PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

People who believe that they are

strong-willed and the masters of
their destiny can only continue
to believe this by becoming
specialists in self-deception.
Their decisions are not really
decisions at all a real decision
makes one humble, one knows
that it is at the mercy of more
things than can be named.
James Baldwin
Giovannis Room (1956)

It is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-

pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished, or a
privilege he has long possessed, that he is set free he
has set himself free for higher dreams, for greater
privileges.
 James Baldwin
Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

The really important kind of freedom involves attention

and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care
about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over
in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
David Foster Wallace
Kenyon College Commencement Speech (2005)

Popular magazines offering advice to those wearily

enduring long-term relationships provide many
suggestions about things to do to improve them.
Time might be better spent reflecting on what one is
already doing! Spontaneity [. . .] is discovered not
through action but through refraining from ones
habitual action and discovering what happens next.

Stephen Mitchell
Can Love Last? (2002)

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Rilke on

various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my
mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to
form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature,
and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I
mean Negative Capability, when a man is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

John Keats
2
 Letter to George and Thomas Keats (1817)

We may be able to tolerate, and even enjoy our own

mess, but nothing tests our feeling for other people
more than our feelings about their mess. Indeed,
our relationship to what we think of as the other
persons disorder, or their disordering of us, is a
picture, a synecdoche of our relationship to them.

Adam Phillips
Promises, Promises (2001)

ART AND LITERATURE

The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food,
you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you
laugh, make you cry, make you connect make you love
are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras.

Barack Obama
The finished artwork is the death mask of the idea.

Paula Rabinowitz
They Must Be Represented (1994)

All art is ultimately social: that which agitates and that

which prepares the mind for slumber. The writer is
deceived who thinks that he has some other choice. The
question is not whether one will make a social statement
in ones work but only what the social statement will say,
for if it says anything at all, it will be social.

3
 Lorraine Hansberry
Toward a New Romanticism (1959)

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The

artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The
novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Writing, reading, or teaching art is like passing the gift
of some inexhaustible disruption from hand to hand.
Fred Moten
Words Dont Go There (2004)


The artist [. . .] must drive to the heart of every answer and
expose the question that the answer hides.

James Baldwin
The Creative Process (1962)

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-
read it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative
reader, is a re-reader.

Vladimir Nabokov
Good Readers and Good Writers (1948)

If the book we are reading doesnt shake us awake like
a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first
place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it?
4
Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at
all; and such books as make us happy we could, if need
be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those
books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and
distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better
than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe
to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka
Letter to Oskar Pollak (1904)

If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic

heritage and tell how things really are, it must
abandon a realism that only aids the faade in its
work of camouflage by reproducing it. The
reification of all relationships between individuals,
which transforms their human qualities into
lubricating oil for the smooth running of the
machinery, the universal alienation and self-
alienation, needs to be called by name, and the novel
is qualified to do so as few other art form.

Theodore Adorno
The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel (1954)

The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical

passage often depends on the intellective comprehension
of its function in a whole that is not present; the
purportedly immediate experience itself depends on what
goes beyond pure immediacy. The ideal perception of
5
artworks would be that in which what is mediated
becomes immediate; navet is the goal, not the origin.

Theodor Adorno
Aesthetic Theory (1970)

6
LOVE COURSE
The people who love only once in their lives are really the
shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their
fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of
imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what
consistency is to the life of the intellect simply a
confession of failure.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

It is not in craving after ready-made, complete and

finished things that love finds its meaning but in
the urge to participate in the becoming of such
things.

Zygmunt Bauman
Liquid Love (2003)

How many times have I asked my own students to

explain why, when there are so many people, only
one plot counts as life (first comes love, then . . .)?
Those who dont or cant find their way in that story
the queers, the single, the something else can
become so easily unimaginable, even often to
themselves. Yet it is hard not to see lying about
everywhere the detritus and the amputations that
come from attempts to fit into the fold; meanwhile, a
lot of world-building energy atrophies. Rethinking
intimacy calls out not only for redescription but for
transformative analyses of the rhetorical and
material conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies
to thrive in the minds and on the bodies of subjects
7
while, at the same time, attachments are developing
that might redirect the different routes taken by
history and biography.

Lauren Berlant
Intimacy (1998)

To be in love is like going out-

side to see what kind of day

it is.
Robert Creeley
The Business (1955)

To think of the world as organized around the

impersonality of the structures and practices that
conventionalize desire, intimacy, and even ones own
personhood was to realize how uninevitable the
experience of being personal, of having personality, is. [. .
.] Attachments are made not by will, after all, but by an
intelligence after which we are always running. (Its not
just Hey, you! but Wait up!) This lagging and sagging
relation to attachment threatens to make us feel
vertiginously formless, except that normative conventions
and our own creative repetitions are there along the way
to quell the panic we might feel at the prospect of
becoming exhausted or dead before we can make sense of
ourselves. In other words, the anxiety of formlessness
makes us awfully teachable, for a minute. To the degree
that the conventional forms of the social direct us to
recognize only some of our attachments as the core of who
we are and what we belong to, ones relation to
attachment is impersonal. To belong to the normal world
8
is to misrecognize only these modes of intelligibility as
expressing ones true self. It brings out my queerness to
think of living less as self-extension than as a process that
interferes with the drama of the self. You will note that I
am talking about impersonality not as the opposite of the
personal say, as structure or power but as one of
its conditions.

Lauren Berlant
Two Girls, Fat and Thin (2002)

9
EMOTIONOLOGY COURSE

Rationality is a very emotional thing. Rationality

has an affect.

Julie Ellison
Catos Tears (1999)

The self, in fact, seems quite capable of entertaining more

than one emotion at a time. None of the emotions
excludes the possibility of feeling many other
concurrently, even their opposites. The oxymorons of
poetic discourse are thus more than figures of speech, O
hateful love, O dull surprise, O attentive reader! It may
also be the case that simultaneously experienced emotions
compound in such a way that, say, joy and regret produce
something that is neither quite joyful regret nor regretful
joy but a vectored product of each.

William Ian Miller

Humiliation (1995)

A graduate student of mine from Korea once gave

me two masks with wildly happy eyes and broad
smiles. These masks, she explained, were used by
Korean peasants when confronting their landlord on
specified occasions; holding the smiling masks over
their faces, they were free to hurl insults and bitter
complaints at him. The masks paid the emotional
respects due the landlord and left the peasants free
to say and feel what they liked.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

10
 The Managed Heart (1979)

In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style

of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way
that loving or hating wallpaper is not a part of
producing wallpaper. Seeming to love the job
becomes part of the job; and actually trying to love
it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in
this effort.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

The Managed Heart (1979)

An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like

somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he
wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's
sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has
on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of
goodwill without goodwills real spirit, it messes with our
heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in
cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It
makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and
angry and scared. It causes despair.

David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)

In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man muses on the

episode in Remembrance of Things Past in which
the servant Franoise, who feels no sympathy for
11
her real-life pregnant kitchen maid, sobs over the
medical book that describes her pains. The
challenge of the scene is its implication that in order
to be able to feel for the maid, Franoise needs to see
her as something in a book. Intruigued by similar
episodes, Rousseau protests that such people only
fancy themselves sympathetic. There is a type that
weeps at a tragedy, yet as never had any pity for
the suffering. Yet he goes on to grant this type a
pervasive normalcy: ultimately, were all this type.

Rei Terada
Feeling in Theory (2001)

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987)

12
UTOPIA
Reality testing is far more than an intellectual or cognitive
function. It may be understood more comprehensively as
the experiential testing of fantasy its potential and
suitability for actualizaiton and the testing of actuality
its potential for encompassing it in, and penetrating it
with, ones fantasy life. We deal with the task of a
reciprocal transposition.

Hans Loewald
Psychoanalysis as an Art (1975)

Suspicion is a philosophy of hope. It makes us

believe that there is something to know and
something worth knowing.

Adam Phillips
Monogamy (1996)
Freedom [. . .] cannot be defined in advance, let alone
exemplified: if you know already what your longed-for
exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the
suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom
after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of
sullying an open future with our own deformed and
repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat
to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity. All
authentic Utopias have obscurely felt this deeper figural
difficulty and structural contradiction.

Frederic Jameson
Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism (1994)

13
POLITICS
To be at home in the world we need to keep it
inhospitable.

Adam Phillips
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1994)

There is tenderness only in the coarsest

demand: that no one shall go hungry
anymore.
Theodore Adorno
Minima Moralia (1951)

A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of

happiness must be chronically unhappy.

Marshall Sahlins
Utilitarianism (2002)

A shared lie is an incomparably more effective bond for a

group than the truth. [. . .] When, for example, the Leader
is caught with his pants down, the solidarity of the group
is strengthened by the subjects common disavowal of the
misfortune that laid bare the Leaders failure or
impotence. [. . .] Perhaps one should reread Hans
Christian Andersens The Emperors New Clothes along
these lines: of course everybody knew that the emperor
was naked, yet it was precisely the disavowal of this fact
that held the subjects together by stating this reality, the
unfortunate child effectively dissolved the social link.
14
 Slavoj Zizek
The Metastases of Enjoyment (2006)

In the Vietnamese language, the word I (toi) means

your servant; there is no I as such. When you talk
to someone, you establish a relationship.

