Falque identifies the flesh as the site of transformation in his The Metamorphosis of Finitude, and in the process, sacralizes the flesh and medicalizes the body. The 'traces' or stigmata of finitude that remain in the flesh notwithstanding, the body is open in a way the flesh is not to alteration. "My flesh is that through which I experience my own body phenomenologically, and not the simple biological and molecular substratum that can be cured, or repaired, or modified" (MF, 136), or, in other words, medicalized. And yet none of this formulation denies "an insistence on the "resurrection of the flesh" (Leib) as a summing up of the lived experience of our bodies" nor does it "imply a denial of the reality of the substantial and material body in the Christian incarnation...It remains the case, however, ...that a total identification of the biological body with the resurrected body...leads to major aberrations" (137).
Aberrations indeed.
What is born of the flesh is flesh (Jn. 3:6). The flesh is born "to a world 'already there'---which I could naturally believe was there before me but which I have to recognize phenomenologically was born only along with me" (129). This birth does not enter the memory (past made present) of the one being born, though the event itself can be certified, witnessed, a birth certificate signed and issued by the physician (or just as commonly, by the professional midwife). Part of the business of medicine is to certify transitions of the body: as a physician, I have completed birth and death certificates, but I do not certify who has been born into finitude, or reborn into finitude metamorphosed. "What is true of birth, in the obscurity of the act of being born for the one who is born, is true also of the mystery of the act of being reborn for the one who is reborn" (129). What, then, precisely, is medicalized? The witnessing gaze of medicine 'sees' only the body, and it is a gaze of power, of science and knowing (see Foucault). The flesh, sacralized into phenomenality, and therefore into its manifestation (see below).
Nonetheless, as Falque argues, "I need witnesses of my flesh, for my birth certificate, but also for my rebirth (baptism and resurrection" (131). Only by such witness does my flesh have an 'origin' and only in this origin and this witness can one find the "clarity of giving birth" which "can be claimed analogically for rebirth and resurrection." Falque's notion of 'analogy' is nothing if it is not charged. It seems at times that Falque, after taking Marion to task for his attempt to invert the metaphysical impulse that moves from the finite to the infinite analogically (analogy from 'below'), that is, by shifting to the side of the infinite as it analogically moves to the finite (analogy from 'above'), he inverts the inversion. And it really seems to be an inversion, and not a subversion, of Marion's novel inversion, which seems to have to happen prior to the implementation of Falque's stratagem.
Still, medicine, seeing the body only, wants to 'hear' from the flesh. The distinction between symptoms and signs, what the patients subjectively experiences and what the medical gaze accesses, respectively, rests in relation among the self, subjectivity and the flesh. When the flesh cannot speak, only a witnessing gaze is in play. In the case of birth, the gaze alone certifies the event. This medicalization of the body allows the flesh to appear in itself and by itself, albeit in a glass dimly.
Of birth certificates and death certificates, of births and deaths, either certificate will do: births are deaths and deaths are births. Being born and reborn remain distinctly other matters. When we are resurrected, we are resurrected 'in' the Resurrected One, who shows himself of himself and of his own initiative. "The initiative of his appearance guarantees me against my own fantasies, insomuch as I receive him there and when I don't expect him: That is to say, the apparition comes from him rather than through me. Thus he is the phenomenon---exactly as phenomenon is defined" (146). Such guarantees against fantasies underscore "the real existence of this object" that presents to consciousness (146). "When the body withdraws and the flesh becomes manifest, it is then that he shows himself" (145). The phenomenological method that elucidates the phenomenality of the body and of the flesh, also causes the withdrawal of the medicalization of the body, and allows the flesh to 'speak' in its own voice. The medical gaze recedes into its witness and certifications, as it is unable to grasp what the flesh communicates; it does not, finally, hear the voice of the flesh apart from its gaze of the body: it hears only through the gaze. The natural attitude simply will not suffice in the moment of the metamorphosis of finitude.
