Saturday, November 14, 2009
See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (part 4)
4. The judge.
The most striking character in Blood Meridian is that of the judge. He is an enigma, an enormous, hairless beast of a man who, despite the mystery of his existence, is ironically the most defined. Like the kid, he is said to have simply appeared, “There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see…Brown thought him a mirage” (124). His existence is spectral. He is as authoritative as he is insane. The judge first appears in an early episode when he without motive turns an entire revival against a preacher. After the riot, a man asks him “Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?” to which the judge casually responds, “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him” (8). The absolute nature of his power and his violence establish the judge as spiritual leader of the company, as well as executor of the desert.
The judge has an understanding of the world which the other characters lack. He has with him a journal in which he catalogues things in nature, “he is a draftsman…he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his council had been sought at its creation” (140). The judge is indeed creator of the pandemonium that is the desert. By his will comes destruction. Conversely, though, he is also very much existent within the symbolic register. One anecdote relates that the judge had “once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness” (141), thus establishing himself as the one from which all imagos are formed. He is the draftsman of the symbolic order, elevating the things he draws to their proper place in the signifying chain. He himself explains, “Whatever exists in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” (198). In the chaotic world of Blood Meridian, he is father.
It is precisely the kid who exists without the judge’s consent. Elevating the kid into the symbolic register, becoming the father, is the object of the judge’s jouissance. He desires nothing else. The judge twice in the novel takes on a perverted fatherly persona. After a raid on an Apache camp, the judge takes with him on his saddle a small boy, only to scalp the child four pages later: “The judge rode…bearing before him a strange dark child covered with ash…with huge black eyes like some changeling…Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed…but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it” (160-164). The judge’s second adoption, a caged half-wit that calls “hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates” (251), is a dumb show of the inevitable relationship that will emerge between the judge and the kid. Like the kid, the idiot is excluded from the symbolic. He has no language, no notion of itself. Mute in its own way, the idiot is entirely fragmented. The judge does not love the idiot as much as he uses him. It becomes a representation of the kid. Its mother is dead, and although it has a name, “there don’t anybody call him it” (256). It is the judge’s aim to keep him mired in idiocy. At a river crossing a group of women see the idiot and he is mothered by a woman named Sarah Borginnis. She calls him by name (James Robert) and bathes him, preparing him for elevation into the symbolic, freeing him from the filth of the blah-blah-blah. The women “led James Robert into the waters…he sees hisself in it, they said” (258). That night the idiot discovers his voice. It “passed from him like a gift” (258). The idiot then falls into the river, submerged in the symbolic. The judge “seized up the idiot…and restored it among its fellows” (259). The judge restored the idiot to its original psychotic state. Only the judge has the right to elevate his children into the symbolic.
The elevation of the kid to a speaking body, the body of signification which he has rejected, becomes the object of jouissance for the judge. While jailed, the kid is visited by the judge. The kid, “began to speak with a strange urgency…and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered” (305). The judge comes to the kid and begins his final luring, “Don’t you know that I’d have loved you like a son?” (306). Imprisoned, it is the first the kid is contained. He is captive audience to the judge. He may finally be spoken to. Having rejected the father, the judge explains, “you were the person responsible…you and none other shaped events along such a calamitous path” (306). The calamitous path in question is psychosis.
Facing the gallows, the kid is surprisingly released. It is not until thirty-one years later does the kid again meet the judge. In a bar he is commanded by the keep, “Speak or forever” (325). A man now, the kid is still premature. He sees himself, “There was a mirror along the backbar but it held only smoke and phantoms” (325). The kid, the man-child, is still in the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. The bar is as incoherent as the kid, ghostlike, carnivalesque, “a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twisted strangely upon a board stage” (324). Among all of this is the judge, who has remained unchanged. The judge again interrogates, “Was it always your intention that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328). The kid had forged an unsustainable identity on silence, indifference, and the annihilation of the father. It is necessary he come full circle and return to the father, to accept signification. It is precisely why he could not kill the judge in the desert (298). The shooting of the dancing bear and the judge’s first words to the kid, “Do you believe it’s all over, son?”(327) begin anew the ritual of the mirror stage. The judge tells him there are “Bears that dance, bears that don’t” (331). The kid must join the dance in order to truly forge an identity, to assume an imago. As his original path was that of the destruction of the name-of-the-father to fill the hole it had created, to become “the child as father of the man” (3), the kid must himself be consumed. This consummation takes place in an outhouse. In the jakes “the judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (333). What better place than the shithouse to be baptized into what was so wholly rejected?
