Obstacles.
"If you're going to believe in narrative, you'll have to believe in that kind of God."
What kind of God is that? One in which mediation by way of representation--a theory of signs--is not a source of anxiety or a reason for skepticism. The Brothers are always talking about reality as though it is not only possible but necessary to know it. They live in a world (remember that world?) in which "you" really is you and not always only you's abstraction, not (already ultimately) an it.
***
I can't write about Lacan with any seriousness. I don't understand Lacan, and what I think I do understand, I find terrifying. And I find tyrannical. For there is no way out of the dream and The Real is no place you'd want to be anyway, could you be there to see it. Maybe you like it that way--to be deluded into being part Master of your own dream, the part where you enter denial, and believe the dream is real enough to see yourself as you see yourself in it. I used to like it that way. But if you don't like it that way, you can't dump Lacan like a sack of crap once you've entered into his sensibility--you can't just decide he's wrong without knowing how and where he's wrong. I mean, maybe you can. But not and talk about "reality" as though it's real, and accessible, and maybe not tyrannical, which is a possibility I'm now trying to consider.
***
I don't mean easily accessible. I never said easy. But the idea that art is sufficient, is all there is available in reality, even between us, between you and me, has worn terribly thin.
***
from the Annunciation Notebook, notes from JL's "Philosophy of Living Being"
"The seduction of my intelligence is that there is something infinite about it. But in the exercise of my intelligence--to think of a reality--there has to be experience. I cannot think outside of my sensible experience. The sensible quality of table is a formal abstraction. I've never touched a man. Never seen a man.
The unique character of intelligence is that it operates on abstraction.
I move myself in the midst of this diversity, and at the same time my intelligence touches something that is more than body, that the body itself cannot explain. This induction respects profoundly the relationship between diversity and unity."
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