#mariruti — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mariruti, aggregated by home.social.
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I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me
I was struck by an eery sense of familiarity when reading Deborah Levy’s reminiscence of an afternoon in a greasy spoon cafe, as a teenager who had recently moved to London from South Africa. From Things I Don’t Want To Know pg 124-125
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.
It’s a quintessential experience of what Margaret Archer calls the rejector in The Reflexive Imperative. The nascent reflexivity of the adolescent who does not know what they want but does know that they don’t want this. They cannot commit to what they are presented with in their given context, so they feel a need to look beyond it. What Levy conveys is the sense of urgency that can accompany this, the claustrophobia of imminence, when traumatic experience accompanies this rejection. It’s not just that something better might be out there, it’s that what is out there is in some fundamental sense intolerable.
There’s a very different version of the experience conveyed in Ian McEwan’s Lessons where the narrator was haunted by a childhood experience of social order being interrupted. He subsequently carried it round with him as an experience that precluded commitment to the life he was leading:
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for.
He did not know what he was waiting for. In one of my favourite songs from my 20s Brian Fallon sings that “We were always waiting for something to happen“. Is this what Ian McEwan’s (clearly somewhat autobiographical) narrator was waiting for? Is this what the teenage Levy was on some level waiting for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJ0WV-GyYQ
It's funny how the night moves
Humming a song from 1962
We were always waiting . . . always waiting
We were always waiting for something to happenIn the latter case I suspect not because Levy’s ‘living autobiography’* is about the agency discovered through writing. As she writes on the final page, “I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world”. “If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it” (pg 160-161). As I read this, the doing came to be the writing, which is something I identify with deeply. Rather than waiting for something to happen, one describes the happenings such that the waiting becomes an object of curiosity rather than an internal state subordinated to an (expected) external reality. It means as one might say in a different register, enjoying your symptom.
In her frustratingly impenetrable New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva remarks that adolescent writing “constitute[s] a desire to name, to bring to light a wavering meaning that lies upon the boundaries of words and drives” (loc 2,577). It can be a discovery which gives “adolescents the impression that they are employing—after a long wait and for the first time in their lives—a living discourse that is not empty, not an ‘as-if.'” (loc 2,320). In other words writing, particularly adolescent writing, facilitates an encounter with the Real. The words I use begin to overflow with something deeper. The manner in which I string them together carries an energy which now seems glaringly absent in my previous experience. I am in touch with something through the words I use, even if I do not know what it is I am touching.
This brings us to the terrain of the transformational object. I realised recently that I’d been slightly misreading this concept from Christopher Bollas. His point is not just that it is a psychic object which generates the feeling of change within us. It is rather that it promises change without agency because it carries the primordial experience of the caregiver who could cater to our internal states without any requirement for action on our part. We search for the other who can change us, carrying the memory of this earliest object relation in which changes in self states depended on the agency of another. The misreading I think was aspirational, in the sense that I would like to read this as an orthodox transformational object, the sense in which it is carried around as latent pre-oedipal baggage in the psyche. In contrast to the unorthodox transformational object which promises change through agency.
This is what writing does I think. When it flows, the experience of pure generativity, the connections which make themselves available pre-consciously, carries the promise of transformation. I can be other than I am. Things can be other than they are. The reason for this is that my words can come into being, as if animated by their own independent spirit. They are mine, yet not mine. They express my thoughts, they extend beyond them. There is something I think profoundly psychologically liberating in writing in which drive energies find a calming but containing expression. I agree with Mari Ruti there clearly is jouissance here. From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
I worry that if we remain content with labelling this jouissance, we miss something deeper. I’m not sure I’ve managed to label it here because my experience of real writing is that it always leaves me with more questions than answers. But there’s something in the psychodynamics of writing which stops us waiting for something to happen. There’s something in it which connects us with our own capacity to make things happen. This is how we avoid a transformational object as something which acts on us and, in a sense, create our own transformational object.
The key I think lies in the receptiveness to the connections which are emerging. This is still a form of waiting, just in a very different key. These enable something to emerge within us which then extends beyond is before, in turn, acting back upon us. We create something proto-other from our own psyche, in relation to which we are then moved. It a transformational object but on a very different trajectory. It is a way in which we can participate in our transformation rather than waiting for it. It is also not the only way.
*This phrase frustrates me and I struggle to articulate why.
#archer #DeborahLevy #margaretArcher #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #reflexivity #temporising #transformationalObject #waiting #writing -
I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me
I was struck by an eery sense of familiarity when reading Deborah Levy’s reminiscence of an afternoon in a greasy spoon cafe, as a teenager who had recently moved to London from South Africa. From Things I Don’t Want To Know pg 124-125
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.
It’s a quintessential experience of what Margaret Archer calls the rejector in The Reflexive Imperative. The nascent reflexivity of the adolescent who does not know what they want but does know that they don’t want this. They cannot commit to what they are presented with in their given context, so they feel a need to look beyond it. What Levy conveys is the sense of urgency that can accompany this, the claustrophobia of imminence, when traumatic experience accompanies this rejection. It’s not just that something better might be out there, it’s that what is out there is in some fundamental sense intolerable.
There’s a very different version of the experience conveyed in Ian McEwan’s Lessons where the narrator was haunted by a childhood experience of social order being interrupted. He subsequently carried it round with him as an experience that precluded commitment to the life he was leading:
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for.
He did not know what he was waiting for. In one of my favourite songs from my 20s Brian Fallon sings that “We were always waiting for something to happen“. Is this what Ian McEwan’s (clearly somewhat autobiographical) narrator was waiting for? Is this what the teenage Levy was on some level waiting for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJ0WV-GyYQ
It's funny how the night moves
Humming a song from 1962
We were always waiting . . . always waiting
We were always waiting for something to happenIn the latter case I suspect not because Levy’s ‘living autobiography’* is about the agency discovered through writing. As she writes on the final page, “I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world”. “If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it” (pg 160-161). As I read this, the doing came to be the writing, which is something I identify with deeply. Rather than waiting for something to happen, one describes the happenings such that the waiting becomes an object of curiosity rather than an internal state subordinated to an (expected) external reality. It means as one might say in a different register, enjoying your symptom.
In her frustratingly impenetrable New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva remarks that adolescent writing “constitute[s] a desire to name, to bring to light a wavering meaning that lies upon the boundaries of words and drives” (loc 2,577). It can be a discovery which gives “adolescents the impression that they are employing—after a long wait and for the first time in their lives—a living discourse that is not empty, not an ‘as-if.'” (loc 2,320). In other words writing, particularly adolescent writing, facilitates an encounter with the Real. The words I use begin to overflow with something deeper. The manner in which I string them together carries an energy which now seems glaringly absent in my previous experience. I am in touch with something through the words I use, even if I do not know what it is I am touching.
This brings us to the terrain of the transformational object. I realised recently that I’d been slightly misreading this concept from Christopher Bollas. His point is not just that it is a psychic object which generates the feeling of change within us. It is rather that it promises change without agency because it carries the primordial experience of the caregiver who could cater to our internal states without any requirement for action on our part. We search for the other who can change us, carrying the memory of this earliest object relation in which changes in self states depended on the agency of another. The misreading I think was aspirational, in the sense that I would like to read this as an orthodox transformational object, the sense in which it is carried around as latent pre-oedipal baggage in the psyche. In contrast to the unorthodox transformational object which promises change through agency.
This is what writing does I think. When it flows, the experience of pure generativity, the connections which make themselves available pre-consciously, carries the promise of transformation. I can be other than I am. Things can be other than they are. The reason for this is that my words can come into being, as if animated by their own independent spirit. They are mine, yet not mine. They express my thoughts, they extend beyond them. There is something I think profoundly psychologically liberating in writing in which drive energies find a calming but containing expression. I agree with Mari Ruti there clearly is jouissance here. From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
I worry that if we remain content with labelling this jouissance, we miss something deeper. I’m not sure I’ve managed to label it here because my experience of real writing is that it always leaves me with more questions than answers. But there’s something in the psychodynamics of writing which stops us waiting for something to happen. There’s something in it which connects us with our own capacity to make things happen. This is how we avoid a transformational object as something which acts on us and, in a sense, create our own transformational object.
