Notes
2022-04-14
Unknowing2022-02-21
有一天突然想到写下来的：
Art, or any kind of creative work, or even psychoanalysis, is not about explaining all, to reduce everything into a system of concepts and theories. It’s about facing the inexplicable, to admit that we don’t understand certain things, to relish in this strange unknowing, that there are parts of the world, parts of ourselves completely unknown even (and above all) to ourselves. It leads to new discoveries. The parts not looked for, unheeded, not known, inactive or even atrophied, long time suppressed, yet always persisting, undiminished, for they are in one sense the most central parts of ourselves, the true self that though deeply hidden yet survives every trauma and rests always as a secret source. From which no rock of (false) self is solid enough to hold back.
los caprichos / Mystères de Paris2022-01-30
最近才知道，戈雅那副 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 是系列 Los caprichos 中的一部分。全体总共80幅，大部分很吓人。
同样是前几天，看到了关于 « Mystères de Paris » 的一条推特, 喜欢插图的风格。
like the notebooks of a dreamer2022-01-06
Adrienne Rich wrote:
For others, a belief in the necessity to create ourselves anew still allows for curiosity about the artifacts of written history—not as verifiable evidence of things done, but as something like the notebooks of a dreamer, which incompletely yet often compellingly depict the obsessions, the denials, the imaginative processes, out of which s/he is still working. Believing in continuity, I myself am hard put to know where the “past” ends and the “present” begins; and far from assuming that what we call the past must teach us to be conservative, I think that for women a critical exploration backward in time can be profoundly radicalizing. But we need to be critically aware of the limitations of our sources.
I quite like the analogy between written history and “the notebooks of a dreamer”. For a long time I was not interesting in history. If it was only about things past as isolated events, then it didn’t motivate me. Like the rises and falls of dynasties or the military conquests of emperors. I want knowledge to be personal: that I can change my life by knowing. Yet recently I came to a different understanding. To understand the world we live in is also to learn about its origins and formations. How different historical forces have formed the lives of people dead and living. And how the weight of history, of culture and society is finally passed down onto individuals. From every single person’s suffering we could find traces of a historical combat, and in every collective struggle it’s the individuals’ lives that are at stake.
Of Woman Born, IV. The Primacy of The Mother
Attente de Dieu2022-01-02
I read this passage in Arienne Rich’s Of Woman Born this afternoon:
Monotheism posits a god whose essential attribute is that he (sic) is all-powerful: He can raze Babylon or Nineveh, bring plague and fire to Egypt, and part the sea. But his power is most devastatingly that of an idea in people’s minds, which leads them to obey him out of fear of punishment, and to reject other (often female) deities because they are convinced that in any contest he will be victorious. He calls himself “Father”—but we must remember that a father is simply a male who has possession and control of a female (or more than one) and her offspring. It is not from God the Father that we derive the idea of paternal authority; it is out of the struggle for paternal control of the family that God the Father is created. His word is law and the idea of his power becomes more important than any demonstration of it; it becomes internalized as “conscience,” “tradition,” “the moral law within.
I couldn’t completely agree with her. Although there exists a link between God and the paternal authority, the power of God, if we were to understand it in the highest sense, should not be a power on others, but an internal power of creation. (At least if it's a Spinozian God).
However there is another point that came to my mind. Rich wrote about man's fear of their initial and total dependence on the mother as a woman. And then I thinks of the creation of Eve: from one of Adam’s ribs. Is this an attempt to overcome the fear by an inversion of woman’s and man’s roles in the act of giving birth? It’s not without some irony: for in reality, it’s the mother with a child in her womb that feels the ache in her ribs, not the man.
And just now, when reading Jacqueline Rose on Simone Weil, I came across these words:
A central question that has vexed so much political thought becomes why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s struggle with this question makes her a psychologist of human power. “Everyone,” wrote the Athenian historian and army general Thucydides in lines that she quoted more than once, “commands wherever he has the power to do so.” No one can resist mastery over others, because the alternative—to be dominated—is so wretched. “We know only too well,” the quotation continues, “that you too, like all the rest, as soon as you reach a certain level of power, will do likewise.” (That “you” is generic and aimed at everyone.) Justice requires, before anything else, a laying down of arms, in both senses of the term. It demands a “supernatural virtue,” Weil comments, because, however advantaged you might be, it involves behaving as if the world were equal; “supernatural” therefore suggests both inspired by divine grace and requiring superhuman effort, as if it were almost too much to ask of anyone.
