#fantasmatic

[fatehbaz]

Thank you. Glad that it’s enjoyable.

Simultaneous rage and compassion. Solemnity and silliness. Somber yet playful. Grieving and joyous. Fire and whimsy.

The juxtaposition is very deliberate, from me. The contrast between deathly seriousness and silliness. How to live a rich and full life in the shadow, in the grips of unending violence imposed from above, without being solely defined by the trauma.

This was a tag, from just this week, that someone added on a post of mine.

Average tags from an average post. These were also from within a few days of each other, which people added to merely one single post of mine:

I guess, the two realms must coexist if I am to survive and also somehow find, make, experience joy. 

To go about your day, witnessing a thousand “small” cruelties and tragedies merely in the first waking hours of the day during the morning bus ride to work. Watch the city from the window. Gentrification, homelessness, chronic illness, institutional disavowal.

Relentless violence. Without pity.

Sometimes I half-seriously joke about the “ethical imperative to be whimsical.” It hurts! We’re being killed! Things are dire! But we won’t concede joy!

How to make a life when you’re being neglected, forsaken, hunted, actively harmed.

---

In a piece from 2023, in Kohl’s special issue on “Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries,” Katie Natanel recently described a similar challenge:

‘I think what is sitting in my heart at this moment is how to hold this together: a will to do things otherwise and build things elsewhere, in ways that keep sight of power – and yet refuse it as totalising. [...] [N]ot an abstract theoretical musing [...]. Rather, it is something to be done -- a practice that we envision and embody because we must.’

---

Avery Gordon, who writes often of institutional abandonment and “hauntings,” described our predicament as if we are trapped in hell:

‘[C]oncentration of global wealth and the “extension of hopeless poverties”; […] the intensification of state repression and the growth of police states; the stratification of peoples […]; and the production of surplus populations, such as the landless, the homeless, and the imprisoned, who are treated as social “waste.” […] To be unable to transcend […] the horror […] of such a world order is what hell means […]. Without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we’re living in hell. [...] [P]eople are rejecting prison as the ideal model of social order. […] Embedded in this resistance, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, is both a deep longing for and the articulation of, the existence of a life lived otherwise and elsewhere than in hell. […] Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about identifying the longings that already exist – however muted or marginal […]. The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity”. It is not simply fantasmatic or otherworldly in the conventional temporal sense. The utopian is a way of conceiving and living in the here and now [...]. But there are no guarantees. No guarantees that the time is right […]; no guarantees that just a little more misery and suffering will bring the whole mess down [...]. There are no guarantees of coming millenniums [...], only our complicated selves together and a […] principle in which the history and presence of the instinct for freedom, however fugitive or extreme, is the evidence of the […] possibility because we’ve already begun to realize it. Begun to realize it in those scandalous moments when the present wavers […]. The point is to expose the illusion of supremacy and unassailability dominating institutions and groups routinely generate to mask their fragility and their contingency. The point is […] to encourage […] us […] to be a little less frightened of and more  enthusiastic about our most scandalous utopian desires and actions [...].” [Text from: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016. Bold emphasis added by me.]

Elsewhere, Gordon also says this:

‘In this context of enhanced militarism and securitisation, [...] [there is] more widespread social abandonment and more entrenched inequalities [...]. At the same time, there is widespread, daily, active and open political opposition to all this, at the scale at which people can contest it [...]. And there are also so many people, more and more [...], looking for ways to think and live on different – better terms – and doing it in small ways [...]. What will happen we don’t know, of course. But as more people become unable to participate in the existing economic and governing systems, they must find another way. [...] [A] standpoint and a mindset for living on better terms than we’re offered; for living as if you had the necessity and the freedom to do so; for living in the acknowledgement, that despite the overwhelming power of all the systems of domination which are trying to kill us, they never quite become us. [...] ‘Can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?’ What would happen if we understood that what haunts from the past are precisely all those aspirations and actions – small and large, individual and collective – that oppose racial capitalism and empire and live actively other than on those terms of order. [...] Julius Scott called it ‘the common wind.’’ [Text from: Avery Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” Transcribed and published at the blog of Verso Books, 2 September 2020.]