The key I think lies in the receptiveness to the connections which are emerging. This is still a form of waiting, just in a very different key. These enable something to emerge within us which then extends beyond us before, in turn, acting back upon us. We create something proto-other from our own psyche, in relation to which we are then moved. It a transformational object but on a very different trajectory. It is a way in which we can participate in our transformation rather than waiting for it. It is also not the only way.
*This phrase frustrates me and I struggle to articulate why.
#archer #DeborahLevy #margaretArcher #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #reflexivity #temporising #transformationalObject #waiting #writing -
I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me
I was struck by an eery sense of familiarity when reading Deborah Levy’s reminiscence of an afternoon in a greasy spoon cafe, as a teenager who had recently moved to London from South Africa. From Things I Don’t Want To Know pg 124-125
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.
It’s a quintessential experience of what Margaret Archer calls the rejector in The Reflexive Imperative. The nascent reflexivity of the adolescent who does not know what they want but does know that they don’t want this. They cannot commit to what they are presented with in their given context, so they feel a need to look beyond it. What Levy conveys is the sense of urgency that can accompany this, the claustrophobia of imminence, when traumatic experience accompanies this rejection. It’s not just that something better might be out there, it’s that what is out there is in some fundamental sense intolerable.
There’s a very different version of the experience conveyed in Ian McEwan’s Lessons where the narrator was haunted by a childhood experience of social order being interrupted. He subsequently carried it round with him as an experience that precluded commitment to the life he was leading:
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for.
He did not know what he was waiting for. In one of my favourite songs from my 20s Brian Fallon sings that “We were always waiting for something to happen“. Is this what Ian McEwan’s (clearly somewhat autobiographical) narrator was waiting for? Is this what the teenage Levy was on some level waiting for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJ0WV-GyYQ
It's funny how the night moves
Humming a song from 1962
We were always waiting . . . always waiting
We were always waiting for something to happenIn the latter case I suspect not because Levy’s ‘living autobiography’* is about the agency discovered through writing. As she writes on the final page, “I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world”. “If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it” (pg 160-161). As I read this, the doing came to be the writing, which is something I identify with deeply. Rather than waiting for something to happen, one describes the happenings such that the waiting becomes an object of curiosity rather than an internal state subordinated to an (expected) external reality. It means as one might say in a different register, enjoying your symptom.
In her frustratingly impenetrable New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva remarks that adolescent writing “constitute[s] a desire to name, to bring to light a wavering meaning that lies upon the boundaries of words and drives” (loc 2,577). It can be a discovery which gives “adolescents the impression that they are employing—after a long wait and for the first time in their lives—a living discourse that is not empty, not an ‘as-if.'” (loc 2,320). In other words writing, particularly adolescent writing, facilitates an encounter with the Real. The words I use begin to overflow with something deeper. The manner in which I string them together carries an energy which now seems glaringly absent in my previous experience. I am in touch with something through the words I use, even if I do not know what it is I am touching.
This brings us to the terrain of the transformational object. I realised recently that I’d been slightly misreading this concept from Christopher Bollas. His point is not just that it is a psychic object which generates the feeling of change within us. It is rather that it promises change without agency because it carries the primordial experience of the caregiver who could cater to our internal states without any requirement for action on our part. We search for the other who can change us, carrying the memory of this earliest object relation in which changes in self states depended on the agency of another. The misreading I think was aspirational, in the sense that I would like to read this as an orthodox transformational object, the sense in which it is carried around as latent pre-oedipal baggage in the psyche. In contrast to the unorthodox transformational object which promises change through agency.
This is what writing does I think. When it flows, the experience of pure generativity, the connections which make themselves available pre-consciously, carries the promise of transformation. I can be other than I am. Things can be other than they are. The reason for this is that my words can come into being, as if animated by their own independent spirit. They are mine, yet not mine. They express my thoughts, they extend beyond them. There is something I think profoundly psychologically liberating in writing in which drive energies find a calming but containing expression. I agree with Mari Ruti there clearly is jouissance here. From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
I worry that if we remain content with labelling this jouissance, we miss something deeper. I’m not sure I’ve managed to label it here because my experience of real writing is that it always leaves me with more questions than answers. But there’s something in the psychodynamics of writing which stops us waiting for something to happen. There’s something in it which connects us with our own capacity to make things happen. This is how we avoid a transformational object as something which acts on us and, in a sense, create our own transformational object.
The key I think lies in the receptiveness to the connections which are emerging. This is still a form of waiting, just in a very different key. These enable something to emerge within us which then extends beyond us before, in turn, acting back upon us. We create something proto-other from our own psyche, in relation to which we are then moved. It a transformational object but on a very different trajectory. It is a way in which we can participate in our transformation rather than waiting for it. It is also not the only way.
*This phrase frustrates me and I struggle to articulate why.
#archer #DeborahLevy #margaretArcher #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #reflexivity #temporising #transformationalObject #waiting #writing -
I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me
I was struck by an eery sense of familiarity when reading Deborah Levy’s reminiscence of an afternoon in a greasy spoon cafe, as a teenager who had recently moved to London from South Africa. From Things I Don’t Want To Know pg 124-125
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.
It’s a quintessential experience of what Margaret Archer calls the rejector in The Reflexive Imperative. The nascent reflexivity of the adolescent who does not know what they want but does know that they don’t want this. They cannot commit to what they are presented with in their given context, so they feel a need to look beyond it. What Levy conveys is the sense of urgency that can accompany this, the claustrophobia of imminence, when traumatic experience accompanies this rejection. It’s not just that something better might be out there, it’s that what is out there is in some fundamental sense intolerable.
There’s a very different version of the experience conveyed in Ian McEwan’s Lessons where the narrator was haunted by a childhood experience of social order being interrupted. He subsequently carried it round with him as an experience that precluded commitment to the life he was leading:
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for.
He did not know what he was waiting for. In one of my favourite songs from my 20s Brian Fallon sings that “We were always waiting for something to happen“. Is this what Ian McEwan’s (clearly somewhat autobiographical) narrator was waiting for? Is this what the teenage Levy was on some level waiting for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJ0WV-GyYQ
It's funny how the night moves
Humming a song from 1962
We were always waiting . . . always waiting
We were always waiting for something to happenIn the latter case I suspect not because Levy’s ‘living autobiography’* is about the agency discovered through writing. As she writes on the final page, “I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world”. “If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it” (pg 160-161). As I read this, the doing came to be the writing, which is something I identify with deeply. Rather than waiting for something to happen, one describes the happenings such that the waiting becomes an object of curiosity rather than an internal state subordinated to an (expected) external reality. It means as one might say in a different register, enjoying your symptom.
In her frustratingly impenetrable New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva remarks that adolescent writing “constitute[s] a desire to name, to bring to light a wavering meaning that lies upon the boundaries of words and drives” (loc 2,577). It can be a discovery which gives “adolescents the impression that they are employing—after a long wait and for the first time in their lives—a living discourse that is not empty, not an ‘as-if.'” (loc 2,320). In other words writing, particularly adolescent writing, facilitates an encounter with the Real. The words I use begin to overflow with something deeper. The manner in which I string them together carries an energy which now seems glaringly absent in my previous experience. I am in touch with something through the words I use, even if I do not know what it is I am touching.
This brings us to the terrain of the transformational object. I realised recently that I’d been slightly misreading this concept from Christopher Bollas. His point is not just that it is a psychic object which generates the feeling of change within us. It is rather that it promises change without agency because it carries the primordial experience of the caregiver who could cater to our internal states without any requirement for action on our part. We search for the other who can change us, carrying the memory of this earliest object relation in which changes in self states depended on the agency of another. The misreading I think was aspirational, in the sense that I would like to read this as an orthodox transformational object, the sense in which it is carried around as latent pre-oedipal baggage in the psyche. In contrast to the unorthodox transformational object which promises change through agency.
