It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to...

Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical....

The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of ‘causa sui.’ in any case the sense of a God who would alone...

Great Other” of transcendence.

The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a...

I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply anencounter, a trifle, you...

According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is...

Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn’t converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn’t know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to...

He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was . . .

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one’s soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing...

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which...

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.

I was always amazed at Cambridge how quickly people appeared to take offence at everything I said, but now I see plainly that it was not my words they hated – it was this fairy...

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do...

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you...