1234notes

[1234notes]

My Relationship to Desire

Probably an essay that they should make you write in high school instead of the ones that you actually do.

Admiration has always been at the center of my attractions to others, but there’s no move from there to sexual desire. I was so in love with a EA, like painfully in love, but it was never really sexual. Sometimes I will look at random people and imagine myself having sex with them, but only rarely.

Meanwhile, I have ample sexual desire when I am by myself. Although I a more of a “routine lover”, I do occasionally have spotaneous moments of arousal (although if that old men think about sex every 7 seconds is anywhere close to true, I am a massive aberration.

Mostly I use porn. The strange intimacy of digital exhibitionism. But for quite a long time I’ve been fixated on girls performing oral sex on men, especially if it involves deepthroating or more aggressive facefucking.

Unfortunately, I’m ashamed of my sexual habits and choice of stimuli. The porn is rough and degrading. But even more than that I’m turned on by various forms of dominating and humiliating women, extending as far as simulated rape.

I get that these desires must be semi common in the population. The amount of pornography and the viewership for the videos I watch certainly seems to suggest so. But what I don’t understand is how those people reconcile these kinds of desires with how they present themselves to others.

I’m ashamed to admit to anyone, including a partner, the things that turn me on. I don’t really see how they can be reconciled with a sexual relationship with another person unless that person happened to be genuinely aroused by it too.

But even just for me, I can’t really fully answer the question of whether or not I actually want to do these things. Obviously so much of it’s steeped in fantasy, but it just feels paralyzing. Knowing so well what turns you on, while also knowing that it’s pretty hard to think it would be accepted by a partner, and even if it was, that you don’t even know how to reconcile it with the reality of sexual relationship with the other person.

Certainly one of the worst parts is the shame and the inability to talk to others about it. And in this way, just like my real life crushes on people are cut off from sexual desire, my sexual desire is cut off from my sexual encounters with others.

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2 thieves who are also lovers. Probably a relationship that’s built around rebellion and a sense of superiority. Could switch between characters and have radio dialoguue throughout.

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How. I supposed to know that shit, when it all in the crib bitch

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Idea for romcom - Masterpost

(1st ep)

Focuses on two main characters

Starts with a kind of tupical shoujo trope. Probably the guy notices the girl because if something embarrassing she does. He swoops in to show interest and to tease her about it and sge blows up at him, tsudere style.

This should be followed by the revelation that they work together. Her outburst should be contextualized by accounts of their past interactions at work. There could be flashbacks or she could talk about them.

This should all coincide with the opportunity for a major promotion/project at work. She really wants to get it, but maybe her work slips somehow (something that makes her look bad to her boss) because she’s angry at him. Whatever incident happens should involve him, probably her getting mad at him again, further drawing his interest to her. (We should get the idea that he hadn’t focused on her too much in the past.)

He should get rhe promotion/project lead and she should be humiliated by being assigned to work under him. She should be furious and he oblivious to her feelings.

Episode should end with a split screen of them both on the dating app. He is intrigued and swipes right, she swipes left.

(Characters)

The main characters are riffs on shoujo leads.

He’s aloof and obtuse, a star at work despite a general lack of commitment.

She’s independent and hard working, but with a tendency to get upset and to put her foot in her mouth.

Complicate this with character depth.

She’s been forced to put up with a succession of immature badly behaved men in her life. She’s been unfairly treated at school/work for being a girl. He’s a breaking point for her. An outlet for rage that we come to learn is justified. She holds back, but her anger inevitably gets out.

Her outbursts interest the guy (he is drawn to her intensity, especially because she rejects him) and also make him more attentive to the bullshit she puts up with every day. He starts to make sacrifices and go out of his way to stand up for her and support her, something that only makes hermore incredulous and ready to erupt at him.

One major riff on the shoujo male lead is that because he’s aloof and not committed, the guy is generally incompetent. Unlike the men who effortlessly succeed, he’s generally bad at his job and he’s also bad at supporting her. He often benefits at work just because how he is seen and her (and the other women’s) work tends to benefit him. His incometency makes him even more detestable to her. He is not charming. However, it starts to become clear that he cares about helping her. This is the only thing he has been seen to actively care about and it’s because he cares about it that he ends up looking stupid/incompetent. His aloofness otherwise covers that up. Although his incompetence initially makes her like him even less, she begins to soften on him. Then he should screw up, doing something that ends up being wway too possesive and entitled. He should initially give up, but then recommit to supporting her. He’ll help her succeed at something and she’ll soften towards him.