This is what writing does I think. When it flows, the experience of pure generativity, the connections which make themselves available pre-consciously, carries the promise of transformation. I can be other than I am. Things can be other than they are. The reason for this is that my words can come into being, as if animated by their own independent spirit. They are mine, yet not mine. They express my thoughts, they extend beyond them. There is something I think profoundly psychologically liberating in writing in which drive energies find a calming but containing expression. I agree with Mari Ruti there clearly is jouissance here. From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
I worry that if we remain content with labelling this jouissance, we miss something deeper. I’m not sure I’ve managed to label it here because my experience of real writing is that it always leaves me with more questions than answers. But there’s something in the psychodynamics of writing which stops us waiting for something to happen. There’s something in it which connects us with our own capacity to make things happen. This is how we avoid a transformational object as something which acts on us and, in a sense, create our own transformational object.
The key I think lies in the receptiveness to the connections which are emerging. This is still a form of waiting, just in a very different key. These enable something to emerge within us which then extends beyond us before, in turn, acting back upon us. We create something proto-other from our own psyche, in relation to which we are then moved. It a transformational object but on a very different trajectory. It is a way in which we can participate in our transformation rather than waiting for it. It is also not the only way.
*This phrase frustrates me and I struggle to articulate why.
#archer #DeborahLevy #margaretArcher #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #reflexivity #temporising #transformationalObject #waiting #writing -
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
#actingOut #BruceFink #DonnelStern #Lacan #MariRuti #workingThrough -
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
#actingOut #BruceFink #DonnelStern #Lacan #MariRuti #workingThrough -
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
#actingOut #BruceFink #DonnelStern #Lacan #MariRuti #workingThrough -
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 liesA 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.
#Jouissance #Lacan #MariRuti #radiohead #WallaceStevens -
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 liesA 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.
#Jouissance #Lacan #MariRuti #radiohead #WallaceStevens -
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 liesA 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.
#Jouissance #Lacan #MariRuti #radiohead #WallaceStevens -
Freud on the psychic rewards of sublimation
Quoted in Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 1375-1381:
#enjoyment #Freud #MariRuti #pleasure #satisfaction #sublimationThe task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. . . . One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or uncovering truths, has a special quality
-
Freud on the psychic rewards of sublimation
Quoted in Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 1375-1381:
#enjoyment #Freud #MariRuti #pleasure #satisfaction #sublimationThe task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. . . . One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or uncovering truths, has a special quality
-
Freud on the psychic rewards of sublimation
Quoted in Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 1375-1381:
#enjoyment #Freud #MariRuti #pleasure #satisfaction #sublimationThe task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. . . . One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or uncovering truths, has a special quality
-
The violence of writing
From Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan by Mari Ruti and Amy Allen, loc 3213:
Julia Kristeva said something related during one of her lectures that I’ve never forgotten because it helped me to break my writing block. She claimed that the most difficult thing about writing is the violence that you have to inflict in order to carve a path through your knowledge: you have more material in your mind than you can possibly put on the written page, so that you need to make the cut—this has obvious Lacanian resonances—that gives you the path you need; being able to sever the necessary bits of material from all the material that you have is essential for creativity. Many people find this task difficult because it’s uncomfortably violent. The implication is that your inability to be aggressive—your fear of your own aggression—can paralyze you. From this perspective, perfectionism, thinking that you need to fit everything you know into your book, is the Achilles’ heel of writers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lCeHQ0T138
Fwiw the phenomenology of writing is completely different for me. The path emerges in an eerily reliable way if I give myself time and space. The violence comes at the editing stage. There’s a point I have to reach of feeling almost… hostile towards my own meandering, baggy, needlessly elaborate prose at which point I can begin to kill my darlings. Until then I find editing almost impossible. I suspect one of the reasons I find it hard is that I fail to make the cut which Kristeva speaks of here. But one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that there’s little check on it. There’s a smoothness to the experience which is pretty much endlessly rewarding for me.
#editing #JuliaKristeva #MariRuti #phenomenology #writing -
The violence of writing
From Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan by Mari Ruti and Amy Allen, loc 3213:
Julia Kristeva said something related during one of her lectures that I’ve never forgotten because it helped me to break my writing block. She claimed that the most difficult thing about writing is the violence that you have to inflict in order to carve a path through your knowledge: you have more material in your mind than you can possibly put on the written page, so that you need to make the cut—this has obvious Lacanian resonances—that gives you the path you need; being able to sever the necessary bits of material from all the material that you have is essential for creativity. Many people find this task difficult because it’s uncomfortably violent. The implication is that your inability to be aggressive—your fear of your own aggression—can paralyze you. From this perspective, perfectionism, thinking that you need to fit everything you know into your book, is the Achilles’ heel of writers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lCeHQ0T138
Fwiw the phenomenology of writing is completely different for me. The path emerges in an eerily reliable way if I give myself time and space. The violence comes at the editing stage. There’s a point I have to reach of feeling almost… hostile towards my own meandering, baggy, needlessly elaborate prose at which point I can begin to kill my darlings. Until then I find editing almost impossible. I suspect one of the reasons I find it hard is that I fail to make the cut which Kristeva speaks of here. But one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that there’s little check on it. There’s a smoothness to the experience which is pretty much endlessly rewarding for me.
#editing #JuliaKristeva #MariRuti #phenomenology #writing -
The violence of writing
From Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan by Mari Ruti and Amy Allen, loc 3213:
Julia Kristeva said something related during one of her lectures that I’ve never forgotten because it helped me to break my writing block. She claimed that the most difficult thing about writing is the violence that you have to inflict in order to carve a path through your knowledge: you have more material in your mind than you can possibly put on the written page, so that you need to make the cut—this has obvious Lacanian resonances—that gives you the path you need; being able to sever the necessary bits of material from all the material that you have is essential for creativity. Many people find this task difficult because it’s uncomfortably violent. The implication is that your inability to be aggressive—your fear of your own aggression—can paralyze you. From this perspective, perfectionism, thinking that you need to fit everything you know into your book, is the Achilles’ heel of writers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lCeHQ0T138
Fwiw the phenomenology of writing is completely different for me. The path emerges in an eerily reliable way if I give myself time and space. The violence comes at the editing stage. There’s a point I have to reach of feeling almost… hostile towards my own meandering, baggy, needlessly elaborate prose at which point I can begin to kill my darlings. Until then I find editing almost impossible. I suspect one of the reasons I find it hard is that I fail to make the cut which Kristeva speaks of here. But one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that there’s little check on it. There’s a smoothness to the experience which is pretty much endlessly rewarding for me.
#editing #JuliaKristeva #MariRuti #phenomenology #writing -
LLMs and crystallisation as a form of object relating
I thought this was interesting from Mari Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 109:
Stendhal labels this process “crystallization,” describing it as follows: Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen. At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. Crystallization endows the beloved with every possible perfection. Through it, the object of our desire, no matter how ordinary, is rendered extraordinary. As Stendhal specifies, crystallization implies “a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart.”
I don’t think this idealisation is narrowly romantic: it’s a particular mode of object relating in which a subject determinedly renders an object as sublime, seeing in every empirical facet of it evidence of the sublimity they have already ascribed to the object in their psyche. Essentially I think it’s a totalising way of reading back your own initial emotional response to the object into the nature of that object itself, in the process sharpening and entrenching the contours of that response.
It’s exactly the form of object-relating which I worry that LLMs make much easier. Object relating like this thrives on articulation. It’s through putting reactions to the object into words that those reactions begin to crystallise the object, inviting stronger and deeper expressions of the initial reaction. It’s an auto-catalytic process: the more you do it, the more you’re prone to doing it. The problem isn’t just model sycophancy (they’re much less likely to check this behaviour than a human interlocutor) but rather the epistemic constraints of being entirely text based and reliant on what the user shares with them.
