Comprehensive Oral Examination

Jacob W. Glazier Psychology 9002: Doctoral Qualifying Seminar

Department of Psychology University of West Georgia

Carrollton, Georgia, USA April 7th, 2015

Outline 1.Aletheia 2.Performativity 3.Desire 4.Praxis 5.Ethics 6.Divinities

1. Aletheia

1. Aletheia •What is truth and falsity? •What is knowledge? •What is ontology? •What is the human being? •What is eudaimonia, the good life? •Why choose aletheia?

1. Aletheia • Early Heidegger, aletheia is correspondence of knowledge with

beings. True and false are categorically distinct, different in kind. • “The “being true” of logos as aletheuein means: to take beings that are

being talked about in legein as apophainesthai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alethes); to discover them. Similarly “being false,” pseudesthai, is tantamount to deceiving in the sense of covering up: putting something in front of something else (by way of letting it be seen) and thereby passing it off as something it is not” (Heidegger, 1927/1996, p. 29, emphasis in original).

• After die Kehre, Heidegger foregrounds aletheia as a priori to truth or falsity, more ambiguous and pre-epistemological. • “Unconcealment thought as clearing, first grants the possibility of truth”

(Heidegger, 1993, p. 446).

• Heraclitus, Fragment 123: Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ • Phonetically: fýsis krýptesthai fileí

• φύσις (phúsis) 1 origin, birth

2 nature, quality, property

3 later, the nature of one's personality: temper, disposition

4 form, shape

5 that which is natural: nature

6 type, kind

7 nature, as an entity, especially of productive power

8 creature

• Κρύπτεσθαι (krýptesthai)

• φιλεῖ (philéō) 1 to love, like, regard highly

2 to treat kindly, welcome

3 (post-Homeric) to show signs of affection, kiss

4 (post-Homeric) to enjoy

1. Aletheia

• Colloquial translation: “Nature loves to hide.” • beings desire to conceal their beingness

• nature carries itself forward, sheltered, into blossoming

• Heidegger: “The emerging bestows favor on self-concealing.”

• Unpacked further: “If we heed the fact that going-up is of itself [von sich aus] a going-back-into-itself, then both determinations are not to be thought somehow only as on hand simultaneously and alongside one another, but instead they mean one and the same basic move…”

(as cited in Dahlstrom, 2011, p. 142-143)

1. Aletheia

• Haraway as radicalized Heidegger • Ontology active, agential, wily, deceptive

• “Nature emerges from this exercise as 'coyote'. This potent trickster can show us that historically specific human relations with 'nature' must somehow ... be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly inhomogeneous” (Haraway, 1991, p. 3).

• Epistemological and/or political action is therefore done through: • “Diffraction does not produce "the same" displaced, as reflection and refraction do.

Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear” (Haraway, 2003, p. 70).

1. Aletheia

• Aletheia as an opening, clearing, and place of play… • “Being understood originality and fundamentally, is simply the ‘play’ of prescencing, of

emerging, a play without ‘why’” (Capobianco, 2010, p. 122).

• Being is like a form of child's play (Spiel) – a kind of gamehood.

• SIMPLY … • Being is the ‘clearing’ that simply clears…

• This signifier ‘simply’ is essential

• Derrida (1978, p. 292): “Play is the disruption of presence... Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.”

1. Aletheia

• Poetic and lyric obscurity as site of aletheia • “Obscurity— what passes for material substance in poetry— [is] the erosion of the

particular darkness of things by their names, producing a metaphysical compound of language and matter, logos and phenomenon” (Tiffany, 2009, p. 61).

• The Riddle • “And this is the aim of a riddle: the dark speech veiling the object coalesces—once the

riddle is solved—into an image of the object itself. Yet obscurity, in a literary sense, is itself already an artifact: the glowing remains of darkness apprehended by language... Naming the dark makes darkness visible, and this conversion from substance to object is always a matter of artifice” (Tiffany, 2009, p. 61, emphasis added).