(That’s basically the first major arc/storyline)

Those are the major subversions of their character types. She’s justifiably angry and he’s incompetent.

However they both also need depth to humanize thrm and make them 3 dimensional:

His aloofness is connected to him having anxiety ineracting with others (this isn’t initially obvious). He also had a case of unrequited love that has caused him to keep his feelings to himself.

She has trust issues and tends to be unnecessarily combative. She’s becoming self destructive because she feels betrayed by those around her. While he’s trying to support her, she’s self sabotaging

(Pt 2 - Supporting Characters)

The show takes place at a tech startup that has created a tinder style dating app. It might be called crimson, but i don’t love that name. The app also needs a USP, but I haven’t come up with that yet. The show’s characters work in a single division of the company, probably marketing or IT.

Othee charachters include:

2 female colleagues/friends

These characters are contrasting figures. One is attractive and the other is not. (The attractive one is prob also a minority of some kind, east asian or indian).

1 female manager

3 peripheral male characters

1 occasionally seen male boss

[1234notes]

I’ve been in the habit of masturbating every night before bed.

I watch porn. Usually compilations, rather than videos of a single couple. They usually involve blow jobs, cumshots, and/or facefucking. Sometimes the odd video will capture my interest based on some elusive appeal, but I tend to return to the old stalwarts in the end.

Some nights I have no desire to masturbate at all. It’s been 3 nights since I last did. On these nights I can’t break away and escape into pornography. My own emptyness absorbs all external stimuli like a black hole.

They say depression manifests in terms of lack of desire to do what ordinarily brings you pleasure. It’s nights like this when I feel something like what I imagine depression might mean.

I feel trapped between two problems concerning sex. One is that I’m ashamed of the pornography I like and afraid of the effects it has on me. The other, as I’ve come to realize is that pursuing a relationship is not a viable option for me. Neither is casual sex.

Starting with the latter first, I’ve come to recognize that I’m not an honest person. I’m a selfish person whose ashamed of their own selfishness and unwilling to try to change. Any attempt to have a relationship with another person would be disingenuous. I’d be going in to it without a sense of purpose I could share with another person. I don’t want anything other than to live unsustainably and pretend that the world isn’t about to come crashing dowm on me. That’s not something I can share with anyone else.

I’ve already hurt one person who didn’t deserve it. She thinks it’s her faul. That she was bad to me. When all the while I was putting her in an impossible position. I was cold. I was removed. I couldn’t share how I really felt or what I really wanted. I won’t do that to anyone else just to not be alone. I know a lot of people do a lot worse to their partners. That being incapable of sharing love isn’t the worse thing I could be. But it’s morally wrong for me to lie about this and who’d want to be in a relationship with someone who was honest about how selfish I really am.

“Want” isn’t really the right word. No one could be in a relationship with someone like that. There’s nothing real to share, other than time and soace. That’s ehy my time and presence have always been the only true things I’ve been able to share with anyone. Not only would it almost inevitably be a problem for them. It’s inevitably a problem for me. It’s a way if being that’s incompatible with feeling close to another person.

And so I mostly have porn. Casual sex is not an option because I’m a genuinely undesirable person and I’m passed the stage in life where any women would pursue it with me. Even if I wasn’t, sex leaves me feeling empty. Anxiety saps at my ability to be comfortable and confident. And my desire is twisted into something ugly and weak. It doesn’t animate me. I have no passion for other bodies. Just anxiety, shame, and a numbness toward human contact that makes me find no enjoyment in it.

The porn helps bring me pleasure, but it also twists my desire away from himan contact. It cuts off possibilities and causes the branches of my desire to shrivel into a narrow and predictable shape. Further, its a kind of desire steeped in cruelty and ambivalence towards others. It can’t be shared any more than my ambivalence towards life can be.

My sexual desires and the things that I want for my life. These are things that I cannot share because they are things that I, myself, cannot embrace. It is to live at a remove from myself. To watch a life play out that I cannot claim. For to claim it would make love and desire for another impossible. I’d sooner not claim it and refuse to allow the matter to be settled. Even if such a decision is merely a willful attempt to pretrend that something could change.

Will I be prepared to claim who I am some day. To acknowledge my feelings abd share them with others. It feels doubtful. I feel it would be wrong. I feel like it would betray those that I love, rather than bringing them closer. To acknowledge your own lack, when such a lack is so profound. To acknowledge a desire to acieve nothing. To be nothing. The most selfish of all desires. How could there be a relationship built on that.