As well, one may read the episode in the jakes as the moment of the kid’s castration. There is a sexual undertone to whatever is happening between the kid and the judge. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” a pissing man tells another. The only reaction to the event is “Good God almighty” (334). The judge, as the father, is the agent of castration, akin to his scalping the Apache child. There is an experience of jouissance in this for the judge. The novel ends in celebration, as “Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing…He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite…He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The kid had no choice but to accept the father. He could not continue to ex-sist. He could not simply be a body, as Miller explains. The subject must accept language in order to elevate into the symbolic, to become a speaking-being so as to truly to forge an imago.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. Ecrits. Trans.
Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or: The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage,
1985.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body. Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.
Lacanian Ink. (15).
The most striking character in Blood Meridian is that of the judge. He is an enigma, an enormous, hairless beast of a man who, despite the mystery of his existence, is ironically the most defined. Like the kid, he is said to have simply appeared, “There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see…Brown thought him a mirage” (124). His existence is spectral. He is as authoritative as he is insane. The judge first appears in an early episode when he without motive turns an entire revival against a preacher. After the riot, a man asks him “Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?” to which the judge casually responds, “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him” (8). The absolute nature of his power and his violence establish the judge as spiritual leader of the company, as well as executor of the desert.
The judge has an understanding of the world which the other characters lack. He has with him a journal in which he catalogues things in nature, “he is a draftsman…he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his council had been sought at its creation” (140). The judge is indeed creator of the pandemonium that is the desert. By his will comes destruction. Conversely, though, he is also very much existent within the symbolic register. One anecdote relates that the judge had “once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness” (141), thus establishing himself as the one from which all imagos are formed. He is the draftsman of the symbolic order, elevating the things he draws to their proper place in the signifying chain. He himself explains, “Whatever exists in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” (198). In the chaotic world of Blood Meridian, he is father.
It is precisely the kid who exists without the judge’s consent. Elevating the kid into the symbolic register, becoming the father, is the object of the judge’s jouissance. He desires nothing else. The judge twice in the novel takes on a perverted fatherly persona. After a raid on an Apache camp, the judge takes with him on his saddle a small boy, only to scalp the child four pages later: “The judge rode…bearing before him a strange dark child covered with ash…with huge black eyes like some changeling…Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed…but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it” (160-164). The judge’s second adoption, a caged half-wit that calls “hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates” (251), is a dumb show of the inevitable relationship that will emerge between the judge and the kid. Like the kid, the idiot is excluded from the symbolic. He has no language, no notion of itself. Mute in its own way, the idiot is entirely fragmented. The judge does not love the idiot as much as he uses him. It becomes a representation of the kid. Its mother is dead, and although it has a name, “there don’t anybody call him it” (256). It is the judge’s aim to keep him mired in idiocy. At a river crossing a group of women see the idiot and he is mothered by a woman named Sarah Borginnis. She calls him by name (James Robert) and bathes him, preparing him for elevation into the symbolic, freeing him from the filth of the blah-blah-blah. The women “led James Robert into the waters…he sees hisself in it, they said” (258). That night the idiot discovers his voice. It “passed from him like a gift” (258). The idiot then falls into the river, submerged in the symbolic. The judge “seized up the idiot…and restored it among its fellows” (259). The judge restored the idiot to its original psychotic state. Only the judge has the right to elevate his children into the symbolic.
The elevation of the kid to a speaking body, the body of signification which he has rejected, becomes the object of jouissance for the judge. While jailed, the kid is visited by the judge. The kid, “began to speak with a strange urgency…and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered” (305). The judge comes to the kid and begins his final luring, “Don’t you know that I’d have loved you like a son?” (306). Imprisoned, it is the first the kid is contained. He is captive audience to the judge. He may finally be spoken to. Having rejected the father, the judge explains, “you were the person responsible…you and none other shaped events along such a calamitous path” (306). The calamitous path in question is psychosis.
Facing the gallows, the kid is surprisingly released. It is not until thirty-one years later does the kid again meet the judge. In a bar he is commanded by the keep, “Speak or forever” (325). A man now, the kid is still premature. He sees himself, “There was a mirror along the backbar but it held only smoke and phantoms” (325). The kid, the man-child, is still in the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. The bar is as incoherent as the kid, ghostlike, carnivalesque, “a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twisted strangely upon a board stage” (324). Among all of this is the judge, who has remained unchanged. The judge again interrogates, “Was it always your intention that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328). The kid had forged an unsustainable identity on silence, indifference, and the annihilation of the father. It is necessary he come full circle and return to the father, to accept signification. It is precisely why he could not kill the judge in the desert (298). The shooting of the dancing bear and the judge’s first words to the kid, “Do you believe it’s all over, son?”(327) begin anew the ritual of the mirror stage. The judge tells him there are “Bears that dance, bears that don’t” (331). The kid must join the dance in order to truly forge an identity, to assume an imago. As his original path was that of the destruction of the name-of-the-father to fill the hole it had created, to become “the child as father of the man” (3), the kid must himself be consumed. This consummation takes place in an outhouse. In the jakes “the judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (333). What better place than the shithouse to be baptized into what was so wholly rejected?
