.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

The Sin in Jouissance

20 comments:

Franco Aragosta said...

ON THIS the DAY of HER HUBAND'S FUNERAL I OFFER AGAIN this TRBUTE to FIRST LADY BARBARA BUSH. I HOPE SHE and HER HUSBAND GEORGE are NOW HAPPILY REUNITED and WILL LIVE FOREVER in PARADISE.


____ Barbara Bush (1925-2018) ____

Beloved source of character and strength.
An asset to her family and our nation
Refreshing for her lack of agitation.
Barbara liived a good life of great length.
A life patrician, gracious, down-to-earth
Regal, yet a quintessential mother
A fount of strong opinion like no other,
But muted, disciplined, and tinged with mirth.
Unusually poised in public life
She had a kind of beauty very rare
Happy to have prematurely aged
Resplendent in her crown of snow white hair
In no way mean, her mind always engaged
Proud, yet humble,and always the ideal wife.


~ FreeThinke

I WOULD HOPE TOO THAT EVERY MEMBER of this NATION WILL SET ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES and OFFER EMPATHY and CONDOLENCES to the BUSH FAMILY on this DAY of SOLEMN MOURNING.

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

What do Lacanians re: jouissance make of Aldous Huxley?

Franco Aragosta said...

Oh, HIM agan!

BOO!

Franco Aragosta said...

The world is filled with endless woe
By wordy nuts who TH(NK they know.

Les Carpenter said...

Indeed it is so. You certainly know Franco by the example you set.

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Franco,

I fall on the Huxley side of the Huxley vs. Orwell debate over which dystopian nightmare vision is coming true.

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

i.e. our totalitarian master is a game show host,

Franco Aragosta said...

I have seen more or les equal measures of truth in the COMBINED nighmare visions of E. M. Forster - The MachIne Stops (1909), Huxley's Brave New World (1931), Orwell;s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four both of which came out in the 1940's. Then, later Margaret Atwood made a great contribution to the genre of nightmare futuristic visions with The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Each of these approaches the future with extreme pessimism to the pont of horror, yet each differs considerably in both style and details. But maybe details don't matter so much since their vision of the future as a grim totalitarian world where individuality is crushed and tyranny reigns supreme is depressingly unified.

As I recall, Huxley tok a satircl approach, and reserved his greatest contempt for commercialism and mass production run amok, where existence more closely resembles FARCE than anything we would recognize identify as "REAL LIFE."

Should we regard these classic works of dystopian fiction as PROPHECY or merely as a WARNING?

That IS The Question.

I lng ago totally rejected the LEFT, because ALL the Left has done is complain, condemn, attack an destroy. They offer no SOLUTIONS, no HOPE for anythng better, only the fierce desire to DISPARAGE, TEAR DOWN and ANNIHILATE the PAST.

What they would replace it with is nearly congruent with the worlds described by the Dystopian Prophets of Doom.

Franco Aragosta said...

And yes The Game Show Host metaphor fits very well the idea of a lunatic world gone to hell, because it embraced flashy, meretricious, vain, utterly heartless nonsense as a replacement for Sound, Honest, Decent, Sincere, Heartfelt Enduring Personal Relationships.

Franco Aragosta said...

( don’t know about you guys, but I found myself watching President Bush’s funeral yesterday, though I hadn’t planned to.

Though much of the music –– particularly toward the end –– was decidedly inferior, and I found John Meachum’s eloquent opening peroration to be smarmy, snidely dismissive of President Trump without once mentioning Trump's name, and nt so subtly self-aggrandizing, I found three of the eulogies –– those by former Canadian Prime M ister Brian Mulroney, retired Senator Alan Simpson, and the late president’s son George W. Bush beautiful, and extraordinarily touching.

During the hour-long service I came to a new appreciation of who our forty-first president really was –– not so much as a politician, but as a man.

