The Game (5)
May 30, 2013, 11:11 am
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
economy,
Encounters,
Love,
Mood,
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Christopher_Bollas,
David_Shields,
Elspeth_Probyn,
Hannah_Arendt,
Juliana_Spahr,
Katie_Stewart,
Leo_Bersani,
Lorelei_SontagTry to forget.
Not unintentional forgetting, but of a thing that insists on being in the flow of things.
It could be the forgetting of a dream that you can’t stop because you’re in it, or of a sense that the world is converging there on that other guy’s table. All of history did not do its work to produce you. You can imagine that all history sought to produce you, but who are you? A bundle of action and feral muttering, a sweet wrapped and inhaled by strangers, booty for money, a bird puffing out its chest, a bit scared, an accident.
***
(more…)
The Book of Love is sad and boring, no one can lift the damn thing . . .
June 3, 2012, 1:25 pm
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
emotion,
Love,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
optimism,
pedagogy,
poetry,
psychoanalysis,
sexuality,
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Adam_Phillips,
Ariana_Reines,
Attachment,
Bollas,
Derrida,
Love,
Nancy,
psychoanalysis,
shattered_love,
teaching,
writingDelaminated from week 1 lecture notes, Love Theory (Winter 2012)…
I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can hold. By “sometimes” I mean all the times. The image is the regressed form, not the narrative noise that comes later to try to apply adhesive to the fantasy and its representation in objects, so that I know I am an event that lives in the world. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green. Most storage lockers are cold enough to slow down that decay, as we know from narrative and domesticity. Aggressions and tenderness pop around in me without much of a thing on which to project blame steadily or balance an idealization. So it’s just me and phantasmagoric noise that only sometimes feels like a cover song for a structuring shape or an improv around genre. In love I’m left holding the chaos bag and there is no solution that would make these things into sweet puzzle pieces. See Phillips’ reading of attachment as the drive to return to the taste of another person: the “sweetness” love stands for binds itself to an infinity of objects and plots and strategies for investing the scene with a worthiness matching our intensity of a need for its nourishment. This is why, perhaps too, Laplanche uses the word “metabolize.”
This is a philosophical “I”. I don’t feel like using “we,” because I fall into the banality pit when I do. (See Derrida on film on love. He should have trusted his first instinct to say nothing, since what he says is nothing, but he was being a good boy, and trying to maintain his availability for the interviewer’s idealization, the death in life of the call and response: he was trying to be loveable. Maybe the phrases one offers as gifts are the best love because they metarecognize the demand for love in any call: but, in itself, the professor’s discourse is not an opening to the other’s inconvenience, and it is not love if it is not opened to that.) (more…)
The Whole Ethic of Sleepless Evidence
September 24, 2011, 9:44 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
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potentiality,
queerness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
C.D. Wright,
Louie,
Louie C.K.,
ordinariness,
poetry,
sexuality,
violence#2 in the series.
I spent most of the summer reading the kind of fierce poetry that moves fearlessly into barely inhabitable breathing space three beats beyond the object that was supposed to anchor attention. A poetics of associology whose noise world sits me down in disbelief at the rare freedom of other people’s minds. Not because attention gets things right (any more than attachment guarantees love), and not because there’s always in operation productive energy that can never be tamed but because—in these poems, and for me–revolt requires curiosity, a tipping over on a verge.
I can’t remember how I heard of C. D. Wright; this book written from within incarcerated space seems to have migrated onto my desk from a lateral impulse I must have had once. People who liked this also liked. It’s been in a pile of revealed intention that I’ve been reading up and down.
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit is one version of the commons: C.D. Wright includes it as a kind of acid irony. After all, the next line, si bleu, si calme, isn’t available as realism to the incarcerated–or the manumitted for now who swerve around aggressively while looking down at their feet, or anyone with a stomach overfull of the indigestible. I read this book and my brain clicked around over it all summer: glory hole, dream hole, peephole. (more…)
