Date: February 11 2025 9:23 AM Title: part 1/6
“For an impassable chasm separates the subject from the rest of reality; it stems from the impossibility of reconciling these two elements (this is reflected in language in the form of paradoxes that cannot be resolved without introducing a metalanguage—and searching for a metareality is one vain task) due to the impossibility of contact with the world except through the prism of my subjectivity.”
Man, the subject, arises from nature, the object. When two people procreate, sperm cells and eggs aren’t subjects, they’re part of nature, objects. Man being an always-already subject does not mean the chasm between object and subject is impassable.
“In the last part, I called attention to drive, the mechanism that keeps organisms alive (in psychoanalytic literature, it is referred to, in a seemingly misleading way, as the death drive).”
This contradicts Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud describes nature as consisting of no unities. Humans are temporary unities that are driven to destroy themselves, returning to nature and dissolving their unity.
Thanatos, the death drive, is appropriately named because it is the drive toward self-destruction, not the drive to want to live. We have Eros and Thanatos. A human being is at all times interpellated by Thanatos, but injected with libidinal energy from the outside, forcing them to release it, like when they procreate, resolving the contradiction.
Unfortunately I didn’t make it past the third chapter when you started muddling Freud and Lacan like this. You might want to become more familiar with their work, and engage more with the immanent logic of Lacan’s post-structuralist critique of Freud, which is dialectical, which your analysis is lacking.
Author's Response:
Thank you for reading, even if it was just the introductory chapters. I'll start by saying that this essay was written with a casual audience in mind. Since you are familiar with the theory of psychoanalysis, I would advise discretion in regards to passages that are there to explain concepts and nomenclature you already understand. As for your critique of me "meddling Freud and Lacan," I'd like to point out that I've commented on this somewhat in the fourth chapter:
>[...] which—I must admit—would probably disgust 'true' Lacanians; but I’m not keen on mindlessly sticking to someone else's thoughts [...]
Freud and Lacan have, in my opinion, contributed greatly to our understanding of the human psyche. However, I have never intended to follow their theories blindly, nor do I agree with everything they've put out. I merely make use of that which they have formulated to expedite my own thoughts in places already trodden by human mind. If I would have to point out my "mentors," though (as in people from whom I actively learned and not just people in whom I found an articulation of my own ideas), it would be the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, especially Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič. Since I believe them to be forerunners within their field, I am more open to engaging with their written thought in a more academic manner--unlike the verbatim writings of Freud and Lacan, which, again, I tread as a stepping stone.
In regards to:
>Man, the subject, arises from nature, the object. When two people procreate, sperm cells and eggs aren’t subjects, they’re part of nature, objects. Man being an always-already subject does not mean the chasm between object and subject is impassable.
I find it hard to believe that this paragraph was written by someone familiar with Freud and Lacan. It betrays a total lack of understanding of the fundaments of their work. Forgive my flabbergast, but with my being unable to find some common ground on which we could both stand, rather than reply to each sentence individually, I'll just try to explain this again.
Man vs. nature, subject vs. object, ideas vs. representations; this is all dualistic language. That's not what Lacan's thought was about. Man cannot arise from nature because there is no nature without man; there is only the all-encompassing Real, which is precisely that which exists through /not being/. There are no objects without subjects. Subjects come into being the moment they are impassably "stretched" between being fully the so-called "matter" and fully the so-called "idea" (the Real divides itself through contradiction into two: that which appears to simply be and therefore we deem it matter, and that which appears to simply not be, and therefore we deem it idea). That's an impossibility - hence, subjects are those who cannot close this Real part of them that exists through /not being/ (they are caught in a self-contradiction of matter and idea which they spawn). This part is the nothing that /excludes itself by means of being absolutely no-thing, including itself/. They are the gap that holds open the doors to both realms, for if matter or idea merges the other one into it, they lose their meaning and return to the Real.
