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A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living
Mari Ruti
Top 10 Best Quotes
“we are tempted to erase the unsettling elements of the other's alterity-the ways in which the other does not coincide with our fantasies-because we imagine that, by so doing, we manage to stabilize our lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be surprised by the other, rather than allowing the other to touch us in unforeseen and potentially enlivening ways, we resort to idealizations that seem to guarantee the reliability of our life-worlds. In this manner, we deprive ourselves of the kinds of transformations that can only ensue from a courageous encounter with the other's irreducible alterity.”
“Schopenhauer once put it, we insist on living our lives "with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.”
“it is our perpetual dissatisfaction with ourselves that causes us to approach the world as a space of possibility that has the power to awaken our attention and make us marvel at its vibrant details.”
“Yet accepting the limits of agency does not suggest that we cannot find meaning, value, and beauty in the world, that satisfaction escapes us, or that we are incapable of creative living. Precisely because our lives can never be willed into a predictable mold, they remain satiated by potentialities that can either be ignored or developed, discarded or pursued. How we choose to take up these potentialities determines our fate. As Phillips puts the matter, the fact that we are not going anywhere in particular “is not so much a cause of grief as an invitation to go on inventing the future.”
“Within this mercurial reality, our happiness depends less on how well or badly we tackle the myriad ordeals of our lives than on how dexterously we withstand the fact that the ground underneath our feet shifts constantly.”
“What we most care about in the world—and particularly what we cannot help caring about on the unconscious level—influences our fate by shaping us into the sorts of persons we are.”
“What we most care about in the world—and particularly what we cannot help caring about on the unconscious level—influences our fate by shaping us into the sorts of persons we are. Consequently, becoming astute readers of our unconscious can help us to better comprehend why our lives have evolved the way they have.”
“This suggests that our ability to dwell within our lack without seeking to close it—our ability to tarry with the negative, to express the matter in Hegelian terms—is indispensable for our psychic aliveness. As a matter of fact, such tarrying with the negative could be argued to be the greatest of human achievements, for it transforms the terrors and midnights of the spirit into symbolic formations, imaginative undertakings, and sites of delicate beauty that make the world the absorbing and spellbinding place that it—in its most auspicious moments at least—can be.”
“This is one reason that improving our external circumstances may not always be enough to alleviate our longstanding anxieties or to make us feel more empowered; to the extent that the unconscious is committed to preserving the past—even when this past is not what we would have chosen—in an unchanging form, it can prevent our inner lives from catching up with modifications of our external conditions”
“This is one reason that improving our external circumstances may not always be enough to alleviate our longstanding anxieties or to make us feel more empowered; to the extent that the unconscious is committed to preserving the past—even when this past is not what we would have chosen—in an unchanging form, it can prevent our inner lives from catching up with modifications of our external conditions.”
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