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A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living
Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”
180 pages, Hardcover
First published July 9, 2009
19 people are currently reading
396 people want to read
About the author
Mari Ruti
48 books140 followersMari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of critical theory and of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She is an interdisciplinary scholar within the theoretical humanities working at the intersection of contemporary theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, trauma theory, posthumanist ethics, and gender and sexuality studies.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 4, 2022
Interesting how in some ways, Mari Ruti has written the same book twice in a sense. Both The Call to Character and A World of Fragile Things, are exploring the same theme: how can psychoanalysis aid us in living well. In both of these books, the art of mourning as I would call it, is essential. This is what Lacan is known for, and what I think ego psychologists don't recognize, mourning is the primary and ultimate art of living well in my eyes. How do we come to recognize that the things we want in our lives are fantasies that are linked to the original fantasy of the lost thing: by recognizing that we never had the thing in the first place, and by recognizing that this is a fantasy. What I am retaining especially for this time, is what ego psychology really fails at, is incorporating mourning into its project, rather the project of ego psychology is to strengthen the narcissistic fantasies that people have of themselves. Now, what I do believe is that counselling psychology and ego psychology has a place, there are people who's egos are so fragile and weak that they could use a bit of strengthening, (I also think we could all use a little of it then and again) however, the follow through of the counselling needs to be the punctuation, the finale, and the ending of the analysis around the lost objects. This is why punctuation is so important for Lacanian psychoanalysis, cut people in their tracks around the fantasies they are inhabiting that make them think that they are immortal, or that the things they possess or are usually trying to possess (because when you get the thing you don't want it anymore) will never fulfill them or live forever. Mourning, and doing so creatively, is the ultimate project for living well, in my opinion.
And I have a major crush on Ruti.
And I have a major crush on Ruti.
February 3, 2022
A beautiful book, exploring a selection of psychoanalytic and philosophical approaches to some of the fundamental questions of life. Reading this gave me somehow a very hopeful and optimistic feeling, that being incomplete is ok, and an underlying feeling of lack can actually be a positive factor that pushes us into meaningful and creative ways of interacting with others and the world, even though we will eventually lose everything (which is also ok, and a defining factor in what it means to be human). I didn't know that much about psychoanalysis beforehand, but this book was a pleasant introduction to some of the key concepts.
October 25, 2015
What is possible? What is impossible? How do we live in a world where everything we love is dissolving? How does the way we perceive the world, create the world?
Mari Ruti demonstrates how psychoanlaysis promises to let us live, in this world of fragile things. In this perspective god is dead, absolute meaning and truth are not there, there is no salvation, there is no sovereign good.
What does this mean? What are we heading towards? If there is no salvation from the imminent doom the world has promised us all, how do we live in the face of this?
Before exploring psychoanlaysis' answer to the human condition Ruti explores the philosophical way of life. A life in which lesser pleasures are sacrificed to contemplate the constant unchanging forms of the universe, leading to self-mastery. For Ruti here is the mistake of the philisophical life as it promises to complete the incomplete human.
Psychoanalysis, however, doesn't promise to fill this fundamental incompleteness but sees it as something to accept and as something fundamental to life, something from which, in fact, life is possible.
The school of psychoanalysis Ruti describes is derived from Freud and Lacan. What makes it different from other approaches is that it doesn't seek to appease the ego of the analysand but to improve the relation between the unconscious and conscious.
Some key concepts explored are: fantasy, lack, the Other, authenticity, liberation, self (fake&true), repetition, desire, loss, mourning, thought objects, destiny, unconscious behavior, and conscious behavior.
If interested in a rough idea of how these concepts help with understanding the self I would recommend this book. It's excited me enough to continue my exploration of psychoanalysis. Also to me the entailments from psychoanalysis regarding the structure of society are subversive and have the potential to aid in the project of human liberation, something very titillating for me!
Mari Ruti demonstrates how psychoanlaysis promises to let us live, in this world of fragile things. In this perspective god is dead, absolute meaning and truth are not there, there is no salvation, there is no sovereign good.
What does this mean? What are we heading towards? If there is no salvation from the imminent doom the world has promised us all, how do we live in the face of this?
Before exploring psychoanlaysis' answer to the human condition Ruti explores the philosophical way of life. A life in which lesser pleasures are sacrificed to contemplate the constant unchanging forms of the universe, leading to self-mastery. For Ruti here is the mistake of the philisophical life as it promises to complete the incomplete human.