As well, one may read the episode in the jakes as the moment of the kid’s castration. There is a sexual undertone to whatever is happening between the kid and the judge. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” a pissing man tells another. The only reaction to the event is “Good God almighty” (334). The judge, as the father, is the agent of castration, akin to his scalping the Apache child. There is an experience of jouissance in this for the judge. The novel ends in celebration, as “Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing…He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite…He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The kid had no choice but to accept the father. He could not continue to ex-sist. He could not simply be a body, as Miller explains. The subject must accept language in order to elevate into the symbolic, to become a speaking-being so as to truly to forge an imago.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. Ecrits. Trans.
Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or: The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage,
1985.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body. Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.
Lacanian Ink. (15).
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Action! [on Artaud]
Currently working on an essay regarding Artaud. Until it is completed, here is something from Žižek to mull over...
"The transfixed gaze isolates a stain of the real, a detail which 'sticks out' from the stain of symbolic reality - in short, a traumatic surplus of the real over the symbolic...it is 'substantiated', caused, created, by the transfixed gaze itself."
[from 'everything you wanted to know about lacan (but were afraid to ask hitchcock)' pg. 236]
"The transfixed gaze isolates a stain of the real, a detail which 'sticks out' from the stain of symbolic reality - in short, a traumatic surplus of the real over the symbolic...it is 'substantiated', caused, created, by the transfixed gaze itself."
[from 'everything you wanted to know about lacan (but were afraid to ask hitchcock)' pg. 236]
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009
Sad News, Sad Tropics
We have learnt with great sadness
of the death of Lévi-Strauss,
whose inspiration was decisive
in the genesis and first developments
of Lacan’s teaching.
We bow with respect
to the memory of this great man.
I will recall here the name of Roman Jakobson,
whose students and friends Lévi-Strauss and Lacan were,
and to whom we are all indebted.
There must be a fourth:
Saussure? Dumézil? Bourbaki? The Foucault of The Order of Things?
Who was their philosopher, their Minerva’s owl?
Or Mallarmé, who knows?
As he was wont, Lévi-Strauss has passed away,
the haughty and melancholy genius of structuralism.
He had to fight hard to be recognised,
and to clear the room, to build the house,
we live in still.
We shall not see his like again.
Jacques-Alain Miller, 3 November 2009, 6.15pm.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Clinical Study Days 4 - NYC.
Pierre-Gilles Gueguen will be the keynote speaker for the fourth Clinical Study Days, being held in New York City on October 16,17 and 18. On Friday he will be speaking on the Semblant and the Phallus, while on Saturday his talk will focus on interpretation.
www.clinicalstudydays.us
www.clinicalstudydays.us
Friday, October 2, 2009
See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (part 3)
3. The Four of Cups and the kid as object of jouissance.
Twice in the novel does McCarthy reference the Four of Cups in reference to the kid. This card, taken from the Tarot deck, is representative of disconnection, apathy, and a turning within the self. At one point, the kid merely sees the card (59), while on a second occasion he draws the card (94). The kid, alienated from the symbolic, is thoroughly stuck inside of himself. Although member of a company of riders, he is more spectator than participant. He is as mutely obedient as he is totally recalcitrant. The acts of his company are like illusions as “he saw from that high rimland the collision of armies remote and silent on the plain below…mute and ordered and senseless until the warring horsemen were gone in the sudden rush of dark that fell over the desert” (213).
The kid is distant, measured by no meridian but his own. Even the desert, the hallucinatory carnival of bloodshed it represents, cannot confine him. He is alien to all, including himself, and it is this that not only aligns him to the Four of Cups, but establishes him as an object of jouissance to those around him. Toadvine excitedly shouts “Kick his mouth in…aw, kick him, honey” as he holds back a man’s head so the kid can kick his face in. He then runs through the street in a dance “like a crazed voodoo doll made animate” (13), while the hotel they’ve lit on fire burns behind him. Stephen Shaviro, in his A Reading of Blood Meridian, states, “this blankness is also what makes the kid into an object of desire for other characters in the book. They lust after him to the precise measure of his own indifference” (151-2). The most striking sexual relation to the kid comes from the judge, who takes as his sole purpose to reign in the kid and establish himself in the position of the name-of-the-father.
Friday, September 25, 2009
In the works: articles and analyses
Working on an examination of Anais Nin's Seduction of the Minotaur as well as an analysis of the paintings of Henry Darger.