1. Aletheia

2. Performativity

• 20th century philosophy (e.g., postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) largely grounded in Heidegger, specifically Being and Time. • What is the human being for Heidegger?

• contra Sartre

• “[Dasein] is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.” (Heidegger, 1927/1996, p. 10, emphasis in original) • Identity as a falling-prey to das Man (the They, the One)

• Identity as a resoluteness

• Later Heidegger as a softening on this ‘existentialist’ position

2. Performativity

• Lacanian theory understands the subject to a function of the big Other, the symbolic-power matrix that stamps out identities • Desire is a call from the Other viz. language: ‘What does the Other want from me?’ • “The effect of language is to introduce the cause into the subject. Through this effect, he is

not the cause of himself; he bears within himself the worm of the cause that splits him. For his cause is the signifier, without which there would be no subject in the real… One therefore does not speak to the subject. It speaks of him, and this is how he apprehends himself… he is produced by the appeal made in the Other to the second signifier” (Lacan, 2006, p. 708).

• Early Butlerian subject theory is the most anti-humanist • Foregrounded by an inability to meet up, discursively, with its copy • Therefore, a subversive or disloyal repetition is an ‘authentic’ repetition • Paradigmatically figured in drag: “I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the

distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity … In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (Butler, 1990, p. 137, emphasis in original).

2. Performativity

• Butler, following Foucault, identifies the cogito (identity, subjectivity, etc.) as a site of power proliferation and policing, of homogeneity and flattening. • “This ‘I thinks’ its offering up the truth of itself in a discourse of identity to satisfy the

one who demands this one of me to avoid the torture that one demands, even to compel the torturer to Love me. But the subject in the subject’s moment of avowal becomes - much to its humiliation - a nodal point in the proliferation of a discourse. For I do not just bind myself to the Other who demands that I identify myself, I bind myself to the discourse which augments its power and reach through my avowal” (Butler, 2015).

• Contra Butler, Žižek (2002) parses this failure in terms of the Butlerian subject perpetually attempting to manifest the historically contingent social norm; even though always failing, “the ideal is still there” (p. 71). • Gender is always a failure but only in a certain, historically predetermined sense, never

as a breakdown as such. This ‘breakdown as such’ Lacan (as cited in Žižek, 2002) called “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” - translated: there is no sexual relationship (p. 71).

2. Performativity

• Dramaturgy • Foucault = Avowal belongs to the order of drama and dramaturgy • Avowal always fulfills the dramaturgical expectations • If I do not publicly disavowal who I have been, I must repudiate that heterogeneity to

become consolidated as an identity.

• Guattari avec Bakhtin • Carnivalesque self-complexification • Linking polyvocal assemblages of enunciation • “The Assemblage of enunciation will thus be led to ‘exceed’ the problematic of the

individuated subject… the question will then become that of the status of these Assemblage components, which find themselves ‘straddling,’ and interacting with, radically heterogeneous domains” (Guattari, 2013, p. 18).

• Foucault: “The problem with avowal is that it tells you nothing. He, the accused, could tell you anything .. can you condemn someone to death you do not know?” (as cited in Butler, 2015)

2. Performativity

3. Desire

• Manqué vs. Surplus • Oedipal psychoanalysis (Freudian, Lacanian, etc.) vs. immanentism (nomadic philosophy,

Deleuze, Guattari, schizoanalysis, etc.)

• Lacanian theory situates desire as a kind of unfulfillment or lack; desire as already haven been given over to the Other • “The presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of the Other, can be found in

every discourse, in its enunciation” (Lacan, 2006, p. 707).

• “The moment of cutting is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap: the pound of flesh that life pays in order to turn the signifier of signifiers, which it is impossible to restore, as such, to the imaginary body; it is the lost phallus of embalmed Osiris” (Lacan, 2006, p. 526).

3. Desire

• Parallelism to early Heidegger… • Everyday desire is a searching from one object to the next

• Heidegger’s das Man insistence on novelty, capitalistic production for its own sake • Stripping of the territory (local values, customs, rituals, etc.) and reterritorialization of capital

(homogeneity, globalization, consumerism, etc.)