Patricia Williams
The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991)


While many European constitutions and the European
Convention on Human Rights guarantee everyone the
right to an education, the right to health care and even the
right to a job or welfare payments, our Constitution does
not. Our Bill of Rights guarantees the individuals right to
be free of Government intrusions, not the individuals
entitlements to Government support. The Supreme Court
has uniformly rejected all claims to constitutional
entitlements.

Patricia Williams
The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991)

Yet, after everything else, there remains the basic
core of socialism so deep in Western culture, the
idea, the moral passion, that it is truly intolerable
and more than a little fantastic that men should not
live in economic equality and in liberty.

Norman Mailer
David Riesman Reconsidered (1959)

15
The child must learn to bear frustration; the adult
must learn not to.

Adam Phillips
Terrors and Experts (1997)

A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art

is possible only to those whose lives do not put such
a strain on them that in their spare time they want
relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously.
The whole sphere of cheap commercial
entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces
relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested.
Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within
the psychological household of the masses to spare
them the effort of that participation (even in
listening or observation) without which there can be
no receptivity to art. On the other hand, the stimuli
they provide permit an escape from the boredom of
mechanized labor.

Theodor Adorno
On Popular Music (1941)

16
EXTRA
A jug full of sharpened pencils and no pens tells me
that he prefers to erase error and anticipates its
reliable arrival.
Christopher Bollas
Being a Character (1992)

A mule is another matter. [. . .] He is used with the

gratuitous sort of toughness an American policeman
uses against anyone (except the right people) who
happens to fall into his power: and this in part for
the same reasons: get hard before the victim does;
or before, in the case of the mule, he gets stubborn or
tricky.

James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1942)

Adam Jernigan, ..03

Quotables
Perhaps you and I have this in common: rhetorically we privilege indolence, but we both really
like to work (Maggie Nelson to Wayne Koestenbaum, 2006)

http://www.phnet.fi/public/mamaa1/quotesnf.htm

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in
words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words (Ursula K. Le Guin,
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969))

It is not asking enough of the theater when one demands from it only perception,
knowledge, informative illustrations of reality. Our theater must stimulate the pleasure
in knowing, must organize the excitement of the process of changing reality. Our
17
spectators have not only to hear how Prometheus was unbound, but must themselves
learn the pleasure they may have in liberating him.
Bertolt Brecht

Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred. (Baldwin)

To dream is to be dreamed is to be part of a dreaming (Bollas, Cracking Up, 3).

We cohere as intensity, we disseminate as association (Bollas, Cracking Up, 57).

participating in democracy requires staking ones life on the good faith of others
(Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American
Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 18).
Writing, reading, or teaching art is like passing the gift of some inexhaustible disruption from hand to hand. Fred
Moten with Charles Henry Rowell, Words Dont Go There: An Interview with Fred Moten, Callaloo 27:4
(2004), 961.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and
being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad
petty, unsexy ways every day. (David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement
Speech, 4/21/2005)

If things aren't funny then they're exactly what they are; and then they're
like a long dental appointment. - Murray Burns

So, in my case, in order to become a moral human being, whatever that may be, I have to hang out with publicans
and sinners, whores and junkies, and stay out of the temple where they told us nothing but lies anyway.
James Baldwin, A Rap on Race

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they
respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour
would appear not to know that the poor exist. / They are aided enormously in this
blindness by the peculiar self-deception the American poor white applies to his own
poverty. His poverty afflicts him with an eerie and paralyzing self-contempt, but he
denies it: poverty is meant for niggers. (Baldwin, To Crush a Serpent, in The Cross of
Redemption: Uncollected Writings, 161).

And yet, of course, we are all fundamentalists about something (Adam Phillips, On
Balance, 51).

The powerless, by definition, can never be racists, for they can never make the world
pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor that makes them fanatics
or revolutionaries, or both; whereas those in power can be urbane and charming and
invite you to those homes which they know you will never own (James Baldwin

DuBois revising his notion that the great problem of the 20 century would be the
th

problem of the color line: I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great
problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the
problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it

18
. . . the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price
of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of [=in] the majority of their fellowmen (
W.E.B. DuBois, Fifty Years After in the 1950s, i.e. 1953)

I do believe that extraordinary events can jar the needle arm, jump tracks, rip across incarnations, and
deposit a life into a groove that was not prepared to receive it. (Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine, 127).

Our central task in the next future should be in my opinion the redefinition of the very
idea of well being (Franco Berardi, Ten Years After Seattle)

Sometimes lost is where you need to be. Just because you dont know your direction doesnt
mean you dont have one (Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 8)

Theory is the only way we know to overcome static self-consciousness and to recontextualize
ourselves (Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura, 13)

The artist [. . .] must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that the
answer hides.1 One of the reasons why all philosophical conclusions will inevitably be
shattered by questions arising is that, as with all forms of thought, the answers we live
by always raise questions that will inevitably carry us into new forms of knowledge
(Bollas, The Infinite Question, 152).

Baldwin on psychoanalysis: No ones navel is worth that much attention. 2

If music gives every impression of being exhausted, then the possibilities for
combining sound and voice hardly seem have to begun to be investigated (K-Punk)

[Y]ou become what you hate (James Baldwin with Jordan Elgrably and George Plimpton,
The Art of Fiction LXXVIII: James Baldwin (1984), in Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt,
eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 238).

There are days you would rather blow up a police station than sit at a typewriter. And
then you have to do something difficult, you have to accept that for you to blow up the
police station, which you are not going to do at any rate, would not be the real
application of your responsibility. So that you have to think yourself beyond the details
of the day of disaster, which exists daily, then react again to your own reaction and try
to find a way to engrave it in stone, to make certain that it will not be forgotten (James
Baldwin with Wolfgang Binder, James Baldwin, an Interview (1980), in Fred L. Standley and
Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi), 200).

After Baldwin objected to the term looter to describe what was happening after the
assassination of Martin Luther King, and after he was asked, How would you define
somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?
Baldwin answered, Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a
cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is
looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesnt really want the TV set. Hes
saying screw you. Its a judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. Everyone
knows thats a crock of shit. He doesnt want the TV set. He doesnt want it. He wants
1
James Baldwin, The Creative Process (1962), The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (New
York: St. Martins, 1985), 316.
2
Fern Maja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), 27.

19
to let you know hes there. The question Im trying to raise is a very serious question.
The mass media television and all the major news agencies endlessly use that word
looter. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the
American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us.
And no one has seriously tried to get to where the trouble is. After all, youre accusing
a captive population who has been robbed of everything by looting. I think its obscene.
(James Baldwin, How Can We Get the Black People to Cool It? Esquire lxx:1 (July
1968), 51).

And this is what Baldwin said after he asserted that local community control not only of
the school system but of the police force was necessary: Look, we live in Harlem, lets
say, or we live in Watts. The mother who comes down there with his cap and his gun in
his holster, he doesnt know what my day is like. He doesnt know anything about me
at all. Hes scared shitless of me. Now, what the fuck is he doing there? All he can
do is shoot me. Hes a hired concentration-camp keeper. I can police my own
community far better than you ever will. Because you cant. Its not in you to do it. I
know why somebody there is upset when he is upset. The cats were right when they
were told by somebody, some cop, some leader, some mayor to go home. They said you
go home, we are home, baby. We can take care of ourselves. This is the message were
trying to get across; we dont need you to take care of us. Good Lord, we cant afford to
have you take care of us any longer! Look what youve done. To us. And to
yourselves, in taking care of us. (James Baldwin, How Can We Get the Black People
to Cool It? Esquire lxx:1 (July 1968), 116).

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it. A good reader, a
major reader, an active and creative reader, is a re-reader." (Nabokov, Good Readers
and Good Writers, Lectures on Literature).

regarding holding hands: This isnt a pass, he said quietly. Its just a Braille the
sighted have worked out for things theyve realized they can see (Rona Jaffe, The Best
of Everything, 179).

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. (The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz)

we can never be born enough (e.e. cummings)

epicures in kissing (Freud, Three Essays)

love is where you find it (James Baldwin with Richard Goldstein, Go the Way Your Blood
Beats: An Interview with James Baldwin (1984), in Quincy Troupe, James Baldwin: The
Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 180).

Im going to help you. I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people. (-
Holly Golightly)

For babies, according to one of the sexual theories of children, are acquired by eating
and are born through the bowels (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 52).

sex without organs (Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man, 98).

20
Kids got it too good now, he complained. TV, bubble gum, plenty to eat. Nothing
bad ever happens to them except they die from an overdose of heroin or else they go to
jail for shooting a cop or a cop shoots them to an early grave. Yeah. Kids got it too
good now (Charles Wright, The Wig, 59).

O teach me how I should forget to think (Shakespearean insult).

bring the knowledge of totality (Barbara Foley, Theory into Practice: An Interview
with Barbara Foley, Jeffrey J. Williams, ed., Critics at Work, 177).