I believe your mistake stems from the dominance of the Platonic (Christian) fundaments of western civilization; namely due to us all so frequently treating our mere concepts (e.g. sperm cells) like actual representative, objective bodies - as if they actually existed somewhere. It is impossible for a sperm cell to be a sperm cell without a human naming it a sperm cell. Make no mistake, this does not mean that things don't happen if they aren't observed by humans. When a tree falls in a forest, but nobody's there, you should ask yourself: how do we know it was a tree? For a subject, there's no escaping the a priori. Paradoxes cannot be resolved within their own language.
To quote Žižek ("Less Than Nothing: Hegel And The Shadow Of Dialectical Materialism"):
>So why can the subject not simply be limited by the object? Not because the subject is absolute in the naïve sense of being the all-encompassing reality, but precisely because it is finite, caught in its self-relating loop and therefore unable to step out of itself and draw a line of delimitation between subjective and objective:everylimit the subject draws is already “subjective” In other words, for the subject to beable to drawa clear “objective” limit between itself and the not-l, its objectivity, it would have to break out of its own loop and adopt a neutral position from which it would have been possible for the subject to compare itself with objectivity. The subject cannot simply be limited by the object because it is caught in its own loop, that is, because every relation it entertains with objectivity is already a mode of self-relating; the subject’s direct relation to the object cannot be a relation of real opposition between two positive forces delimiting each other, but only a purely logical relation between the subject and an emptynegative X, not even the Kantian Thing-in-itself.
As for the death drive, I'm honestly not sure what you're on about. Perhaps you've got it the other way around. I explain it further in the following chapters. You say:
>Thanatos, the death drive, is appropriately named because it is the drive toward self-destruction, not the drive to want to live.
No, the death drive is a drive that through continued self-destruction assures continued life. Can you imagine what would happen if we all purely pursued our pleasure principle? We'd pleasure ourselves to death since unity (as opposed to disunity) is the highest pleasure.
To quote Žižek ("Organs without bodies"):
>Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final “relaxation” in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. “Death drive” as “beyond the pleasure principle” is the very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension.
"Endlessly repeating the state of tension;" to me this sounds like a life well lived.
Thanks again for stopping by. I hope you find the will to continue reading. If not, I hope that you at least see this reply, despite it being somewhat late.
Date: September 30 2024 2:04 PM Title: part 1/6
Right, so firstly I deserve a shirt that says 'I survived this Essay' from how long it is.
I'm sure you've gotten remarks on the contents of the essay itself so I'm going to set that aside and instead approach this from the actual structure of an essay in English. It is, in a word, a fuckin' mess. Overly rambling, impenetrable to your average reader, and more asides with vague relation to the overall point than Beowulf.
As it is, most people aren't going to bother reading beyond the first paragraph and that is a failure of the writer not the reader. If your actual structure is what puts off readers that is completely on you and having talked to people that tried to read it and said nah, its a problem.
Since you couch this as more of a philosophical text rather than a scientific one, I will offer a golden rule from Hamlet that is usually applied in fiction writing but applies well to most forms of writing. Brevity is the soul of wit. That means don't waste my fuckin' time. You keep it concise, easy to understand, and digestible. To your average lay person, this is as digestible as granite.
As one of many examples I found in this:
"Parrhasius and Zeuxis, two ancient Greek artists, had once engaged in a painting contest. The task was clear: to depict the real world as faithfully as possible. The great master Zeuxis decided to paint grapes; when it came time to present the results of their work, he removed the curtain covering his painting—and hungry birds flew down to the canvas. Confident in his victory, he looked at Parrhasius’s still-covered painting and called on him to unveil his work. And so Parrhasius turned out to be the winner—he had painted the very curtain that Zeuxis had mistaken for a real object, believing it to hide the actual subject matter."
This entire paragraph and the one following it can and should be entirely removed. It serves only to be referenced later on in a vague connection during later points. Nothing about it provides any impactful supporting use to your overall point that your average person is going to care about.
