Quotation

"To put one brick upon another,
Add a third and then a forth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.

But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all."

Philip Larkin


(thanks for this suggestion of a friend of mine!)

pornography

pornography is based in a tremendous fear of mutual engagement of the people involved in the action: there is no story, there are no real characters in pornographic videos, for instance


Slavoj Zizek

sexuality: the lesson of psychoanalysis

sexuality became sexual only by being disturbed through trauma



Slavoj Zizek

the minimal level of ideology

The most important are things that we do not know that we know (unknown knows = unconscious prejudices)



Slavoj Zizek

pleasure

you can have as much as you want of pleasure, because pleasure is already deprived of its substance


Slavoj Zizek

charity

the notion of charity is fundamental
for today's capitalism


I pay to maintain the other at a distance



Slavoj Zizek

guarantee

the phantasmic gaze is always there
as a guarantee of our being


Slavoj Zizek

(this statement, and others posted today, are taken from the last videos presented. I strongly recommend these videos, note-book and pen)

truth

the truth has the structure of a fiction

Jacques Lacan
(quoted by S. Zizek)

the core of ourselves

we can not identify the core of ourselves.

unwritten rules, even obscene rules
(far beyond the formal ones) -
they are what keeps us together as a society


Slavoj Zizek

theatre

when you act you are more "real" than in "reality" -
that is why we need theatre


Slavoj Zizek

transgression

transgression is something that the power structure needs in order to reproduce itself


Slavoj Zizek

Psychoanalysis today

The role of psychoanalysis today is to open up a space where you are allowed not to enjoy



Slavoj Zizek

lines, things, places and people

"ORIGINALLY, "THING" MEANT A GATHERING OF PEOPLE, AND A PLACE WHERE THEY WOULD MEET TO RESOLVE THEIR AFFAIRS. AS THE DERIVATION OF THE WORD SUGGESTS, EVERY THING IS A PARLIMANT OF LINES."

TIM INGOLD

"LINES. A BRIEF HISTORY"
LONDON, ROUTLEDGE, 2007, P. 5

TIM INGOLD WILL SPEAK IN THE AUDITORIUM OF THE MUSEUM OF SERRALVES, PORTO, PORTUGAL, NEXT 15TH MAY, 21:30 H.
(there in no places left)


Tim Ingold has made a revolution in Anthropology and, I believe,
in our way of looking at the world

_________

Papers published in Portugal, as far as I know:
Retrospect – p. 9-16 journal Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia vol. 45, 2005, 1/2
Materials against materiality – p. 9 - 24 journal Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia vol. 47, 2007
Comment, pp. 313 - 317 Journal of Iberian Archaeology, Porto, vol. 9/10, 2006/2007

Quoting Zizek

"The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the subject to the object-cause of its desire, which can never be attained. The object-cause is always missed; all we can do is encircle it. In short, the topology of this paradox of Zeno is the paradoxical topology of the object of desire that eludes our grasp no matter what we do to attain it."

Slavoj Zizek,
“Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture”, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1992, p. 4.

Quoting

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner
run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito.
Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

Jean Dubuffet




Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from
any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating
circumstances of history.

André Breton

Source:
http://www.artquotes.net

Quotation

"There is, as philosopher Michael Thompson has demonstrated, no "real definition" of life, no set of unambiguous empirical criteria to differentiate living from nonliving substance (including, it must be said, the presence of DNA, which Thompson correctly identifies as the fetish concept of our time)." *

W. J. T. Mitchell
"What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images", Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p.52

_________
* Cf. Michael Thompson, "The representation of Life", in "Virtues and Reasons: Essays in Honour of Philippa Foot" (eds. Rosalind Hursthouse; Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 248-296.

Quotation

"Paradoxically, then, if Freudian interpretation is both positioned and questioned by the operation of the thing (the unconscious, the Other) that it reads, the condition of its insight is at the same time the condition of its error. This play between blindness and insight means that psychoanalysis is neither a straightforward discourse of truth (science) nor of falsehood (fiction); instead, psychoanalysis unsettles the binary opposition of truth and fiction, finding that each strangely inhabits the other. The fact that psychoanalysis occupies this troubling hinterland between reality and fantasy, truth and invention (just as the symptoms it studies belong straightforwardly neither to the psyche nor the body, but inhabit the hybrid space of the psychosomatic) means that psychoanalysis challenges the divisions by which we habitually think. As a discourse it demands that we open the familiar categories of our understanding to the “Other”, the repressed, the strange, the unconscious. In continual renewal itself, psychoanalysis requires that we, too, perpetually renew our symbolic constructions of language, culture and the mind.
According to Peter Brooks psychoanalysis – as an encounter with psychic and symbolic otherness, and the unconscious – constitutes itself as “inherently dialogic” (...), a field of open and perpetually opening debate. Psychoanalytic interpretation, literary or otherwise, can never come to rest in any final truth or final cure; it preserves what Elizabeth Wright calls the “incalculable”."

Steven Vine (ed), "Literature in Psychoanalysis",
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 14

Source: http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0333791754.Pdf

NOTE: ALL THE INTRODUCTION OF THIS BOOK IS VERY INTERESTING - IT IS AVAILABLE ON LINE (PDF)
(THE RED COLOUR IN CERTAIN PARTS OF THE QUOTATION IS A RESULT OF MY READING)

Quotation

"Psychoanalysis is inescapably a discourse on the repressed, the silent, the unseen."

Steven Vine *
in Introduction to

Literature in Psychoanalysis
A Reader
Edited by: Steven Vine

Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

This introduction is very interesting. It is available on line (pdf) at:
http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0333791754.Pdf


* Department of English, Swansea University, Wales, UK

Source of image: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?is=0333791754

Quoting David Hockney

+ I may seem to be passionately concerned with the 'hows' of representation, how you actually represent rather than 'what' or 'why'. But to me this is inevitable. The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.

+ All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

+ Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

+ There comes a point where you see it all as completely empty being a popular artist to the extent that people who are not necessarily interested in art know about things or take some little interest. I think that now for me it's a burden. It's a bit hard to deal with and it wastes time as well.

+ The pictures on the walls aren't like movies. They don't move, they don't talk, and they'll last longer. They will last longer.

+ When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom, it's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything.


Source: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/hockney_quotes.htm

"being human"

"DO NOT SPEND ALL YOUR TIME BEING HUMAN"

GILLES DELEUZE

(as presented by Manuel de Landa in the lecture below)