/lit/ - Literature

>>3997686
Would it be correct to say that the Abject is the discovery of the monstrous in the innocuous?

>>3997686
While eating your liver I am pissing In to your arsehole. I'm only doing this to hide my pathetic love for Care Bears.

Or /jp/, spend some time on /jp/.

>>3997772
I don't understand

>>3997775
Were you disgusted with yourself after you masturbated to the imagined taste of your mothers cunt?

>>3997780
I have never done such a thing. Please explain in more concrete terms.

>>3997783
Go masturbate to the imagined taste of your mothers cunt.

>>3997794
I really don't want to do that. I understand that abjection is something to do with disgust and something to do with monstrosity, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Please be more articulate and to the point.

>>3997797
If you're not getting the clue from the cunt you're not going to

>>3997808
So it's something about the Oral phase of development, perhaps about Oedipal urges?

>>3997811
Read Lacan, Then Kristeva you horrible cockcheese. It's The Real.

>>3997860
I asked for someone to explain it to me. Please do so.

>>3997686
>laymans terms

The cornerstone of Lacanian theory is the impossibility of translating it into laymans terms. Everything else is more or less up for grabs.

>>3997909
Fuck.

Fine, can someone explain the abject to me in a way that doesn't make me want to hit my head against a wall?

This is what I understand from trying to understand:

The abject is horror found when something is inbetween self and other: for instance, a train with a face. You aren't sure that it's a little boy or a forty ton vehicle of coal and death that can very easily kill the Fat Controller.

(I'm trying to understand the abject in terms of Thomas the Tank Engine. Help, please.)

>>3997916
You know Nietzsche's quote: if you stare in the abyss the abyss stare back into you.

Or the cliche` "I fought monsters for so long I have become one myself"

Or the unfathomable horror that lovecraft talks about.

That's the abject.

>>3997916
Hot men are >>>/hm/ that way to answer your question about homework.

The abject is the terrifying and irrepressible Real (ie: Lacanian) experienced as disgust. Your mothers cunt. The real is the slippage between subject and object, like when you accidentally kill the whore but keep fucking.

>>3997923
So how the fuck does it relate to Thomas the Tank Engine?

>>3997926
Not homework, personal intellectual pursuit.

>>3997916
the basic example kristeva gives is the corpse. it is recognizable, but utterly inhuman. it's like us, and we can see ourselves in it, but it's also something that is impossible for us to reckon with, that is, it is dead. it is impossible for you or me to understand dead, but the familiarity is jarring

>>3997933
So it's like the uncanny valley with added nightmares? Right.

>>3997929
Google thomas the tank engine. Open one of his images. Stare in his eyes. Don't you see the twinkle of delight. The stare of a man who would enjoy to see you naked masturbating.
Who would walk in your room while your sleeping and tweak at your soul with his fingers. Grabbing your anus between his thumb and index finger while making a slow rotation.
You see that? Do you see it? That's the abject.

>>3997939
I'm not sure how to say that in a way that won't get me sued for sexual assault.

>>3997929
Thomas is a man machine, and he wants nobody but you. Also boys shouldn't be made of metal and be threatened by their father with scrapping for being naughty, nor haul mixed goods at fifty miles an hour.

>>3997943
Does this rope in Fordism and Geder Performativity?

That is; the engines are reduced to "naughty little boys" who shunt goods at 50 miles an hour by their "father", but abjectly they are monstrous trains?

Choo Choo Choo
Here come Thomas the Tank Engine
Thomas the Tank Engine is Death
from town to town he passes picking
us up by the handful
some of us old but most of us you
he takes us on a long long trip
from which we have yet to come back

why is he smiling?

>>3997953
Because he is a Really Useful Engine, of course.

>>3997953
He's smiling because the line terminates at Birkenau.

>>3997954
Death is the engine of history - Hegel

>>3997959
It seems whenever I ask about Lacan, everyone who replies is trolling me.

>>3997950
Fordism relates to the boss/worker dialectic and the diesels. Gender performativity relates to fat controller father and the good/naughty boy distinction. Thomas performs masculinity on the trucks and Annie and Clarabelle

>>3997962
Can you expand a bit on the good/naughty boy distinction?

>>3997966
Masculinity is a gender performance. Performing as the good boy—Thomas, Gordon—demands the fathers attention and placards him in the hope he won't castrate you and eat you but destroys individuation. The naught boy—James, the Trucks—buys into the fathers demands so he can destroy you. Both perform the distinction from the female and reinforce the arbitrary power systems of male engendering.

>>3997923
If that is true, the abject is a completely useless notion because it is much too broad.

>>3997969
This is bordering on 2intellectuallystimulating4me, but is what you're saying that the good boy seeks the father's attention and approval to avoid castration anxiety, whilst the naughty boy does so to destroy him?

So what I've learnt in short:
>Abjection is "This is 2scary4me"
>Gender Performativity is "I can be any pretty flower I so choose to be"

Is this what lit students really believe?

>>3997978
I don't know. I'm trying to make sense of it all.

>>3997976
Abjection is the scariness of the object qualities of subjects. Gender performativity is observing that gender is a constant performance we must conform to (not a choice).

Naughty boys _demand_ castration, because as boys they cannot defeat the father.