Henry Darger
Henry Darger
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (Part 2)
2. The kid without signification becomes a parricide.
“See the child” (3). The first line of Blood Meridian presents a body manifested from nothing. There is no birth, merely Gestalt. The Kid, in his fourteenth year, has received nothing from his parents. He is base exteriority. His mother died in childbirth, and his father is a schoolteacher who has not taught him to read or write. The Kid was never told his mother’s name, and is himself nameless. He lacks signification, he has not possession of a proper noun by which to elevate himself. But a specter, “all history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3). The lack of a parental structure presents an absence of the name-of-the-father. It is entirely foreclosed from The Kid, giving him no choice but to abandon any notion of it. He ultimately abandons the father, exiling himself from the name-of-the-father, left to his own impotent devices in the forging of any identity.
Language is meaningless to The Kid. He is stuck in the blah-blah-blah of the imaginary. In exile he “hears tongues that he has not heard before” where “speech sounds like the grunting of apes” (4). There is no notion of a unified speaking being. In Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body, Jacques-Alain Miller explains, “We identify the body and the being of life in some spontaneous, imaginary way…as far as the speaking body is concerned, it does not emerge from being but from having” (15). The Kid is suspended between the being and having, the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. Because he is alienated from the symbolic, the chaos of language is made physical in violence. It is the only sense in the senseless world through which The Kid has become pilgrim. Even the first words spoken directly to and for him are maniacal. The earless Toadvine states, “I’m goin to kill you…Kill your ass” in such a way that “he had codified is threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant” (McCarthy 9). Toadvine is unsuccessful in killing The Kid, but becomes something of an early indication that the name-of-the-father is the hole in which he needs to fill. Toadvine is by no means a father figure, but his words are formative.
Without signification, The Kid experiences a stabilization of his identity through violence. In destroying any notion of the name-of-the-father, he becomes a nom-du-père-icide. For him “All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and residue of a nameless rage. Here are the dead fathers” (146). The rampant violence in which The Kid is a willing participant is the means by which he may fill the hole of the name-of-the-father by destroying it. In doing so he may become “that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry…by decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (199).
“See the child” (3). The first line of Blood Meridian presents a body manifested from nothing. There is no birth, merely Gestalt. The Kid, in his fourteenth year, has received nothing from his parents. He is base exteriority. His mother died in childbirth, and his father is a schoolteacher who has not taught him to read or write. The Kid was never told his mother’s name, and is himself nameless. He lacks signification, he has not possession of a proper noun by which to elevate himself. But a specter, “all history present in that visage, the child the father of the man” (3). The lack of a parental structure presents an absence of the name-of-the-father. It is entirely foreclosed from The Kid, giving him no choice but to abandon any notion of it. He ultimately abandons the father, exiling himself from the name-of-the-father, left to his own impotent devices in the forging of any identity.
Language is meaningless to The Kid. He is stuck in the blah-blah-blah of the imaginary. In exile he “hears tongues that he has not heard before” where “speech sounds like the grunting of apes” (4). There is no notion of a unified speaking being. In Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body, Jacques-Alain Miller explains, “We identify the body and the being of life in some spontaneous, imaginary way…as far as the speaking body is concerned, it does not emerge from being but from having” (15). The Kid is suspended between the being and having, the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. Because he is alienated from the symbolic, the chaos of language is made physical in violence. It is the only sense in the senseless world through which The Kid has become pilgrim. Even the first words spoken directly to and for him are maniacal. The earless Toadvine states, “I’m goin to kill you…Kill your ass” in such a way that “he had codified is threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant” (McCarthy 9). Toadvine is unsuccessful in killing The Kid, but becomes something of an early indication that the name-of-the-father is the hole in which he needs to fill. Toadvine is by no means a father figure, but his words are formative.
Without signification, The Kid experiences a stabilization of his identity through violence. In destroying any notion of the name-of-the-father, he becomes a nom-du-père-icide. For him “All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and residue of a nameless rage. Here are the dead fathers” (146). The rampant violence in which The Kid is a willing participant is the means by which he may fill the hole of the name-of-the-father by destroying it. In doing so he may become “that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry…by decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (199).
Transcendental Pornography: Lacanian Feminine Sexuality in 'The Devil in Miss Jones' (full text)
The Devil in Miss Jones begins and ends on the couch. Less than a year before the release of the film, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan announced “Le femme n’existe pas” (“The Woman does not exist”). This is not an admonition of women proper, but The Woman, a singular, barred entity. It is a semblant, or the make believe of an appearance, that does not and cannot exist in the Lacanian unconscious. It is just this, The Woman, that is quite brilliantly captured in Justine Jones. For Lacan, The Woman is representative of the not-all. This being not-all there results from there being “no symbol of the feminine sex which can couple in the unconscious with the signifier of the phallus.”[1] The phallus is not considered the penis proper; rather, the organ acts as the object of fantasy. This places women in an interesting position, so to speak. Because of the absence of a symbol in the Lacanian system, she has the choice of aligning herself with the phallus, or rejecting it entirely. Thus the woman is split. She is not-whole. The Woman does not exist.