• objet a as puncture in field of desire • A ‘stopgap’ for the lostness of desire in the Other

• A way out?

• Lacan’s (friend’s) matchbox • Totemic fetishism

• “a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheimung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing” [das Ding] (as cited in Ruti, 2012, p. 131)

• Still a kind of simulacrum, does not meet the sublime…

3. Desire

• Deleuze & Guattari, following Marxism, employ the term desiring-production to channel the abundance of libido energy into a ready-to-work mode of being • “The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the

unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself—in myth, tragedy, dreams—was substituted for the productive unconscious” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983, p. 24).

• Foucault • Conceptualizes desire similarly to D&G – early Foucault as disciplinary, later Foucault as creative

• Puissance vs. pouvoir / Power to act v. power to dominate

• Perversion • Pervert as a biopolitical creation

• Juridical stamping of self-policing

• As a function of nominalization…

• “It is not only that perverts stay away from analysis because of a history of mistreatment, but also that allegedly perverse modes of enjoyment are seen as a rebuke to analytic know-how. In appearing as untroubled, the happy pervert apparently troubles the psychoanalyst” (Dean, 2008, p. 101).

3. Desire

4. Praxis

• Lacan makes disavowal structural to perversion… knows what he is for the Other. • Neurosis repression

• A question posed to the Other

• Psychosis foreclosure • Name-of-the-father is not integrated into the Symbolic order

• Disavowal • "je sais bien, mais quand-même.”

• "I know very well, but nevertheless.”

• “I know very well, but all the same.”

• Zizek: function of ideology

• Kristeva: function of language

4. Praxis

• Perversion as a figure to read psychoanalysis against itself – i.e., let’s get out of the Oedipal theater (because it doesn’t exist in the first place!) • Perverts as an enigma / riddle to analysts

• Miller: “Few perverts ask to undergo analysis. We might conclude that perverts are unanalyzable, but the fact is they simply don’t come asking to undergo analysis” (as cited in Dean, 2008, p. 100).

• Miller: “[they] don’t come to seek out the lost object; thus, it is just plain common sense to believe that, in some way, they have found it and can expect nothing from analysis. The effect known since Lacan as the ‘subject supposed to know’ doesn’t arise with a true pervert […] You need a certain void or deficit in the place of sexual enjoyment for the subject supposed to know to arise” (as cited in Dean, 2008, p. 101).

4. Praxis

• The pervert’s will-to-enjoy: “volonté-de-jouissance” • Holds himself up for the enjoyment of the Other… an instrumentalization • Matheme: a <> $

• Inverse of the fantasy

• Examples of perverts… • the judge, the professor, and the priest • as a mediator of the jouissance of others…

• Schizoanalysis as a perverse discipline • “a discipline for reading other modelling systems” (Guattari, 2013, p. 17, emphasis in

original). • “the analysis of the impact of Assemblages of enunciation on semiotic and subjective

productions in a given problematic context” (Guattari, 2013, p. 18, emphasis in original).

4. Praxis

• If we take moralist, the guru, the minister as operating in a perverse mode of being – i.e., knowing the will of the Other, etc…. a channeling

• Heideggerian praxis as dwelling • That is, “guardianship of, caring-for, ‘the abode’ , our world” (Young, 2002, p. 100).

• I.e., the fourfold: earth, sky, divinities, and mortals

• Mirror-play or ring-dance that creates a space of dwelling and a being able to care for • Causal interconnection between the various elements

• The thinging of the thing

4. Praxis

5. Ethics

• The meta-narrative for most humanistic, Lacanian, Heideggerian, and existential ethics runs along some version of Sophocles tragedy of Antigone.

