks the place where I end and where you start. I don’t think Thom Yorke’s lyric is a deliberate reference but I do think these lines can be read together as the sharp flash, the rupture in what we imagine, constituted by the Lacanian Real. The X marks the terrifying point where symbolisation breaks down, when something darker and older bursts through to the surface. Note the next verse in Radiohead’s song after X marking the place:

I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive
I will eat you alive

And there'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies
There'll be no more lies

A removal of the distance, a suspension of the hiatus, an obliteration of the X. There will no longer be a point which marks our edges. There will be fusion and with it there will be no more lies. It’s a song about exactly the “devouring jouissance” which Ruti is describing but in this case it describes the story of this jouissance from the inside. This is the terrain of Lacanian ethics and it maps out aspects of our existence together which too easily get lost in other approaches.