A World of Fragile Things

Mari Ruti

Description

How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Foucault, Western philosophers have sought to define "the art of living"—the complex craft of human existence that elicits our thoughtful participation, and the idea that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner but is instead a process that invites our active and lively engagement. A World of Fragile Things offers a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective on "the art of living," one that focuses on ongoing and ever-evolving processes of self-fashioning rather than defining a fixed and unitary sense of self. With a compelling blend of philosophical insight and psychoanalytic acumen, Mari Ruti asks experts and readers alike to probe the complexities of human existence, offering a contemporary outlook on some of the most enduring questions of Western thought.
Introduction

1. The Art of Living

2. The Pursuit of Happiness

3. The Remaking of Fate

4. The Fall of Fantasies

5. The Residue of Love

Epilogue
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438427195
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Mari Ruti

A World of Fragile

Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

Things

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A World of Fragile Things

SUNY SERIES IN P SYCHOANALYSIS AND C ULTURE

Henry Sussman, editor

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

Mari Ruti

S t at e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s

Cover art by Richard NalliPetta,A Fragile World, April 2008.

Sections of chapters 2 and 4 were previously published in “The Fall of Fantasies: A Lacanian Reading of Lack,”The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association56 (2008): pp. 483–508.

Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

© 2009 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Ruti, Mari. A world of fragile things : psychoanalysis and the art of living / Mari Ruti. p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9781438427157 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9781438427164 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Happiness. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Wellbeing. I. Title. BF575.H27R87 2009 150.19'5—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2008047325

Introduction

Chapter One The Art of Living

Contents

Chapter Two The Pursuit of Happiness

Chapter Three The Remaking of Fate

Chapter Four The Fall of Fantasies

Chapter Five The Residue of Love

Epilogue

Notes

Index

1

15

41

67

89

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141

149

171

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Introduction

Psychoanalysis—as a form of conversation—is worth having only if it makes our lives more interesting, or funnier, or sadder, or more tormented, or whatever it is about ourselves that we value and want to promote; and especially if it helps us find new things about ourselves that we didn’t know we could value. New virtues are surprisingly rare. —Adam Phillips

WE LIVE IN a world of fragile things: fragile selves, fragile psyches, fragile loves. One of the most distinctive features of human existence— what makes it recognizable as human and what gives it its characteris tically bittersweet quality—is that we tend to be acutely aware of its precariousness even when we are more or less courageously focused on taking advantage of the various opportunities that it affords. Human life is therefore inherently paradoxical in the sense that we strive to make the most of circumstances that we know will end disastrously, with our own death. As 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, 1 although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.” In this book, I take a broadly philosophical approach to the ques tion of what it means to be a human being. More particularly, I am interested in basic questions about what makes our lives meaningful, worthwhile, or interesting, what gives us a sense of aliveness, and how

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A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

we might be able to meet the world in creative ways. However, rather than developing this line of inquiry along traditionally philosophical lines, I am eager to establish what psychoanalysis as a theoretical dis course—as a rather peculiar theory of what it means to be human—can tell us about the existential strategies that allow us to survive the pre cariousness of our lives. How do we cope with the uncertainties of exis tence—with our relative powerlessness with regard to our own des tiny—without falling into states of anxiety, inaction, or hopelessness? How do we make the most of our everyday realities without becoming paralyzed by their ephemeral nature? How do we manage to appreci ate the beauty and intricacy of our lives while haunted by the certainty that the bubblewilleventually burst? The fragility of our lifeworlds asks that we approach them with a combination of tenacity, grace, and wisdom. Western philosophers since Socrates have called the attempt to arrive at an effective combination of 2 these ingredients the “art of living.” This art of living is premised on the idea that there is a complex craft or poetics to human existence that elic its our thoughtful participation—that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner, but rather a process that invites our active and lively engage ment. The Western strategy for coping with human frailty has therefore frequently been to transform a potentially vulnerable condition into an empowered one, to insist that while fate cannot be dictated to, itcanbe manipulated and shaped according to our hopes, wishes, and aspira tions. Though this line of reasoning is far from universal, it can be found in various key currents of Western thought since Socrates’s famous assertion that only the examined life is worth living all the way to Sartre’s insistence that the human subject is in the final analysis respon sible for the choices that it makes in its life. The philosophical response to the idea of human helplessness has thus often been to recast this helplessness as a site of possibility and selfovercoming. This book develops a specifically psychoanalytic account of the art of living. We will discover that this account not only deviates from, but in many ways contradicts, some of the most cherished principles of the traditional art of living. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis shares with the