It also makes me wonder if modes of object relating would be a useful analytical frame to bring towards the suffusion of LLMs into the lifeworld.
#crystallization #idealisation #LLMs #MariRuti #obesssive #Stendhal -
LLMs and crystallisation as a form of object relating
I thought this was interesting from Mari Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 109:
Stendhal labels this process “crystallization,” describing it as follows: Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen. At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. Crystallization endows the beloved with every possible perfection. Through it, the object of our desire, no matter how ordinary, is rendered extraordinary. As Stendhal specifies, crystallization implies “a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart.”
I don’t think this idealisation is narrowly romantic: it’s a particular mode of object relating in which a subject determinedly renders an object as sublime, seeing in every empirical facet of it evidence of the sublimity they have already ascribed to the object in their psyche. Essentially I think it’s a totalising way of reading back your own initial emotional response to the object into the nature of that object itself, in the process sharpening and entrenching the contours of that response.
It’s exactly the form of object-relating which I worry that LLMs make much easier. Object relating like this thrives on articulation. It’s through putting reactions to the object into words that those reactions begin to crystallise the object, inviting stronger and deeper expressions of the initial reaction. It’s an auto-catalytic process: the more you do it, the more you’re prone to doing it. The problem isn’t just model sycophancy (they’re much less likely to check this behaviour than a human interlocutor) but rather the epistemic constraints of being entirely text based and reliant on what the user shares with them.
It also makes me wonder if modes of object relating would be a useful analytical frame to bring towards the suffusion of LLMs into the lifeworld.
#crystallization #idealisation #LLMs #MariRuti #obesssive #Stendhal -
LLMs and crystallisation as a form of object relating
I thought this was interesting from Mari Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 109:
Stendhal labels this process “crystallization,” describing it as follows: Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen. At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. Crystallization endows the beloved with every possible perfection. Through it, the object of our desire, no matter how ordinary, is rendered extraordinary. As Stendhal specifies, crystallization implies “a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart.”
I don’t think this idealisation is narrowly romantic: it’s a particular mode of object relating in which a subject determinedly renders an object as sublime, seeing in every empirical facet of it evidence of the sublimity they have already ascribed to the object in their psyche. Essentially I think it’s a totalising way of reading back your own initial emotional response to the object into the nature of that object itself, in the process sharpening and entrenching the contours of that response.
It’s exactly the form of object-relating which I worry that LLMs make much easier. Object relating like this thrives on articulation. It’s through putting reactions to the object into words that those reactions begin to crystallise the object, inviting stronger and deeper expressions of the initial reaction. It’s an auto-catalytic process: the more you do it, the more you’re prone to doing it. The problem isn’t just model sycophancy (they’re much less likely to check this behaviour than a human interlocutor) but rather the epistemic constraints of being entirely text based and reliant on what the user shares with them.
It also makes me wonder if modes of object relating would be a useful analytical frame to bring towards the suffusion of LLMs into the lifeworld.
#crystallization #idealisation #LLMs #MariRuti #obesssive #Stendhal -
Winnicott’s distinction between the true self and the false self
This is the best summary I’ve seen of this distinction from Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 64:
#MariRuti #Ruti #WinnicottWinnicott explains that our inner agility is threatened whenever we feel assaulted by the outside world—whenever we feel traumatized either by our intimate relationships or by a wounding social context. Predictably enough, our usual response to such situations is to set up psychological barriers to protect ourselves against being violated. Such defensive barriers over time congeal into false self-presentations that make us feel reassuringly self-contained even as they gradually deprive us of our existential elasticity; we feel impermeable, and sometimes even invincible, without necessarily being aware of the ways in which we have relinquished our claim on a full bodied life. As our true self slips into hiding behind the false one, we become more and more unyielding, more and more uncompromising, often alienating the people we most care about. Yet, ironically enough, the ultimate goal of the false self is to safeguard the continued viability of the true self in the face of external challenges. In this paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of emotional complexity, sustains our latent capacity for such complexity by ensuring that our true self does not get exploited to the point of total suffocation.
-
Winnicott’s distinction between the true self and the false self
This is the best summary I’ve seen of this distinction from Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 64:
#MariRuti #Ruti #WinnicottWinnicott explains that our inner agility is threatened whenever we feel assaulted by the outside world—whenever we feel traumatized either by our intimate relationships or by a wounding social context. Predictably enough, our usual response to such situations is to set up psychological barriers to protect ourselves against being violated. Such defensive barriers over time congeal into false self-presentations that make us feel reassuringly self-contained even as they gradually deprive us of our existential elasticity; we feel impermeable, and sometimes even invincible, without necessarily being aware of the ways in which we have relinquished our claim on a full bodied life. As our true self slips into hiding behind the false one, we become more and more unyielding, more and more uncompromising, often alienating the people we most care about. Yet, ironically enough, the ultimate goal of the false self is to safeguard the continued viability of the true self in the face of external challenges. In this paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of emotional complexity, sustains our latent capacity for such complexity by ensuring that our true self does not get exploited to the point of total suffocation.
-
Winnicott’s distinction between the true self and the false self
This is the best summary I’ve seen of this distinction from Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 64:
#MariRuti #Ruti #WinnicottWinnicott explains that our inner agility is threatened whenever we feel assaulted by the outside world—whenever we feel traumatized either by our intimate relationships or by a wounding social context. Predictably enough, our usual response to such situations is to set up psychological barriers to protect ourselves against being violated. Such defensive barriers over time congeal into false self-presentations that make us feel reassuringly self-contained even as they gradually deprive us of our existential elasticity; we feel impermeable, and sometimes even invincible, without necessarily being aware of the ways in which we have relinquished our claim on a full bodied life. As our true self slips into hiding behind the false one, we become more and more unyielding, more and more uncompromising, often alienating the people we most care about. Yet, ironically enough, the ultimate goal of the false self is to safeguard the continued viability of the true self in the face of external challenges. In this paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of emotional complexity, sustains our latent capacity for such complexity by ensuring that our true self does not get exploited to the point of total suffocation.
-
Writing revives the self yet demands the self’s surrender
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3786:
Writing comes as a liberation that is also a compulsion; it revives the self, yet it also demands the self’s absolute surrender; it invades even as it gives life. Writing, in Cixous’s rendering, requires the self to yield to a force outside of itself that speaks its meaning through the trembling body of the one who is being urged to swell to a size of a prophet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI&t=915s
#compulsion #drives #MariRuti -
Writing revives the self yet demands the self’s surrender
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3786:
Writing comes as a liberation that is also a compulsion; it revives the self, yet it also demands the self’s absolute surrender; it invades even as it gives life. Writing, in Cixous’s rendering, requires the self to yield to a force outside of itself that speaks its meaning through the trembling body of the one who is being urged to swell to a size of a prophet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI&t=915s
#compulsion #drives #MariRuti -
Writing revives the self yet demands the self’s surrender
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3786:
Writing comes as a liberation that is also a compulsion; it revives the self, yet it also demands the self’s absolute surrender; it invades even as it gives life. Writing, in Cixous’s rendering, requires the self to yield to a force outside of itself that speaks its meaning through the trembling body of the one who is being urged to swell to a size of a prophet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI&t=915s
#compulsion #drives #MariRuti -
Melancholia and creativity
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3851:
…creativity as a tangible outpouring of psychic energy can take place only at the moment when melancholia is transcended. This instance of transcendence does not have to be—and rarely is—permanent, yet it is absolutely necessary for the subject’s ability to mobilize its inner resources in such a way as to be able to translate melancholia into meaning; the melancholy subject may reside at the threshold of innovation, but it is the very essence of melancholia to block and inhibit the subject’s access to its innovative capacities as long as it is incapable of finding its way out of the labyrinth of its melancholy investments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4orCW0rKuAo
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something for you
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing for you
God, where have you been?From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3424:
We will discover that insofar as melancholia activates the subject’s fantasy of being able to reunite with lost objects, it quite effectively bars the subject’s access to the signifier. In this sense, the melancholy subject is by definition a subject of silence. In Lacanian terms, melancholia represents a victory of the subject’s fantasmatic fixations over its sublimatory capacity to redirect desire along more rewarding lines. It represents a triumph of the imaginary over the symbolic, of fantasy over the signifier, of sadness over narrativization.