Psychoanalysis, however, doesn't promise to fill this fundamental incompleteness but sees it as something to accept and as something fundamental to life, something from which, in fact, life is possible.
The school of psychoanalysis Ruti describes is derived from Freud and Lacan. What makes it different from other approaches is that it doesn't seek to appease the ego of the analysand but to improve the relation between the unconscious and conscious.
Some key concepts explored are: fantasy, lack, the Other, authenticity, liberation, self (fake&true), repetition, desire, loss, mourning, thought objects, destiny, unconscious behavior, and conscious behavior.
If interested in a rough idea of how these concepts help with understanding the self I would recommend this book. It's excited me enough to continue my exploration of psychoanalysis. Also to me the entailments from psychoanalysis regarding the structure of society are subversive and have the potential to aid in the project of human liberation, something very titillating for me!
December 8, 2021
Ruti attempts to rescue self-help from the various trends that have defined it in our enlightened century: the capitalist/punitive-mindset of self-improvement, the solipsism of self-compassion, and the positivist rationalism of neuropsychology. Even more impressively, she wields psychoanalysis and critical theory - modes of analysis that often facilitate dismal, depressing assessments of modernity - with a hopeful, generative spirit. (I suppose we might as well call that aim "self-help," making my praise rather circular.) I felt convinced throughout that we can understand, mourn, and live through loss not just through our resilience but through deliberate engagements with our surroundings of the sort that Ruti calls "creativity." Perhaps I felt convinced because she's a skilled rhetorician and stylist who constructs arguments that culminate in poetic ideas like (paraphrasing here) "We are human to precisely the degree we have experienced loss." She spins rudimentary psychoanalytic concepts into accessible, actionable thought processes, so those who have read widely in the field might be skeptical, bored, or unimpressed. But for me, a reader only fleetingly familiar with the field, reading Ruti felt like undergoing psychoanalysis and for that reason, this text provided me with one of the richest reading experiences I've had over the past few years.
January 17, 2014
Nothing in this book is new or original but she wrote consise introductions to several important approaches to psychoanalysis: Klein, Kristeva, Mitchell, and most notably, Lacan.
The book is a pleasure to read.
The book is a pleasure to read.
July 24, 2016
Philosophers since before Socrates have taken up the question of what makes a good life. And it is commonplace for thinkers who are interested in this sort of question to frame the good life as something of an "art," something that takes focus and skill, time and practice. The good life is something one works at, strives for, but never arrives at.
Fine and well.
But what does it look like when the question of the good life gets into the hands of psychoanalytic and postmodern theory? What does it look like when one takes up the question of the good life but concedes from the get-go that there really is no such thing as the good life, and insists, instead, that there are only many (infinitely many) variations on the good life, many good lives in the plural. In fact, such a theorist would likely think, the very notion that there is only "one" good life (something that was assumed for millennia) which all people need to aspire for is probably a defense mechanism, a tactic that anxious ethicists use to evade the bleak truth that none of us really know how we should live, that none of have a monopoly on the good life, and that we are all pretty damn lost and uncertain, much more humbled than we would like to believe when it comes to approaching these sorts of lofty questions.
Beyond this, such a theorist would think, the notion that we could even work toward "one" universal ideal good life has already failed to admit that we are not one with ourselves -- we are legion. As Freud has taught us, we are deeply ambivalent creatures, passionately loving and hateful, ambivalent to the core. We must come to terms with the fact that we hate the objects we love, and love the objects we hate. The notion of a coherent and stable Self has been obliterated by both psychoanalysis and postmodern criticisms.
And yet, we are not down for the count. We continue to ask, What is the good life? What do we wish to aspire for? What do we love about ourselves that we have yet to admit? What is coming? Where are we going? How can we get on, and live some semblance of a "good life," once we have become unhinged, lost, destabilized at our foundations? How can we live a good life in this world of fragile things, of uncertainties and contingencies?
It is this question that Mari Ruti attempts to answer, though not in any definitive sense, of course. Her insights are noteworthy, and there are many of them. I share just a few of them with you now:
- There are no definitive or fixed answers to the question, What does it mean to be a person? The moment we decide once and for all the answer to this question is the moment we give up the art of living, of figuring out how to live; how we answer this question will change and develop as we grapple with what most intensely shapes us as individuals, with what we value most, with what we learn that we valued without knowing it, etc.