Gordon adds that “the struggle to transform the world takes place immanently today now.”

---

In a similar style, AM Kanngieser says:

‘The no of refusal is a mode of survival: an impenetrable boundary, silent or shouted. It is a refusal to be killed or to succumb [...]. Vast ecosystems flattened for plantations and fields, raw minerals pulled from the ground and sea for the building of nation-states [...]. Being-with requires a pause from which to imagine this otherwise, in all of its vastness and uncertainty. [...] To be-with [...] needs a disposition of attentiveness, listening, curiosity and noticing, [...]. The immensity of the loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities exceeds what we can comprehend. But [...] so do the myriad, and insuppressible flourishings and alliances, the joyfulness and love, the lives lived otherways.’ [Text from: AM Kanngieser. “To undo nature; on refusal as return.” transmediale. 2021.]

---

What kind of “flourishings and alliances”?

In an interview from 2021, Robyn Maynard describes the importance of care, love in “fighting back”:

‘Every day I wake up and rehearse the person I would like to be. […] To use the words of the late, great, C.L.R. James, “every cook can govern.” Organizing, whether formal or informal, whether geared toward a short term goal or a massive, transformative shift: this is what happens when people consciously decide to come together and “shape change,” to think with Octavia Butler. And to move through the world with the intention of making it a better place for living creatures to inhabit. […] And most importantly, it’s an invitation to join in. And it is a reminder that liberation is not a destination but an ongoing process, a praxis. Every day, groups of parents, librarians, nurses, temp workers, ordinary people, tired of the horrors of the present, come together to decide what kind of world they want to inhabit. […] In a historic time of mutual aid, newly created support networks, and old and new freedom strategies, we bear witness to rehearsal, study, experimentation in form, a multiplicity of formations of struggle being waged, often most strongly by people for whom freedom has been most denied. I’m thinking here of Claude McKay’s words from “If We Must Die”: “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” [...] [F]or so many people, whether abandoned by the state [...] or abandoned by society in a carceral site, fighting back, by virtue of necessity as well as of ethics, is building, always building. This is the freedom work, and the love work, and the care work, of rehearsal.’ [Text from: Robyn Maynard. “Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World: An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.” Intefere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics.” 19 November 2021.]

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As for whimsy as an antidote.

I like what Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo says:

‘Opacity, multiplicity, and refraction unsettle many […]. Here I must reveal myself as someone who loves deviance and mischief. […] The word furtive delights me. A quick [online] search for synonyms yields other poetically inspiring words: secretive, surreptitious, clandestine, covert, conspiratorial, oblique, and shifty. […] We must fold these small acts of love and creativity and play (and laughter and irreverence and whimsy) into other resistant projects against white supremacy […]. In various trans-American imaginaries, the boonies are raced as nonproductive land inhabited by people who are not fully part of the Western episteme. [...] Caribbean(ist) people are familiar with el monte, the hills, or les mornes. El monte is always just around the corner, encroaching, sprouting persistently like fungi amid the rubble of hurricane disasters or abandoned plantation and industrial sites. [...] The hills, like much of our hemisphere, are sites of damage containing the residual energy of violence, [...] the “places of irresolution.” [...] I turn over rocks and push thorny vines to the side to find wet dirt, small creatures, and, perhaps, delightful hidden treasures [...]. I open my hands so that these and other surprises “jump into [them] with all the pleasures of the unasked for and the unexpected” [...]. Remaining open to these gifts of the nonhuman natural world [...]. What can we make possible when we make room for the unexpected in the midst of ruin. […] How much ruddier might we be against the multiheaded hydra of white supremacy as “a world of mutually-flourishing companions” [...]?’ [Text from: Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo. “Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness.” Small Axe. July 2019.]

