Other's words to the forefront / les paroles des autres en premier plan

 

( Before I go into this week's quote selection )

 The Four Seasons

Like spring, I treat my comrades warmly.
Like summer, I am full of ardor for my revolutionary work.
I eliminate my individualism as an autumn gale sweeps away fallen leaves,
And to the class enemy, I am cruel and ruthless like harsh winter.
-Lei Feng

‘Narcissism’ originated as a term of clinical description, having been chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to define that form of behaviour whereby an individual treats his own body in the same way in which he might treat that of any other sexual object, by looking at it, stroking it and caressing it with sexual pleasure until by these acts he achieves full gratification. In this formulation the term ‘narcissism’ means a perversion that has swallowed up the entire sexual life of the individual, and consequently entails the same expectations that we would bring to the study of any other perversion.

( Good ol' Freud )

 

( on homeless bodies )

           Excluded from the public places that make up the city, the homeless exist in a perpetual state of movement… “It is the coming day, not the hour of expulsion, that brings the torment and exhaustion. By day, most cities and municipalities tolerate the homeless people who live on their streets only as long as they are in motion…. Homeless people with nowhere to go are often forced to spend their day getting there. Walking, remaining upright, and endlessly waiting become all-consuming tasks, full-time work”. Paradoxically, the homeless are forced into constant motion not because they are going somewhere, but because they have nowhere to go. Going nowhere is simultaneously being nowhere; homelessness is not only being without home, but more generally without place.
-Samira Kawash

Psychoanalysts, postmodernists, and feminists have contributed to the undermining of the foundations of Western thought. There are also ambivalent about and partially complicit with it. Psychoanalysts call into question the autonomy of reason, the equation of consciousness and mind, and the unity and stability of the self. They emphasize the existence and partial autonomy of an inner world pervaded by desire and fantasy. This inner world has unconscious and uncontrollable effects on other aspects of human subjectivity such as thought. Postmodernists compose more complex and less hopeful stories about the relationships between knowledge, power, history and subjectivity.  Feminist theorists argue that ideas about knowledge are dependent upon and made plausible by the existence of specific sets of social relations, including gender.
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From a feminist viewpoint it appears (at best) quite odd that many postmodernists are unaware of the problems in their approach to gender. They are emphatic in their claims that the subject is a thoroughly constituted but not a constituting being. However, writers such as Derrida appear to adopt a voluntaristic (indeed almost free-will) approach to gender identity.If subjectivity is constituted by pregiven categories like masculine and feminine, no individual subject can escape the effects of these categories any more than she or he could speak a private language. Unless the entire discursive field (and each subject's unconscious) is changed, these categories will continue to generate particular forms of subjectivity beyond the control of individuals, no matter how freely the subject believes she or he is playing with them.
-Jane Flax