- Theoretical advances in how we think about subjectivity: Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as an inherently disruptive element of psychic life and the postmodern depiction of decentered, polyvalent and fragmentary psychic life; psychoanalysis is especially adept at contributing to the question about the art of living because, well, it sees better than most other disciplines that human psychic life is deeply mysterious and often incoherent
- One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to enable us to work through disillusionments until they yield some sort of insight for us
- In contrast to merely consuming the conventions and meaning we have received—which make us feel secure because they are oh so familiar, all too human—Nietzsche insists that we take an avid role in shaping our life-worlds, creating ourselves as if we were inventors (because we are inventors!); Nietzsche envisions a transvaluation (a revitalization) of the codes and values by which we live
Fitting everything and everyone (including oneself) into tidy categories inevitably marginalizes whatever eludes the unitary scheme that the totalizing project attempts to uphold; it is an inevitably violent project, far from innocent, and quickly becomes an attempt to dominate everything from the self to nature to other cultures and modes of life
- The art of living as formulated by the ancients through Nietzsche aimed to activate the subjects capacity to become a more fully realized version of itself, to reach potentialities that exceed its current configuration of itself; but the contemporary cult of authenticity asks the subject to become what is already, deep down, is; both have potential pitfalls but what the authenticity cult easily loses sight of is the notion that the self is an ongoing process, not a static vision of essential traits; authenticity fanatics also fail to distinguish between hegemonic and oppressive social alliances (which certainly do force a person to give up their authentic desires) from forms of sociality that are loving, vitalizing, and conducive of creativity—most social settings are likely to contain a combination of these elements so it is crucial that we learn how to interpret our life-worlds in order to learn which parts of them are empowering and which are not; we should not (and cannot) pit authenticity against sociality as such—we are singular, as Heidegger thought, only within a social context, inherently inter-subjective beings, Dasein-with; authenticity should be seen as more of an ever-renewed process of self-fashioning rather than an ideal of self-mastery and anti-sociality; subjective singularity is less a matter of discovering or returning to the essence of one’s being than it is of feeding the inner spark that sustains one’s aptitude for self-transformation; there is no alpha or omega, no essence at the beginning, or telos (final destination) at the end; “We need to forego any firm conclusions about what our lives can or should entail” (36); this sort of self-reflexivity can, when it’s working at its best, assist us in making choices we are each fond of—even if such choices do not cohere with the dominant expectations of our social environment: What might it connote to choose personal satisfaction over the narratives of success and achievement we have been fed since birth and by our culture at large? What might it signify not to want to follow the path that our talents appear to dictate to us?
- Be patient with yourself; you are fragile
Fine and well.
But what does it look like when the question of the good life gets into the hands of psychoanalytic and postmodern theory? What does it look like when one takes up the question of the good life but concedes from the get-go that there really is no such thing as the good life, and insists, instead, that there are only many (infinitely many) variations on the good life, many good lives in the plural. In fact, such a theorist would likely think, the very notion that there is only "one" good life (something that was assumed for millennia) which all people need to aspire for is probably a defense mechanism, a tactic that anxious ethicists use to evade the bleak truth that none of us really know how we should live, that none of have a monopoly on the good life, and that we are all pretty damn lost and uncertain, much more humbled than we would like to believe when it comes to approaching these sorts of lofty questions.
Beyond this, such a theorist would think, the notion that we could even work toward "one" universal ideal good life has already failed to admit that we are not one with ourselves -- we are legion. As Freud has taught us, we are deeply ambivalent creatures, passionately loving and hateful, ambivalent to the core. We must come to terms with the fact that we hate the objects we love, and love the objects we hate. The notion of a coherent and stable Self has been obliterated by both psychoanalysis and postmodern criticisms.
And yet, we are not down for the count. We continue to ask, What is the good life? What do we wish to aspire for? What do we love about ourselves that we have yet to admit? What is coming? Where are we going? How can we get on, and live some semblance of a "good life," once we have become unhinged, lost, destabilized at our foundations? How can we live a good life in this world of fragile things, of uncertainties and contingencies?
It is this question that Mari Ruti attempts to answer, though not in any definitive sense, of course. Her insights are noteworthy, and there are many of them. I share just a few of them with you now:
- There are no definitive or fixed answers to the question, What does it mean to be a person? The moment we decide once and for all the answer to this question is the moment we give up the art of living, of figuring out how to live; how we answer this question will change and develop as we grapple with what most intensely shapes us as individuals, with what we value most, with what we learn that we valued without knowing it, etc.