Medically un-certifiable, un-see-able rebirth, "[t]he resurrection is not simply the manifestation, or the appearance, of another mode of presence of the flesh. It is also a disqualification, or rather a withdrawal, of the substantiality of the body" (144). With respect to the resurrected Christ and the empty tomb tradition, "[t]he objectivity of the disappearance (of the body) signals, then, the disappearance of objectivity (of all reified bodies in the resurrection)". And along with such disappearances, whether on the road to Emmaus, in the delivery room or prior to delivery to the morgue, the medical gaze and all its medicalizations, that it itself visits or that which is visited upon it, is itself perhaps reborn into objectiveness (Gegenstandlichkeit, nach Husserl), which then might make an appearance in the phenomenological moment.
Emmanuel Falque certainly passes for a Catholic, but The Metamorphosis of Finitude will not be receiving the imprimatur or nihil obstat any time soon. He might turn out to be one of those radical theologians John Caputo has insisted into existence; the phenomenology of the resurrection is a theopoetics par excellence, and quite possibly haunts the Catholic tradition with rattling chains of a monadological panentheism. There is great beauty in the spiritual suffering in the Father through the suffering of the Son in the flesh, yet this can be construed as 'making of God' in the image of Husserl. The consciousness of God, on His side of the Resurrection, sleeps in Falque's phenomenology and somnambulates the divine perichoresis: God is Unconscious, to resurrect Jacques Lacan through Tad DeLay's treatise of that title on the psychoanalytic of religio-politics. The Father must be waked as he is [cata]Falque'd, so that we can see if he stays dead, or if this death of God is the death of a conceptual idol (31); so we can see if God awakens from the Mitternachtslied's 'deep dream' of the Symbolic order to insist on his existence. In the meantime, God rests in the Real, calling all finitude to himself, into metamorphosis, into a new heaven and a new earth,within a new God and a new human, in a world transformed.
Showing posts with label God is Unconscious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God is Unconscious. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Sunday, May 3, 2015
The Confessions: St. Augustine on the Borromean Knot
Several texts have been folding, unfolding and folding together in my imagination lately: Keller's 'planetary entanglements' in her Cloud of the Impossible, Lacan's "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," and Marion's In the Self's Place. Happily, both Tad DeLay and Slavoj Zizek, two powerful apologists of Lacan and his work, have provided provocative lenses through which Descartes' cogito comes into focus in Ecrits and in Marion's examination of Augustine's Confessiones.
Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):
What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).
I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.
Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting.
The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).
Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).
Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.
Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.
Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).
The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.
Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.
...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).
Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.
Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).
Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.
According to Marion,
confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).
In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.
Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.
Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)
Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).
In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.
The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.
Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):
What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).
I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.
Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting.
The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).
Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).
Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.
Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.
Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).
The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.
Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.
...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).
Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.
Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).
Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.
According to Marion,
confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).
In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.
Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.
Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)
Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).
In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.
The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
God is Unconscious: A Review
Psychoanalysis is structured like a religion. It is a coffee-table book about coffee tables, and turns itself into a coffee table if one is needed. Christianity is structured like a cup of coffee.
A man approaches an analyst asking if there's anything he can do to help his brother who thinks he's a chicken. The analyst responds, 'why don't you bring him in?' The man replies, 'because we really need the eggs.' No, not that Marx.
What that anecdote excludes is the jealousy of the analyst, who would like a brother like that, because he really needs the eggs, too. The analyst's desire is for eggs in perpetuity.
The analyst is the subject-who's-supposed-to-know. He just doesn't know Foucault. The original Ovaltine (or better yet, 'Roundtine') determines just what knowledge is. That's right: that Marx. Seinfeld, Groucho, Allen--I get them all confused, but not so confused as to miss out on my secret decoder ring, which, when it comes to Lacan...
