isaac smith

“I dream of a moment when, without my asking, my actions will betray completely this part of me that asks for nothing”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“This is the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction). Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of
themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European
societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied
greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved.
Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the
seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of
Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed
to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century
there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and
another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has
been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time
when people supported the humanistic values represented by National
Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with
humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too
supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a
fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has
always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from
religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the
conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“one cannot properly describe human life unless one bathes it in the sleep into which it plunges night after night and which sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea…Indeed, what one has meant to do during the day it turns out, sleep intervening, that one accomplishes only in one's dreams, that is to say after it has been diverted by drowsiness into following a different path from that which one would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off and has a different ending. When all is said, the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all the escape from the waking world. After having desperately, for hours on end, with their eyes closed, resolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that the preceding minute has been weighed down by a line of reasoning in strict contradiction to the laws of logic and the reality of the present, this brief 'absence' signifying that the door is now open through which they may perhaps presently be able to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting-place more or less remote from it, which will mean having a more or less 'good' night. But already a great stride has been made when we turn our backs on the real, when we reach the outer caves in which 'auto suggestions' prepare—like witches—the hell-broth of imaginary illnesses or of the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour when the spasms which has been building up during the unconsciousness of sleep will be unleashed with sufficient force to make sleep cease.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way