- Theoretical advances in how we think about subjectivity: Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as an inherently disruptive element of psychic life and the postmodern depiction of decentered, polyvalent and fragmentary psychic life; psychoanalysis is especially adept at contributing to the question about the art of living because, well, it sees better than most other disciplines that human psychic life is deeply mysterious and often incoherent
- One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to enable us to work through disillusionments until they yield some sort of insight for us
- In contrast to merely consuming the conventions and meaning we have received—which make us feel secure because they are oh so familiar, all too human—Nietzsche insists that we take an avid role in shaping our life-worlds, creating ourselves as if we were inventors (because we are inventors!); Nietzsche envisions a transvaluation (a revitalization) of the codes and values by which we live
Fitting everything and everyone (including oneself) into tidy categories inevitably marginalizes whatever eludes the unitary scheme that the totalizing project attempts to uphold; it is an inevitably violent project, far from innocent, and quickly becomes an attempt to dominate everything from the self to nature to other cultures and modes of life
- The art of living as formulated by the ancients through Nietzsche aimed to activate the subjects capacity to become a more fully realized version of itself, to reach potentialities that exceed its current configuration of itself; but the contemporary cult of authenticity asks the subject to become what is already, deep down, is; both have potential pitfalls but what the authenticity cult easily loses sight of is the notion that the self is an ongoing process, not a static vision of essential traits; authenticity fanatics also fail to distinguish between hegemonic and oppressive social alliances (which certainly do force a person to give up their authentic desires) from forms of sociality that are loving, vitalizing, and conducive of creativity—most social settings are likely to contain a combination of these elements so it is crucial that we learn how to interpret our life-worlds in order to learn which parts of them are empowering and which are not; we should not (and cannot) pit authenticity against sociality as such—we are singular, as Heidegger thought, only within a social context, inherently inter-subjective beings, Dasein-with; authenticity should be seen as more of an ever-renewed process of self-fashioning rather than an ideal of self-mastery and anti-sociality; subjective singularity is less a matter of discovering or returning to the essence of one’s being than it is of feeding the inner spark that sustains one’s aptitude for self-transformation; there is no alpha or omega, no essence at the beginning, or telos (final destination) at the end; “We need to forego any firm conclusions about what our lives can or should entail” (36); this sort of self-reflexivity can, when it’s working at its best, assist us in making choices we are each fond of—even if such choices do not cohere with the dominant expectations of our social environment: What might it connote to choose personal satisfaction over the narratives of success and achievement we have been fed since birth and by our culture at large? What might it signify not to want to follow the path that our talents appear to dictate to us?
- Be patient with yourself; you are fragile
December 18, 2018
After a cursory treatment of “the art of living” from Plato to Foucault (using Hadot and Nehamas), Ruti sketches out dimensions of it informed by psychoanalysis. She takes up five topics. Happiness begins with the subject’s lack of completeness and emerges with maki g use of accidents. Fate is not a matter of destiny but if patterns that avail themselves of refashioning; we can “own up” to our Ucs (Loewald). There are Fantasies that narrow the range of options (fantasies of self-sufficiency) and those that offer novel perspectives; what makes the difference is whether the subject is attuned to the other as other to itself, that is, uncategorizable; for the other can assert authority or explode with a surplus of meanings. As a result, agency is a matter of taking up the multiple significations of language. Lastly, Love does not hold onto the last but works through it, by mourning, which embraces solitude and uses isolation as a site for creative emergence of new possibilities. The book leans on lack from Lacan, personalizing the Ucs from Loewald, opening up the possibility of new possibility from Lear, signification from Kristeva, and the true/false self from Winnicot. An accessible synthesis, but remains at a frustrating level of vagueness.
September 2, 2019
Ruti writes in a very digestible, considerate way that allowed for me to consider the implications and associations I'd been making throughout my psychoanalytic journey thus far.
While I was skeptical from the first chapter, the fourth and fifth chapters were incredibly informative.
While I was skeptical from the first chapter, the fourth and fifth chapters were incredibly informative.
November 21, 2023
there are so much to say, im saving and collecting my words now, them to get good enough for dearest creature ms ruti
August 31, 2025
i have no words. just read it. one of the best nonfiction books i’ve read in my life. agh i’m so sad it ended.
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April 13, 2016A good refresher on psychoanalysts and philosophy. The author blended the elements together well
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews