Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  The most valuable essays here are "To Die One's Own Death" and "In Extremis" on Simone Weil. The first argues persuasively, to my mind, that Freud's concept of the death drive arose from the death of his most loved daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud due to the 'Spanish' flu. That theoretical innovation led to, in Rose's words, "a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism's need to follow the path to its own death," or as Freud puts it in  Beyond the Pleasure Principle , "The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion." Rose applies this insight to our experience of callous and careless death during the COVID pandemic and derives an ethical guide: we should work for a fairer world where people are enabled not only to live free and fulfilling lives, but also...

 A brilliant reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism by the late Edward Said. It originates as a talk given at the Freud Museum in London. After Said's talk, Jacqueline Rose responded, and her response was fittingly included in the Verso book. Said concludes: "Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community is very much a part of the complex of ideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets to mention what I think is an essential component of it: its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is a subject which George Steiner has celebrated with great elan for many years. But I would want to quality Deutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside of his or her community. This is now ...

 "The alienated patient, in search for and in need of an idol, finds the analyst and usually endows him with the qualities of his father and mother as the two powerful persons he knew as a child. Thus the content of transference is usually related to infantile patterns while its intensity is the result of the patient's alienation. Needless to add that the transference phenomenon is not restricted to the analytic situation. It is to be found in all forms of idolization of authority figures, in political, religious, and social life." (53) "Just as our sense develop and become human senses in the process of their productive relatedness to nature, our relatedness to man, says Marx, becomes human relatedness in the act of loving. "Let us assume man to be man , and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically inclined person; if you wish to influence...

I wrote a poem for Kevin Kwan, yes, the author of Crazy Rich Asians . Thanks, Hsien Min and QLRS, for publishing it. Chinese New Year celebrations. Had lunch and lo hei at West New Malaysia with Kim L, Dee M, Joel A, Melinda, Zhi Yuan, and Guy. Having steamboat dinner at Patsey's place tonight in Croton-on-Hudson. On Monday, announced the 4th cycle of Singapore Unbound fellowships: two writing residencies in a Southeast Asian country of the fellow's choice. Started on Wednesday the 4-class course on phenomenology with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. The instructor is Michael Stevenson, a historian of philosophy. Brentano's distinction between mental and physical phenomenon, picked by Husserl in his Logical Investigations , with the emphasis on "intention," to be glossed as the "aboutness" of consciousness. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something. Hard, but interesting.

I found François Jullien's In Praise of Blandness last summer in the great architecture and design bookstore in Bras Basah Complex, where I brought GH to buy art supplies. I have read Jullien's The Impossible Nude years ago with a great deal of interest while I was working on the poems for The Book of the Body . In Praise of Blandness examines not just Chinese art, but also Chinese philosophy, ethics, music and poetry for a common denominator called dan , which Jullien translates as fadeur , and his English translator Paula M. Varsano translates as blandness. In his Prologue, after acknowledging the difficulty, in fact, the undesirability, of defining blandness, Jullien describes the word thus, at the same time summarizing the movement of thought in the book: Blandness: that phase when different flavors no longer stand in opposition to each other, but, rather, abide within plenitude. It provides access to the undifferentiated foundation of all things and so is valu...

Written as long ago as 1963, this book still speaks with a fresh, combative yet engaging voice. Friedan set out to understand the nagging sense of emptiness that American suburban housewives felt in the 1950s. Marshaling the data and arguments of psychology, sociology and history, she made the case that this existential nullity resulted from the attempt to live according to what she called the feminine mystique, the idea that a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a wife and a mother. In different chapters, Friedan analyzed and criticized the contributions of Freudian psychoanalysis, functional sociology (including Margaret Mead's later writings), sex-directed education, post-war uncertainties and rampant consumerism to the feminine mystique. The synthesis of research and polemic is quite compelling. Equally persuasive is her demonstration of the deadly consequences of the feminine mystique. Taking the home as the boundaries of her world, the American housewife exhausted her...

