On Flirtation
Please see my page on Adam Phillips for more. Some quotes below:
Exploiting the ambiguity of promises - the difference, say, between someone being promising and someone making a promise - flirtation has always been the saboteur of a cherished vocabulary of commitment.
It is one of the advantages of flirtation that it can protect us from idolatry - and its opposite - while acknowledging the draw of such grand absolutes. Flirting, in other words, is an often unconscious form of scepticism. States of conviction conceal the sense in which we are continually making our minds up.
My conversations with this woman left me preoccupied with a range of rather obvious, and clinically pertinent, questions. What kind of love affair is a person having with time, and what kind of object is it for them? Is it, for example, something that needs filling or something that tends to get wasted? Is there never enough or does a lot of it have to be killed? What makes us feel there is plenty of it or that it is running out? If we spend so much time planning to use it, what is the risk of leaving things to chance? Entrusting oneself to a person is quite different from entrusting oneself to time.
Freud and Proust are alert in complementary ways to the senses in which knowing people - or certain kinds of knowledge about people - can be counter-erotic; that the unconscious intention of certain forms of familiarity os to kill desire. It is not simply that elusiveness, or jealousy, sustains desire, but that certain ways of knowing people diminish their interest for us; and that this may be their abiding wish. So we have to watch out for the ways people invite us - or allow us - to know them; and also alert ourselves to the possibility that knowing may be too tendentious, too uncanny, a model for loving.
In order to make sense of the experience that wanting is always conflictual - that people can be wrecked by success - Freud suggests that we imagine our lives as a story in which three parts of ourselves rae always involved: that in doing any one thing we have at least three projects: we are satisfying a desire, we are sustaining a sense of moral well-being, and we are ensuring our survival.
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Firstly, it can be useful to think of ourselves as multiple personalities; of our internal worlds as more like a novel than a monologue. Each character, or part of ourselves, has different projects, and different criteria of success; so some people, for example, live as though they would prefer to be morally right than sexually satisfied, or clever rather than ordinary. In these cases it is as though an internal democracy has become a meritocracy; certain internal voices become muted because a repertoire of ways of being has been turned into a set of alternatives…. Conflict requires the forging of incompatibles. The second point that follows from this is that because our different selves have different projects, success and failure are inextricable; success for one self can feel like failure for another, and vice versa.
If somebody you are longing to see makes you wait too long for them, it is extremely difficult to appreciate them when they finally arrive; and to recuperate your desire for them.
Depression is a self-cure for the terrors of aliveness, of being alive to one’s losses and therefore to one’s desires. From a psychoanalytic point of view, imagination - the capacity for representation - begins, or rather, is initiated, by the experience of loss….
Knowing people is what we do to them when they are not there.
“For if it is true that those who are slaves to their moods, being drowned in their sorrows, reveal a number of psychic or cognitive frailties, it is equally true that a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorry or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative.”
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
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