To ask

What does “transcendental norm” mean?

Anyone who can answer gets a cyber chocolate from me.

Death of the Author; Aura of the Letter

Firstly, this post will not be on technology. It will not concern itself with the issue of copyright, cyberspace or Copyscape even though that topic is worth exploring in terms of cultural value, work of art, and simulacra. In the end (if there is one), what is put on the internet, inscribed and written down, precipitates the death of the author. For the final answer of the letter is none other than: “Eat your Dasein.”[1] Even the citation goes as far to demonstrate that the letter lives beyond the author for what Lacan was, in actuality, referring to the password of a Congress in Zurich in the year before the Seminar was given.

But I digress. The imperative here is the usage of language, which, in the world that we are speaking of today, is English. What I am writing now-which at the moment of completion will materialise my death-arises out of a need to respond to a lack that can be located anywhere today and that is the abuse of one’s language. At this point, I claim that the pertinence of this post will only be realised insofar that the addressed reader takes pride in her linguistic skills and places a priority on language, which is already much more than we can ask of from the average individual.

Cringe-worthy

As per working title, which sums up my thoughts when I, by means of “an interminable chain” of linkages and pure curiosity, visited a site. To cite,

Yet, another blog has fallen prey to copyright infringement – what some referred to as “plagiarism”. The latest victim in my circle, happened to be Trinity whose contents have been copied into toysrours. Unfortunately, I feel there is little we can do to plagiarism. (Endoh, 2007 Nov 10)

Mememememe…

Random thought: an interminable chain of signifiers….memememememememeeeeee…

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog… [ABJ]
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself…[After the jump]
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs…[Not going to…]
4. Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog…[Negated by the absence of (3)]

7 Random Facts:

1. I gesticulate when I speak. My hands move around, trying to connote spatiality with my thoughts. My friends find it wildly amusing; they think I’m a rare breed. I think they mean weird.

On Lacan and Knowledge

That is why the method of textual commentary proves itself fruitful. Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis. How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me—I had the impression he meant this or that—that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go as far to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding. (Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 73)

To read Lacan’s texts then, one has to assume the intersubjective position of the analyst and to rest the text in the patient’s couch. Begin by thinking that you don’t understand.

Assemblages

[Facebook Ad Backlash Begins]
A reasonable assemblage of various critics on the new social marketing Facebook has introduced, addressing the lack of privacy and such.

[An Open Letter to the Prime Minister]
She appeals for political openness. In Singapore.

[Best Headline from Reuters]
Hide your pills in poop, they say. Ferrets rock.

[Where’s your angel?]
She has a league of angels behind here. Where’s mine? In hiding perhaps…

The futility of the hunt for the past

Like a dog chasing after its own tail, the pursuit of the past—nostalgia—is forever doomed to failure, twice over. The attempt to recapture a moment that has already passed and slipped us by, is always at one remove. No photograph can sufficiently stand for the recalled moment in its entirely for the photograph is always and only a snapshot.

To exacerbate matters, our desires are even questionable as well. Are those desires really our own? For according to Lacan, the desire is the Other’s desire, the desire of the Symbolic Order. Much like canned laugher, we are always prompted on when to laugh and when not too. When an individual desires something, it is always a social product that is by no means an individual’s decision. Language, the Symbolic Order, decides your desire for you.