[zizekianrevolution]

The pervert's jouissance seems to be located in a middle ground in which he pretends to feel the psychic stakes that constitute his backbone: on the one hand, the primacy of the law of his desire as the only possible law of desire, and, on the other hand, the recognition of the desire of the other as the mediating factor in everyone's desire. With regard to these two options, perverse jouissance utilizes an impossible strategy of conciliation. This strategy is designed both to evoke in a third party the conviction that this jouissance may perhaps not be perverse and, at the same time, to entrap him in it. Thus the pervert first posits the law of the father (and castration) as an existing limit, so as to go on to show that it is perhaps not a fixed law since one can always take the risk of overstepping it. This strategy of overstepping is where the pervert finds his jouissance. But the strategist's pleasure cannot be obtained without the complicity—imaginary or real—of a third party who witnesses, dumbfounded, the pervert's fantasmatic conjuring trick with regard to castration.

-Joel Dor

[tenderperversion]

In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse - to prescribe what will count as political discourse - by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never per­mitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix's iconic image of Lib­erty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility - her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it's held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the abso­lute logic of reproduction itself - to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the "politics" of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the "inspirational" "One Day More"), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation's good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to pre­serve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.

LEE EDELMAN, NO FUTURE: QUEER THEORY AND THE DEATH DRIVE

[baravaggio]

In short, the social structures from which it is often said that the eroticizing of mastery and subordination derive are perhaps themselves derivations (and sublimations) of the indissociable nature of sexual pleasure and the exercise or loss of power. To say this is not to propose an “essentialist” view of sexuality. A reflection on the fantasmatic potential of the human body—the fantasies engendered by its sexual anatomy and the specific moves it makes in taking sexual pleasure—is not the same thing as an a priori, ideologically motivated, and prescriptive description of the essence of sexuality. Rather, I am saying that those effects of power which, as Foucault has argued, are inherent in the relational itself (they are immediately produced by “the divisions, inequalities and disequilibriums” inescapably present “in every relation from one point to another”) can perhaps most easily be exacerbated, and polarized into relations of mastery and subordination, in sex, and that this potential may be grounded in the shifting experience that every human being has of his or her body’s capacity, or failure, to control and to manipulate the world beyond the self.

— Is the Rectum a Grave? by Leo Bersani (1987)

[divdevdump]

CHILDREN’S FICTION often belongs to children in name alone. After all, narratives of childhood are largely written by adults, usually to reinforce what Henry Jenkins has called “the myth of childhood innocence”—an ideal that envisions the child as somehow universal, apolitical, and sacred. “Too often,” Jenkins writes,

our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults.

Bound by the contradiction of being vulnerable to politics and at the same time magically beyond its purview, the figure of the child in popular culture does not reflect material realities. Instead, as Lee Edelman says in his 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the image is of a “fantasmatic Child”: a repository of utopian hopes and dreams but also a battleground of deep-seated and incoherent cultural anxieties.

Two examples of popular media from this year, the viral Max/Investigation Discovery docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV and the A24 sci-fi/horror film I Saw the TV Glow, reveal the limits of the childhood innocence myth. They both also happen to draw attention to two major cultural forces so often blamed for corrupting the innocent child: television and queerness. Interestingly, both texts link these two forces together, albeit in distinct ways and to different ends. In Quiet on Set, viewers witness the toxic treatment of child actors working for the popular kids’ cable network Nickelodeon in the 1990s and early 2000s. The majority of the docuseries attributes the on-set abuses to a handful of “bad apples”—including two queer Nickelodeon employees—and each episode unpacks in detail the specific nature of their transgressions. By compiling and displaying evidence of Nickelodeon’s mishandling of child stars in the making of its shows, Quiet on Set proposes that television for children comes at a significant cost to children. As the title suggests, the making of kids’ TV must involve a “dark side”—one that includes but is not limited to the suppression, abuse, and manipulation of vulnerable young stars by adults who may care more about the business of “kids’ TV” than they do about actual kids.