Gerard Damiano’s second film – note the word, he did not make just another fuck flick – presents, in Justine Jones, a woman entirely foreclosed from the phallus. A thirty-something spinster, her virginity is intact. She has never had sex or even known any sort of desire. She is so far removed from the phallus, she wouldn’t know what to do with it. This is the jumping-off point for Damiano. The first scene of the film ends with Justine Jones’ killing herself. She examines her naked body in a mirror as if it were someone else’s, something alien to her. She cannot read it. The unreadable body has no value, it is incoherent. Her physical act, the slitting of her wrists, is suicide through vivisection.
The Catholic rulebook is fairly direct in its punishment for suicide – eternal damnation. That’s it! Even one as pure and innocent as Miss Jones cannot escape it.
For the sake of this analysis, Hell is not considered in traditional terms. It is the real, the register of the unconscious which is un-faceable. It is what individuals cannot and will not subject themselves to, lest be rendered psychotic. For Lacan, the real is the realm of the impossible.
Miss Jones’ arrival in Limbo presents for the powers that be a bit of a conundrum. They are forced to condemn a woman who otherwise deserves nothing less than salvation. Mr. Abaca, an angel figure whose job is to direct the newly departed, cannot help her peculiar case. Justine will not simply resign herself to her fate. She resolves to earn it. In a fit of Faustian desire, she chooses to immerse herself in the one, most crucial thing she lacked – sexuality. She chances a journey during which she will completely re-
write herself and grab a hold of the signifier (that which relates to the subject of something else) of the phallus.
Learning to speak and the event of the body.
Lacan structures the unconscious like a language. As a speaking being man is forced into the chain of signifiers which not only form his identity, but also establish a social link, namely the sexual relationship. A result of there being no symbol for the female sex, the woman is not whole and the sexual relationship is impossible. Man is phallic by nature, his jouissance (fr. joy, orgasm, cumming) is situated in the phallus. Not just a sensation, jouissance is beyond pleasure. It is so beyond pleasure that it is actually painful for the subject. Lacan can be no more direct when he states “jouissance is suffering.”[2] Women, on the other hand, are split up the middle. As such, the phallus becomes necessary for The Woman to become one (whole).
Miss Jones’ first sexual encounter is with the Teacher (Harry Reems), who, as his name suggests, is responsible for introducing her to the sexual discourse. This is done by way of a variety of sex acts and through language as well. He operates as the Master, commanding her to “open yourself to me.” He then instructs her to speak. Exposing himself to her, he asks, “By what name do you call this?” She responds quietly “Cock, penis, prick,” repeating the words more emphatically, an act of naming the phallus – making it her own. There is elation as she consumes it, first by mouth, and then vaginally. Her inhibitions begin to wane as she develops a rapport with the phallus, establishing herself in the chain of signifiers.
Her sexuation continues with a roll around with another woman. What is most striking in this encounter is its resonance to the Mirror Stage. Lacan believed humans to be born prematurely, and it is through mimicry that the identity is founded. This mimicry is fostered in language (“She’ll grow up to be like her mother”) and an actual image of another (be it another child, or merely a reflection in a mirror). It is from this that the speaking being is written. The formation of the specular image, the reflection of one’s body which is simultaneously one’s self and the object of desire, is central to the Mirror Stage. Miss Jones’ lesbian experience is her coming into contact with a woman’s body so as to learn her own. This is emphasized the moment the other woman begins to paint her. Where her experience with the Teacher is focused primarily on the language of sex, this is the crucial moment in the formation of the body.
Becumming the phallic woman.
The Woman experiences a different kind of jouisance than the man, the jouissance of the body, which is not complementary to phallic jouissance. If The Woman’s jouissance were in fact based on the phallus, she would be whole. In his seminar Encore, Lacan explains, “The fact remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely in the following respect: being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance…she has a different way of approaching that phallus and of keeping it for herself.”[3] Women, therefore, have an infinite number of ways to align themselves with the phallus in order to achieve a semblance of being One, of filling up.
The evolution of Miss Jones into a phallic woman – her staking claim to it – is characterized through masturbation. The woman needs the phallus to operate as a plug, which could be anything. While pleasuring herself in a bath tub, the phallic symbol is simply a thin hose spurting water, a rudimentary, yet functional substitute. She matures, though, as the film progresses. After a second go-round with the Teacher, her methods become a bit more sophisticated. She moves on to fruit, stuffing herself with grapes and fellating a banana, illustrating the sustenance of the phallus as an object of fantasy. Later in the scene, the introduction of a snake brings life to it. The snake slithers from between her legs to her mouth, where she begins to imitate it, flicking her tongue as she closes her lips around its head. It is her phallus in her mouth, forming a circle, a unity. This marks her transition from signifying the not-whole to an apparent domination of the phallus.
