[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
A.B.Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
4 Ibid., pp. 42 3.
5 Jean Paul Sartre makes a similar point about anxiety by taking the example of a
man standing on top of a cliff. What is horrifying for this man is not the possibility
of falling, but the fact that he has the power to jump into the abyss. See his Being
and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E.Bernes
(New York: Taylor and Francis Books Ltd., 2002).
6 The inability to make decisions is referred to also as buridantis . See http://
www.oprah.com/health/omag/health_omag_200101_reinven. 1_reinven. jhtml
7 See The New York Times, 27 Aug. 2000.
NOTES 95
8 Ibid.
9 See Sigmund Freud, Group psychology and the analysis of the ego , The Pelican
Freud Library, vol. 10 (London, Penguin, 1985). Paradoxically it was Freud s
nephew, Edward Bernays, who became known as the father of public relations. His
book, Propaganda in 1928 promoted advertising as the primary mode of
communication. As a representative of Lucky Strike, Bernays became known as the
person who helped to break the ban on women smoking in public. His marketing
strategy was to organize a contingent of women to ostentatiously puff torches of
freedom during a parade.
10 See Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001).
11 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp 139, 208.
12 Recently, there has been a boom of such coffee places in Japan. Consumers there
explain that in the past they used to frequent bars and tea houses after work in order
to avoid going home, but now they go to Starbucks because it feels more like
home. Of course, this fake home is a calm oasis without screaming children and
nagging spouse.
13 On how this experience economy affects tourism, see Dean MacCannell, The
Tourist (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1999).
14 Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: J.P.Tarcher, 2001), p. 7.
15 Ibid., p. 29.
16 Ibid., p. 30.
17 See Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Send? A
Meditation on the Loneliness of the Sexes (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
18 Ben Cheever, Selling Ben Cheever (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), p.
99. On the same theme, see also Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
19 Fran Abrams, Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage (London: Profile
Books, 2002), p. 1.
20 Ibid., p. 7.
21 Ibid., p. 5. Ehrenreich has a much more politically conscious view and points out
that the poor severely lack civil liberties and that they are living in a particular type
of dictatorship: My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage
workers the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being reamed out by managers
are part of what keeps wages low. If you re made to feel unworthy enough, you
may come to think that what you re paid is what you are actually worth (Nickel
and Dimed, p. 211)
22 Polly Toynbee in Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain (London: Bloomsbury,
2003) gives the most leftist account of how the poor live by pointing out the demise
of the trade unions and the political confidence that the proletarians used to have in
the past: Even if the poorer worker were always on the underside of that class and
largely ignored by the strong trade unions, by hanging on to the idea of a united
working class, gripping its coat-tails, they too could feel represented by its class
Politics (pp. 226 7).
23 Cheever, Selling Ben Cheever, pp. xviii xix.
24 The New York Times Magazine, 13 April 2003.
96 NOTES
25 The new reality shows that depict how ordinary family life today resembles sit-coms
are openly admitting how today people s everyday lives are shaped in accordance
to the movies and not vice versa.
26 See Frank Furedi, Paranoid Parenting (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2002).
FOUR
LOVE ANXIETIES
1 Women have in the past frequently sent Valentine cards to themselves in order to
be able to display them in their apartment or office and thus incite jealousy of the
others. Although here one can easily see that the subject makes such gestures to
elicit a response from the Other, sending an e-greeting to one s own computer
appears much more of a solitary act. However, a computer, too, can be taken as a
big Other a new type of symbolic space.
2 Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, trans. Gladys Thomas and Mary F.
Guillemand (http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext98/cdben10.txt).
3 Ibid.
4 Here one needs to look at Lacan s formulas of sexuation, especially their lover
part. One finds on the male side a split subject and the phallus. There is no direct
link between the phallus and the split subject: the subject has a relation only to
object a on the female side of the formulas. And on the female side, one finds three
elements: a barred Woman, who has a relation to the phallus on the side of man and
to a barred Other, while she has no relation to object a, which is on her side of the
formulas. See, Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and
Knowledge (Seminar XX, 1972/3), transl. Bruce Fink, New York, Norton, 1998).
See also, Reading Seminar XX, Lacan s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and
Feminine Sexuality, ed. Susan Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2002).
5 Jacques Lacan, Angoisse (unpublished seminar), 5 June 1963.
6 Ibid., 26 March 1963.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Jacques-Alain Miller, H2O: Suture in Obsessionality (http:www.lacan.com/
suturef.htm).
10 Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar (London:
Verso, 1994), p. 81.
11 Psychotics often function very well in society, because they have a great ability to
mimic the behaviour of others around them. More on psychosis in Genevieve Morel,
Ambiguités sexuelles: Sexuation et psychose (Paris: Economica, 2000).
12 Ibid.
13 See Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge
(Seminar XX, 1972/3), trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998).
14 See, Libération, 20 and 21 Aug. 1983
15 The seduction that such a Cyrano can engage in on the Internet can, of course,
create quite a havoc in women s lives. At the time of the war in Afghanistan,
Colonel Kassem Saleh engaged in numerous Internet affairs with women who were
most charmed by his prose. He was a tall, good-looking, special forces officer
NOTES 97
contacting women from the war zone and was able to write messages that women
found as intoxicating as a crystal flute of champagne . And he seemed to be so
different from other commitment-phobic men, since he often quickly asked women
to marry him, forgetting, of course, that he was already married. While this story
sounds nothing new in today s times, what is more paradoxical is that when the
story of this online Lothario was revealed on TV, some women who were in love with
him, decided to search for their legal rights and demand some repayment for their
suffering. As one woman says: We are not a group of stupid, naïve women& . We
are bright, intellectual, professional women. I can t tell you how much he wooed us
with his words. He made us feel like goddesses, fairy princesses, Cinderellas. We had
all found our Superman, our knight in shining armor (Independent, 12 June 2003).
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]