I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, also links queerness and television. Rather than present television as threatening in the “bogeyman” sense, the film suggests that TV is a disruptive force to the status quo; in the film, it threatens both the imaginary separateness of kids’ TV from other types of media and the myth that childhood is somehow devoid of or separate from queer and trans ways of life. The film centers on a different kind of youth-focused television that emerged in the same historical moment as Nickelodeon: the meteoric rise of the WB and UPN networks in the year 1995 and the “youth market” that became their demographic targets. The two main characters, teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), share an obsession with a coming-of-age, supernatural horror series called The Pink Opaque that airs on the “Young Adult Network,” a fictionalized WB/UPN counterpart. When both Owen and Maddy become hyper-identified with the two teen protagonists at center of the program (whose mission is to slay villains sent by the “big bad” Mr. Melancholy week after week), their existence as suburban teenagers—and their desire to eventually lead normal lives as adults—is thrown into doubt.

Described by the director as an allegory for the experience of coming out as trans, I Saw the TV Glow constructs an analogy between the fantasy worlds that television may provide us and the not-so-distant fantasy of creating a queer life outside of the norms often prescribed for children. The choice between what is queer and what is normative materializes when The Pink Opaque eventually impels one of the teens, Maddy, to reject the reality of suburban life in favor of a different universe, while Owen is left with the choice to remain in his current reality—despite knowing there might be a challenging but fulfilling alternative—or to follow Maddy to an unknown plane of existence.

Both Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow explore anxieties around television, gender, sexuality, and queerness, but both also confront the impossibility of “kids’ TV.” Each text, in its respective style and subject matter, points to the potential hazards of seeing both kids’ media and children themselves as existing in a vacuum, apart from the realities of adulthood. Both texts also suggest the inevitable damage that results from adults’ investment in producing certain ideas of the child—harm that ranges from the literal and physical to the figural and symbolic—and in pushing on children ideas of the good life grounded in financial and commercial success, rather than other metrics of happiness and fulfillment. The medium of television at the center of Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow becomes an interesting zone to challenge the tensions at the heart of what we consider “good” for kids, in part because television itself is so often assumed to be “bad” for them. Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow suggest that it is not television itself that is inherently good or bad; instead, they illustrate how TV becomes imbued with specific values to different and sometimes disparate ends. If both I Saw the TV Glow and Quiet on Set show the figure of the child under threat, the former locates that threat not in television but in the surrounding culture. By contrast, Quiet on Set seems to hold out on the promise of television’s “good” (consumer) influence on children, if only it can be saved from a few “big bad” executives and crew members. ... (click link to read full Article)

[thennextcomes]

In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner, or more partners, whatever you are doing. It's always... There has to be always some fantasmatic element. There has to be some third imagined element which makes it possible for me, which enables me, to engage in sexuality.

[paarijaata]

“This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric (I do not dream of some extravagant site) nor emperical (I do not intend to buy a house according to the views of a real-estate agency); it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself...”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

[hebecci]

27/07/2023 Mercury-Venus-Lilith conjunction

Thoughts, sentiments and sovereignty align in the energy of centration on July 27 2023. Meaning that our affection and communication are completely free of social norms for a day and it’s out in the open.

Venus of: love, relationship, art, séduction, beauty, attraction, value, affection, appearance, gift, compliments, pleasure, esthetics, value and harmony

Mercury of: thoughts, words, mental state, communication, exchanges, commerce, intelligence, messages, small trips, mobility, tools, modifications

Lilith of: authenticity, primitivity,taboos, “unleashement”, provocation, promiscuity, exile, wild, fantasmes, non conformity, untameable

These three meet and make one for a day.

Brainstorm: So here comes the deep and raw compliments and wild gifts. There is an edge to relationships and exchanges at this time. Something that we don’t talk about invites us to express ourselves authentically with charm and wit. Promiscuity becomes interesting and stimulating at this time. The search for pleasure is also intellectual now and has we explore deeper and freer aspects of our sensuality, the needed informations are received and given. The value of activism is highlighted and it makes itself attractive by provoking pleasant ideas that free us. Words and thoughts tend to easily connect to taboo subjects and desires. But these provocative talks and thoughts happen graciously, with love or sentiments for the subject or person. Our loving nature is easily expressed in wild ways. We are not conforming to any ways of communicating affection at this time. It’s the most primitive part of us that gets to experience interesting pleasures. The fascination for someone or something is shared and talked about. We share intelligently what we don’t usually share. We talk about what we don’t casually talk about in beautiful ways. Our personal rebellion is in search of intellectual pleasure. Provoking pleasantries with a fantasmatical mind.

