Trauma and Philosophy

Even more than was true of my previous post — “The Changing of the Same (In the First of Two Senses),”[1] the first of the two posts that constitute this current short series — to a very large extent this post consists of quotations from various sources.

This is the first of a two-part post-series to each part of which I have given the above main title: “The Changing of the Same.”

I shall borrow a quote from one of my masters, Jacques Lacan, who — never one to beat around the bush — offered a direct definition of the real, a bit of a sly one, which is: the real is the dead-end of formalization. — Alain Badiou[*] The above citation…

[. . .]It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred.

If at the end of the week the worker had enough left to enable him to forget the hell he lived in for a few hours by getting drunk on bad liquor, it was the most he could achieve.

NOTE TO MY READERS: This is my first post in a year.

A bit over half a year ago now, on October 14 of 2024, I put up on this blog-site my post “The Choice to Choose.”

NOTE TO READERS: The following post is a slightly revised version of the first section of the eleventh and final chapter of my book Addiction and Responsibility, which is available in the “Store” at the top of this blog-site.

Eroticism is one thing.

Israel in exile is in statu nascendi,[1] a situation which is parallel to their wanderings in the wilderness.

[. . .]

Debates on Scottish education happened in the past, say between 1820 and 1930 and maybe on three major occasions a fight to stave off the move towards specialism, a kind of a rearguard action.

NOTE TO READERS: Today’s post consists mainly of citations from diverse sources.

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. — T.

We should all always practice abstinence from attribution — that is, from tracing events back to what we take to be their causes.

Prelude Trauma can — and after a certain point surely will — cause disability.

Prelude to This Two-Part Post We could understand the entire theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle not simply as the explanation of trauma from the distance of theoretical speculation but as the passage of the story of the child in a theoretic…

Authentic reality only becomes visible when one is finally left with no other choice but to choose, at last and for the very first time, truly to have a choice.

You may agree with a reproach that is often directed at me, namely that I write in a style requiring more effort and attention than a novel, for example.

“I’ll teach you to think!”