Either Way You Gotta Pay
The radio awakened me at 6AM, my usual rising time. Aware that if I lay there just a few more seconds I’d get additional rest before waking to the music again. Or I could go ahead and get up, and gain the 20 minutes of reading and writing time here at Starbucks. Either way, something to be gained and a price to be paid. I chose.
I am working to understand the writing of Jacques Lacan, a theoritican of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan maintains there is an ethical structure to the Freudian categories, equally important as the therapeutic point of Freud’s research. I am reading for the second time, How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek, taking notes as I try to absorb the terms, the angle of approach taken.
I am reminded that this is how you learn a language. It is about exposure to vocabulary and syntax. You hang on like a dog-with-a-bone until the connections are made, and you are transformed, understanding and speaking in a new way. Then it is a different world in terms of the new language
Here is a text that I read this morning, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Troilius and Cressia, used by Lacan. Shakespeare’s message is about the cost of unbounded quest for power that upends the centralized hierarchic order…
Ulysses speaks:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power…..
Do not these words describe the state of our country politically at this juncture? The obscene, cruel Realpolitik stands brazen, unmasked in the public square.
This is no massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