11:15 Mercury meets Venus r

In touch with what you love of a person and the ability to express it. Tell someone you love them, show appreciation, gifts, display of affection, cooperation and diplomacy, beautifying, changing appearances. Mental pleasure. Productively creative. Excellent for deals (specially closing them). Win-wins. Artistic skills. Understanding your values. Why someone attracts or repels us. Contacts blossoming in relationships.

17:03 Mercury meet Lilith r

Channeling deeper wounds and instincts into writing. Speaking up for ostracized people. Free thinker with no moderation that speaks impulsively and emotionally. Satiated and edgy thought patterns. Teaching to go by wild instincts. Harshness and strictness in choices. Challenging fear, anxiety and doubt. Building an intellectual connection with sexual desires. Finding your core voice. Knowing how to give and get respect. Influential words fighting tyranny and indecency.

21:36 Lilith r meets Venus r

Unconventional relationships, highly sexually charged, erotic fixation, exploring sexual appetite, sex magick and rituals, sensuality that breaks social conventions, freeing yourself, being true to yourself in relationships, honouring values, sovereignty.

21:43 Lilith r meets Venus r

21:57 Lilith r meets Venus r

[allael]

"The shared sacrifice embodied by the incest prohibition—and not some positive characteristic held in common among all the members of a society—brings unity and coherence to a loosely organized group. ...

The prohibition of incest is the prohibition of enjoyment. Incest is identical with enjoyment insofar as incest implies actually enjoying one’s love object itself rather than a fantasmatic replica."

📘 Enjoyment Right & Left, Todd McGowan, 2022.

[yngsuk]

The signifier, as alienating and meaningless token of our Symbolic constitution as subjects (as token, that is, of our subjectification through subjection to the prospect of meaning); the signifier, by means of which we always inhabit the order of the Other, the order of a social and linguistic reality articulated from somewhere else; the signifier, which calls us into meaning by seeming to call us to ourselves: this signifier only bestows a sort of promissory identity, one with which we can never succeed in fully coinciding because we, as subjects of the signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves, can only ever aspire to catch up to whatever it is we might signify by closing the gap that divides us and, paradoxically, makes us subjects through that act of division alone. This structural inability of the subject to merge with the self for which it sees itself as a signifier in the eyes of the Other necessitates various strategies designed to suture the subject in the space of meaning where Symbolic and Imaginary overlap. Politics names the social enactment of the subject’s attempt to establish the conditions for this impossible consolidation by identifying with something outside itself in order to enter the presence, deferred perpetually, of itself. Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject’s alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history. If politics in the Symbolic is always therefore a politics of the Symbolic, operating in the name and in the direction of a constantly anticipated future reality, then the telos that would, in fantasy, put an end to these deferrals, the presence toward which the metonymic chain of signifiers always aims, must be recognized, nonetheless, as belonging to an Imaginary past. This means not only that politics conforms to the temporality of desire, to what we might call the inevitable historicity of desire—the successive displacements forward of nodes of attachment as figures of meaning, points of intense metaphoric investment, produced in the hope, however vain, of filling the constitutive gap in the subject that the signifier necessarily installs—but also that politics is a name for the temporalization of desire, for its translation into a narrative, for its teleological determination. Politics, that is, by externalizing and configuring in the fictive form of a narrative, allegorizes or elaborates sequentially, precisely as desire, those overdeterminations of libidinal positions and inconsistencies of psychic defenses occasioned by what disarticulates the narrativity of desire: the drives, themselves intractable, unassimilable to the logic of interpretation or the demands of meaning-production; the drives that carry the destabilizing force of what insists outside or beyond, because foreclosed by, signification.