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3454:
Melancholia therefore provides the subject an indirect means of sheltering objects that it considers so precious that their loss seems inconceivable. Such objects, which often take on a larger-than-life meaning and magnificence, demand the individual’s loyalty so intensely that disavowal becomes impossible; if the subject finds it difficult to relinquish its ties to a lost object, it is because psychic energy has been invested in this object so forcefully—with such ferocious fixity—that giving it up seems to threaten the subject’s very sense of self.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jMEvF6hcrA
When I took the blame
#creativity #loss #MariRuti #melancholia
We layed in ruins trying to quote your phrase
We're yelling, "someone's got the answers
But I'd rather think there's nothing to be found" -
Melancholia and creativity
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3851:
…creativity as a tangible outpouring of psychic energy can take place only at the moment when melancholia is transcended. This instance of transcendence does not have to be—and rarely is—permanent, yet it is absolutely necessary for the subject’s ability to mobilize its inner resources in such a way as to be able to translate melancholia into meaning; the melancholy subject may reside at the threshold of innovation, but it is the very essence of melancholia to block and inhibit the subject’s access to its innovative capacities as long as it is incapable of finding its way out of the labyrinth of its melancholy investments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4orCW0rKuAo
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something for you
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing for you
God, where have you been?From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3424:
We will discover that insofar as melancholia activates the subject’s fantasy of being able to reunite with lost objects, it quite effectively bars the subject’s access to the signifier. In this sense, the melancholy subject is by definition a subject of silence. In Lacanian terms, melancholia represents a victory of the subject’s fantasmatic fixations over its sublimatory capacity to redirect desire along more rewarding lines. It represents a triumph of the imaginary over the symbolic, of fantasy over the signifier, of sadness over narrativization.
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3454:
Melancholia therefore provides the subject an indirect means of sheltering objects that it considers so precious that their loss seems inconceivable. Such objects, which often take on a larger-than-life meaning and magnificence, demand the individual’s loyalty so intensely that disavowal becomes impossible; if the subject finds it difficult to relinquish its ties to a lost object, it is because psychic energy has been invested in this object so forcefully—with such ferocious fixity—that giving it up seems to threaten the subject’s very sense of self.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jMEvF6hcrA
When I took the blame
#creativity #loss #MariRuti #melancholia
We layed in ruins trying to quote your phrase
We're yelling, "someone's got the answers
But I'd rather think there's nothing to be found" -
Melancholia and creativity
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3851:
…creativity as a tangible outpouring of psychic energy can take place only at the moment when melancholia is transcended. This instance of transcendence does not have to be—and rarely is—permanent, yet it is absolutely necessary for the subject’s ability to mobilize its inner resources in such a way as to be able to translate melancholia into meaning; the melancholy subject may reside at the threshold of innovation, but it is the very essence of melancholia to block and inhibit the subject’s access to its innovative capacities as long as it is incapable of finding its way out of the labyrinth of its melancholy investments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4orCW0rKuAo
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something
I've got to take what I'm making and turn it into something for you
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing
I've got to break what I'm making and turn it into nothing for you
God, where have you been?From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3424:
We will discover that insofar as melancholia activates the subject’s fantasy of being able to reunite with lost objects, it quite effectively bars the subject’s access to the signifier. In this sense, the melancholy subject is by definition a subject of silence. In Lacanian terms, melancholia represents a victory of the subject’s fantasmatic fixations over its sublimatory capacity to redirect desire along more rewarding lines. It represents a triumph of the imaginary over the symbolic, of fantasy over the signifier, of sadness over narrativization.
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3454:
Melancholia therefore provides the subject an indirect means of sheltering objects that it considers so precious that their loss seems inconceivable. Such objects, which often take on a larger-than-life meaning and magnificence, demand the individual’s loyalty so intensely that disavowal becomes impossible; if the subject finds it difficult to relinquish its ties to a lost object, it is because psychic energy has been invested in this object so forcefully—with such ferocious fixity—that giving it up seems to threaten the subject’s very sense of self.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jMEvF6hcrA
When I took the blame
#creativity #loss #MariRuti #melancholia
We layed in ruins trying to quote your phrase
We're yelling, "someone's got the answers
But I'd rather think there's nothing to be found" -
Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg
And I'm never real,
it's just a sketch of me
And everything I've made
is trite and cheap
And a waste
Of paint, of tape, of timeI encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary
Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.
Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.
Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.
This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:
“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”
This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.
What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:
“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”
Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I
Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.
Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.
I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:
“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”
It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:
“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”
In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:
“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”
What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.
#existentialism #flourishing #livingWell #MariRuti #mentalHealth #Philosophy #psychoanalysis #psychology #writing -
Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg
And I'm never real,
it's just a sketch of me
And everything I've made
is trite and cheap
And a waste
Of paint, of tape, of timeI encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary
Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.
Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.
Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.
This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:
“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”
This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.
What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:
“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”
Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I
Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.
Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.
I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:
“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”
It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:
“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”
In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:
“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”
What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.
#existentialism #flourishing #livingWell #MariRuti #mentalHealth #Philosophy #psychoanalysis #psychology #writing -
Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg
And I'm never real,
it's just a sketch of me
And everything I've made
is trite and cheap
And a waste
Of paint, of tape, of timeI encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary
Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.
Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.
Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.
This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:
“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”
This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.
What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:
“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”
Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I
Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.
Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.
I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:
“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”
It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:
“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”
In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:
“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”
What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.
#existentialism #flourishing #livingWell #MariRuti #mentalHealth #Philosophy #psychoanalysis #psychology #writing -
Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg
And I'm never real,
it's just a sketch of me
And everything I've made
is trite and cheap
And a waste
Of paint, of tape, of timeI encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary
Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.
Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.
Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.
This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:
“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”
This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.
What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:
“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”
Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I
Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.
Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.
I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:
“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”
It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:
“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”
In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:
“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”
What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.
#existentialism #flourishing #livingWell #MariRuti #mentalHealth #Philosophy #psychoanalysis #psychology #writing -
Nietzsche and Nick Cave
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 4470:
At the same time, I feel that Nietzsche explores quite compellingly the enigmatic relationship that at times exists between destruction and resurrection, for he recognizes that for new forms of life to emerge, something within the subject’s inner life must be shaken to the core so as to shatter the well-established structures that hold it immersed in, and therefore confined to, outmoded psychic conditions and conventions.
From Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage.
But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.Cave, Nick; O’Hagan, Seán. Faith, Hope and Carnage (p. 107). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfKYImFP_Pw&list=OLAK5uy_mKzBStg8ZwVFvvXwvegykcI66kS17he9U&index=2
And everyone has a heart, and it's calling for something
#MariRuti #NickCave #Nietzsche #renewal
We're all so sick and tired and seeing things as they are
The horses are just horses and their maines ain't full of fire
And the fields are just fields and there ain't no law
And everything is hidden, everyone is cruel
There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
It's just a wish that time can't dissolve at all -
Nietzsche and Nick Cave
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 4470:
At the same time, I feel that Nietzsche explores quite compellingly the enigmatic relationship that at times exists between destruction and resurrection, for he recognizes that for new forms of life to emerge, something within the subject’s inner life must be shaken to the core so as to shatter the well-established structures that hold it immersed in, and therefore confined to, outmoded psychic conditions and conventions.
From Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage.