We can add up Lacan, Zizek, and perhaps Delay, then divide by Lyotard, and you're left with a religion without a metanarrative. But what is psychoanalysis without its metanarrative of power, its hegemony over real, symbolic and imaginary registers poking its nose through the unconscious into consciousness? While it allows the analysand to dig deeper, psychoanalysis will not discover its own difficulty with things that don't work in the image of the discoveries of the analysand. It is blind to see that the reflection of the knave is the fool, and the fool's reflection is the knave. "And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind..."
When psychoanalyts leave the bedside (couch-side? In any event the traditional clinical setting) to become culture critics, yet bring the same tools (bag of tricks?) to the game, we should expect some electricity. Cultures must undergo a reduction to organism whose narrative is not told in the first person, but always in the 3rd. The relationship between the critic and the subject is dramatically transformed. Against Lacan's protestations, the analyst, far from interrupting too soon, tells the whole story (at least when they give seminars or write books); but, of course, the master has endorsed the creative shift away from the altar, away from ritual, to the vox populi.
Tad DeLay's wonderfully written book on the interface of theology/religion and psychoanalysis, God is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis & Theology (Wipf and Stock, 2015) is a fascinating recollection and meditation of the discipline's unfolding into the intellectual worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries. I identify the work as a 'book' because I have not decided just what genre the book should be received into; and that could be a good thing. I recall that Michel Foucault once said his major works were more like novels than philosophy. I'll therefore stick with 'book,' though genealogy, novel or rhapsody would work just as well.
The book opens with an anecdote recalling a conversation between Jung and Freud, who upon sailing into NY Harbor and viewing a statue guarding an impressive city, recognized that they were delivering a 'plague,' not unlike the way the USS Indianapolis delivered the 'bomb.' Either way, an explosion can't be far off, or at least something that goes 'bang.' DeLay writes about an invasion, a cathectic advance of an occupying force that electrified the world with currents buzzing to this very day. Freud and Jung were no lads from Liverpool, but they were bigger than Jesus Christ.
Or so the story goes. Cathexis is the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king. In his introduction, DeLay promises a dose of rage with a sense of irony (xxiv) that will result in a "materialist protest against theologies that do no work" (xxii). He offers an anti-cathexis on nearly every page, allowing the book to breathe, enfold, unfold, then fold together. No doubt this is why religion emerges triumphant: the registers of subjectivity are charged and discharged in rhythmic but unregulated apophatic space, in the movements across the unguarded frontiers of the real, symbolic and imaginary by disembodied spirits of the hysteric, the obsessive, the psychotic and the neurotic, searching horizons of anxiety, resistance and repression. It's a religion of a mystic.
Still, if psychoanalysis is to 'unsettle theology,' it must relinquish the analyst-as-subject-supposed-to-know and rely on differance. Intepretation must be deferred and differentiated from imagination, for the truth must be reloaded in manageable aliquots (27). The process is very tenuous, of course, because repetition is irresistible in its thirst for the 'new' (39). "Wherever there is theology, there is anxiety...[T]he relation of theology is fluid and produces a back and forth experience of the negative and the positive" (43). Apparently, theology is unsettled by exposing its undulations of apophatic and cataphatic moods, its claim that anything gets done, that something is working in the bipolarity of mood swings.
Even an unsettled, perhaps haunted, "[t]heology is at its best when it acknowledges itself as a nexus around a void" (47). And here is where DeLay discovers but does not annouce the incestuous relations between psychoanalysis and its cognate siblings. Cathexis masquerades as a drive encircling a void that must momentarily be filled by any of the cognates (47). Here is a great irony with no little rage: all the cognates love to build fences, and that these fences spin and oscillate around the objects taking turns in the center: the cognates are the objects of their own desire, and results in an excess of jouissance for its own sake. The more things change the more they stay the same: that's the trick of any cognate dreaming of hegemony.