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

[chantelle]

“CECI N’EST PAS UNE VAGINE”

Subscribed

The story is well known: in Metz, an incident occurred at the exposition of art works linked to Jacques Lacan. Two feminists staged a protest in front of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World owned by Lacan; Deborah de Robertis wrote ‘MeToo’ on the painting which depicts a headless torso of a sexually aroused naked woman’s body, focused on her hairy vulva. The title of a predominant feminist reaction tells it all: “Hurrah for the Courbet vandals: defacing the vulva painting is basic feminism” – de Robertis “is right to think the painting is misogynistic: the model doesn’t even have a face!”[1]

Are things really so clear and simple? While fully respecting the feminist objections as well as rejecting the traditionalist academic disdain for the de Robertis’s act, I think things are more complex. Yes, there is a long history of a woman’s dismembered by a (male) painter. Recall “A Woman Throwing a Stone” (Picasso, 1931): the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are, of course, a grotesque misrepresentation, if measured by the standard of realist reproduction; however, in their very plastic distortion, they immediately/intuitively render the Idea of a “woman throwing a stone,” the “inner form” of such a figure. Upon a closer look, one can easily discern the steps of the process of (what Husserl would have called) “eidetic reduction” of the woman to her essential features: hand, stone, breasts… this painting thinks, it performs the violent process of tearing apart the elements which, in their natural state, co-exist in reality. However, the problem is WHAT does this painting think – one should not forget that it was made by a male painter tearing apart a woman’s body…

So let’s begin with politics. Courbet was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death four years later. As for the fact that the torso is headless, we should remember that back in 2014, de Robertis already performed a feminist act in Musee d’Orsay: in front of the same painting, she sat down with her legs widely spread, fully exposing her vulva to the spectators.[2] This confrontation of the real displayed vagina with her fantasmatic double on a painting produces the effect of "This is not a vagina," like that of "This is not a pipe" in the famous Magritte painting - the scene in which a real person is shown side by side with the ultimate image of what she is in the fantasy for the male Other. But is a woman really more “objectivized” when painted as a headless torso?

To grasp what is happening here, on should recall the paradigmatic hard-core sexual position (and shot) which is easy to identify: the woman is lying on her back with her legs spread wide backwards and with her knees above her shoulder; the camera is in front, showing the man’s penis penetrating her vagina (the man’s face is as a rule invisible, he is reduced to an instrument), but what we see in the background between her thighs is her face in the thrall of orgasmic enjoyment. This minimal “reflexivity” is crucial: if we were just to see the close-up of penetration, the scene would soon turn boring, disgusting even, more of a medical showcase – one has to add the woman’s enthralled gaze, the subjective reaction to what is going on. Furthermore, this gaze is as a rule not addressed at her partner who is doing it but directly at us, viewers, confirming to us her enjoyment – we, spectators, clearly play the role of the big Other who has to register her enjoyment. The pivot of the scene is thus not male (her sexual partner’s or the spectator’s) enjoyment: the spectator is reduced to a pure gaze, the pivot is woman’s enjoyment (staged for the male gaze, of course). The sad irony here is that the very fact that the woman is not “objectivized” but rendered as a subject makes her humiliation worse: she has to fake her enjoyment. Being compelled to enact fake subjective engagement is much worse than being reduced to an object.

So, back to the photo of the painting and the “real” de Robertis displaying her vulva: the paradox is that, no matter what her intentions were, the real de Robertis displaying her vulva is much closer to pornography than Courbet’s painting precisely because her vulva is accompanied by her gaze (her head looking at us), while the effect of Courbet’s painting is much more disturbing – why, precisely? While it is not, of course, a feminist painting in any sense (it clearly addresses a male gaze), it clearly renders the deadlock (or dead end) of the traditional realist painting, whose ultimate object - never fully and directly shown, but always hinted at, present as a kind of underlying point of reference - was the naked and thoroughly sexualized feminine body as the ultimate object of male desire and look. The exposed feminine body functioned here in a way similar to the underlying reference to the sexual act in the classic Hollywood, best described by the famous instruction of the movie tycoon Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters from Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon:

"At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard. ... Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strentgh to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified."

