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"In a way, notes make an end run around anxiety. And anxiety shows up a lot around sex. You may not agree with Bronski’s (in press a) assertion that “everyone likes . . . slasher films where sex and anxiety are bound together and released in the spattering of red fluid,” buthundreds of millions of box-office dollars can’t be all wrong. As Sallie Tisdale, a Buddhist whose Talk Dirty to Me (1994) made Newsweekheadlines several years ago, wrote, “the merging of two into one in orgasm, this blending of identity, combines bliss and anxiety in astrange stew” (p. 281).

God carried away writing these up in Word, highlighting the best phrases, then lost all the drama and yellow in the copy/paste. Sad day.“Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart…” (826)“Anxiety…is like a blow on the head—it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line.

2 - “Although the disturbance of sex has many histories and manifestations, here I stress affect’s role. The affects around sex make it difficult to think about.

“The affects around sex make it difficult to think about. So when examining sex, it helps to weave theory and feeling together by splicing theoretical and philosophical ref lections with clinical retrospection.”“Factor’s manifold and mingled aspects unfold when examined through the lens of sexual countertransference; sexual countertransference through affect, abjection, and intersubjectivity; and sex itself through all of them.”“Like all emotions, sexual feeling tends to be catching—I feel it, you feel it.

Benjamin’s work relies on the presumption and argues for the proposition that recognition is possible and that it is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance.There are several passages in almost any text of hers that gives one a sense of what recognition is about. It is not the simple presentation of a subject for another that facilitates the recognition of that self-presenting subject by the Other.

“Central to her philosophical inheritance is the notion of recognition itself, a key concept that was developed in Hegel’s (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit and that has assumed new meanings in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1981) and Axel Honneth (1995) in recent years. In some ways, Benjamin’s work relies on the presumption and argues for the proposition that recognition is possible and that it is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance”“a sense of what recognition is about.

272 - “One of the distinctive contributions of her theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, that intersubjectivity adds to object relations the idea of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. This means that whatever the psychic and fantasmatic relation to the object may be, it ought to be understood in terms of the larger dynamic of recognition.

"In some ways, Benjamin's work relies on the presumption and argues for the proposition that recognition is possible and that it is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance" (272)"a process that is engaged when subject and Other understand themselves to be reflected in one another, but where this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other (through an incorporative identification, for instance) or a projection that annihilates the alterity of the Other.

Why ambivalence and not "happiness"?“This way [Benjamin's third where negation can produce joy] of approaching the triadic relation is a happy one, but I confess that I am not sure it is finally credible or, indeed, desirable. It is indisputably impressive, though, as an act of faith in relationships and, specifically, in the therapeutic relationship itself. But as an act of faith, it is difficult to “argue” against.

"For if it is the case that destructiveness can turn into recognition, then it follows that recognition can leave destructiveness behind. Is this true? Further, is the dyadic relationship assumed by recognition, given the qualification that the process of recognition now constitutes “the third,” itself based on a disavowal of other forms of triangulation? And is there a way to think of triangulation apart from oedipalization?