I inaugurated my blog with a post about the relationship of two passages written by James Joyce, one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the other from Ulysses, both revolving around the word ‘yes’ (which was used in drastically different ways in the two passages). I connected these passages to Nietzsche’s philosophy, […]
Joyce and Nietzsche, Take 2
Category: Psychoanalysis
The U.S. philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, saw human beings as restless animals, whose defining trait was the uncontainable nature of their desire. No utopia that we can imagine will ever fully satisfy us – we will always want more. Lear’s interest in our irrepressible urge to transcend ourselves was already apparent in the first […]
Lear on Freud: the Uncontainable Nature of Desire
On February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and English entered a distinctly Victorian register. Their union helped stabilize a language of respectability, domestic virtue, and institutional authority. Journalism, biography, and private correspondence adopted disciplined sincerity, shaping a standardized, morally weighted English for generations.
Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (1840) – The Union That Anchored Victorian English
Hugo von Hofmannsthal reshaped how English modernism understands the failure of language. Through translation and criticism his work taught English to name silence fragmentation and interior doubt. He helped writers and scholars confront moments where speech falters meaning fractures and modern consciousness begins.
Birth of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) – The Writer Who Taught English Modernism to Listen for Silence
Through Jun Takami English learned restraint. His Shōwa era fiction entered the language by translation teaching it to render interior life without spectacle. Ethical pressure illness and silence shaped a prose of hesitation where meaning rests in understatement and moral ambiguity rather than declaration or revolt.
Birth of Jun Takami (1907–1965) – The Writer Who Entered English Through Psychological Precision
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) based on reading approximately 40-50 of my blog posts to trace my intellectual trajectory. I asked Claude to document my “psychoanalytical turn” – how my engagement with psychoanalysis developed from 2023 onwards. What follows is Claude’s analysis, written in my voice. My engagement with psychoanalysis began […]
My Psychoanalytical Turn: An Intellectual Biography
Je vous souhaite une très belle journée à toutes/tous 🙂 Aucune aurore boréaleNe pourra colorer mon ciel.Loin de toi je m’affaleRien n’est plus pareil. Je ne sais plus comment je visDans ces instants loin de toiChaque jour je me languisJe sens la morsure du froidCelle qui me paralyseQuand l’absence perdureCelle qui me brutaliseSans plus d’ouverture […]
Seul ton amour éclaire mon ciel – Only your love lights up my sky
penwithlit 