But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.Cave, Nick; O’Hagan, Seán. Faith, Hope and Carnage (p. 107). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfKYImFP_Pw&list=OLAK5uy_mKzBStg8ZwVFvvXwvegykcI66kS17he9U&index=2
And everyone has a heart, and it's calling for something
#MariRuti #NickCave #Nietzsche #renewal
We're all so sick and tired and seeing things as they are
The horses are just horses and their maines ain't full of fire
And the fields are just fields and there ain't no law
And everything is hidden, everyone is cruel
There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
It's just a wish that time can't dissolve at all -
Nietzsche and Nick Cave
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 4470:
At the same time, I feel that Nietzsche explores quite compellingly the enigmatic relationship that at times exists between destruction and resurrection, for he recognizes that for new forms of life to emerge, something within the subject’s inner life must be shaken to the core so as to shatter the well-established structures that hold it immersed in, and therefore confined to, outmoded psychic conditions and conventions.
From Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage.
But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.Cave, Nick; O’Hagan, Seán. Faith, Hope and Carnage (p. 107). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfKYImFP_Pw&list=OLAK5uy_mKzBStg8ZwVFvvXwvegykcI66kS17he9U&index=2
And everyone has a heart, and it's calling for something
#MariRuti #NickCave #Nietzsche #renewal
We're all so sick and tired and seeing things as they are
The horses are just horses and their maines ain't full of fire
And the fields are just fields and there ain't no law
And everything is hidden, everyone is cruel
There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
It's just a wish that time can't dissolve at all -
“I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word”
I wish I had started reading her work much earlier. This ending to her first book Reinventing the Soul ❤️ From loc 4722:
Much of this book was written under the mundane conditions of scholarly exertion. But there are parts—perhaps the best, perhaps the worst—that were written in the rare and enchanting state of inspiration. If this makes me terribly antiquated, I do not mind a bit. Critics may take from me whatever else they wish, but I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word. Amor fati.
Amor Fati ✊
#amorFati #enjoyment #fate #MariRuti #writing -
“I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word”
I wish I had started reading her work much earlier. This ending to her first book Reinventing the Soul ❤️ From loc 4722:
Much of this book was written under the mundane conditions of scholarly exertion. But there are parts—perhaps the best, perhaps the worst—that were written in the rare and enchanting state of inspiration. If this makes me terribly antiquated, I do not mind a bit. Critics may take from me whatever else they wish, but I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word. Amor fati.
Amor Fati ✊
#amorFati #enjoyment #fate #MariRuti #writing -
“I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word”
I wish I had started reading her work much earlier. This ending to her first book Reinventing the Soul ❤️ From loc 4722:
Much of this book was written under the mundane conditions of scholarly exertion. But there are parts—perhaps the best, perhaps the worst—that were written in the rare and enchanting state of inspiration. If this makes me terribly antiquated, I do not mind a bit. Critics may take from me whatever else they wish, but I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word. Amor fati.
Amor Fati ✊
#amorFati #enjoyment #fate #MariRuti #writing -
Glow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9_bnyad6IE&list=RDu9_bnyad6IE&start_radio=1
#MariRuti #nature #runningThe fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets a—that have become detached from it. Such little morsels of jouissance may find their way into entirely ordinary objects, lighting them up with a special glow.
Mari Ruti, The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism loc 307 -
Glow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9_bnyad6IE&list=RDu9_bnyad6IE&start_radio=1
#MariRuti #nature #runningThe fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets a—that have become detached from it. Such little morsels of jouissance may find their way into entirely ordinary objects, lighting them up with a special glow.
Mari Ruti, The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism loc 307 -
Glow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9_bnyad6IE&list=RDu9_bnyad6IE&start_radio=1
#MariRuti #nature #runningThe fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets a—that have become detached from it. Such little morsels of jouissance may find their way into entirely ordinary objects, lighting them up with a special glow.
Mari Ruti, The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism loc 307 -
Glow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9_bnyad6IE&list=RDu9_bnyad6IE&start_radio=1
#MariRuti #nature #runningThe fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets a—that have become detached from it. Such little morsels of jouissance may find their way into entirely ordinary objects, lighting them up with a special glow.
Mari Ruti, The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism loc 307 -
Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis
I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:
This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.
One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.
#concern #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #whyThingsMatterToPeople -
Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis
I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:
This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.
One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.
#concern #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #whyThingsMatterToPeople -
Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis
I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:
This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.
One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.
#concern #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #whyThingsMatterToPeople -
Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis
I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:
This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.
One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.
#concern #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #whyThingsMatterToPeople -
Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom
There’s a slightly bleak and apologetic note to Mari Ruti’s writing here on pg 156 of The Call of Character. There’s a much nicer way of framing this: through therapeutic work we can begin to craft our own symptom rather than grapple with what spontaneously emerges. Once you understand the work something destructive is doing for you, it becomes possible to find other ways of scratching that psychic itch:
In this context, it is useful to recall that a symptom is at bottom a method of binding energy that has no other place to go. This implies that to the extent that we are able to devise an effective way of discharging our excess energy, we might be able to dodge the most voracious of symptoms. Many high-achieving individuals, for instance, are successful in part because they have found a suitable outlet for the surplus of energy that courses through their bodies and minds. Consciously or unconsciously, such individuals understand that they have a choice between pathology and achievement, that the less they are able to pour their tension into their accomplishments, the more likely it is to erupt in painful symptoms, obsessions, neuroses, and addictions of various kinds. This may seem like a sad state of affairs, and it may also be an addiction of sorts, but it is arguably one of the least destructive means of processing anxiety.
Once you cut through the mystification, there’s a deeply affirming message buried at the heart of Lacanian theory and practice: frantically looking for something to complete you is getting in the way of enjoying the many things you do have in your existence. There is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in existence, if only you can prise yourself out of the struggle to find some final resolution to it all. Ultimately I think it’s quite similar to what Bollas says in quite a straightforward mode: “I am telling the patients to stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being, and get to what one can know by simply relaxing and talking”.
#MariRuti #neuroticism #symptom -
Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom
There’s a slightly bleak and apologetic note to Mari Ruti’s writing here on pg 156 of The Call of Character. There’s a much nicer way of framing this: through therapeutic work we can begin to craft our own symptom rather than grapple with what spontaneously emerges. Once you understand the work something destructive is doing for you, it becomes possible to find other ways of scratching that psychic itch:
In this context, it is useful to recall that a symptom is at bottom a method of binding energy that has no other place to go. This implies that to the extent that we are able to devise an effective way of discharging our excess energy, we might be able to dodge the most voracious of symptoms. Many high-achieving individuals, for instance, are successful in part because they have found a suitable outlet for the surplus of energy that courses through their bodies and minds. Consciously or unconsciously, such individuals understand that they have a choice between pathology and achievement, that the less they are able to pour their tension into their accomplishments, the more likely it is to erupt in painful symptoms, obsessions, neuroses, and addictions of various kinds. This may seem like a sad state of affairs, and it may also be an addiction of sorts, but it is arguably one of the least destructive means of processing anxiety.
Once you cut through the mystification, there’s a deeply affirming message buried at the heart of Lacanian theory and practice: frantically looking for something to complete you is getting in the way of enjoying the many things you do have in your existence. There is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in existence, if only you can prise yourself out of the struggle to find some final resolution to it all. Ultimately I think it’s quite similar to what Bollas says in quite a straightforward mode: “I am telling the patients to stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being, and get to what one can know by simply relaxing and talking”.
#MariRuti #neuroticism #symptom -
Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom
There’s a slightly bleak and apologetic note to Mari Ruti’s writing here on pg 156 of The Call of Character. There’s a much nicer way of framing this: through therapeutic work we can begin to craft our own symptom rather than grapple with what spontaneously emerges. Once you understand the work something destructive is doing for you, it becomes possible to find other ways of scratching that psychic itch:
In this context, it is useful to recall that a symptom is at bottom a method of binding energy that has no other place to go. This implies that to the extent that we are able to devise an effective way of discharging our excess energy, we might be able to dodge the most voracious of symptoms. Many high-achieving individuals, for instance, are successful in part because they have found a suitable outlet for the surplus of energy that courses through their bodies and minds. Consciously or unconsciously, such individuals understand that they have a choice between pathology and achievement, that the less they are able to pour their tension into their accomplishments, the more likely it is to erupt in painful symptoms, obsessions, neuroses, and addictions of various kinds. This may seem like a sad state of affairs, and it may also be an addiction of sorts, but it is arguably one of the least destructive means of processing anxiety.