From this point on her partners become secondary, mere semblants. She is totally uninhibited, the ultimate phallic woman. Her dominance, controlling two men at once in the penultimate scene of the film, is all too apparent. She doesn’t need them, they’re merely cocks, reduced to operating for her.
“Garcin: I dare say some get used to it in time.
Valet: Some do. Some don’t.” – Sartre, No Exit.
Harry Reems, after reading the script of The Devil in Miss Jones, noted “This is No Exit in its thinnest disguise.” There is a truth to that statement. Yet Hell, for Miss Jones, is the real, the register of the unconscious that is excluded from any symbolic orientation. It cannot be captured in language, which is why it carries such traumatic implications for the subject. It is that which cannot be spoken. The real entirely fragments the body, disassociating it from the imaginary and symbolic registers that hold it together. It is in these first two registers that the image is cohered and situated through language. Fissure of the two renders the subject psychotic. Miss Jones, her body image having been wholly identified with the phallus, and whose sole jouissance derived from it, is now as exiled from it as she was in the beginning of the film. She is but a hole – total lack. From that, there truly is no exit.
Her exile, her hell, is fully realized in her cell mate, who shows no interest in fulfilling her desire. He is more concerned with discussing his trade secret for catching flies than this woman offering herself to him. She pleads for his prick, near unintelligibly, jamming her fingers into herself. “I can’t do it by myself!” she whines. And she’s correct. She never really could to begin with. He simply tells her to be quiet. There is no language in the real. Neither of them make much sense, but the man and his flies are on to something. The sexual relationship, the discourse between The Woman and the phallus, cannot be articulated. There is no symbol for the female. To attempt to speak this relationship is no different than grasping at flies. “Close your eyes, you’ll see,” says the man. He’s right. One sees nothing because it doesn’t exist. That is precisely why Miss Jones cannot do it by herself. To amend Sartre, Hell is the real. It is the complete fragmentation of the body, the disintegration of language. It’s a nasty trick jouissance played on poor Miss Jones – cumming so hard it tore her apart.
It is highly doubtful that Damiano had Lacan in mind when he wrote The Devil in Miss Jones. Be that as it may, his ability to create erotic cinema that allows for such analysis elevates his work above that of mere stroke material. The marriage of such films with critical theory can only enhance the accessibility of both schools.
[1] Pickman, Claude Noële. "Examining a clinic of the not-all." The Letter (2004): 22-23.
[2] Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book V11. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, trans.
Dennis Porter,
[3] -------- The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of
Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973. trans. Bruce Fink. Jacques-Alain Miller ed.
©Peter Lang, 2009.
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Sunday, September 20, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (Part I)
1.
The paternal battle underlying Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is founded in a fundamental interruption of Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Motherless and taught nothing by his father, what is presented is a struggle over the formation of the imago, a struggle rooted in violence and hallucination. Absented from the rudimentary process that allows the individual to assume an identity, the body remains fragmented, therefore thrusting the subject into a state of psychosis.
The Mirror Stage is the course by which the child, through mimicry, becomes enmeshed in the symbolic register. The developing subject is introduced to language, from which arises the chain of signifiers, and may therefore inherit a unified understanding of the body. For Lacan, the newborn is born developmentally premature, thus garnering a need to “establish a relationship between the organism and its reality.” Designated as the Innenwelt and the Umwelt, the inner and outer worlds, the child, through language, formulates an identity through a discourse between the two by means of the symbolic. The imago is contingent on this process. If the Mirror Stage is retarded, the child faces the threat of becoming alienated from the symbolic, and risks falling into psychosis. Without the mediation of the symbolic what is experienced is a “fragmentation of the body…regularly manifested in dreams,” and “the aggressive disintegration of the individual.”
The stifling of the Mirror Stage is centripetal to the developmental struggle that underlies Blood Meridian. The Kid travels in a kind of limbo. He is stuck in what Lacan describes as:
"The jubilant assumption of his specular image by this kind of being – still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject."
Because of this, The Kid is disenfranchised from the symbolic. He has not the tools to participate in an interior/exterior dialogue, and is subsequently forced into the desert of the real, becoming the main attraction in an ironic carnival of self discovery.
The paternal battle underlying Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is founded in a fundamental interruption of Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Motherless and taught nothing by his father, what is presented is a struggle over the formation of the imago, a struggle rooted in violence and hallucination. Absented from the rudimentary process that allows the individual to assume an identity, the body remains fragmented, therefore thrusting the subject into a state of psychosis.