• The hero’s “NO!” ... contra a ‘perverse’ ethics • “For both [Heidegger and Lacan], the important theme in Antigone is not that prudential

wisdom is ‘the best of all out wealth,’ as Tiresias declaims, but that heroism is required to sunder convention in order to create authentically or pursue to the bitter end one’s desire or life’s project … it is precisely the transgression of conventional limits in the name of one’s project that appear to be the condition of the possibility of living an ‘authentic’ or ‘heroic’ – if not happy – life” (Capobianco, 2010, p. 131).

• “The crucial feature of her action lies… in the supreme indifference she displays, her disregard for any consequences in the world of the living – a hardness she reveals in the opening lines of the play, as though her choice had already been made in advance… it is this supreme waywardness and detachment that cuts the hero off from the community, leading her to act in haughty solitude and indifference, but at the same time in a manner that turns out to have incalculable effects, so that her act still reaches the world of the living, to whom it was not addressed” (Sheperdson as cited in Capobianco, 2010, p. 138).

5. Ethics

• Schizoanalytic ethics - a ‘perverse’ ethics? As a mimesis of the Other’s jouissance… • A subterranean mode of being, becoming-imperceptible • Connected to Tiffany’s analysis of cant, kitsch, and the riddle of the Sphinx • Complementary to the Heideggerian play of being

• “The imperceptible appears as the perceived object of desire itself, ‘the nonfigurative of desire’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 284).

• A life of art, a life of artifice • Self-poetic maneuverability, tacticality and becoming diffuse a la Pierrot • The realm of the asignifying, asubjective and facelessness – never reterritorializing on itself • “Only a line of flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the

opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new happiness?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 207).

5. Ethics

6. Divinities

• The divinities are the gods of the fourfold • Sky, earth, mortals, gods

• Messengers via Hölderlin as angels – What is the message? • The divine destings, laws, or edicts

• “Antigone’s resistance to the merely ‘human statutes’ of Creon’s state, for example, is justified by – here Heidegger quotes Sophocles – ‘the immutable, unwritten edict divine’ (I. p.166)” (as cited in Young, 2002, p. 95).

• These divine destining are asignifyable: transmissible only through embodiments or incarnations… in this way a becoming-imperceptible

• “‘the gods’ of late Heidegger are the reincarnations of early Heidegger’s ‘heroes’” (Young, 2002, p. 96).

• “Later Heidegger’s gods, that is, are not just the ‘messengers’ of the divine laws but are charismatic inspiring, and so authoritative, messengers” (Young, 2002, p. 97, emphasis in original). • “For Heidegger the nature of ultimate ethical authority is charismatic” (Young, 2002, p. 97,

footnote) … the forgers of post-mediatic assemblages of enunciation

6. Divinities

• Heidegger grounds the gods in the historical-symbolic as a particular paragon and totemic kind of fetish • “As heritage, the gods are always present. They are, however, pallid, sickly” (Young,

2002, p. 113).

• “To care-for the gods is, therefore, passively and actively, to promote their flourishing, their appropriation” (Young, 2002, p. 114).

• Also as a function of techne wherein one brings-forth the gods, beckons them. • In this way the gods are created having special energetic and discursive effects

• A searching, cultivation, setting oneself ready, reading the signs for their return

6. Divinities

• Guattari’s post-media era… the gods as forgers of assemblages of hyper-cathected signifiers • Guattari’s artifice as that which is flush with the Real

• More Freudian than Lacan viz. libidinal energetics, both psychical and physical

• “a postmedia era that would give the Assemblages of subjective self-reference their full scope” (Guattari, 2013, p. 6)

• Deleuzian buggery reading of Heideggerian divinities viz. Guattari’s schizoanalytic diagrammatics • Taking an author from behind and producing an offspring which is recognizable and yet

monstrously different

• Post-mediatic subjectivities are … “like pieces on a chess board that have been knocked slightly, the gestures, postures, profiles, facial traits, folds of clothing of all the characters have been diverted from their ‘natural’ position so as to be re-oriented in such a way that they answer to an enigmatic play of correspondences” (Guattari, 2013, p. 254).

6. Divinities

References

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