Once you cut through the mystification, there’s a deeply affirming message buried at the heart of Lacanian theory and practice: frantically looking for something to complete you is getting in the way of enjoying the many things you do have in your existence. There is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in existence, if only you can prise yourself out of the struggle to find some final resolution to it all. Ultimately I think it’s quite similar to what Bollas says in quite a straightforward mode: “I am telling the patients to stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being, and get to what one can know by simply relaxing and talking”.
#MariRuti #neuroticism #symptom -
The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living
I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost object which dimly echoes in the mundane objects which we desire.
In The Call of Character (2013) this is conceived of in terms of our sensitivity to the echo of the Thing. There are little slivers of the sublime we find in certain objects, which can give us direction in how we choose to live. What matters is cultivating a sensitivity to that echo, to better discern when we hear the call and when we do not. It’s only through doing so that we can be faithful to our own desire.
In The Creative Self (2025)* this is conceived of in terms of placing the glow into these objects. Lacan’s phrase about raising mundane object to the dignity of the Thing is taken quite literally at points, as if there is a choice about when and how we do this. It’s still acknowledged that we find objects with this sliver already embedded but Ruti says that “many forms of creativity are a matter of generating this glow” (loc 324). Particularly towards the end of her section, Ruti argues that we need to be discerning about which objects we raise in this way. We should be highly selective: “Not all objects should qualify; the objects in question should have something genuinely special about them” (loc 2105). I can see three different relations being posited here:
- Discovering the echo of the Thing in a mundane object
- Creating an object which is an echo of the Thing
- Raising an object to the dignity of the Thing (regardless of where it has the echo)
It’s 3 which troubles me. If it’s a question of which objects should qualify it implies that our raising an object to the dignity of the Thing is a voluntaristic action. We choose what to elevate in a concrete way, with the corollary that sometimes our choices are mistaken. I don’t understand what this choice entails though: the examples Ruti cites draws heavily on Marion Milner’s creative practice which I read as much more to do with 1 i.e. cultivating qualities of attention which enable us to discover the echo/glow in the mundane objects of the world. What 3 shares with 2 is a subtle voluntarism which I think sits uneasily with the psychoanalytical logic of the argument. I also don’t think it fits Ruti’s own account of her personal experience of creativity which has much more in keeping with the receptive unconscious rather than a purposeful practice of sublimation.
I see why Ruti wants to do this, I think. It provides a critical vantage point in which something like existential authenticity can be a bulwark against the siren song of consumer capitalism. The problem is that I don’t think it works. I think the psychoanalytical logic is betrayed by the political uses to which it is put. This is not to say that I don’t think psychoanalysis has political implications. Clearly it does. But I don’t think it can be used to provide the foundation for a critical theory. Or at least not as neatly as Ruti is trying to do.
As you can tell from the last few days of blogging, this point is bugging me. I want to emphasise that I love Ruti’s work. This has been a revelation to me. But the reason why I never found critical theory deploying psychoanalysis intellectually satisfying in the past remains the case here, albeit in a more subdued way.
*This is written with Gail Newman but they seem to have written their sections individually.
#creativity #GailNewman #Lacan #MariRuti #MarionMilner #theThing -
The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living
I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost object which dimly echoes in the mundane objects which we desire.
In The Call of Character (2013) this is conceived of in terms of our sensitivity to the echo of the Thing. There are little slivers of the sublime we find in certain objects, which can give us direction in how we choose to live. What matters is cultivating a sensitivity to that echo, to better discern when we hear the call and when we do not. It’s only through doing so that we can be faithful to our own desire.
In The Creative Self (2025)* this is conceived of in terms of placing the glow into these objects. Lacan’s phrase about raising mundane object to the dignity of the Thing is taken quite literally at points, as if there is a choice about when and how we do this. It’s still acknowledged that we find objects with this sliver already embedded but Ruti says that “many forms of creativity are a matter of generating this glow” (loc 324). Particularly towards the end of her section, Ruti argues that we need to be discerning about which objects we raise in this way. We should be highly selective: “Not all objects should qualify; the objects in question should have something genuinely special about them” (loc 2105). I can see three different relations being posited here:
- Discovering the echo of the Thing in a mundane object
- Creating an object which is an echo of the Thing
- Raising an object to the dignity of the Thing (regardless of where it has the echo)
It’s 3 which troubles me. If it’s a question of which objects should qualify it implies that our raising an object to the dignity of the Thing is a voluntaristic action. We choose what to elevate in a concrete way, with the corollary that sometimes our choices are mistaken. I don’t understand what this choice entails though: the examples Ruti cites draws heavily on Marion Milner’s creative practice which I read as much more to do with 1 i.e. cultivating qualities of attention which enable us to discover the echo/glow in the mundane objects of the world. What 3 shares with 2 is a subtle voluntarism which I think sits uneasily with the psychoanalytical logic of the argument. I also don’t think it fits Ruti’s own account of her personal experience of creativity which has much more in keeping with the receptive unconscious rather than a purposeful practice of sublimation.
I see why Ruti wants to do this, I think. It provides a critical vantage point in which something like existential authenticity can be a bulwark against the siren song of consumer capitalism. The problem is that I don’t think it works. I think the psychoanalytical logic is betrayed by the political uses to which it is put. This is not to say that I don’t think psychoanalysis has political implications. Clearly it does. But I don’t think it can be used to provide the foundation for a critical theory. Or at least not as neatly as Ruti is trying to do.
As you can tell from the last few days of blogging, this point is bugging me. I want to emphasise that I love Ruti’s work. This has been a revelation to me. But the reason why I never found critical theory deploying psychoanalysis intellectually satisfying in the past remains the case here, albeit in a more subdued way.
*This is written with Gail Newman but they seem to have written their sections individually.
#creativity #GailNewman #Lacan #MariRuti #MarionMilner #theThing -
The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living
I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost object which dimly echoes in the mundane objects which we desire.
In The Call of Character (2013) this is conceived of in terms of our sensitivity to the echo of the Thing. There are little slivers of the sublime we find in certain objects, which can give us direction in how we choose to live. What matters is cultivating a sensitivity to that echo, to better discern when we hear the call and when we do not. It’s only through doing so that we can be faithful to our own desire.
In The Creative Self (2025)* this is conceived of in terms of placing the glow into these objects. Lacan’s phrase about raising mundane object to the dignity of the Thing is taken quite literally at points, as if there is a choice about when and how we do this. It’s still acknowledged that we find objects with this sliver already embedded but Ruti says that “many forms of creativity are a matter of generating this glow” (loc 324). Particularly towards the end of her section, Ruti argues that we need to be discerning about which objects we raise in this way. We should be highly selective: “Not all objects should qualify; the objects in question should have something genuinely special about them” (loc 2105). I can see three different relations being posited here:
- Discovering the echo of the Thing in a mundane object
- Creating an object which is an echo of the Thing
- Raising an object to the dignity of the Thing (regardless of where it has the echo)
It’s 3 which troubles me. If it’s a question of which objects should qualify it implies that our raising an object to the dignity of the Thing is a voluntaristic action. We choose what to elevate in a concrete way, with the corollary that sometimes our choices are mistaken. I don’t understand what this choice entails though: the examples Ruti cites draws heavily on Marion Milner’s creative practice which I read as much more to do with 1 i.e. cultivating qualities of attention which enable us to discover the echo/glow in the mundane objects of the world. What 3 shares with 2 is a subtle voluntarism which I think sits uneasily with the psychoanalytical logic of the argument. I also don’t think it fits Ruti’s own account of her personal experience of creativity which has much more in keeping with the receptive unconscious rather than a purposeful practice of sublimation.
