quoi

Thus, language brings with it the world of meaning and alienates the subject from its real being. Desire is formed in the discourse of the Other. Objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, emerges when the child is separated from the mother, and thus the objet a can be understood as a remainder of the illusion of the full jouissance.

We aren’t going to have real change and reform in our criminal justice system if we ignore violent crime. We’re talking about people: not bad people or good people, but just people. If the goal is public safety, then we should be doing whatever it takes to say, “How do we make sure this harm doesn’t happen again and how do we keep people safe?” The answer is not, overwhelmingly, to just throw somebody in a cage and then throw them back out on the street after whatever the sentence is. Where they’re not in a position to thrive. It’s personal to me. I think about my grandfather. My grandfather was a guy who was incredibly physically abusive to his family. To the point where my grandmother left him and my mom dropped out of high school to take care of the family. When I got older, and he was dying — essentially, he was drinking himself to death, he struggled with alcoholism — my mom let him back into our lives. And for me, he was the most patient, kind, funny person … I loved him to death. He’d play the guitar for me, he’d tell me these wild, fantastical stories. When I got older I thought about this abusive husband and father, and this really incredible grandfather, and recognized that they were just so equally true. He was somebody that could have been cycling in and out of our criminal justice system, but it wouldn’t account for the fact that he was a Korean War combat veteran, he came home with PTSD, self-medicated with alcohol. And where were our systems in place to support him so that he could support his family? So that he could do things differently? I see that with my clients all the time. There will be somebody that is getting into fights and the DA says “Hey, we gotta throw this person in jail.” My answer is “Well you’ve thrown him in jail two or three times, he comes back, he’s still engaging in this behavior, we’re not changing behavior. Let’s learn about him instead. He has a trauma history, he is somebody who was abused badly as a child. All that was modeled for him were really unhealthy relationships. Why can’t we invest in support services, why can’t we give him access to therapy?” Because that could change behavior rather than throwing him in jail, which obviously isn’t working. Tying it back in to my personal story: what was modeled for my parents, certainly, were unhealthy relationships. Then what were modeled for me were really unhealthy relationships. It is only through access to things like therapy that have allowed me to be able to navigate relationships in a healthier way than those who came before me in my family tree. Now I recognize that we should be taking a holistic trauma-informed approach to address violence.

The youth of our schools are as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piece-work are by their pay packets.

“You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth.”

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

Those who do not suffer in the horror of a low-lying fog enjoy the day like fools who believe that daylight is their due. How can one be innocent in a world where there is guilt? On the other hand, those who can overlook the horror of the fog in which they suffer know that they deserve this intoxicating day.

(Queer Theory Anon here) No, it's not a joke. I don't understand the hate for Queer Theory or queer academia in general. I know you're educated and you don't want to insult your followers or friends who haven't sought a formal education, and that's all right. Judging by the replies, some of them didn't even finish highschool. It's a shame this new queer generation is so unaccomplished.