Photographs

Maduro's Roving Urban Cavalry Provacateurs

Video of President Maduro Praising Police Actions Against the "Fascist Demonstrators"... and their subsequent confiscation of demonstrator's motorcycles... blaming protestors for the roving motorcycle cavalry tactics that his own forces used in murders and assaults captured on Video's here and here/ and more obviously here demonstratting two man surveillance and riot control unit tactics.

The Power of the Symbol

Dream On

...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

Venezuela 2-12-14

The Nothing to Otherness: Using Language to Create/ Maintain a Social Distance

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

- Rudyard Kipling, "If"

On Maintaining "Safe" Post-Modern Social Relationships...

What is love? As Alain Badiou, our good friend, put it in his wonderful book In Praise of Love, there is always something traumatic/extremely violent in love. Love is a permanent emergency state. You fall in love. And it’s crucial [to know] that in English and in French we use this expression; you “fall” in love. You lose control. I claim that love, the experience of passionate love, is the most elementary metaphysical experience, it’s a platonic experience. In the sense of, you lead your easy, daily life, you meet [up with] friends, go to parties and whatever, everything is normal, maybe here and there a one-night stand, and then you passionately fall in love, [and] everything is ruined. The entire balance of your life is lost. Everything is subordinated to this one person. I almost cannot imagine in normal daily life, outside war and so on, a more violent experience than that of love. And I think [this is] which is why all the “advisers” that we [supposedly] need today are trying precisely to domesticate or erase this excess of love. It’s as if love is too poisonous and then they, [i.e.] all the marriage and dating agencies, tell you that the trick is how to find yourself in love without falling in love. This idea came to me when on one of my Transatlantic flights I read one of those stupid airline journals and there was a text in there, in big letters, claiming: “We will enable you to find yourself in love, without the fall”, without this dangerous exposure. And I think this fits perfectly to our daily narcissistic metaphysics. You know the old story that I repeat all the time; we want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol, and we want love without its dangerous moment, where you get lost.

- Slavoj Zizek, "On Love as a Political Category"

Sexual Differences in Jouissance

According to Lacan, masculine subjects and feminine subjects are defined differently with respect to language and the symbolic order. Masculinity and femininity are defined as different kinds of relations to the symbolic order, different ways of being split by language. Lacan's formulas of sexuation concern only speaking subjects, and (according to Bruce Fink) only neurotic subjects.

MASCULINE SUBJECTS

Masculine subjects are those who are wholly determined by the phallic function. The phallic function refers to the alienation brought about by language. Masculine subjects are wholly alienated within language, and they are altogether subject to symbolic castration.

Being completely determined by the phallic function, masculine subjects are bounded or finite with respect to the symbolic register. In terms of desire, the boundary for a masculine subject is the father and his incest taboo. A masculine subject's desire never goes beyond the incestuous wish, as this would involve uprooting the father's boundaries as the very anchoring point of neurosis, the Name/"No!" of the Father. The masculine structure is in some ways homologous with obsessive neurosis.

Linguistically speaking, the limit of a masculine subject is the first signifier--the father's "No!"--which is the point of origin of the signifying chain and which is involved in primal repression: the institution of the unconscious and of a place for the neurotic subject.

A masculine subject's jouissance is limited to that allowed by the play of the signifier itself--to what Lacan calls phallic jouissance, and to what might similarly be called symbolic jouissance. Insofar as it is related to the body, phallic or symbolic jouissance involves only the organ designated by the signifier, which thus serves as a mere extension or instrument of the signifier.

The fantasies of a masculine subject are tied to that aspect of the Real that under-writes the symbolic order, namely objet petit a. Objet petit a keeps the symbolic moving in the same circuitous paths, in constant avoidance of the Real. Because the objet petit a is here only peripherally related to another person, Lacan refers to phallic or symbolic jouissance as masturbatory (Seminar XX, p. 75).

FEMININE SUBJECTS

Feminine subjects, unlike masculine ones, are not wholly hemmed in by the phallic function; feminine subjects are not wholly under the sway of the signifier. Although she is also alienated, a feminine subject is not altogether subject to the symbolic order. Masculine subjects are limited to phallic jouissance, but (at least some) feminine subjects are capable of Other jouissance. This Other jouissance is connected with S1, not with S2. But whereas S1 (the father's "No!") functions for man as a limit to his jouissance, for a feminine subject, S1 is not a master but an an elective partner. S1 is an endpoint for masculine subjects, but an open door for feminine subjects. This means that she can step outside the boundaries set by symbolic (masturbatory) jouissance.

Feminine structure proves that the phallic function has limits, and that the signifier isn't everything. Feminine structure thus bears close affinities to hysteria as defined in the hysteric's discourse (see Seminar XVII).

It is crucial to bear in mind that the logic of sexuation described here bears little or no relation to biology. Thus a male hysteric is characterized by feminine structure; this means that he may experience both phallic and Other jouissance. Similarly, a female obsessive-compulsive is characterized by masculine structure, and her jouissance is exclusively phallic or symbolic in nature.

extracted by others from Bruce Fink, "The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance"

Crawling Away for Want of a Better Word...

I want to stay sad forever
Soft as the clouds, deeper then the ocean

Beyond the human experience, there's a feeling
Passing time, when I was three

Nothing cannot be defined, it just slips away
Stop, silence, nothing, everything

Words are just conjectures of the mind, sound is just vibration
Experience is just an illusion, thought is just an idea

Breath, stillness, everything, nothing
It is here that you will find what you have always been looking for

Escape through the door onto green fields and the pouring rain
Redemption

Every moment that passes brings you closer
Divide me into half and release me

I want to stay sad forever

- Maazrizwan85, "For Want of a Better Word"

Am I the Cynic?

...after all, it's not MY ideology I'm accepting of.How about those who purposely OVER-identify with an ideology?