The Mirror Stage is the course by which the child, through mimicry, becomes enmeshed in the symbolic register. The developing subject is introduced to language, from which arises the chain of signifiers, and may therefore inherit a unified understanding of the body. For Lacan, the newborn is born developmentally premature, thus garnering a need to “establish a relationship between the organism and its reality.” Designated as the Innenwelt and the Umwelt, the inner and outer worlds, the child, through language, formulates an identity through a discourse between the two by means of the symbolic. The imago is contingent on this process. If the Mirror Stage is retarded, the child faces the threat of becoming alienated from the symbolic, and risks falling into psychosis. Without the mediation of the symbolic what is experienced is a “fragmentation of the body…regularly manifested in dreams,” and “the aggressive disintegration of the individual.”
The stifling of the Mirror Stage is centripetal to the developmental struggle that underlies Blood Meridian. The Kid travels in a kind of limbo. He is stuck in what Lacan describes as:
"The jubilant assumption of his specular image by this kind of being – still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject."
Because of this, The Kid is disenfranchised from the symbolic. He has not the tools to participate in an interior/exterior dialogue, and is subsequently forced into the desert of the real, becoming the main attraction in an ironic carnival of self discovery.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Stephen Dedalus - Analyst and Analysand
The third episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses presents the convoluted interiority of Stephen Dedalus. Walking upon the strand he reflects on the “ineluctable modality of the visible…Signatures of all things I am here to read” (31). In a fit of Aristotelian introspection, Stephen understands that the visible and audible worlds are forced upon him. From this comes the need to order the world of representation through language. The ears are never closed and there is no control over what is seen when the head is turned. Stephen is attacked by what he is forced to see and hear. The appearance of things is contingent on both reality, and one’s construction of what is perceived. As a result, nature for Stephen is like a book, it must be read if one is to find any significance in it. If it lacks any signification, it is in danger of unraveling. Because Stephen’s reality is so self-contained, it is just this unraveling that he, through language, must prevent both in nature and within himself.
Poetic language is all Stephen has to protect himself from the real. As he walks the shore he ponders “seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: aware of them bodies before of them coloured” (31). Stephen understands the nature of the real, how it must be mediated through symbolic representation. Yet, the real to Stephen is of a dual nature, that of the “diaphane” and the “adiaphane.” The former is representative of a transparent real, that which is tied to the imaginary and the symbolic, while the latter is that which is emancipated from the two. The adiaphane is utter blackness, it true, unmitigated real. Nature itself, as Lacan explains in Seminar XXIII, is similarly split through language. He states, “Nature…is distinguished by not being one. Thus the logical procedure for approaching it – to term nature that which one excludes in the very act of taking interest in something, that something being distinguished by bearing a name. By this procedure, nature only risks being characterized as a hodge-podge of what lies outside nature” (1). This, for Stephen, is the seaspawn and seawrack, the crunching filth that remains incoherent until it is named.
Stephen tells himself to “Shut your eyes and see” (31). Only through language may he eliminate the real as it is forced upon him. The internal and external worlds in which he is forced to wander must be measured by an “Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching” (31). The trauma of sensation, as well as the nightmare of history is un-faceable if there is a world without language. Stephen is constantly writing and re-writing himself, thus extending that text to the world around him. He calls himself a “changeling…I spoke to no-one: none to me” (38). For Stephen there is no coherent identity without language.
This changeling Stephen is the result of one who personifies the sexual relation in language. Lacan asserts: “We must break through into a new imaginary in relation to meaning.” This implies a discourse between language and the body. Stephen is perpetually involved in this, for language is his sole possession. Lacan furthers this: “One only recognizes oneself in what one has. One never recognizes oneself…in what one is” (46-7). Stephen is meant to be read, “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful…When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”(34). Stephen desires to be both father and son, to be “made not begotten” (32). It is only through words that this can take place.
Sheldon Brivic, in his book The Veil of Signs does a remarkable job of explicating Stephen’s condition. He describes Stephen’s creative drive by way of sin. Brivic explains, “sin becomes an activity through which he develops himself by being shaken loose from an established context in order to enter a realm of semiotic shifting that expands his range of linguistic structure…The more he possesses language and its devices the more mind he has.” It is “life as a process of self-creation” (37). Stephen may only create his own world, become the “Unfallen Adam” (U 39), by remaining an apostate. The Other, for Stephen, thus becomes the mind of the artist, “he tries to claim this mind as his own by foreseeing the artist who will give form to his life (Riquelme 84), but this artist must always remain beyond him” (Brivic 37). The mess of signifiers forced upon him ineluctably must all fit neatly into the universe he has created, yet this is impossible. There will always be that “word known to all men” that he can never know. There will always be a return to what he has forsaken, namely the Church and the family. Stephen refuses the return Lacan gives emphasis to when he states “this decided filth must be passed through, so that something in the order of the real may perhaps be found [retrouver]” (48). For Stephen, the knot of the R.S.I. is in constant danger of unraveling. His notion of navel chords as a unifying system, “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh” (32), is threatened by the word that he cannot know. Without this word, there may be no consistency to the knot.