>The abject is horror found when something is inbetween self and other

You know the truism that you hate others because you recognize aspects of yourself that you don't like in them? Well, the "other" is always inside. This is one of the fundamental messages in Lacan. The relation of subject and object is as much intra-personal as technological. These relations of the self get are further complicated by social relations. Horror comes from the realization that our self is never truly ours. This is the abject.

And, well, your relation of Kristeva to Thomas the tank engine seems desperate and wanky.

>>3997982
So how does abjection link into Thomas?

(Thanks a lot for explaining the performativity)

The abject is like the skin that forms on milk if you leave it too long. Icky!

>>3997988
It was never mine in the first place, it was literally the first thing someone mentioned when I posted here asking about Thomas.

>>3997986
The engines are subject objects for boy children to live out their fears of castration upon. Their bodies are damaged unto death but remade whole by the power of the name of the father.

>>3997998
So, to translate:
the engines are observer entities on which boys levy their castration anxiety. Their (which their, the boys or the trains?) bodies are very badly harmed but are remade by "The laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication"?
W-w-w-what?

>this thread

>>3998002
The fat controller is the father

>>3998007
That doesn't help at all. I know that he's the father. I don't understand the second sentence at all.

>>3998009
All things are metaphors in Lacan. Mostly metaphors for the penis. Which is itself a metaphor. For the penis.

>>3998015
Yes, so can you please explain the second sentence?

>>3998016
When naughty boys agree to be good boys the father devastates them.

>>3998023
So, essentially, when sinners aim for redemption, they are denied it?

Are you actually talking about Thomas the fucking Tank Engine?

>>3998023
Decastrates

>>3998030
>Not talking about the most important literary body of the last two hundred years
>>3998031
How can you decastrate something?

>>3998028
Well, eventually the fat controller forgives them if it is economic. Turning men into economic objects is...abject

>>3998034
And Fordist?

>>3998032
The father gives the good boys permission to have their cocoa back. How could Zeus the new father pull his brothers and sisters from his own fathers gut? Cock power.

>>3998040
Cocoa=cock. Sorry. Autocorrecting lacan

>>3998041
So, how to I turn this into something that doesn't read like the penis-rants of a madman?

>>3998045
It's Lacan. It ALWAYS reads like the penis rants of a madman

>>3998047
Yes, but I'm writing a mini-thesis. It as to be liegible and unrapy.

>>3998048
Liege able—looking for daddy's approval eh?

>>3998059
Quite.
I'll post what I've got once I've finished the first draft.

Okay, here's my first draft. It's shit, I know. What do I do to make it fractionally less shit?

Contrarily, in terms of the Railway Series, there is quite a lot to say about Father figures. The Fat Controller is the patriarch of Sodor, what he says, goes, he is the father of all the engines, both in a Christian sense and in a Lacanesque sense. As the Christian Father, it is he who doles out quick punishment upon those who are envious or scheming, and who blesses those who excel. Scrapping is an analogue for Hell; something each train fears more than anything else, a true non-existence. To be labelled a “Really Useful Engine” is an analogue for Heaven. Therefore, Sodor is a form of Purgatory for Engines, where their actions are judged: once they become “Really Useful”, they undergo theosis, and become favoured by the Fat Controller. On the other hand, if they are cruel or frequently rude, then they are sent away from Sodor to be scrapped, that is, going, quite literally, to Hell.

>>3998078
In terms of Lacan and Kristeva, the trains are at once human and engine; they are abject. While at one moment, they are little boys playing at trains, since the trains are sentient, which is an impossibility- the next they actually are forty ton engines encased in steel, hurtling along tracks on an imaginary island in the Irish Sea. This horror can be focussed through the sheer frailty of the world: in Duck and the Diesel Engine, Duck crashes into a barbershop and it's miraculous that no one is harmed, despite the enormous hole in the wall. The feminist philosopher, Judith Butler tells us of the idea of gender performativity, that all walks of gender are performed by the person. The engines are objects on which boys can relieve their castration anxiety- the “good” boy, or rather, engine, seeks approval and attention from the father, or rather, Controller, to avoid castration, or rather, scrapping whereas the “naughty” engine demands castration as he cannot destroy the father.

>>3998003
I want a refund!

This is the most disgusting thread I have ever read.

Someone implied that either of you might be lit students/graduates. Is this accurate?

>>3998047
>Not knowing the difference between penis and phallus.
>Not knowing that in Lacan there is no penis.
>Not knowing that lacan doesn't talk about the phallus as much as zizek does.
>Commenting on an author you clearly have no understanding of.

>>3999794
Do you really think I care about getting this right on /lit/? Really. I'll stick my penis in your phallus.

>>4000308
>Not believing that /lit/ is serious discussion.
>Saying that he is been trolling when ignorance exposed.
>Being such a summerfag.

>>4000366
Implying straw men on /lit/ while not being able to spot trolling? We all know what your objet petit a is

>>4000308
>not realizing your posts on /lit/ will be brought up on Judgement Day

>>4000432
You've never heard of anti-pascals wager. I am at peace with my fallibility.

>>4000428
>not knowing that the objet petit a permits no identity.

>>4000582
>I can spot tautologies!
I can jump puddles!

Now if only you had childhood mental paralysis so that boast was a result of significant development.

>>4001474
>Not knowing the difference between tautology and apodicticity.