circulation within my skull

“ Lacan’s point here is that an insurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real substance—or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es(das Ding), welches denkt.” Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved form the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only Kant that the distinction made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.

“ Appreciate why it was that Pascal and Kant fidgeted about like two valets in the process of acting like Vatel with respect to you.

“ Heine will remark, only half in jest, that Kant had in any case far surpassed Robespierre in intellectual terrorism: whereas the guillotine managed to kill off only a pathetic, fat king who had lost his head anyway, the axe of reason had slain deism itself throughout Germany.

“ All of which leads to the conclusion that it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well that he is to be bumped off on his way out, by the gallows or anything else (all this, of course, is located under the rubric of passionate excesses, a rubric that raises a lot of other questions); it is not impossible that this man coolly accepts such an eventuality on his leaving - for the pleasure of cutting up the lady concerned in small pieces, for example.

“ This is where I stand-how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

“

The ruin had always abused women, in the Kantian sense. It used them as a means to an end, and the end was ruin of the soul.

On one occasion they were wasted on LSD at a fairground, in some type of spinning machine. The operator called out: “You’re all going to die.” Later, back indoors, they plunged deeper into polydrug abuse…She could not deny what had happened, but hated it. That was the beginning of the end, although she went along with far, far more.