The exposed feminine body is thus the impossible object, it functions as the ultimate horizon of representation whose disclosure is forever postponed - in short, it functions as the Lacanian incestuous Thing. Its absence, the Void of the Thing, is then filled in by "sublimated" images of beautiful, but not totally exposed, feminine bodies, i.e. by bodies which always maintain a minimum of distance towards That. But the crucial point (or, rather, the underlying illusion) of the traditional painting is that the "true" incestuous naked body nonetheless waits there to be discovered - in short, the illusion of traditional realism does not reside in the faithful rendering of the depicted objects; it rather resides in the belief that, BEHIND the directly rendered objects, there effectively IS the absolute Thing which could be possessed if we were only able to discard the obstacles or prohibitions that prevent access to it.

What Courbet accomplished in his “Origin” is the gesture of radical desublimation: he made the risky move and simply went to the end by way of directly depicting what the previous realistic art was just hinting at as its withdrawn point of reference - the outcome of this operation, of course, was the reversal of the sublime object into abject, into an abhorring, nauseating excremental piece of slime. (More precisely, Courbet masterfully continued to dwell at the very blurred border that separates the sublime from the excremental: the woman's body in "L'origine" retains its full erotic attraction, yet it becomes repulsive precisely on account of this excessive attraction.) Courbet's gesture is thus a dead end: the dead end of the traditional realist painting - but precisely as such, it is a necessary "mediator" between traditional and modernist art, i.e. it stands for a gesture that had to be accomplished if we are to "clear the ground" for the emergence of the modernist "abstract" art. How?

With Courbet, we learn that there is no Thing behind its sublime appearance, that if we force our way through the sublime appearance to the Thing itself, all we get is a suffocating nausea of the abject - so the only way to reestablish the minimal structure of sublimation is to directly stage THE VOID ITSELF, the Thing as the Void-Place-Frame, without the illusion that this Void is sustained by some hidden incestuous Object. One can now understand in what precise way, and paradoxical as it may sound, Malevitch's "Black Square" as the seminal painting of modernism is the true counterpoint to (or reversal of) "L'origine": in Courbet, we get the incestuous Thing itself which threatens to implode the Clearing, the Void in which (sublime) objects (can) appear, while in Malevitch, we get its exact opposite, the matrix of sublimation at its most elementary, reduced to the bare marking of the distance between foreground and background, between a wholly "abstract" object (square) and the Place that contains it. The "abstraction" of the modernist painting is thus to be conceived as a reaction to the over-presence of the ultimate "concrete" object, the incestuous Thing, that turns it into a disgusting abject, i.e. that turns the sublime into an excremental excess.

So far from being a simple male-chauvinist depiction of the object of desire, Courbet’s “Origine” confronts the male desire with its deadlock: what you really desire is a headless monster, and it is your gaze (sustained by desire) which decapitates the woman.

[heartshapedgreen]

Misrecognition (meconnaissance) describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire: its operation is central to the state of cruel optimism. To misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities — which it might or might not have.

[...] Sedgwick's mode of reading is to deshame fantasmatic attachment so as to encounter its operations as knowledge. For example, we may feel the violence of history as something "it" does to "us," but Sedgwick argues that the stories we tell about how subjectivity takes shape must also represent our involvement with the pain and error, the bad memory and mental lag, that also shape our desire's perverse, twisted, or, if you prefer, indirect routes toward pleasure and survival. [...]

Any writer's task, in this view, would be to track desire's itinerary, not on behalf of confirming its hidden or suppressed Truths or Harms but to elaborate its variety of attachments as sexuality, as lived life, and, most importantly, as an unfinished history that confounds the hurts and the pleasures.

[...] But I also resist idealizing, even implicitly, any program of better thought or reading. How would we know when the "repair" we intend is not another form of narcissism or smothering will? Just because we sense it to be so? Those of us who think for a living are too well-positioned to characterize certain virtuous acts of thought as dramatically powerful and right, whether effective or futile; we are set up to overestimate the proper clarity and destiny of an idea's effects and appropriate affects. As I argued in "Slow Death," such dramas can produce strange distortions in the ways we stage agency as a mode of heroic authorship, and vice versa: such dramas of inflation distract attention from the hesitancy and recessiveness in ordinary being.

Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant

[zizekianrevolution]

For Lacan the way that he reads Freud's and I think quite accurately that fantasy and reality actually have a similar structure right they we see that both fantasy and reality are constituted on the basis of the exclusion of the repressed so when a fantasy is established it functions as a permanent mode by which the subject can gain pleasure gain satisfaction in relation to objects in reality and in this sense waking up as we said getting too close to the end of the film to the point that the fantasy defends against well waking up from the dream would be the same as waking up from reality what may wakes the father up is exactly something that is unreal something that is external to reality something that cannot exist within the framework of reality within the framework of fantasy and it wakes him up because in order for reality to exist this thing must be excluded and this thing is what Lacan calls the Real at that point and it is the only thing that we can truly determine as wakefulness or for us today we might say that instead of reality in this colloquial way we would say REAL reality psychic reality as we call it now after this session is a fantasmatic construction which masks the traumatic loss that constitutes it so fantasy is what enables the dynamic of both what we call sleeping dreaming waking dreaming and what we also define as psychic reality and this is to say and I got this little intuition listening actually to to a stand-up by Louis CK a long time ago this is this is to say that there are some moments in life that have no witness well in the case of the real it is principally defined as the unwitnessable right being in this real is something that one cannot experience one cannot experience reality when we oppose it to psychic reality we might say that the father was dreaming facing the real which is something that is not able to experience and then woke up to reality to keep on dreaming to keep on being in a fantasy now this kind of real this reality that is opposed to psychic reality is something that we might say separates these two states but it is indiscernible from the perspective of the axis from the perspective of the subject and Louis CK speaks about it in terms of dying he says uh quite in a joking way one cannot live in the moment of dying he says one can never know can never be sure how old they will be when they die because you might be dying and you are saying oh I have a few more minutes I might I'm going to be 99 years old but then you don't die or then you do you never know you never know you can never know that on the same note and this is a huge problems for for those suffering from insomnia one cannot be awake at the moment of falling asleep this this is a huge problem for the Insomniac right they want to be there to be to be a witness to the moment of falling asleep basically they want to be in the reality Beyond psychic reality they want to be in the real an impossibility so we see something crucial and Freud says that when he speaks about dreaming without using these terms he says that we see that without the real we would probably stay asleep forever there would be nothing that would wake us up and this shows you that there is something about death yes and you can take it with my example from above as well that is a fundamental aspect of our psychic life and then when we speak about reality and on the same note we speak about fantasy we see that it is exactly what sustains life in our psyche by allowing us to keep on sleeping to keep on dreaming and well in this sense well the demanding the subject to take part in this objective real is like demanding the subject to take part in death it is impossible

-Leon Brenner

[forestdeath1]

The ultimate properly Freudian lesson is thus that the explosion of human symbolic capacities does not merely expand the metaphoric scope of sexuality: activities that are in themselves thoroughly asexual can get "sexualized," everything can be "eroticized" and start to "mean that"…

Much more importantly, this explosion sexualizes sexuality itself: the specific quality of human sexuality has nothing to do with the immediate, rather stupid, reality of copulation, inclusive the preparatory mating rituals; it is only when animal coupling gets caught in a fantasmatic frame that we get what we call sexuality, i.e., that sexual activity itself gets sexualized.

This, then, is why adults also need sexual education – perhaps even more than children. What they have to learn is not the technique of the act, but what to fantasize while they are doing it. Each couple has to invent their specific formula.

Effectively, to paraphrase Dogberry's advice to Seacoal from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing to which Marx refers in Capital: "To be able to enjoy sex is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature."

[blackcoffeestudies]

the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.11 In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse—to prescribe what will count as political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix’s iconic image of Liberty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility—her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it’s held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself—to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the “politics” of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the “inspirational” “One Day More”), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.

Lee Edelman, No Future

[beast-pulse]

hey gays ever seen this guy's stuff?

makes these really sensual / suggestive artsy videos usually fuckin around w/ body paint and ancient or ritualistic sort of imagery, weird and intriguing

i have to go with posting this one for the focus of 'wrestling' which, i dont even have to explain lol [and they seem quite into it too] but i'd also point out 'Eternal Dance', 'Into The Blue' trailer, 'Magical Mirror'