To tell everything is a very effective means of keeping secrets. Secrets hidden at the
heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to light, as, on some unlucky high
noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat
even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and
proves that the eye cannot be trusted (Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man, 214).

on an childs relation to his parent/elder: he will not begin to doubt anything she says
until he begins to doubt everything (Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man, 146)

on childraising: Harriet does not so much believe in protecting children as she does in
helping them to build a foundation on which they can build and build again, each time
lifes high-flying steel ball knocks down everything they have built (Baldwin, Going to
Meet the Man, 145).

I think you owe it to me, as my friend to fight me, to let me get away with nothing, to
force me to be clear, to force me to be honest, to allow me to take no refuge in rage or in
despair, or in the peculiar form of complacency sometimes known as Negro militancy.
And, of course, I owe you the same (James Baldwin, Dialogue in Black and White,
Quincy Troupe, ed., James Baldwin: The Legacy, 148).

on American friendship: The Americans on the boat did not seem to be so bad, but I
was fascinated, after such a long absence from it, by the nature of their friendliness. It
was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any
possibility of friendship. [. . .] Once we had become Pete or Jane or Bill all that
could decently be known was known and any suggestion that there might be further
depths, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation of that privacy
which did not, paradoxically, since they trusted so little, seem to exist among
Americans (Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man, 159-60).

Even before I got myself there, New York had become a symbol of my liberated self,
and I knew that it was in a kind of turbulence that that self must attempt to find itself
(John Rechy, City of Night, 20).

All of youth is beauty if one defines beauty as that which precedes

blemish: but blemish is character, and a pretty brow without the
scars of character signifies only youth, and not proper beauty, which
is banded with marks and acts. (Cynthia Ozick, Trust)

21
Response to an interviewers query about whether she thinks of herself as a feminist:
Thats one of the few labels Im content with. But even so . . . is it a noun? I doubt it.
(Susan Sontag)

Of L.A.: The invitation to rot obliviously, to die without feeling it, to grow old looking
young, is everywhere in this glorious, sunny, many-colored city (Rechy, City of Night,
177).

When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and
suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it (Updike, Rabbit, Run 230).

What psychoanalysis is looking for in an active subject is precisely the fundamental

fantasy which sustains his disavowed passivity (Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, 117).

Im not the type that has to see my face in the kitchen floor modern mother
ambivalent about the gendered distribution of labor, cited in Hochschild, The Second
Shift, 248.

possibilize the impossible (Glyn Daly, Introduction: Risking the Impossible,

Conversations with Zizek, 13).

We know we should all go out in the streets, but when we get there, there's no there there.
(Brian Holmes, Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power

Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism

that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. [. . .] The
left should demand more globalization not less. [. . .] Digital communications,
pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on that either effect us all
and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. [. . .] Capitalism
typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled
by it (Glyn Daly, Introduction: Risking the Impossible, Conversations with Zizek, 16-
17).

the body is a blind unsentient barrow of deluded clay (Faulkner, Absalom 114)

The slave resisted his desocialization and forced service in countless ways, only one of
which, rebellion, was not subtle. Against all odds he strove for some measure of
regularity and predictability in his social life. Because his kin relations were
illegitimate, they were all the more cherished. Because he was considered degraded, he
was all the more infused with the yearning for dignity. Because of his formal isolation
and liminality, he was acutely sensitive to the realities of community. The fierce love of
the slave mother for her child is attested in every slaveholding society; everywhere the
slaves zest for life and fellowship confounded the slaveholder class; and in all
slaveholding societies the existential dignity of the slave belied the slaveholders denial
of its existence (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 337-
8).

THOUGHT

The means by which opinion can become knowledge, is the relation of thought to its
object. By satiating itself with its object, thought transforms and divests itself of the

22
element of arbitrariness. Thinking is no mere subjective activity but, as philosophy at
its height recognized, essentially the dialectical process between subject and object in
which both poles first mutually determine the other (Adorno, Opinion Delusion
Society 231).

Reasons orientation leads the subject away from himself rather than reinforcing
him in his ephemeral convictions (Adorno, Opinion Delusion Society 234)

LOVE

There are people who would never have fallen in love if they had never
heard of love. (Francois de la Rouchefoucauld)
SEXUALITY

There is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself, and a
great many people who came out of the closet should reconsider (James Baldwin,
Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood, Baldwin: Collected Essays, 827).

What we should seek in a committed erotic relationship is primacy in another persons

erotic life, not exclusivity (Savage Love, 89)

Sexuality isnt always or only about sexuality (Warner, Publics and Counterpublics 221)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Martha Reganhart was sure you could tell something about a mans character from the
way he carved a turkey. If he twittered and made excuses and finally hacked the bird to
bits, he was Oedipal, wilted under responsibility, and considered himself a kind of
aristocrat in the first place voil, Dick Reganhart. If he made a big production out of it,
clanging armor and sharpening knives, performing the ritual and commenting on it at
the same time, he was either egomaniacal or alcoholic, or in certain spectacular cases
her fathers, for instance both. Of course if the man just answered the need, if he stood
up, executed his historical function, and then sat down and ate, chances were he was
dutiful, steady, and boring. That was her grandfather, who had had to carve through
many bleak Oregon Thanksgivings, after her father had packed his valise, looted the
liquor cabinet, and left that eloquent, fateful note. (Philip Roth, Letting Go 207).

CLASS

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

She had so many children, she didnt know what to do.
But try as she would she could never detect
which was the cause and which the effect.
(Piet Hein, cited in The Body Remembers 37)

Now that she was [an] heir, [she] detested to hear sums of money mentioned,
especially small sums (Cather, The Professors House 34).

23
Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded (Karl
Marx)

The cultural elements introduced nowadays [. . .] are either labeled cultural goods [.
. .] spiritual contents administered like medicines [. . .], delivered to your home like
commodities [. . .] or they are scraps from the bourgeois kitchen that now end up
down below at a reduced price (Kracauer, The Salaried Masses 103).

In the Vietnamese language, the word I (toi) . . . means your servant; there is no I
as such. When you talk to someone you establish a relationship (Patricia Williams,
The Alchemy of Race and Rights 62, citing Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh, The
Raft Is Not the Shore 38)

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull,
whey then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also
be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be,
write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like
ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than
ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us
(Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience 69, citing Steiner, Language
and Silence 87, citing Kafka).

If capitalist society is grounded upon property relations, these relations are wed to
monogamy, family, and the sexual strictures which maintain them. It is yet to be
established that sexual life can be promiscuously altered without affecting the psychic
real estate of capitalism. (Mailer, Advertisements for Myself 362).

Little is gained and much is lost when we let a scorn for liberalism occlude the often
nuanced and conflicted work performed by political abstractions. This, I take it, is the
virtue of Fredric Jamesons insistence that even the most ideological of forms are at one
and the same time utopian: false promises, however insidious, carefully mark out the
possibility conditions of resolutely historical ideals. With this in mind, I have chosen to
focus less on the extent to which the New Deal consistently failed to realize some of its
most socially progressive promises than on how, from the start, even its most utopian
ambitions marked a considerable reconfiguration of the kind of liberalism North
describes above (Szalay, New Deal Modernism 23).

Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from
infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our
parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo
of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from the past. It is
not only the dead weight of the institutions of the past but indeed the inefficient and
often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for
responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for out individual growth.
(Norman Mailer, The White Negro in Advertisements for Myself 345)

Lenin once remarked that socialism had to be built by people who were moulded by
capitalism. The truth is, people are only transformed when they participate in the
transformation of reality (Lkacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism 105).

24
Almost a punk or flaneur ethos: Each bedizened window, each gaudy empty display
evokes something in her that loved and understood the gaudy, the emptiness defined
her own emptiness and that in the faces flitting past her. She walked with a swagger
here, gazing boldly into those faces, always hoping to happen upon some violence, or to
be involved in some spectacular brawl (Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones 213).

Republican wedge politics: McCarthyism and militant anti-Communism were less a

reaction to the Soviet threat abroad or disloyalty and espionage at home than a political
wedge used by Republicans to fracture the New Deal coalition in the same way that
they would recapture power by demonizing liberalism in the 1980s (Dickstein,
Leopards in the Temple 7)

Althusser predicates neither the capitalists nor the managers but the functionaries as the
high priests of the ruling ideology (Lenin and Philosophy 133).

"It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."
Walter Benjamin

Might may not make right, but there is no right nation without might (Richard
Wright, I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me)

To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one
should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its
reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to
my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one
with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I
concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to
be in it (Butler, Gender Trouble xxvii)

All art is ultimately social: that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for
slumber. The writer is deceived who thinks that he has some other choice. The
question is not whether one will make a social statement in ones work but only what
the social statement will say, for if it says anything at all, it will be social (Lorraine
Hansberry, The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism, Black
Scholar 12:2 p.5). She notes that it is mistaken to presuppose that art which merely
accepts or affirms things as they are is not social statement (ibid p.4).

I believe in the truth of art and the art of truth and the most painful exigency of
cultural and social life will not be exempt from exploration by my mind or pen
(Lorraine Hansberry, The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,
Black Scholar 12:2 11).

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and react to the
miseries which afflict this world (Lorraine Hansberry, The Negro Writer and His
Roots: Toward a New Romanticism, Black Scholar 12:2 12).

If I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make on our own
system that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the
system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally
distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the
sociological, from the cultural to the political it would be the demand for full

25
employment, universal full employment around the globe (Jameson, The Politics of
Utopia).