These reflections on power come in the midst of her 1942 text Attente de Dieu, her deepest meditation on God: “The true God is God conceived as all-powerful, but as not commanding everywhere he has the power to do so.” (This makes God the one exception to Thucydides’ rule.) In fact, “God causes this universe to exist, but he consents not to command it.” Through Creation, God renounced being “everything.” To revolt against God because of human misery is to misrepresent God as a “sovereign” or tyrant who rules the world, as opposed to a deity who has laid down his power. It falls on humans to create a better world—a form of freedom, or divine abandonment, or both.
Most often translated as Waiting for God, Attente de Dieu might also be rendered as God’s Expectation; it is God who is waiting for man to fulfill this promise. To do so, he must relinquish the misguided conviction, cherished by the strong, that the justice of their cause outweighs that of the weak. Nothing, we might say, perpetuates injustice as much as the belief of the privileged that their privilege is just. Or, as Weil observes in her Marseille notebook, “the rich are invincibly led to believe they are someone.”
happy new year2022-01-01
现在看来，2021年过得并不比2020年更慢。这两年同时也是一个新的开始。
过去十多年里，大概每三、四年会有新的人生与阅读的阶段。2009-12接触了莎士比亚、尼采、黑塞、Nabokov、陀思妥耶夫斯基…同时还有日本古典文学：和泉式部、清少纳言。12-16大学四年间最主要的影响是英美文学，更具体说是诗歌：Stevens, Eliot, Dickinson, Emerson, Melville… 17-20来法国前几年的主题是 Spinoza & Deleuze, 在文学方面则是延续以前的惯性（也有 Jacques Chauviré 这样的发现…还是刚来法国时寄宿家庭的奶奶推荐给我的）在2020年底我开始见咨询师，也逐渐接触两个新的领域：psychanalyse & féminisme. 可以感到无数全新的力量涌出：与过去每次开始的时候同样。就好像是重新发明自己，或是进入一个新的世界。
在这一年间与咨询师的谈话中，我得到了许多之前完全无法想象的知识。有时伴随着剧烈的情绪：意想不到的悲伤，或是释然的喜悦。我也开始想写下一些东西，以不同的声音。不是诗歌中抽象、匿名的自我，而是一种更加直接、具体，直接表现自我的复述。虽然一直以来理想都是 Stevens 或 Bishop 那样的写作，然而现在的我更需要后一种。
Violence, aggression : 或许有些奇怪，但这是目前对我最为重要两个概念。我开始认为：许多问题的根源都来自被人们压抑的暴力与攻击性。同时，暴力与 aggression 在这里并不是指字面意义上的伤害或侵犯他人，而是一种更为基本的东西。像是 Winnicott 所说：”The baby needs hate to hate…” Violence not in its banal form but as a central fabric of human nature. 像是希腊戏剧中的暴力。在过去，我认为那些战争与残酷的场景只是夸张的想象。然而它们更是某些情绪的外在表现。如果考虑一些我最喜欢的文学作品：Moby Dick, Mort à crédit, Paradise Lost, 或是巴托克的音乐，或许可以说他们包含一种最高的 Agon.
There is no love without hate. Or, the psychic flow cannot be separated into several distinct channels of love and hate, affection and sexuality, aggression and kindness. To believe that one can separate all these things, to love yet never to hate, to long for affection yet denies any trace of sexuality, to be kind without ever giving aggression : is to demand the impossible, and ask for repression & inhibition. There are all and one in the same impetuous and freeing flow of psychic energy.
Jacqueline Rose 关于母亲的文章，以及目前正在读的 Of Woman Born, 都将这种暴力与女性或母亲建立起联系。在假期前的最后一次咨询中，我对咨询师说：« c’est comme si la violence féminine rend le monde plus accessible pour moi… »
写得有些混乱所以写到这里好了。无论如何，我对新的一年充满期待。新年快乐。
