In this sense, we may say that Hitchcock's Rope is an inherently Hegelian film....he gets back from the other his own message in its inverted, true form, i.e., when the true dimension of his own "letter" (teaching) reaches its proper addressee, namely himself - he is shaken and shrinks back from the consequence of his words, unprepared to recognize in them his own truth. Lacan defines "hero" as the subject who (unlike Caddell and like Oedipus, for example) fully assumes the consequences of his act, that is to say, who does not step aside when the arrow that he shot makes its full circle and flies back at him - unlike the rest of us who endeavor to realize our desire without paying the price for it... (pp. 13-14)
So I only read a few pages at a time, and only when I'm in the mood for some serious entertainment, then I have to take a break and return to the ordinary, concrete reality of a weekend at home, because my critical, discursive mind is worn out. So I look up from my book and the full moon is rising in the northeastern sky, right between the fence and the tree and the garage. The cat and the dog are both napping, and the fire is going strong. The women of the house are at a cookie exchange with other women of other houses. It's a perfect night to walk the dog, cold and bright and quiet in half-empty, school-out-on-break Methodistville.
The shift of perspective at work here can be exemplified by means of the dialectic of law and violence: first, law appears as opposed to particular acts of violence that subvert it, the subject is torn between "pathological" impulses to transgress law and between the ethical injunction to obey it; then, the ground is suddenly swept from under his feet when he experiences how the reign of law itself is founded upon violence, i.e., how the imposition of the reign of law consists in the universalization of a violence which thereby becomes "legal." ...As soon as some political force threatens too much the circulation of capital - even if it is, for example, a benign ecological protest against woodcutting - it is instantly labeled "terrorist," "irrational," etc. Perhaps, our very survival depends on our capacity to perform the above-described reversal and to locate the true source of madness in the allegedly neutral measure of "normalcy" which enables us to perceive all opposition to it as "irrational." ...on Hegel's dictum that the true source of evil is the very neutral gaze which perceives Evil all around. (pp. 82-83)
Back in autobiographical mode, I sat at the dining room table and tried to address and stamp the remainder of the holiday letters to send to family and friends, as we have every year since - I can't remember when that ritual started - probably when the kids were little and we felt the need to chronicle each year's passage. I cranked out the first twenty brief personal notes with just the mixture of levity and gravity appropriate to the occasion and the recipient, I hope, and if not, they'll know that I've finally lost it after all, if they hadn't already drawn that conclusion. The second twenty didn't flow as easily, having run out of different ways to say the same thing without quoting Mel Torme, "although it's been said many times many ways..." It helped that the same generic letter is printed on three different colors of paper, a bold visual innovation over years past.
...discourse itself is in its fundamental structure "authoritarian" .... Out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, a consistent field of meaning emerges through the intervention of a Master Signifier - Why? ...the symbolic order in which the subject is embedded is simultaneously "finite"...and "infinite".... Because of this inherent tension, every language contains a paradoxical element which, within its field, stands in for what eludes it.... This signifier is the Master Signifier: the "empty" signifier which totalizes ("quilts") the dispersed field... (pp. 102-103)
It was the kind of Saturday that lends itself to small tasks like sweeping the kitchen and den, bringing in firewood, cleaning and oiling boots, shoveling the walk, doing a load of laundry, staying out of the way while Gven and Helga make batch after batch of biscotti to share with the neighborhood ladies. It's their yearly ritual, and they put a lot of energy into the effort, which connects them with their mothers and grandmothers, and now to their daughters, so be it.
Brecht's "learning plays" were motivated by his encounter with the universe of Noh plays - what we encroach upon thereby is the relationship of the West with Japan qua fantasy object. That is to say, the history of the so-called cultural exchange between Europe and Japan is a long story of missed encounters.... In Europe, Japan functions as a kind of fantasy screen onto which one projects one's "repressed." The fantasy image of Japan is ramified into two main branches: the "fanatic" Japan (kamikaze, samurai, the code of honor - Japan as the ethics of unconditional obedience) and the "semiotic" Japan (from Eisenstein to Barthes: kabuki, the Japanese art of painting - Japan as an empire of signs delivered from Western logocentrism). The first fantasy is usually appropriated by the political right and the second by the Left... (p. 174)
Independently of all this, as far as I can tell from inside my own skin, I checked out Listening to Prozac from the library the other day. No, I don't take the stuff, and I'm not clinically depressed, just Scandinavian. It had been on my list for a while, based on a quote I saw somewhere, and it felt like the right time to get into it. By the way, today's Merriam-Webster Word of the day is seasonal affective disorder \SEE-zun-ul-a-FEK-tiv-dis-OR-der\ noun: "depression that tends to recur as the days grow shorter during the fall and winter." No kidding, you can't plan these things. So I'm a chapter into it, and the writing is slow and monotonous, you know, best-selling expert writes patronizingly for the general audience, but he has a point to make about the obvious appeal of miracle drugs that appear to make people happy, and I'm receptive to the analogies with cosmetic surgery in the kind of personality change he claims antidepressants effect.
And then, while writing this, something happened. I got an email from a friend from graduate school, one of the two or three closest in a group of us who helped each other survive, aided by copious amounts of coffee, Buckeye Donuts, beer, and half-baked ideas. He and his wife, also a grad student in the same department at the time, have split up. I just mailed my holiday letter to their old address; I hope it gets forwarded to one of them. I will soon receive his card in the mail, and then I'll know more of the background. Now I am depressed.
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