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.” In today’s post I will examine one of two radically [1] different senses of that phrase with which I have entitled both posts, then in my next post I will examine the second sense. The first sense of that main title, the sense at issue in this present post, is precisely…
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 is the opening paragraph of the second of three parts of a very short book the important contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (born…
[. . .]It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be. [*] Those are the closing lines of Wild, an autobiographical book by Cheryl Strayed that I read earlier this year. First published in 2012, that book rose to the number 1 status on the New York Times best-seller list, and was also…
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. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs was an enormous increase in prostitution, drunkenness and crime. The utter wretchedness of mankind dawns on one when he reads of the spiritual degradation and moral…
NOTE TO MY READERS : This is my first post in a year. At the bottom of that previous post, which went up on Monday, April 28, 2025, I wrote I’d no longer put up posts at regular intervals, but only “if and when time and the sprit move me to do so.” Since then, I’ve been busy for the last year writing a book I’ve entitled Answering the Call of Thought: A Memoir of My Vocation Into and Beyond…
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.” Once he had read that post, a friend of mine asked me a question about it. He asked me if what I said in that post entailed that it was always the case that one should make a choice immediately when one is faced with options. I replied that there were often cases in which one needed to…
To react to something that happens is to empower that to which one is reacting. To respond to something that happens is to empower oneself.
Eroticism is one thing. Possessiveness is another thing altogether. Any admixture of the latter utterly corrupts the former. “Possessive eroticism” is an oxymoron. In this post, I will attempt to explain the great — indeed, defining — difference between the two, the erotic and the possessive. I may not use those exact terms in what follows, but if you as readers give the matter due thought as you…
Israel in exile is in statu nascendi , [1] a situation which is parallel to their wanderings in the wilderness. The Exile is the wilderness of the nations, where there is no sense of being rooted to the land or any adherence to a state. [. . .] Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, is convinced that putting down roots in the state and in the earth was misguided. Therefore, he completely uproots the…
[. . .] No honest Old Testament prophet ever promised eternal joy to his nation save on the other side of disaster. Much less can an honest New Testament prophet, using the cross of Christ for his understanding of human fate, predict for men and societies immortality without judgment. To show up as clearly as may be the potentiality of catastrophe in our lives is as much a function of reason using…
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. Slowly but surely the English university system was creeping in, in place of the traditional generalist approach of the Scottish system. It’s not some airy-fairy abstract notion. The English system educated…
NOTE TO READERS: Today’s post consists mainly of citations from diverse sources. All the citations give us food for thought, especially when read together, as I strongly encourage readers of this post to do. Now the workshop in which we shall diligently execute all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community. — The Rule of St. Benedict , Chapter 4 [1] Heard to its…
The full flowering of modernity is the end of the world. It is the end not just of some particular world — as when we speak of “the world of ancient Greece” or “the world of the Roman Empire” — but of any world at all. It is the end of the world as such, the end of the very worlding of the world, to borrow a way of speaking from Heidegger.
We should all always practice abstinence from attribution — that is, from tracing events back to what we take to be their causes . However, abstaining from such attribution is no easy thing to do. After all, attributions are like food: We can’t do without them. What is more, they are also like sex: No one wants to do without them. Accordingly, the no usage criterion for abstinence — the criterion…
Prelude Trauma can — and after a certain point surely will — cause disability. However, we need to be cautious about all of this, because it’s easy to use this information in a way that reinforces the medical model and carceral systems. Trauma is a failure of community — and government — not a problem inside an individual. [. . .] — Katie Tastrom, A People’s Guide to Abolition and 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 theoretical act of transformation. For what is the story of the mind’s attempt to master the event retrospectively if not the story of a failed return:…
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. That is the point of breakdown of all duplicity, most especially duplicity toward oneself, not just toward others. Only when one finally arrives at such a crossroads — such a turning point, such a jumping off place — where one is truly…
Whatever society to which we belong, we are in fact enchained by our socially imposed customs, caught in them as in a trap. Such imposed customs may look like no more costumes that we don at our own free discretion. In reality, however, they are costumes cast upon us irrespective of our individual wills. What is more, the practicing of such imposed customs — the wearing of such costumes cast over…
Every rule needs at least one exception, for “the exception proves the rule,” to put the point in a common way.
May we all, in our times today, be given eyes to see and ears to hear that we must change our lives!