I see why Ruti wants to do this, I think. It provides a critical vantage point in which something like existential authenticity can be a bulwark against the siren song of consumer capitalism. The problem is that I don’t think it works. I think the psychoanalytical logic is betrayed by the political uses to which it is put. This is not to say that I don’t think psychoanalysis has political implications. Clearly it does. But I don’t think it can be used to provide the foundation for a critical theory. Or at least not as neatly as Ruti is trying to do.
As you can tell from the last few days of blogging, this point is bugging me. I want to emphasise that I love Ruti’s work. This has been a revelation to me. But the reason why I never found critical theory deploying psychoanalysis intellectually satisfying in the past remains the case here, albeit in a more subdued way.
*This is written with Gail Newman but they seem to have written their sections individually.
#creativity #GailNewman #Lacan #MariRuti #MarionMilner #theThing -
The jouissance of writing
From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjzJKCZWYc
Nothing is more entertaining
Than fuckin’ with words and their arrangementI really identify with what Ruti is describing here, even if in my case it’s unambiguously pleasurable. There is nonetheless an excess to the pleasure which means it needs to be described as jouissance. It feels to me like there’s a continuous stream of reactions and associations forming just beneath the surface of my awareness which I tune into when I’m writing. The writing process is little more than just deliberately tuning in so that stream starts flowing out of me and onto the page, until either it feels exhausted or I do at which point I stop.
It’s a process which I’ve learned to steer by being vaguely purposeful with what I read, who I talk to, what I think about. I suspect if I stopped reading, stopped having interesting conversations, the stream wouldn’t exactly dry up but it would lose force and momentum in a way that would make writing far more difficult. At present it’s just a case of finding time to tune into that inner process, which at the moment is proving extremely difficulty. But it’s still relatively easy to write every day in at least one small burst.
The problem I experience is editing. Firstly, it’s something I struggle with cognitively. I know how to write over my own words in a way that gradually refines them. I know how to reach a point where I’m able and willing to hack away at the manuscript. There’s a certain pleasure in killing your darlings once you reach a vivid sense of the finished work underlying them. But I can only restructure in an intuitive way. I find it hard to cognitively map a text which is why I increasingly rely on LLMs to help me plan this process.
Perhaps more importantly I get bored at this stage. It’s not that I don’t care about the finished work but the jouissance described above has largely gone. Ruti has a lovely image about jouissance and words on loc 1225:
Sometimes I even picture tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification
When I’m editing I can still stumble across these little barnacles of jouissance attached to my words. But they’ve washed up on the beach and the jouissance has now died. I can see they were there, but the energy is gone. It means I find editing a slightly depressing process as well as a boring one. It’s the mirror image of the liveness and lightness which characterises writing for me. A sort of turgid death march because I know I have to engage in before anyone will be willing or interesting in the outgrowths of this strangely energetic and ultimately slightly solipsistic process of how I write.
#creativity #editing #enjoyment #Jouissance #MariRuti #pleasure #writing -
The jouissance of writing
From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjzJKCZWYc
Nothing is more entertaining
Than fuckin’ with words and their arrangementI really identify with what Ruti is describing here, even if in my case it’s unambiguously pleasurable. There is nonetheless an excess to the pleasure which means it needs to be described as jouissance. It feels to me like there’s a continuous stream of reactions and associations forming just beneath the surface of my awareness which I tune into when I’m writing. The writing process is little more than just deliberately tuning in so that stream starts flowing out of me and onto the page, until either it feels exhausted or I do at which point I stop.
It’s a process which I’ve learned to steer by being vaguely purposeful with what I read, who I talk to, what I think about. I suspect if I stopped reading, stopped having interesting conversations, the stream wouldn’t exactly dry up but it would lose force and momentum in a way that would make writing far more difficult. At present it’s just a case of finding time to tune into that inner process, which at the moment is proving extremely difficulty. But it’s still relatively easy to write every day in at least one small burst.
The problem I experience is editing. Firstly, it’s something I struggle with cognitively. I know how to write over my own words in a way that gradually refines them. I know how to reach a point where I’m able and willing to hack away at the manuscript. There’s a certain pleasure in killing your darlings once you reach a vivid sense of the finished work underlying them. But I can only restructure in an intuitive way. I find it hard to cognitively map a text which is why I increasingly rely on LLMs to help me plan this process.
Perhaps more importantly I get bored at this stage. It’s not that I don’t care about the finished work but the jouissance described above has largely gone. Ruti has a lovely image about jouissance and words on loc 1225:
Sometimes I even picture tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification
When I’m editing I can still stumble across these little barnacles of jouissance attached to my words. But they’ve washed up on the beach and the jouissance has now died. I can see they were there, but the energy is gone. It means I find editing a slightly depressing process as well as a boring one. It’s the mirror image of the liveness and lightness which characterises writing for me. A sort of turgid death march because I know I have to engage in before anyone will be willing or interesting in the outgrowths of this strangely energetic and ultimately slightly solipsistic process of how I write.
#creativity #editing #enjoyment #Jouissance #MariRuti #pleasure #writing -
The jouissance of writing
From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjzJKCZWYc
Nothing is more entertaining
Than fuckin’ with words and their arrangementI really identify with what Ruti is describing here, even if in my case it’s unambiguously pleasurable. There is nonetheless an excess to the pleasure which means it needs to be described as jouissance. It feels to me like there’s a continuous stream of reactions and associations forming just beneath the surface of my awareness which I tune into when I’m writing. The writing process is little more than just deliberately tuning in so that stream starts flowing out of me and onto the page, until either it feels exhausted or I do at which point I stop.
It’s a process which I’ve learned to steer by being vaguely purposeful with what I read, who I talk to, what I think about. I suspect if I stopped reading, stopped having interesting conversations, the stream wouldn’t exactly dry up but it would lose force and momentum in a way that would make writing far more difficult. At present it’s just a case of finding time to tune into that inner process, which at the moment is proving extremely difficulty. But it’s still relatively easy to write every day in at least one small burst.
The problem I experience is editing. Firstly, it’s something I struggle with cognitively. I know how to write over my own words in a way that gradually refines them. I know how to reach a point where I’m able and willing to hack away at the manuscript. There’s a certain pleasure in killing your darlings once you reach a vivid sense of the finished work underlying them. But I can only restructure in an intuitive way. I find it hard to cognitively map a text which is why I increasingly rely on LLMs to help me plan this process.
Perhaps more importantly I get bored at this stage. It’s not that I don’t care about the finished work but the jouissance described above has largely gone. Ruti has a lovely image about jouissance and words on loc 1225:
Sometimes I even picture tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification
When I’m editing I can still stumble across these little barnacles of jouissance attached to my words. But they’ve washed up on the beach and the jouissance has now died. I can see they were there, but the energy is gone. It means I find editing a slightly depressing process as well as a boring one. It’s the mirror image of the liveness and lightness which characterises writing for me. A sort of turgid death march because I know I have to engage in before anyone will be willing or interesting in the outgrowths of this strangely energetic and ultimately slightly solipsistic process of how I write.
#creativity #editing #enjoyment #Jouissance #MariRuti #pleasure #writing -
Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self
From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150:
In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can also be hard to give up a past that has been particularly rewarding; it can be hard to surrender what has brought a great deal of satisfaction. Yet if we are to give fresh editions of ourselves a chance, we must find a way of doing so. Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self. This amounts to a lifetime of mourning. There will always be regrets and misgivings. We tend to get nostalgic about parts of our past that made us happy. And we tend to grieve the loss of certain opportunities: we lament having made this choice rather than that, of having taken this turn rather than that. But most of all, we mourn those aspects of ourselves that we are forced to renounce because they have become redundant. Sometimes our mourning is so intense that we cannot bring it to a timely conclusion but instead form melancholy attachments to dimensions of ourselves that are largely obsolete.
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
[....]
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
- The Layers, by Stanley Kunitzhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UHEIqbbr1o
#ageing #MariRuti #personalMorphogenesis #StanleyKunitz
