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Mark Carrigan

Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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  • The neurotic individual and the group

  • Winter is coming

  • Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

  • LLMs, thoughts and the thinking of those thoughts

  • When Lacan came to America

  • Calm creation that in opening closes, often ceases by starting

  • Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

  • Living on the Other’s time

  • Revisiting poststructuralist approaches to language in order to understand how we live and work with LLMs: the Pikachu Capybara effect

  • The inevitability and irreversibility of loss

  • The Covid-19 pandemic as a social mechanism driving biographical change

  • Something will always be lacking

  • A Lacanian analysis of addiction

  • The most common use of LLMs in 2025 is therapy/companionship

  • The jouissance of the new far right

  • Black Pill Claude’s bleak vision of the coming future: the peaceful extinction of human agency

  • Gen Z Reform voters who are sympathetic to Corbyn. Or, the jouissance of Nigel Farage

  • We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand

  • The unpredictable, unfathomable point of decision

  • A reluctant (and partial) defence of Mark Zuckerberg’s claims about AI friends

  • “You’re in charge of your life, you can do more than you are doing. Let’s see where it takes you”

  • Are digital elites literally trying to establish a new species?

  • The risk of (enshittified) LLMs for mental health

  • The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

  • Why do I write? The question generative AI implicitly poses to us

  • The epistemopathic dimension of writing with LLMs

  • Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing

  • Generative AI and the challenge of unbidden thoughts

  • On being a mystery to ourselves

  • Machine writing and keeping your inner world awake

  • Plants and animals don’t fight the winter

  • Immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy

  • An abundance of knowledge obliterates the lack which generates desire

  • If we only concentrate on putting out the blaze, we’ll eventually burn out

  • The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

  • Can LLMs sustain and transform affect

  • Zupančič: How to live a life worth living

  • René Girard as reductive Lacanianism

  • Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up

  • Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing

  • Rebecca Solnit on the politics of hope

  • Lacan lecturing in English: Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject whatever

  • The anxiety of individualisation

  • Lacan on the anxiety of love

  • Companions in the infinite rather than comfort animals

  • Wrestling as an incubator of conspiracy culture

  • The fantasy of knowledge as attempt to foreclose otherness

  • The social imaginary of middle class 90s kids

  • Music can grip us with the energy of a religious conversion. Once it is heard, one never experiences the world in quite the same way

  • New couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do

  • Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

  • We who are your closet friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group

  • What is the objet petit a for aspiring writers?

  • Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises: a dialogue with Claude 3.5 about an incomplete book project

  • We can’t escape the trap of desire, but we can approach that trap with greater poise

  • Automatic writing with image generators

  • Why spend two minutes trying to tell someone what they meant to you when the platform can write a ‘heartfelt’ message for you?

  • The Lacanian understanding of love

  • bell hooks on the difference between cathexis and love

  • Epidemiological self-consciousness and the suddenly countercultural status of the sovereign individual

  • Elon Musk’s social media addiction

  • Liberal conspiracism and the parts of the psyche that media literacy training doesn’t touch

  • Atomised society has stitched itself back together and it’s pretty awful really

  • A symptom isn’t a symptom until it’s reflexively recognised as such by the analysand

  • It seems, as one becomes older, that the past has another pattern

  • There is always a missed understanding between people

  • All trauma is preverbal

  • The wayward temporality of psychic life

  • The friendly face of objet petit a

  • Burdened by the image of an unalienated future, one finds oneself fleeing from existence itself

  • That secret that you know but you don’t know how to tell

  • Fling the emptiness in your arms out into the spaces we breathe

  • The best resource on Lacan I’ve encountered so far

  • Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden

  • Those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden

  • Seeing my response under the new description allows me to experience it in a new way

  • Disillusioned Awakenings in Dark Times: Reading Bernard Stiegler after the Covid Event

  • I’ve been free associating with Claude 3 which is now enthusiastically free associating back to me

  • How to free associate

  • The more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists

  • On being sane in insane places

  • I just discovered Therapist Reaction YouTube and I can’t stop watching it

  • The liquidation of significance and symbolic misery

  • On getting what you want

  • The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

  • Gillian Rose on the satisfaction of writing and the joyful agony of loving

  • An affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to experiences of cognitive frustration

  • “The demons in your head are real and you can kill them”

  • Playing in the ruins of your past expectations

  • The libidinal economy of symbolisation

  • Eudaimonic Bubbles as a normative rather than analytical concept

  • Technosolutionism meets anomie

  • The psyche is intrinsically constituted by its relation to infinity

  • What need do conspiracy theories serve?

  • The monster became self-conscious of its size and intoxicated by the belief in its own omnipotence

  • You assumin’ I’m a human, what I gotta do to get it through to you I’m superhuman?

  • Lacan on the trauma of birth

  • Nothing can ever be beautiful enough to wipe out the traces of imperfections and faults

  • “Mummy, I done an album!”: the excremental character of creative production

  • A relational theory of existential challenge

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