It is a desire that is negative. Self destructive. Not nihilistic, but willfully unwilling to play the game. Committed to rejecting the attempt to achieve anything other than my own narrow way of being.

There can be no relationship there. No ability to grow together. And sexuality just taakes me further down this route. Away from meaningful contact with others. Towards a negative and self denying contact with myself.

[1234notes]

How could you tell a love story about someone who is alone and unable/unwilling to meet someone?

They’re unable to meet someone because they’re going through the motions in life. They don’t see any kind of future for themselves. They work for small accomplishments and live for reliable pleasures.

You could have the story focus on past relationships that failed.

You could also have the story follow a prrson or people that they never meet.

Do you have to have a vision of yourself to have a relationship. I think you need to have a life that someone else could be part of. Instead, this is a story about living without having a life to share. In fact, a relationship with a person like that just wouldn’t work because the relationship would become that person’s life. The way they were living and wanted to live would vanish, and the person would become unhappy and the relationship would fail.

So the only love story about a person like that would be a failed one. Any other person who shared that kind of life could never share a relationship with them. There just isn’t anything to share between them.

Life without a purpose, or at least life without a purpose anchored in major human values, values that can be shared. This person’s values are too small, too weak. They don’t lead anywhere. They don’t bring them together with anyone.

I guess that’s one way to think about what it means to be alone. It can have nothing to do with the fact of not being in a relationship and everything to do with having values and desires that can’t be shared with others.

[1234notes]

2 ideas

1. Essay about Joy describing how I've seen my time in school as preparation for teaching since I was an undergraduate. (Could talk about Game too. Telling me how academia is like a competition.

2. Education and passion belong together

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Through objects and our relationships to them we can find and locate theory,

But also, through theories and our relationships to them we can find objects

Theory changes how we look at objects and thus canges the objects we find meaningful.

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Pragya likes lelectric lights... weird

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Tod Machover

"The chello range is identical to the human voice--that is, the male and female voice combined."

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“The relationship between the ground and that which it grounds isnow rather one of reflection: positivity, although appearing to differ fromits ground in negativity (i.e., through its very appearing or phenomenality),nevertheless essentially reflects that negativity, is never in other words trulyother to it. Or: in contrast, we set forth a radical difference between positivity and negativity, one that constitutes this relationship of grounding insuch a way as to allow for, precisely, the betrayal of negativity by beings. Although incontestably grounded in negativity, beings would then not reflectthat ground at all. Rather, they conceal it, and this concealment is effected,paradoxically enough, through their very unconcealing, or appearing.” (335, Nothing Resists Modernity)

(Positivity and Negativity appear are extremely similar to Deleuze’s Actual and Virtual)

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“For this reason the passage of the subject to its outside does not end when it sees itself in its own mirror image. Instead, each image, in its failure to represent the subject adequately, inevitably gives way to another,thus ensuringthe proper endlessness of this movement. This endlessness allows one to understand this movement as not simply one of deferral from image to image but rather as one in which this very deferral points to the ultimate emptiness—or nothingness—of the image in general.” (331, Nothing Resists Modernity)

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“Here, self-identification proceeds by the internalization (or assumption) of those images of things that it sees in the outside world and that constitute the sum total of its theoretical knowledge. This knowledge is thus not simply objective in that it concerns objects external to Japan itself; rather, in a much more complex, detourlike fashion, objective knowledge reveals it self to be precisely the means by which knowledge of the self is attained.” (331, Nothing Resists Modernity)

(Towards an understanding of Documentary: When we see others in the image, we are really seeing the projection of our ideal self upon those people. This is interesting when we think of the “liberal consensus documentary” and the common refrain it produces in its viewers: “thank god that’s not me or mine.” If objective knowledge is how we come to know our “self”, than the documentary fails utterly in its pursuit of making sensible and intelligible the experiences of others. It would take a different kind of documentary to overcome our process of identification with the image, however, it the value of these documentaries is how in critiquing their practice we become able to recognize the fundamental issues of identifying with a supposedly objective camera-eye which can no longer be believed to build empathy through an identification with others, but only ensures our mutual alienation through further attempts to reify the self.) 

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“Analysis of the structure of interdependence through opposition, in whichself-identity is gained by a positing of difference in the other, should not,however, blind us to the ways in which the self acquires identity by positinga sameness in the other. Here, the other functions as a kind of mirror for theself, providing it with the opportunity to see itself reflected in what appearsto be its own image. This determination of the other as same is, of course,possible only through an elimination of that other’s alterity, an alterity thatthe image is incapable of accommodating or taking into account. In this wayit can be said that the image is instrumental in the effacement of the other. ...