What may be more difficult to deal with is the idea that the full employment of the
human race, a utopian lifting up of everyone on the globe into a minimal life-
satisfaction and consumption, might be a catastrophe of equal proportions. [. . .] Put
more simply and concretely, we have been accustomed to think of the destruction of
buildings and cities as some fundamental image of disaster and even of apocalypse.
What if, on the contrary, it were building itself, and the possibility of perpetual
construction, that was the real catastrophe? (Jameson, The Uses of Apocalypse 41).

There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry
anymore (Adorno, Minima Moralia 155-6). And this is precisely what can be said of
millions of fine Germans who never participated in the murder of the Jews (and of
homosexuals) but who failed to find the idea of the holocaust unbearable (Leo Bersani, Is
the Rectum a Grave? 201).

What more vigorous fillip could be given to the wallows of one bogged in the big
world than the example of life to all appearances inalienably realized in the little?
(Beckett, Murphy)

We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is major events which most determine a
person. He is more deeply and lastingly influenced by the tiny catastrophes of which
everyday existence is made up, and his fate is certainly linked predominantly to the
sequence of these miniature occurrences (Kracauer, The Salaried Masses 62).

Analysis [i.e. the critical or deconstructive element of psychoanalysis, the negative

hermeneutic] needs the fecund elaborations provided by free association [i.e. the
productive element of psychoanalysis, the positive hermeneutic], a movement away
from the latent unconscious, in order to suggest the secret subtext. To dismantle the
patient must construct. To find the truth all patients must lie (Bollas, Forces of Destiny
23)

Please do not understand me too quickly (Andre Gide)

Yet, after everything else, there remains the basic core of socialism so deep in
Western culture, the idea, the moral passion, that it is truly intolerable and more than
a little fantastic that men should not live in economic equality and in liberty. As
serious artistic expression is the answer to the meaning of life for a few, so the
passion for socialism is the only meaning I can conceive in the lives of those who are
not artists; if one cannot create works one may dream at least of an era when
humans create humans (Mailer, Advertisements for Myself 203)

As is so often the case with Sam these days, he cannot await their embrace with any
sure anticipation. Eleanor may be in the mood or Eleanor may not; there is no way he
can control the issue. It is depressing; Sam knows that he circles about Eleanor at such
times with the guilty maneuvers of a sad hound. Resent her as he must, be furious with
himself as he will, there is not very much he can do about it. (Mailer, Advertisements for
Myself 180)

26
It is not altogether perverse. If Eleanor causes him pain, it means after all that she is
alive for him. I have often observed that the reality of a person depends upon his
ability to hurt us (Mailer, Advertisements for Myself 182)

Like so many young men, he entertained the secret conceit that he was an
extraordinary lover. One cannot really believe this without supporting at the same time
the equally secret conviction that one is fundamentally inept (Mailer, Advertisements for
Myself 180)

Hip is but another name for lumpen (Jean Malaquais, Reflections on Hip, in Mailer,
Advertisements for Myself 359)

the chest-out, stomach-in, pinch-buttocks of the Star-Spangled Banner (Mailer,

Advertisements for Myself 364)

Is there nothing to remind us that the writer does not need to be integrated into his
society, and often works best in opposition to it? I would propose that the artist feels
most alienated when he loses the sharp sense of what he is alienated from. (Mailer,
Advertisements for Myself 188)

We learn by experience that we mean something other than what we thought we

meant (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.?)

BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS, MIDDLINGS

"The ending of the session which current technique makes into an

interruption that is determined purely by the clock and, as such, takes no
account of the thread of the subject's discourse plays the part of a
scansion which has the full value of an intervention by the analyst that is
designed to precipitate concluding moments (Lacan, Ecrits 209).

But all endings are also beginnings.

We just don't know it at the time.
(Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, pg. 1 line 3-4)

To be genial means [. . .] subjectively to achieve the objective. [. . .] Geniality [. . .] is

free, yet at the same time bears the feeling of necessity (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 171).
To be congenial is to do what is required by social mores, yet to do so out of the
freedom of subjective will. For Adorno, as for Kant, genius results from this same
dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity: it is the subjects pursuit of and
submission to objective necessity which yields the highest freedom.

interdetermination of feeling and thought: Feeling and understanding are not absolutely
different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms
of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of
sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from the relation to thought and turn a
blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the
sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about
historically and is revocable. Ration without mimesis is self-negating. Ends, the raison dtre
of raison, are qualitative, and mimetic power is effectively the power of qualitative distinction. [.
27
. .] The contemporary loss of experience may largely coincide with the bitter repression of
mimesis. [. . .] Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. (Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory 331)

Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger. [. . .] Now
that American hotels are decorated with abstract paintings la manire de . . . and
aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay
the price that it is no longer radical (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 29).

on the impersonality of emotion: Technological requirements drive out the

contingency of the individual who produces the work [and this too makes the work
more objective]. The same process that traditionalists scorn as the loss of soul is what
makes the artwork in its greatest achievements eloquent rather than merely the
testimony of something psychological or human, as the contemporary prattle goes. [. . .]
Emphatically modern art breaks out of the sphere of the portrayal of emotions and is
transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve [ not
portraying emotions but refracting or expressing the emotional climate or mood of a
particular sociohistorical situation] (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 60).

The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective
means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the faade
made up of classified data [i.e. that which the Culture Industry has pre-digested on our
behalf, assimilating the raw data of sense impressions under a concept, work which is
normally done by subjectivity], that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything
which breaches that faade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all
ready-made judgments and substitutes relatedness to the object [in Kant this had
constituted aesthetic experience proper] for the majority consensus of those who do not
even look at it, let alone think about it in other words, the objective itself. Just how
vacuous the formal objection to subjective relativity is, can be seen in the latters most
intimate field, aesthetic judgment. Anyone who, drawing on the strength of his precise
reaction to a work of art, has ever subjected himself in earnest to its discipline, to its
immanent formal law, the compulsion of its structure, will find that objections to the
merely subjective quality of his experience vanish like a pitiful illusion (Adorno,
Minima Moralia 84/69-70).

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work (Dialectic of

Enlightenment 123/137).

Pleasure hardens into boredom because, in order to remain pleasure, it must demand
no effort and thereby moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association (Dialectic of
Enlightenment 123/137).

The thought of happiness without power is unbearable, because only then would it
be true happiness (Dialectic of Enlightenment 154-5/172).

Where art is experienced purely aesthetically, it fails to be fully experienced even

aesthetically (Aesthetic Theory 131). Adornos formula might well be reversed in order
to stress the way in which, when art is experienced only transaesthetically, in the
apprehension of its truth content, this last is also missed, and its transaesthetic vocation
is itself lost to such experience (Jameson, Late Marxism 131)

28
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from personality. But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to
escape from these things. (T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Selected
Essays 10-11, cited in Jameson, Late Marxism 125). Here, the notion that objectivity gets
incorporated into subjectivity, and that poetry designates a Kantian disciplining of
subjectivity in order that one might relinquish oneself to the object, correlates with a
Leysian theory of the free subject as one who is maximally open to identification
(~Keatss notion of negative capability). But Eliots second sentence suggests that only
those who have a robust Hegelian subjectivity will desire or be able to appreciate a
Kantian experience of relinquishment. Kaja Silverman suggests as much in her essay
about how men get aligned ideologically with self-mastery and thus will be prone to
seek and derive a thrill from experiences of self-relinquishment. Jameson elaborates:
This concluding pointed sentence, of course, rechannels the significant anti-
subjectifying impulses of high modernism (shared by Adorno) into an equally period-
characteristic conservative disdain for the anonymous and inauthentic masses
(something that Adornos analysis of the so-called Culture Industry has often been
accused of as well) (Jameson, Late Marxism 125).

Truth is threatened only by the nave affirmation of cultural values that have become
unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy,
and so on terms that in themselves certainly refer to lofty ideas but that have lost
much of their scope along with their supporting foundations, due to social changes.
Furthermore, many of these concepts have acquired a bad aftertaste today, because they
unjustifiably deflect an inordinate amount of attention from the external damages of
society onto the private individual. Instances of such repression are common enough in
the fields of literature, drama, and music. They claim the status of high art while
actually rehearsing anachronistic forms that evade the pressing needs of our time
(Kracauer, The Mass Ornament 326).

Fashion effaces the intrinsic value of the things that come under its dominion by
subjecting the appearance of these phenomena to periodic changes that are not based on
any relation to the things themselves. The fickle dictates of fashion, which disfigure the
world, would be purely destructive in character if they did not confirm in however
low a realm the intimate human connectedness that even things can effectively come
to signify (Kracauer, The Mass Ornament 67).

But only those who leave for leavings sake are travelers; hearts tugging like balloons
(Baudelaire, The Voyage).

If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things really are, it must
abandon a realism that only aids the faade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it. The
reification of all relationships between individuals, which transforms their human
qualities into lubricating oil for the smooth running of the machinery, the universal
alienation and self-alienation, needs to be called by name, and the novel is qualified to
do so as few other art form (Adorno, The Position of the Narrator in the
Contamporary Novel, (1954), 32).