The Woman and the Idea of Trouble You are the wall at my road’s end, Open your gates, and let me through to God. —Anna Wickham (1883–1947), “Prayer to Love” In the day room a woman stupefied from masturbation. Another flirted with Bonaparte. A third delivered nightly a hundred babies and in the morning killed their mouths. A painter, once a great beauty, had rubbed all her hair out. The troublesome idea was that you were not so different. You recognized them as fun-house distortions of your lust, your love of power and of babies, your aspiration for art. The quinine, delivered in a kind tonic, queried your head. When your husband dragged you shouting from the garden to the confines of the house, you put a fist in the glass door. Your poem was a symptom of madness, as was your belief that your husband, an astronomer, did not understand you. Now you lived in a house that arranged its barred windows for your pleasure. Your head had not one, but two doctors. What yo...

The header comes from a Commentary piece in the TLS (March 4, 2011) by Brian Leiter. Leiter tries to show how prescient Nietzsche was in anticipating recent results of empirical psychology. I am intrigued by the connections, but also at the same time uneasy. Not only are these experimental results debated in the scientific community, as Leiter admits, but they do not seem to me to escape Nietzsche's own perspectivist critique. Are they another case of finding what you are looking for? Here is Leiter on the psychology studies: [Of moral philosophy] Nietzsche's general view is that moral judgements, not only those of the philosophers, are "just sign language of the affects", a view recognizable to any student of contemporary psychology as winning support from, for example, Jonathan Haidt's work on moral judgement, such as his well-known paper "Ther Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail" (2001). * [Of the unconscious] The Nietzsche who laments, in The ...

TLS January 12 2011 from Julian Bell's review of Deanna Petherbridge's The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and theories of practice : ... Klee's notion of "taking a line for a walk", or Matisse's "desire of the line"... *** from John Ray's review of British Museum exhibit "Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead": O my heart of my mother, my heart of my forms, do not stand against me as a witness, do not oppose me in the tribunal, do not incline against me in the presence of the Keeper of the scales, for you are my spirit which is in my body, the god with the potter's wheel who moulded and made safe my limbs. Go on to the happy places to which we speed. In ancient Egypt, these were the words that were needed during the judgement of the dead. The subject's heart is being weighed in a balance, in the presence of the most awesome of the gods. In the opposite pan of the scales is the feather of truth, and the heart of the righteo...

Finished reading Common Knowledge Volume 11 Issue 3 this afternoon on Christopher Street pier. Pankaj Mishra, the Indian novelist, has an eloquent essay on how the evils of colonialism can never be balanced by its supposed benefits. He took issue with William Dalrymple's book White Mughals for representing interracial relationships between British men and Indian women in the eighteenth century as happening beyond a mere handful of the elite. In his reply, "Assimilation and Transculturation in Eighteenth-Century India," Dalrymple defends his thesis ably. Most persuasive, to my mind, is the fact that over one-third of the British men in India willed all their possessions either to one or more of their Indian companions (bibis) or to their Anglo-Indian children. This situation changed with the abolition of the East India Company in 1858, and the imposition of direct rule from the Colonial Office in London. The imperial myth of racial superiority set in, and our view of the...

Leo Bersani's Baudelaire and Freud (1977) operates on the fundamental Freudian assumption that "no text is fully present to itself." Attention to its "lack" will propel the reader from the text into "a fascination with other texts having the same potential for both fixing and scattering our attention," in this study, Freud's texts. Bersani is careful not to view Freud's texts as a master-key to unlock the meaning of Baudelaire's poetry; instead, Freud's texts "bring a certain coherence to the given literary text and accelerate its disruptive interpretive mobility," a statement which I take to mean, Freud will give a meaning (not the meaning) of Baudelaire, and will clarify the subversive nature of his poetry. I am wary of psychoanalytical (or Marxist or feminist or queer) readings of literature because all too often they reduce literary works to codes to be cracked by the theorist, and the decoded meanings sound distressingl...

From Christopher Reid's review of Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group at the Tate Britain: The more likely truth is that Sickert was simply the first painter in a long tradition to point out that the reclining nude, a standard compositional trope, had a lot in common with the inertia of a corpse, and the scrutiny of the artist with the calculating gaze of the malefactor. *** From Fernando Cervantes' review of Marjorie Trusted's The Arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700 : In the 1920s, Jose Ortega y Gasset attempted to counter these myths with the argument that Europe was not the creation of the sovereign nation state but, rather, the result of a piecemeal and laborious cultural fusion of what he called the "Germanic" and the "Mediterranean" elements. What particularly interested Ortega was that this fusion had been attained Iberia earlier and more permanently than in any other part of Europe, so that the presence of those very elements th...