The problem of desire is foundational for Lacan, and DeLay's exposition of it in his Chapter 4, "Psychopathology" positions his critique of "American Evangelical," "fundamentalist," Christianity, especially his exposition of perversion (122 ff.) He remains faithful to the axiom that 'one's desire is the desire of the Other.' "[T]he pervert is primarily defined by the mechanism of fetish disavowel and his fantasy that he is the object of the Big Other's desire" (77). Simplified to its basic term, perversion is delusion (78). Here is DeLay at his most meticulous, and he must be read cautiously and deliberately. Let him hold his reader's hand very closely, through his articulation of 'transference' to his disclosure of an essential "pattern: perversion pressures neurosis to reorient specifically as obsessionalism, often through hysteric or psychotic language," which is, like any other language, conventional, "exchangeable" and "irrelevant" (123). The only thing that matters is "that things work smoothly."
And things work smoothly until they don't work smoothly. And then we must begin again. Not in Zizek's nightmare Hegel where 'again' is more of the same, but in a hope that repetition has a rebirth, and something actually changes, something psychoanalysis might call a cure, but in its religious version would call a cura pastoralis. And this is why I predict that the authorial intelligence at work in the synthesis of God is Unconscious cannot rest until it rests in the heart of Keller's Cloud.
DeLay's book deserves a 2nd printing, and not just to rid the book of its distracting and escalating typographical errors and frank word omissions. God is Unconscious deserves a second hearing. DeLay writes pleasantly, with clarity and controlled enthusiasm as he takes his reader on a search where he himself searches. We must allow him to steer us on the never-intersecting edges of the rope of the Borromean knot, through subjectivity and into his enthralling subject, which he admits is not deconstruction, but certainly not indeconstructible.
A man approaches an analyst asking if there's anything he can do to help his brother who thinks he's a chicken. The analyst responds, 'why don't you bring him in?' The man replies, 'because we really need the eggs.' No, not that Marx.
What that anecdote excludes is the jealousy of the analyst, who would like a brother like that, because he really needs the eggs, too. The analyst's desire is for eggs in perpetuity.
The analyst is the subject-who's-supposed-to-know. He just doesn't know Foucault. The original Ovaltine (or better yet, 'Roundtine') determines just what knowledge is. That's right: that Marx. Seinfeld, Groucho, Allen--I get them all confused, but not so confused as to miss out on my secret decoder ring, which, when it comes to Lacan...
We can add up Lacan, Zizek, and perhaps Delay, then divide by Lyotard, and you're left with a religion without a metanarrative. But what is psychoanalysis without its metanarrative of power, its hegemony over real, symbolic and imaginary registers poking its nose through the unconscious into consciousness? While it allows the analysand to dig deeper, psychoanalysis will not discover its own difficulty with things that don't work in the image of the discoveries of the analysand. It is blind to see that the reflection of the knave is the fool, and the fool's reflection is the knave. "And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind..."
When psychoanalyts leave the bedside (couch-side? In any event the traditional clinical setting) to become culture critics, yet bring the same tools (bag of tricks?) to the game, we should expect some electricity. Cultures must undergo a reduction to organism whose narrative is not told in the first person, but always in the 3rd. The relationship between the critic and the subject is dramatically transformed. Against Lacan's protestations, the analyst, far from interrupting too soon, tells the whole story (at least when they give seminars or write books); but, of course, the master has endorsed the creative shift away from the altar, away from ritual, to the vox populi.
Tad DeLay's wonderfully written book on the interface of theology/religion and psychoanalysis, God is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis & Theology (Wipf and Stock, 2015) is a fascinating recollection and meditation of the discipline's unfolding into the intellectual worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries. I identify the work as a 'book' because I have not decided just what genre the book should be received into; and that could be a good thing. I recall that Michel Foucault once said his major works were more like novels than philosophy. I'll therefore stick with 'book,' though genealogy, novel or rhapsody would work just as well.