The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical passage often depends on the
intellective comprehension of its function in a whole that is not present; the
purportedly immediate experience itself depends on what goes beyond pure
immediacy. The ideal perception of artworks would be that in which what is mediated

29
becomes immediate; navet is the goal, not the origin (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 338).
This begins to explain even if it doesnt justify why I seem so cold-hearted. Because
I believe that emotions and esp. positive emotions like affection and pleasure need
be mediated by intellection.

The identification carried out by the subject was ideally not that of making the artwork
like himself, but rather that of making himself like the artwork. This identification
constituted aesthetic sublimation; Hegel named this comportment freedom to the
object. He thus paid homage to the subject that becomes subject in spiritual experience
through self-relinquishment, the opposite of the philistine demand that the artwork
give him something (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 17).

A Beethoven symphony as a whole, spontaneously experienced, can never be

appropriated. The man who in the subway triumphantly whistles loudly the theme of
the finale of Brahms First is already primarily involved with its debris (On the Fetish
Character of Music 281).

Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit the beginning and the
end of each part must beat out the standard scheme. [. . .] Complications have no
consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations
occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing
fundamentally novel will be introduced (Adorno, On Popular Music 18).

A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose
lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both
boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial
entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and
pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological
household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening
or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art. On the other hand, the
stimuli they provide permit an escape from the boredom of mechanized labor (On
Popular Music 38).

The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better
(Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 14)

The new listeners resemble the mechanics who are simultaneously specialized and
capable of applying their special skills to unexpected places outside their skilled trades.
But this despecialization only seems to help them out of the system. The more easily
they meet the demands of the day, the more rigidly they are subordinated to that
system. [. . .] The possibility of individual shelter and of a security which is, as
always, questionable, obstructs the view of a change in the situation in which one
seeks shelter. [. . .] One feels that he is simultaneously betraying the possible and
being betrayed by the existent (Adorno, On the Fetish Character of Music and the
Regression of Listening 294).

All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and

through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property
(appropriation) is a precondition to production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap
from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property (Marx, Grundrisse 87).

30
The world has long dreamt of that of which it had only to have a clear idea to
possess (Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843).

A jug full of sharpened pencils and no pens [. . .] tells me [. . .] that he prefers to erase
error and anticipates its reliable arrival (Bollas, Being a Character 55).

On the gendering of excess: As it is said of Chimena in the Romances of the Cit: How
beautiful she was in tears. On the other hand, a mans lack of self-control is either ugly
and repugnant, or else ludicrous. Children, e.g., burst into tears on the most trifling
occasions, and this makes us smile. On the other hand, tears in the eyes of an austere
man who keeps a stiff upper lip under the stress of deep feeling convey a totally
different impression of emotion (Hegel, Aesthetics: The Ideal in The Hegel Reader
433).

What kind of crime is the robbing of a bank compared to the foundation of a bank?
(Brecht, ?)

A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class

with private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all (John Dewey).
Hence the need for Spivakian speaking-to qua unlearning.

The child must learn to bear frustration, the adult must learn not to (Phillips, Terror
and Experts xi).

He did not put his hat on right away. First he fingered it, deciding how his going
would be, how to make it an exit not an escape. [. . .] Sweet, she thought. He must
think I cant bear to hear him say it. That [. . .] goodbye would break me to pieces.
Aint that sweet (165).

Anything dead coming back to life hurts (Amy to Sethe in Beloved 35).

beaucoup fantastic (Play It As It Lays 37).

A mule is another matter. [. . .] He is used with the gratuitous sort of toughness an

American policeman uses against anyone (except the right people) who happens to fall
into his power: and this in part for the same reasons: get hard before the victim does;
or before, in the case of the mule, he gets stubborn or tricky (Agee, Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men 189).

The good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the working class [include]
winning a truly dangerous fist fight at the age of eight or getting sex before fourteen,
dead drunk by sixteen, whipped half to death by your father, making it in rumbles with
a proud street gang, living at war with the educational system, knowing how to snicker
at the employer from one side of the mouth, riding a bike with no hands, entering the
Golden Gloves, doing a hitch in the Navy, or a stretch in the stockade, and with it all,
their sense of lan, of morale, for buddies are the manna of the working class: there is a
God-given cynical indifference to school, morality, and job. The working class is loyal to
friends, not ideas (Mailer, Armies of the Night 258)

31
the beast with two backs (Iagos phrase for lovemaking in Othello)

nothing
I have done

is made up of
nothing

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All 104 conceding the impossibility of eradicating all
symbolic residues.

His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess that hating them
would have consumed him. [. . .] He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men
[. . .] but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression (The Bluest Eye 150).

Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb. [. . .] Anger is better. There is a sense of being
in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth (The Bluest Eye 50).

When you see a bad psychological drama that doesnt work you say, I didnt like the
play. When you see a bad political play that doesnt work you say, I dont like
political theater (Tony Kushner in Conversation 191).

Were at a point in American political history where its much easier to say Im a
homosexual than it is to say Im a socialist (Tony Kushner in Conversation 155).

There are a lot of nice people who cant get their shoes tied in the morning, and not
being able to dress yourself is in its own way an act of resistance to capitalism (Tony
Kushner in Conversation 64).

I firmly believe in using the Holocaust as model, promiscuously. I think we should be

very liberal with likening people to Nazis. I wrote a play about this [A Bright Room
Called Day] (Tony Kushner in Conversation 54).

As long as there are decent people in the world, theres going to be a demand for
socialism (Tony Kushner in Conversation 37).

I remember talking to a Mormon who said he was retired and did Temple work. It
turned out that Temple work meant being baptized in other peoples stead. That
meant he was being washed on the nipples and genitals hundreds of times a day so that
other peoples souls could be sealed for all eternity. That sounds more fun than most
religious vocations (interviewer Adam Mars Jones, Tony Kushner in Conversation 25).

no politics without hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
151)

Let us begin from an empirical given: police intervention in public spaces does not
consist primarily in the interpellation of demonstrators, but in the breaking up of
demonstrations. The police is not the law interpellating individuals (as in Althussers
Hey, you there!) unless one confuses it with religious subjectification. It is, first of all,
a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isnt: Move
along! There is nothing to see here! The police says that there is nothing to see on a
road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating
is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in
32
transforming this space of moving along into a space for the appearance of a subject:
i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring that space, of what
there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein (Jacques Rancire, Ten Theses
on Politics 10).

the good old American anxiety strata the urban middle-class with their proliferated
monumental adenoidal resentments, their secret slavish love for the oncoming
hegemony of the computer and the suburb (Mailer, Armies of the Night 34).

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What
they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their
lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the
life of the intellect simply a confession of failure (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian
Gray 43).

Perhaps by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted the passion itself.
Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations (Oscar
Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H., in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
212-3).

pleasure as a gift to the other: He felt that she decided, long ago, precisely where the
limits were, how much she could afford to give, and he had not been able to make her
give a penny more. She made love to him as though it were a technique of pacification,
a means to some other end. However she might wish to delight him, she seemed
principally to wish to exhaust him; and to remain, above all, herself on the banks of
pleasure the while she labored mightly to drown him in the tide. His pleasure was
enough for her, she seemed to say, his pleasure was hers. But he wanted her pleasure to
be his, for them to drown in the tide together (Baldwin, Another Country 171-2).

Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to

be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an
array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration,
domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger,
differentiation, and so on. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas
for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different
body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number
of combinations the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities makes this an
enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships,
different configurations of connections, between self and others" (Steven Mitchell, Relational
Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 91)

a synopsis of envy, esp. of penis envy: She has seen it and knows that she is without it
and wants to have it (Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love 177).

Freuds name for woman: the little creature without a penis (Freud, Sexuality and the
Psychology of Love 191)

on projection, referring to how paranoiacs project e.g. their own aggression or jealousy
onto others, but less onto any old others than onto objects who are themselves already
the carriers of those attributes: They do not project it into the sky, so to speak, where
there is nothing of the sort already (Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love 154).

33
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
(Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love 52)

Baldwin on the American hug: the oddly truncated, shrinking, American embrace
(Baldwin, Another Country 239-40).

Whenever he said [. . .] he wanted me to [. . .] settle down [. . .] I thought of the

sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond (Giovannis Room 22).

You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in
prison in order to avoid being hit by a car (Giovannis Room 117).

Conceptions just a shot in the dark (Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives 3).

Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of
safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion.
Artists are here to disturb the peace (Conversations with James Baldwin 21).

It is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream

he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free he has
set himself free for higher dreams, for greater privileges (Baldwin, Nobody Knows
My Name 209).

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has
lived through. Most people had not lived [. . .] through any of their terrible events.
They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in
a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him
this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life
(Baldwin, Another Country 128)

You and I have hurt each other many times. [. . .] And wasnt it because just
because we loved love each other? (Cass to Richard in Baldwins Another
Country 107).

The first relief from tension in the enchanted game of love usually comes when the
lovers call each other by their first names. This act stands as a solitary pledge that the
yesterdays of the two individuals will be incorporated in their today (Bauman,
Liquid Love 19). ~taking a photograph, having a dinner party, moving in together.

It is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its
meaning but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things (Bauman,
Liquid Love 6).

