#quote18

Jouissance is a legal term - in Latin usufructus - referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to owning it.

Don't expect anything more subversive in my discourse than that I do not claim to have a solution.

the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is not the confessionary pacification/gentrification of the trauma, but the acceptance of the very fact that our lives involve a traumatic kernel beyond redemption, that there is a dimension of our being which forever resists redemption-deliverance.

Well, a revolution is going to fail if history itself is not ready for the change. If it doesn’t fail, it’s because history demands it. Which is not to say that people should not revolt thinking that this is not yet the right moment to do so—what Žižek rightly calls the “neurotic” approach to the question of the revolution. It’s not easy to know whether history is ripe, so you just go out and do whatever you need to do in order to continue to live.

Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question wether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher.

Here, we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: ‘reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction, and in the productive process; while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’ spectral logic of Capital which determines what goes on in social reality. This gap is palpable in the way the modern economic situation of a country is considered to be good and stable by international financial experts, even when the great majority of its people have a lower standard of living than they did before

One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition: the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted ‘between the line’, through its lacks and distortions. In the Jewish tradition, there is a well-known story of a rabbi narrating to a young pupil the legend of a prophet to whom a Divine vision appeared; when the youngster eagerly asks him: ‘Is this true? Did it really happen?’, the rabbi answers: ‘It probably didn’t really happen, but it is true.’