I had resented his presidency, and still regard it as misguided and an unnecessary failure, but there was a great deal more to George H. W. Bush than that. He was a kind man, a good and loving husband and father, a highly accomplished businessman, a brave fighter pilot, and a beautifully disciplined individual who always put principle above party and above his own best interests.

For this he was called a “wimp,” by the Masters of Deceit and Derision who run the ENEMEDIA, but even though I disagreed with his always too polite and accommdating acquiescence to perceived enemies both at home and abroad –– I now feel compelled to respect him both for being a loving human being beloved by all who really knew him, and even more for always being true to himself.

More than that we have no right to ask of anyone.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Lacanians believe our capitalist culture has a mandate, "Enjoy!" which would very much put them into Huxley's camp. The Orwellian 1984 autocratic "father" is not the permissive post-modern "father". The former could be easily disobeyed, the second is MUCH more demanding.

Franco Aragosta said...

All right but I see terminology of that sort not as KNOWLEGE, but as the imaginative, theoretical CONSTRUCTS of academics who make up THEORIES out of thin air, then like to present them as if they were hard EVIDENCE or proven FACT.

THE TERMINOLOGY KEEPS CHANGING IN ORDER TO IMPRESS THE UNINITATED WITH HOW TERRIBLY BRILLIANT AND FAR ADVANCED THE PERPETRATORS OF THESE VARIED FORMS OF INTELLECTUAL SHAMANISM MUST BE.

Or so it seems to me.

I believe along with Solomon (Ecclesiastes) that "there is nothing new under the sun."

Except for superficial changes in clothing, architecture, and interior decoration, the tangible breakthroughs in Medicine, Science, Technology and Engineering, Everthing else is a mere reshuffling of wisdom discovered by the earliest tribal cultures before the dawn of Civilization or alternate periods of affirmation and denial and retooling of the same.

A rose is still a rose, even if you decide to call it a potato. ;-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

“…I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek

Franco Aragosta said...

CLASSIC SAGE ADVICE from GUY LOMARDO c. 1949

_______ ENJOY YOURSELF ________

You work and work for years and years,
___ you're always on the go
You never take a minute off,
___ too busy makin' dough
Someday you say, you'll have your fun,
___ when you're a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you'll have
___ in your old rockin' chair!

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself,
___ it's later than you think


You're gonna take that ocean trip,
___ no matter come what may
You've got your reservations made,
___ but you just can't get away
Next year for sure, you'll see the world,
___ you'll really get around
But how far can you travel
__ when you're six feet underground?

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams,
___ your ravishing brunette
She's left you and she's now become
___ somebody else's pet
Lay down that gun, don't try my friend
___ to reach the Great Beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for
___ a redhead or a blonde!

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself,
___ it's later than you think


You never go to night clubs
___ and you just don't care to dance
You don't have time for silly things
___ like moonlight and romance
You only think of dollar bills
___ tied neatly in a stack
But when you kiss a dollar bill,
___ it doesn't kiss you back!

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself,
___ it's later than you think

______________________

I was only eight or nine when this first came out. My Mom and Dad got the biggest kick out of it. We played it so often on the Victrola I had all the words memorized before I had any idea what they meant.
Unfortunately my father didn't take the advice seriously. He had a severe paralytic stroke when he was just 44, and I was 12. He recovered, and live for another 25 years, but he was never the same again, and the poor guy never got to enjoy even one moment of retirement. Neither did my mother who took care of him all those years and then died, herself, shortly after he did. Neither reached the age of seventy..

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Franco...

Jack London's "The Iron Heel."

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

FJ...

Marx was a shitty pseudo-Hegelian.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

By the time of his death, Hegel was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically, the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels and Marx himself.[2] They were often referred to as the Young Hegelians.

Franco Aragosta said...

Everybody's gotta hate something
But nobody ought to hate being free.


+...M _E_R_R_Y_ ...+... C_H_R_I_S_T_M_A_S ...+

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

Young Hegelians are shittysl Hegelians.

(((Thought Criminal))) said...

*shitty