[Vivaldo] had often thought of his loneliness [. . .] as a condition which testified to his
superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely
and unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with
which to enter it (Baldwin, Another Country 60). These character types are dialectical
opposites. Each takes a defensive approach to solitude: the one embracing solitude as a
defense to relationality, the other avoiding solitude as a defense to confronting the self.
You have to enter solitude in order to break out of loneliness.

34
The dreamwork of normalcy is the realism of fantasy. The couple is supposed to
merge fantasy with the real without violating either (Berlant, The Sublime and the
Pretty 11).

Rationality is a very emotional thing. Rationality has an affect (Julie Ellison, Catos
Tears 189).

The road to hell is paved with good intentions (?)

There is a big secret about sex: most people dont like it (Leo Bersani, [1987])

This world is more like the Beyond of Bed, Bath, and Beyond: a space where sex
takes place vaguely defaced by sweat or steam (Berlant, The Sublime and the Pretty
8).

While many European constitutions and the European Convention on Human Rights
guarantee everyone the right to an education, the right to health care and even the right
to a job or welfare payments, our Constitution does not. / Our Bill of Rights guarantees
the individuals right to be free of Government intrusions, not the individuals
entitlements to Government support. The Supreme Court has uniformly rejected all
claims to constitutional entitlements (Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
25).

Emmanual Levinas has taught us, wisely, that the question to be posed is simple but
unanswerable: Who are you? The violent response to the Other knows that it does
not know, and does not want to not know. It wants to shore up what it takes for
granted and expunge what threatens it with not knowing, what forces it to reconsider
the presuppositions of its world and their contingency and malleability. The
nonviolent response lives with its not knowing in the face of the Other, since
sustaining the bond which the question opens to is finally more valuable than
having a surety in advance about what defines the human and what its future life will
most likely be (Butler, Women and Social Transformation 17)

The self, in fact, seems quite capable of entertaining more than one emotion at a time.
None of the emotions excludes the possibility of feeling many other concurrently, even
their opposites. The oxymorons of poetic discourse are thus more than figures of
speech, O hateful love, O dull surprise, O attentive reader! It may also be the case that
simultaneously experienced emotions compound in such a way that, say, joy and regret
produce something that is neither quite joyful regret nor regretful joy but a vectored
product of each (William Ian Miller, Humiliation 133)

It is not easy to separate out the pure feeling of a single emotion from the emotions
that help cause it or are felt simultaneously with it or are felt very quickly after the onset
of it. The literature, for instance, often discusses shame along with anger, and
humiliation and embarrassment with rage and indignation. As a preliminary matter it
would seem obvious that the constellation of emotions surrounding any particular
emotion depends on the details of the eliciting conditions of that emotion. Whether
rage rather than despair attends humiliation will depend on who or what is perceived
to have caused it, or on who or what can plausibly be blamed for causing it, and on
what the possibilities of remedying it may be. We should expect rather wide-ranging
cultural variation, depending on the rules and practices regarding blame, the

35
permissible objects of blame, the extent to which blame is appropriately focused inward
or projected onto others [attributional style: inward v. outward, global v. specific,
enduring v. transient]. Humiliation would thus yield different accompanying
emotions, which would vary according to how cultural norms and dispositional traits
enable people to recognize certain justice in their own discomfiture. These practices
will be intimately connected with cultural rules governing honor and the intensity with
which honor is held as a value; they will also be tied up with the various styles in which
remedial work is accomplished, whether, for instance, vengeance is preferred to
apology and forgiveness, whether ready-made rituals exist to do the work of
ameliorating the state of humiliation or of objectifying the feeling so as either to get rid
of it or to preserve it (William Ian Miller, Humiliation 159-60)

Im reminded of Victor Turners etymology of the word experience, where he derives

it from the Indo-European per-, meaning to attempt, venture, or risk, which also yields
the word peril (Bollas, Freely Associated 13).

The [finished] work is the death mask of the idea (Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be
Represented 2)

She had often made him feel that when she straightened his tie, she straightened much
more (West, Miss Lonelyhearts 11).

It is the imagination on which reality rides. [. . .] It is for this reason that I have always
placed art first and esteemed it over science in spite of everything (William Carlos
Williams, M.D. Spring and All 139)

Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa in books (Williams,
Spring and All 128)

In many poor and sentimental households it is a custom to have cheap prints in

glass frames upon the walls. These are of all sorts and many sizes and may be found
in any room from the kitchen to the toilet. The drawing is always of the worst and
the colors, not gaudy but almost always of faint indeterminate tints, are infirm. Yet a
delicate accuracy exists between these prints and the environment which breeds
them. But as if to intensify this relationship words are added. There will be a
sentiment as it is called, a rhyme, which the picture illuminates. Many of these
pertain to love. This is well enough when the bed is new and the young couple
spend the long winter nights there in delightful seclusion. But childbirth follows in
its time and a motto still hangs above the bed. It is only then that the full ironical
meaning of these prints leaves the paper and the frame and starting through the glass
takes undisputed sway over the household (Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations
in Imaginations 76)

Reality testing is far more than an intellectual or cognitive function. It may be

understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of fantasy its potential
and suitability for actualizaiton and the testing of actuality its potential for
encompassing it in, and penetrating it with, ones fantasy life. We deal with the task of
a reciprocal transposition. (Hans Loewald, Psychoanalysis as an Art and the Fantasy
Character of the Psychoanalytic Situation in Papers on Psychoanalysis 368).

36
Within our rules of reference, the right sort of drag on a cigarette could register the
right complexity of consent (Bill Brown, A Sense of Things 19)

Cynicism, laughter, the second husk into which the shucked man crawls (Djuna
Barnes, Nightwood 53)

Everybody knows the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, and the rich get rich
That's how it goes,
And everybody knows. (Leonard Cohen)

The flneur is the man who goes botanizing on the asphalt (Benjamin, Charles
Baudelaire 36)

A graduate student of mine from Korea once gave me two masks with wildly happy
eyes and broad smiles. These masks, she explained, were used by Korean peasants
when confronting their landlord on specified occasions; holding the smiling masks over
their faces, they were free to hurl insults and bitter complaints at him. The masks paid
the emotional respects due the landlord and left the peasants free to say and feel what
they liked (Hochschild, The Managed Heart 80).

In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the
service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not a part of producing
wallpaper. Seeming to love the job becomes part of the job; and actually trying to love
it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in this effort (Hochschild, The Managed
Heart 5).

An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he
wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on
us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our
heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It
makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. (David Foster Wallace, A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again)

Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I cant relax.
I giggle a lot, I chatter, I call friends. Its as if I cant release myself from an artificially
created elation that kept me up on the trip (Hochschild, The Managed Heart 4).

try everything once: Ah never have done it so fur. But as de old folks always say,
Ahm born but Ah aint dead. No tellin whut Ahm liable tuh do yet (Janie to Tea
Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God 101)

idealization v. love: He aint kissin yo foot and taint in uh man tuh kiss foot long.
Mouf kissin is on uh equal and dats natural but when dey got to bow down tuh love,
dey soon straighten up (Their Eyes Were Watching God 21-2).

The fight for Eros is the political fight (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization xxv).

37
A body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in em (Cather, My
ntonia 60).

Popular magazines offering advice to those wearily enduring long-term relationships

provide many suggestions about things to do to improve them. Time might be better
spent reflecting on what one is already doing! Spontaneity [. . .] is discovered not
through action but through refraining from ones habitual action and discovering
what happens next (Stephen Mitchell, Can Love Last? 199).

LOVE

How many times have I asked my own students to explain why, when there are so
many people, only one plot counts as life (first comes love, then . . .)? Those who dont
or cant find their way in that story the queers, the single, the something else can
become so easily unimaginable, even often to themselves. Yet it is hard not to see lying
about everywhere the detritus and the amputations that come from attempts to fit into
the fold; meanwhile, a lot of world-building energy atrophies. Rethinking intimacy
calls out not only for redescription but for transformative analyses of the rhetorical and
material conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies to thrive in the minds and on the
bodies of subjects while, at the same time, attachments are developing that might
redirect the different routes taken by history and biography (Berlant, Intimacy 6).

Love is lak de sea. Its uh movin thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de
shore it meets, and its different with every shore (Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching
God 182)

Being in love is like going out-

side to see what kind of day

it is.

Robert Creeley, cited in Stephen Mitchells chapter Safety and Adventure in Can
Love Last? [I love this quote! It suggests that being in the thing called love requires or
entails that one venture out- of oneself! To invest in another is to invest in being
wrenched from, and only otherwise returned to, oneself. It suggests that ones
investment in a lover becomes akin to ones investment in the day itself, in witnessing
all the different sides and kinds of a day, etc.]

Ursula Le Guin, in her novel The Lathe of Heaven, writes that making love is like baking
bread: each time it must be done with care and from the beginning (Stephen Mitchell,
Can Love Last? 130).

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine,
incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness
of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up
(Walter Benjamin)

38
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can
only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions
are not really decisions at all a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is
at the mercy of more things than can be named (Baldwin, Giovannis Room 20)

A dog starved at his masters gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.
William Blake

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss
of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see
and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one
knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet,
it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he
has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free he has set
himself free for higher dreams, for greater privileges (Baldwin, Nobody Knows My
Name 209)

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to ones beliefs, and the equal
impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman
excesses (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son 126).