For Takeuchi, the image is associated above all with the West and has,he believes, functioned throughout modern history as the driving force be- hind the advance of westernization ... This same phenomenon can be seen in the relations between China andJapan, the latter understood as already thoroughly westernized. As exemplified in the Japanese reception of the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936),respect for the otherness of the other is forced to yield to a reflective seeingof that other strictly in terms of oneself: “When Japan [which, accordingto Takeuchi, “remains within the fantasy of progress”] sees Lu Xun, he is distorted, just like all things, into an advocate of progress (shinposhugisha), asuperior enlightenment thinker. He is distorted in mirror-like fashion (kagaminari ni) into an enlightenment thinker who desperately chased after Europein trying to improve backwardness. He becomes a Chinese Ogai” (“Kindai,”  ̄160; emphasis added). 

The mirror image must be understood as a kind of “distortion” (yugami).In its distortion, paradoxically enough, it allows the Other to come into focusas visibly present before the eyes. We have already discussed how this distortion is foremost one of reduction of the Other’s alterity, an alterity that quamaterial can never be brought into presence (or represented) as the object ofthe scopic or knowing subject (shukan). Alterity is nonphenomenologizablein the sense that it resists appearing to consciousness as such. Clearly, thisis what Takeuchi attempts to show in the Japanese reading, or rather mis-reading, of Lu Xun.14 From the viewpoint of Japan, Lu Xun becomes theembodiment of the desire for westernization—which is, not surprisingly,what Japan itself is.

And yet things become very complicated at this point. For, Takeuchiasserts, insofar as Japan cannot be anything before its representation ofitself, “Japan is nothing” (“Kindai,” 145; emphasis added). Meaning this: thatJapan “is” only the desire to be (something), and nothing more than that;it is akin to that manque-à-être of which Jacques Lacan speaks—or indeed,following Takeuchi’s own path of reading, it is whatthe philosopher NishidaKitar ̄o tried to think as the selflessness of the desiring self.15 Because Japanis inherently nothing, in other words, it must project its being onto an otherwho can thus be for it.” (329-330, Nothing Resists Modernity)

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“Hence although self-identity first reveals itself as a possibility at the level of signification, it is never in fact realized at that level. Consequently the self is haunted by the sense of its own incompletion, which in turn generates an even greater desire to overcome this lack. Takeuchi notes this unremitting desire for self in the case of Europe: “Through incessant tension, they [i.e., Europeans] attempt to be their own selves. This constant activity to be their own selves makes it impossible for them to stop merely at themselves. They must risk losing themselves in order that their selves can be their selves” (“Kindai,” 131). The difference between this frenzied search for self andthe activity of “self-negation” lies inthis,thatthe latter is centered on avoiding the temptation—or, more fundamentally, acknowledging the impossibility—of identifying with that signifier that has been culturally and historically produced so as to signify (or represent) one’s self. Knowing that the self cannot be actualized in the world, it resists positing an oppositional other against which to realize itself.” (327, Calichman, Nothing Resists Modernity)

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““The self itself does not exist,” he writes (“Kindai,” 145). This is because it always encounters a “juncture” that disturbs its identity and forces it to be Other: “The self changes by holding fast to itself. (That which does not change is not a self.)” (326, Calichman, Nothing Resists Modernity)

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“As with many of the best critics of nationalism, Takahashi follows Heidegger’s statement in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism” that nationalism is to be understood most properly as subjectivism. The national subject that Katō aims to construct, according to Takahashi’s reading, is one necessarily based on unity, internal homogeneity, and self-representation. This unity can be seen primarily negatively, as Katō mourns its loss in the postwar period in the form of what he refers to as the nation’s “personality split.””  (27)

Here, Calichman shows us that the notion of nationalism, or more broadly, the existence of the national subject, is intimately linked with the theorization of subjectivity as a unitary and fixed interiority of consciousness. By that logic, we might surmise that we need a theory of the nationalism as an unfixed and evolving creation of the self from without as well as within. This would be the kind of nationalism Michael Moore displays in Where to Invade Next (2016) (America’s greatness as what it can take from others). This is a more pragmatic approach than Naoki Sakai’s because we do not throw out our identification with the nation, we just remap the flow of that identification.