Philosophy, Literature, Essays, and Thoughts
There are 3 types of sadness. Grief (mourning). Melancholy. Depression (in the non-clinical sense). Each signifying a relationship to the loss of an object. Grief is sadness over the loss of an object that I once had. It is when something is taken away from me. When someone dies. When some situation changes. It is … Continue reading Grief. Melancholy. Depression
The loss of desire is the loss of the human. It is desire that makes us human. To not desire is to cease to be. What is desire? Desire is always a desiring. It is constant. It is a wanting of something that you cannot get, a longing for what is always already out of … Continue reading No Desire
(I was to do some research on Berkeley. But, as usual, I ended up procrastinating. This time I found some old writing for UChicago Uncommon App that I've abandoned—because I was rambling too much and for too long. But I do really like it. I've added the last half from jouissance onwards. Hope you find … Continue reading Movement
What makes us human? Love? Violence? Evil? All of that, true, but also shame. It is a proof of the Bible's great literary value that the first thing Adam and Eve acquire after the fall is shame. They start to wear clothes, they are embarrassed when God visits them, they are thrown into the chains … Continue reading Shame. The Rawest Human Emotion.
For Freud, we escape from reality into dreams, and then encounter in it what is so real and traumatic that we escape from dreams (desperately) back into reality. This is how we should read the play. It is not a comedy, but the more tragic of all because it ends happily. The middle portion where … Continue reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hannah Arendt wrote about this in Between Past and Future: We are always subject to social pressures. When parents reject any form of discipline of the child, in fear of destroying their childhood innocence, of tyrannizing them, they are only leaving children to the tyranny of the larger social group. I can see this clearly … Continue reading Be Myself?
This year will probably be the most stressful year of my school life. I am applying to University this November. There are still 3 months but I am frankly already worn out. I frankly just want to do what I love (reading Literature, writing, doing contemporary continental stuff), but instead I have to do what … Continue reading David Foster Wallace—Choose Your Desires Wisely!
"Fixation", from Freud, is the constant desiring of something beyond reasonable limit. It is something that persists from when one is a child to when one is an adult. What we are fixated on is the object of fantasy, an object that promises fulfillment when we attain it. We crave fulfillment because we, so long … Continue reading Intervention of the Real (What is Fantasy? From a Psychoanalytic perspective)
I have been slowly going through Borges’ Collected Fictions for quite some while now (in fact, almost a year), and I’m, finally—or perhaps sadly—more than halfway through. There was one story that I read today that left a great impression on me, more than some of his more famous stories (Garden of Forking Paths, Lottery … Continue reading The Aleph
It is exam season again for me. I am delaying my (dreaded) revision by writing this reflection. I am exhausted. This exhaustion is an empty of one's soul that stems out of futile labor—the understanding that what one does is completely worthless, but to be forced to do it. There is a lot to analyze … Continue reading Reflections on Revision (And Exams)