The word safety bring us to the real meaning of the word religious as we use it
(Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 296). The principles governing the rites and customs of
the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites
and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and
Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two
others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Chartiy, but
this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world
(Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 305).

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be
conquered by it; fears must be faced (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 303)

War serves to defend ourselves against the Terrifier as an internal, absolute enemy. . .
. In this manner we arrive at the incredible paradox that the most important security
function is not to defend ourselves against an internal enemy but to find one (Franco
Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War).

In all jazz, and especially in all the blues, there is something tart and ironic,
authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are
happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white
Americans sing them sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that
one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their
brave and sexless little voices. Only the people who have been down the line, as the
song puts it, know what this music is about (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 311).

It really requires an empty stomach to laugh with, that only when you are hungry or
frightened do you extract some ultimate essence out of laughing (Faulkner, Absalom,
Absalom! 103)

39
And what are you white people doing up here in Harlem?
Were citizens. We go anywhere we like (Invisible Man 283).

Through the voice of his protagonist, Ralph Ellison suggests that one goal of (his) fiction
had been to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your
certainties (Invisible Man 580-1).

If theres one thing I totally distrust, in fact, more than distrust, despise and have
contempt for, it is people looking for roots. Because anyone who can conceive of
looking for roots, should, already, you know, be growing rutabagas (Spivak, The
Post-Colonial Critic 93).

Ancient glories imply [. . .] present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia (Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son 102).

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked (Ellison, Invisible Man 265-6).

I would prefer not to (Bartleby in Melville, Bartleby the Scribner, quoted in Phillips,
Promises, Promises 282)

Because I couldnt find any food I liked. If I had found any, believe me, I should have
made no bones about it and stuffed myself like you or anyone else (The hunger artist
to the circus overseer in Kafkas A Hunger Artist, quoted in Salecl, Perversions of Love
and Hate 113)

A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically

unhappy (Marshall Sahlins, Utilitarianism)

What is [psychoanalysiss] aim? To be able to feel alive and to cathect the many
possibilities offered by the diversity of life (Andre Green, cited in Phillips, Promises,
Promises 301).

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be
present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread (Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time 311)

that agony of naked inanesthetisable nerve-ends which for lack of a better word men
call being alive (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 26)

Normal means richly conflicted. (Bollas, Hysteria 4)

If we could imagine dissonance become man and what else is man? this
dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover
dissonance with a veil of beauty (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 143)

40
A shared lie is an incomparably more effective bond for a group than the truth. [. . .]
When, for example, the Leader is caught with his pants down, the solidarity of the
group is strengthened by the subjects common disavowal of the misfortune that laid
bare the Leaders failure or impotence. [. . .] Perhaps one should reread Hans Christian
Andersens The Emperors New Clothes along these lines: of course everybody knew
that the emperor was naked, yet it was precisely the disavowal of this fact that held the
subjects together by stating this reality, the unfortunate child effectively dissolved the
social link (Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment 58)

While the good old days are an enjoyable topic of conversation and improve with the
telling, there is little reward in remembering the bad days, unless they reflect
favorably on ones present situation and successful ascent (Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children
of the Great Depression, 4)

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Rilke on various subjects; several things
dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously
I mean Negative Capability, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (Keats, 1817
letter to brothers, but see also Bions last chapter of Attention and Interpretation)

We may be able to tolerate, and even enjoy our own mess, but nothing tests our feeling
for other people more than our feelings about their mess. Indeed, our relationship to
what we think of as the other persons disorder, or their disordering of us, is a
picture, a synecdoche of our relationship to them (Phillips, Promises, Promises 68)

Suspicion is a philosophy of hope. It makes us believe that there is something to

know and something worth knowing (Phillips, Monogamy 41). This is one dialectical
rejoinder to Sedgwicks critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

He who humbles himself wills to be exalted (Nietsche, said of Christ, quoted in

Phillips, Promises, Promises 170)

Truth-through-biting is the prototypical gesture of a psychological writing of the

kynical type of unmasking, which oscillates between a biting to death that causes
[Nietzsche] to suffer [. . .] and the desirously precise, cruel, and tender nibbling at
subjects with which mere contemplation would accomplish nothing in the face of a
sensual hunger for knowledge (Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsches Materialism 65)

We have no future if we keep our integrity (Thingy, The Long Song at the End of
the Record)

By fashioning the murky density of the Other, the colonial regime succeeds in
dematerializing and purifying its own violence in a crucial hegemonic transposition.
The colonized mirror creature, through specular, becomes real and laden with a
negative material gravity in an exchange where the violence of the colonizer becomes
spiritualized that is, made rational and lawful (Feldman, On Cultural Anesthesia
413).

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, he thought quietly. Perhaps it
could not live anywhere else (Faulkner, Light in August 481)

41
I believe Im paraphrasing Whitman, didnt he say, To have good poets means we
must have good readers, too, something like that? (Faulkner in the University 52).

The very distinction between the individual and the collective [. . .] is socially
determined and renegotiated by each and every cultural act (Brian Massumi, Parables
of the Virtual 9)

SENTIMENTALITY

The American corporate executive, who was after all the foremost representative of
Man in the world today, was perfectly capable of burning unseen women and children
in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the
generous use of obscenity in literature and in public (Mailer, The Armies of the Night 49)

Since Rousseau makes imagination a condition for emotion, [. . .] de Man writes in

Blindness and Insight that pity [. . .] is [. . .] inherently a fictional process that transposes
an actual situation into a world of appearance, of drama and literary language: all pity
is in essence theatrical. Continuing this train of thought in Allegories of Reading, de Man
muses on the episode in Remembrance of Things Past in which the servant Franoise,
who feels no sympathy for her real-life pregnant kitchen maid, sobs over the medical
book that describes her pains. [Allegories of Reading 76]. The challenge of the scene is its
implication that in order to be able to feel for the maid, Franoise needs to see her as
something in a book. Intruigued by similar episodes, Rousseau protests that such
people only fancy themselves sympathetic. There is a type that weeps at a tragedy,
yet as never had any pity for the suffering [Rousseau, Ouvres Compltes 5:378n, quoted
in Of Grammatology 239n and discussed in Blindness and Insight 132]. Yet he goes on to
grant this type a pervasive normalcy: ultimately, were all this type (Terada 36-7);

Because [. . .] fiction [. . .] is about someone else it allows a forgetfulness of the readers

self even as the feeling is being imagined within the readers own emotional resources.
A moving narrative requires the surrogate womb of the readers feeling so that the
emotional process, as opposed to the content, is most truly the readers. It is not
surprising, therefore, that reading should often prove to be a more intense experience
of self through freedom from self while real persons require an imaginative
sympathy (Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling 7)

When sentimentality meets politics, it uses personal stories to tell of structural

effects, but in so doing it risks thwarting its very attempt to perform rhetorically a
scene of pain that must be soothed politically. Because the ideology of true feeling
cannot admit the nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together and the
ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a civic-minded but
passive ideal of empathy (Berlant, Poor Eliza 641).

Sentimentality authorizes empathy as a way of humanizing the structurally

dehumanized, which places the hermeticism of privilege at risk but can also confirm
it as a site where people with good intentions can have good emotions that absolve
them from risking the material conditions that privilege them. [. . .] So the book [The
Female Complaint] tells a lot [about] [. . .] why pain gets turned into entertainment
and gets placed at the center of liberal culture as the site of white ethics (Berlant,

42
Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant, Jeffrey J. WIlliams, ed., Critics at
Work, 271).

with quote from Rousseau above: The, too, beauty and myths are perennial masks of
poverty. The traveler comes to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hills,
the streams, the foliage but not the poor. Or perhaps he looks at a run-down
mountain house and, remembering Rousseau rather than seeing with his eyes, decides
that those people are truly fortunate to be living the way they are and that they are
lucky to be exempt from the strains and tensions of the middle class. The only problem
is that those people, the quaint inhabitants of those hills, are undereducated,
underprivileged, lack medical care, and are in the process of being forced from the land
into a life in the cities, where they are misfits (Harrington, The Other America 3-4).

Ah! would twere,

But were there ever any
Writhd not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
Keats, Drear-Nighted December

Passion drives intentional subjectivity to its self-undoing in senseless vigor an

undoing that does not have to be figured as decadent excess, but can be conceived as an
interior limit of volition. Passion, therefore, characterizes the nonsubjectivity within the
very concept of the subject (Terada 5)

Imagine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only
dolls! (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 282)

In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the
principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art
enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any
photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic
contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 19)

Aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder. [. . .] That shudder

in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by
the other (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 331).

Feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and
remain depended even in their dividedness (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 331)

The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical passage often depends on the
intellective comprehension of its function in a whole that is not present; the purportedly
immediate experience itself depends on what goes beyond pure immediacy. The ideal
perception of artworks would be that in which what is mediated becomes immediate;
nvet is the goal, not the origin (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 338)

Science [. . .] hasnt given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new
sins not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. Cather, The Professors House

43
Psychoanalysis is a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them
from having the kinds of conversation they want, and how they have come to believe
that these particular conversations are worth wanting (Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling,
and Being Bored 6)

The profoundest way of recognizing something, or the only way of recognizing some
things, Freud will imply, is through hiding them from oneself. And what is profound,
or rather of interest, is not only what one has hidden but also the ways one has of
hiding it (Phillips, First Hates 17)

To be at home in the world we need to keep it inhospitable (Phillips, First Hates 24)

Ones real life is so often the life that one does not lead. (Oscar Wilde)

sucking dick on the sneak tip for a couple of dollars (Bourdieu, The Weight of the World
170).

perversion = knowing what you desire before you desire it.