The book opens with an anecdote recalling a conversation between Jung and Freud, who upon sailing into NY Harbor and viewing a statue guarding an impressive city, recognized that they were delivering a 'plague,' not unlike the way the USS Indianapolis delivered the 'bomb.' Either way, an explosion can't be far off, or at least something that goes 'bang.' DeLay writes about an invasion, a cathectic advance of an occupying force that electrified the world with currents buzzing to this very day. Freud and Jung were no lads from Liverpool, but they were bigger than Jesus Christ.
Or so the story goes. Cathexis is the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king. In his introduction, DeLay promises a dose of rage with a sense of irony (xxiv) that will result in a "materialist protest against theologies that do no work" (xxii). He offers an anti-cathexis on nearly every page, allowing the book to breathe, enfold, unfold, then fold together. No doubt this is why religion emerges triumphant: the registers of subjectivity are charged and discharged in rhythmic but unregulated apophatic space, in the movements across the unguarded frontiers of the real, symbolic and imaginary by disembodied spirits of the hysteric, the obsessive, the psychotic and the neurotic, searching horizons of anxiety, resistance and repression. It's a religion of a mystic.
Still, if psychoanalysis is to 'unsettle theology,' it must relinquish the analyst-as-subject-supposed-to-know and rely on differance. Intepretation must be deferred and differentiated from imagination, for the truth must be reloaded in manageable aliquots (27). The process is very tenuous, of course, because repetition is irresistible in its thirst for the 'new' (39). "Wherever there is theology, there is anxiety...[T]he relation of theology is fluid and produces a back and forth experience of the negative and the positive" (43). Apparently, theology is unsettled by exposing its undulations of apophatic and cataphatic moods, its claim that anything gets done, that something is working in the bipolarity of mood swings.
Even an unsettled, perhaps haunted, "[t]heology is at its best when it acknowledges itself as a nexus around a void" (47). And here is where DeLay discovers but does not annouce the incestuous relations between psychoanalysis and its cognate siblings. Cathexis masquerades as a drive encircling a void that must momentarily be filled by any of the cognates (47). Here is a great irony with no little rage: all the cognates love to build fences, and that these fences spin and oscillate around the objects taking turns in the center: the cognates are the objects of their own desire, and results in an excess of jouissance for its own sake. The more things change the more they stay the same: that's the trick of any cognate dreaming of hegemony.
The problem of desire is foundational for Lacan, and DeLay's exposition of it in his Chapter 4, "Psychopathology" positions his critique of "American Evangelical," "fundamentalist," Christianity, especially his exposition of perversion (122 ff.) He remains faithful to the axiom that 'one's desire is the desire of the Other.' "[T]he pervert is primarily defined by the mechanism of fetish disavowel and his fantasy that he is the object of the Big Other's desire" (77). Simplified to its basic term, perversion is delusion (78). Here is DeLay at his most meticulous, and he must be read cautiously and deliberately. Let him hold his reader's hand very closely, through his articulation of 'transference' to his disclosure of an essential "pattern: perversion pressures neurosis to reorient specifically as obsessionalism, often through hysteric or psychotic language," which is, like any other language, conventional, "exchangeable" and "irrelevant" (123). The only thing that matters is "that things work smoothly."
And things work smoothly until they don't work smoothly. And then we must begin again. Not in Zizek's nightmare Hegel where 'again' is more of the same, but in a hope that repetition has a rebirth, and something actually changes, something psychoanalysis might call a cure, but in its religious version would call a cura pastoralis. And this is why I predict that the authorial intelligence at work in the synthesis of God is Unconscious cannot rest until it rests in the heart of Keller's Cloud.
DeLay's book deserves a 2nd printing, and not just to rid the book of its distracting and escalating typographical errors and frank word omissions. God is Unconscious deserves a second hearing. DeLay writes pleasantly, with clarity and controlled enthusiasm as he takes his reader on a search where he himself searches. We must allow him to steer us on the never-intersecting edges of the rope of the Borromean knot, through subjectivity and into his enthralling subject, which he admits is not deconstruction, but certainly not indeconstructible.
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