If your essay isn't made for the average reader then it exists as basically little more than self masturbatory philosophy flexing where you will link this, assert your points as fact, and when someone responds to you, you can tell them to read your essay because you absolutely know its impenetrable. And if they continue to try and debate your content when they haven't read it you can disregard their opinions because clearly they aren't suited for the debate. And if you don't then your English grasp isn't as solid as you think it is structure wise.
Overall your grade here is a D+ from me. I know you don't want advice because tbh thats not the point of writing something like this, but. Carve the shit out of this. Cut the absolute shit out of the metric ton of fat. I put this thing through a word counter. It said its 17k words long. 17,000. Holy shit, there are complete stories for size fetish out there that aren't that length lol. There are maybe 7k words that have anything useful, impactful, or informative to say. That is completely absurd. No one is gonna wanna engage with this, regardless of contents. You could have an interesting discussion here personally in my opinion given the content, but its presentation ensures your discussions will be with very few people.
tl;dr edit this shit down to like a quarter of the size, remove the self hand job pseudo intellectual references, and make your point more clear and you maybe have a decent essay.
Author's Response:
Thank you for the feedback. I understand you brought up the Greek tale only as an example, but I cannot stress enough how vital it is for the entire essay. It's probably the last thing I would remove, literally. This tale is an incredibly useful metaphor for everything I describe. If you don't understand some passage, you only have to ask yourself: 'what would be the curtain here?'. It's the most important backbone of the entire system.
I am always sincere and I have something of a phobia of not telling what I believe to be the truth (which makes it really hard to have small talk irl, by the way...), so I kindly ask you to take what I'm about to say as nothing less than my real thoughts on this matter; not as an act of boasting or mental masturbation, or anything else that it isn't. The comments about my essay being difficult to read were a shock to me. I tried my best to make it as readable as possible, and I modelled its structure according to my own train of thought that led me to the conclusions I present before I even started writing it (my notes aside). I always try to tell the reader what I'm about to do in the following sections, summarize what I've done, and explain the entire road ahead. I clearly define what I mean by every important word, such as 'size,' 'shame,' 'sexuality,' 'drive,' 'desire,' etc. I repeat myself just so that the reader doesn't have to check again what I mean by 'linguification' or 'pre-symbolic', for example. I wrote a summary of the entire process of the emergence of a size enjoyer at the end. I divided the essay into thematic parts, each of them serving a clearly stated purpose. I assure you sincerely and with all my heart, that I thought each word through. My writing speed is usually a few sentences an hour (well, my sentences are long, so let's say 200 words an hour). Any reference I make is not meant to be an act of philosophical wankery, but an invitation to look closer, connect loose threads, and gain a better understanding by averaging the meanings of each word or reference.
This essay was initially posted on my FB group, each part a separate post. Perhaps this is why it didn't appear to be this difficult for my readers there to read it. I am still, however, personally baffled by you thinking 17k words is long. You only have to read it; I had to write it, in two languages nonetheless, after spending every day for months trying to work the issues out; months of lectures, reading, and examination of every piece of information related to my childhood. It's not much to ask for, especially for something that I believe to be the most important contribution to the understanding of size as a culture phenomenon.
I must admit something about my creative process, and especially writing philosophy: I do it for myself. I'm happy when people read my stories, but if someone is put off by the introduction or is only looking for a quick read with one hand on the mouse or the phone and the other on their pp, instead of something to think about for the next few days or more, I do not particularly care about such a reader.
I will not make any substantial edits to this essay and I will likely continue expanding it with addendums, but make no mistake, I am taking your (and other people's) comments seriously. I'll try to eventually publish a version only a few thousands words long, likely with references to the original in certain places, for people who want to look further into the matter or just don't understand the logical leaps I'm making. Or maybe a video? I'll see what I can do, though I have already a dozen or so stories that I began writing but haven't finished to work on, ha!