Perversions are always prefigurings; or, to put it another way, we could say that we
are being perverse whenever we think we know beforehand exactly what we desire.
To know beforehand is to assume that otherness, whether it be a person, a medium, an
environment, is redundant (Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored 63); at the
same time, though, Phillips, like Berlant, entreats us to become brave enough to let
[our] feelings develop in the absence of an object toward a possible object, as it were
and by doing so commit [ourselves], or rather, entrust [ourselves], to the inevitable
elusiveness of that object (Phillips, On Being Bored 78). Jameson has diagnosed the
importance of retaining this same dialectical tension in our attitudes towards utopia:
Freedom [. . .] cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified: if you know already
what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the
suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition;
while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and
repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies
of the future collectivity (Jameson, Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism 384-5). It is a
negative dialectic that he would insist remain unresolved: All authentic Utopias have
obscurely felt this deeper figural difficulty and structural contradiction (Jameson,
Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism 385).

The way I think about it, each new attachment is a scene for a desire to become
different (a desire for non-traumatic self-interruption), but for all the optimism in
that it can enact also other potentially contradictory desires--a masochistic desire to
be defeated, drowned out by a new object, or to be propped at all times onto a
demand thus not experiencing one's own shapelessness or alterity or perversion or
bad faith; or a desire *not* to be something you're being, which means the new object
is experienced as a positivity when its psychic function is negative. So when I'm
crushed out I just try to refocus and ask whether the terms of intimate solidarity I'm
living are ones I can live with and if not, whether I've done the work to change them,
before I go ambling along with all my jumble of incoherences (Berlant, personal
email).

Its impossible to go through life assuming that you know who youre going to fall in
love with. (James Baldwin with Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch, Disturber of the Peace:

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James Baldwin An Interview (1969), in Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, eds.,
Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 80).

To think of the world as organized around the impersonality of the structures and
practices that conventionalize desire, intimacy, and even ones own personhood was to
realize how uninevitable the experience of being personal, of having personality, is. [. .
.] Attachments are made not by will, after all, but by an intelligence after which we are
always running [i.e. our desires and attachments are cognized only latently]. (Its not
just Hey, you! but Wait up!) This lagging and sagging relation to attachment
threatens to make us feel vertiginously formless, except that normative conventions and
our own creative repetitions are there along the way to quell the panic we might feel at
the prospect of becoming exhausted or dead before we can make sense of ourselves. In
other words, the anxiety of formlessness makes us awfully teachable, for a minute. To
the degree that the conventional forms of the social direct us to recognize only some of
our attachments as the core of who we are and what we belong to, ones relation to
attachment is impersonal. To belong to the normal world is to misrecognize only these
modes of intelligibility as expressing ones true self. It brings out my queerness to think
of living less as self-extension than as a process that interferes with the drama of the self
[this rhymes with her email to me about how a relationship is something that avails
self-interruption]. You will note that I am talking about impersonality not as the
opposite of the personal say, as structure or power but as one of its conditions
(Berlant, Two Girls, Fat and Thin 74).

Psychoanalysis, as Freud acknowledged, doesnt know anything that literature doesnt

know (Phillips, Terrors and Experts 35).

Now honey, [. . .] I can see them busting me for impersonating a man but a woman!
really! (dragqueen in Rechy, City of Night, 96).

You would be a wild rose by any other name (Rechy, City of Night, 107)

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46
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering
on our skull, whey then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy?
Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books
as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we
must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and
distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside
us.

-- Franz Kafka

"In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man muses on the episode in

Remembrance of Things Past in which the servant Franoise, who feels no
sympathy for her real-life pregnant kitchen maid, sobs over the medical
book that describes her pains. The challenge of the scene is its
implication that in order to be able to feel for the maid, Franoise needs
to see her as something in a book. Intruigued by similar episodes,
Rousseau protests that such people only fancy themselves sympathetic.
There is a type that weeps at a tragedy, yet as never had any pity for the
suffering. Yet he goes on to grant this type a pervasive normalcy:
ultimately, were all this type.

-- Rei Terada

"The identification carried out by the subject was ideally not that of
making the artwork like himself, but rather that of making himself like
the artwork. This identification constituted aesthetic sublimation; Hegel
named this comportment freedom to the object. He thus paid homage to
the subject that becomes subject in spiritual experience through self-
relinquishment, the opposite of the philistine demand that the artwork
give him something.

-- Theodor Adorno

The American corporate executive, who was after all the foremost
representative of Man in the world today, was perfectly capable of
burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a
large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the generous use of
obscenity in literature and in public.

-- Norman Mailer

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"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

-- Anonymous

"There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go

hungry anymore.

-- Theodor Adorno

"Because [. . .] fiction [. . .] is about someone else it allows a

forgetfulness of the readers self even as the feeling is being imagined
within the readers own emotional resources. A moving narrative
requires the surrogate womb of the readers feeling so that the emotional
process, as opposed to the content, is most truly the readers. It is not
surprising, therefore, that reading should often prove to be a more
intense experience of self through freedom from self while real persons
require an imaginative sympathy.

-- Michael Bell

"I would propose that the artist feels most alienated when he loses the
sharp sense of what he is alienated from.

-- Norman Mailer

The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical passage often

depends on the intellective comprehension of its function in a whole that
is not present; the purportedly immediate experience itself depends on
what goes beyond pure immediacy. The ideal perception of artworks
would be that in which what is mediated becomes immediate; navet is
the goal, not the origin.

-- Theodor Adorno

"To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood,

something one should never do precisely because that would get one in
trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the
same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into
the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble,

48
even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I
concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it,
what best way to be in it."

-- Judith Butler

"If I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make
on our own system that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied
without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at
once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every
conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the
cultural to the political it would be the demand for full employment,
universal full employment around the globe.

-- Fredric Jameson

"Yet, after everything else, there remains the basic core of socialism so
deep in Western culture, the idea, the moral passion, that it is truly
intolerable and more than a little fantastic that men should not live in
economic equality and in liberty. As serious artistic expression is the
answer to the meaning of life for a few, so the passion for socialism is the
only meaning I can conceive in the lives of those who are not artists; if
one cannot create works one may dream at least of an era when humans
create humans

-- Norman Mailer

While many European constitutions and the European Convention on

Human Rights guarantee everyone the right to an education, the right to
health care and even the right to a job or welfare payments, our
Constitution does not. / Our Bill of Rights guarantees the individuals
right to be free of Government intrusions, not the individuals
entitlements to Government support. The Supreme Court has uniformly
rejected all claims to constitutional entitlements.

-- Patricia Williams

49
Emmanual Levinas has taught us, wisely, that the question to be posed is
simple but unanswerable: Who are you? The violent response to the
Other knows that it does not know, and does not want to not know. It
wants to shore up what it takes for granted and expunge what threatens
it with not knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of
its world and their contingency and malleability. The nonviolent response
lives with its not knowing in the face of the Other, since sustaining the
bond which the question opens to is finally more valuable than having a
surety in advance about what defines the human and what its future life
will most likely be.

-- Judith Butler

We may be able to tolerate, and even enjoy our own mess, but nothing
tests our feeling for other people more than our feelings about their
mess. Indeed, our relationship to what we think of as the other persons
disorder, or their disordering of us, is a picture, a synecdoche of our
relationship to them.

-- Adam Phillips

Perversions are always prefigurings; or, to put it another way, we could

say that we are being perverse whenever we think we know beforehand
exactly what we desire. To know beforehand is to assume that otherness,
whether it be a person, a medium, an environment, is redundant.

Adam Phillips

"We must become brave enough to let our feelings develop in the
absence of an object toward a possible object, as it were and by doing
so commit ourselves, or rather, entrust ourselves, to the inevitable
elusiveness of that object.

-- Adam Phillips

Reality testing is far more than an intellectual or cognitive function. It

may be understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of
fantasy its potential and suitability for actualizaiton and the testing of
actuality its potential for encompassing it in, and penetrating it with,
ones fantasy life. We deal with the task of a reciprocal transposition.

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-- Hans Loewald

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their
destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-
deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all a real decision
makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than
can be named.

-- James Baldwin

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always
known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And
at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the
future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one
knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is
only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a
dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he
is set free he has set himself free for higher dreams, for greater
privileges.

-- James Baldwin

Im reminded of Victor Turners etymology of the word experience,

where he derives it from the Indo-European per-, meaning to attempt,
venture, or risk, which also yields the word peril.

-- Christopher Bollas

To be at home in the world we need to keep it inhospitable.

-- Adam Phillips

"Spontaneity [. . .] is discovered not through action but through refraining

from ones habitual action and discovering what happens next.

-- Stephen Mitchell

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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-- Toni Morrison

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