Because Stephen is so self-contained he takes on the remarkable position of being both analyst and analysand. He exists entirely within himself, and lacks an adequate interlocutor with whom to convey his innermost self. The closest he had was Cranly, his only real friend in A Portrait. Buck Mulligan is no substitute. It is a mere touch that sets the two apart: “Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s…Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen…Cranly’s arm. His arm” (6). Thus Stephen’s only true analyses are within himself. The Proteus episode, consisting entirely of Stephen’s interior monologue, is he on the couch set against himself: “You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time…My two feet are in his boots are at the end of his legs” (31). He wanders, collecting sensations, and constructs his own reality so as to prevent any disruption in the unity of the world. He even desires the presence of another, namely Cranly, “Stanch friend, a brother soul…His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all” (41). His self-exile has isolated him. He has truly become the boy that can enjoy invisibility (9).
It is the enjoyment of invisibility, the being through words in a self-created world, which protects Stephen from the real. In the construction of his own reality, he may fully cohere the R.S.I. Yet Stephen’s real is inescapable. This real is characterized in the ghost of his mother, which twice affects him symptraumatically. Stephen suffers greatly for the loss of his mother. Indeed, he is blamed for her death, as he would not kneel and pray for her at her dying request. First she appears as a “Ghoul,” a “chewer of corpses” to which he implores to “Let me be and let me live” (9). The second and most striking of the apparitions takes place in the Circe episode. Written in play form, Joyce uses this as a means to institute a meta-fiction into the narrative. As the Bloomsday world is a fictionalized account of Dublin in 1904, the events in Circe unfold in Nighttown, a fictionalization of the Bloomsday world. In this, the world is grotesque and debased, hallucinatory and dreamlike. It is a realm without adequate language, and therefore without adequate signification. It is the perfect inverse to Stephen’s interior world in Proteus. The wanderers of Nighttown are forced to face the unface-able. In other words, Nighttown is the real. Stephen’s mother appears “emaciated…her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould” (473). She commands Stephen to repent or suffer the eternal fires of Hell. He pleads to her, states his case, yet still a “green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart” (475). Language is of no shelter in Nighttown. He is thrust into the real, that from which he is foreclosed. He asks of his mother, “Tell me the word…the word known to all men” (474). Unable to cloud the real through language, he smashes the light, “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (475). The exchange with his mother in Circe relates directly back to Proteus. In recalling his time in Paris, the phrase “Shattered glass and toppling masonry” (36) arises regarding a bombing committed by an IRA friend. As well, he asks himself “What is that word known to all men?” (41).Without the mediation of the symbolic, namely poetic language, Stephen’s world is at risk of total fragmentation.
Through all of his introspection, his need to attain the Other of the mind of the artist, and to shed the fetters of the world that he has tried to forsake, all Stephen can do is write. He is a crippled creator, neutered by the inability to fully cohere the knot of the R.S.I. Despite all of the creation that takes place in Proteus, it culminates as “he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (40). Language cannot save him. His understanding of signifiers is what he injects into them, not their true meaning. What he does not understand is that his system only allows for a nature that is indeed a hodge-podge, it becomes a senseless blabbering and nothing more. Furthermore, Stephen’s perception is stunted as the day before he had broken his glasses. He is by no means clear-sighted, neither physically or as creator. He is unable to focus on a unity because he has separated himself from any semblance of such. Only when he allows himself to fully understand the signification he creates may he achieve the consistency he so severely lacks.
Poetic language is all Stephen has to protect himself from the real. As he walks the shore he ponders “seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: aware of them bodies before of them coloured” (31). Stephen understands the nature of the real, how it must be mediated through symbolic representation. Yet, the real to Stephen is of a dual nature, that of the “diaphane” and the “adiaphane.” The former is representative of a transparent real, that which is tied to the imaginary and the symbolic, while the latter is that which is emancipated from the two. The adiaphane is utter blackness, it true, unmitigated real. Nature itself, as Lacan explains in Seminar XXIII, is similarly split through language. He states, “Nature…is distinguished by not being one. Thus the logical procedure for approaching it – to term nature that which one excludes in the very act of taking interest in something, that something being distinguished by bearing a name. By this procedure, nature only risks being characterized as a hodge-podge of what lies outside nature” (1). This, for Stephen, is the seaspawn and seawrack, the crunching filth that remains incoherent until it is named.
Stephen tells himself to “Shut your eyes and see” (31). Only through language may he eliminate the real as it is forced upon him. The internal and external worlds in which he is forced to wander must be measured by an “Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching” (31). The trauma of sensation, as well as the nightmare of history is un-faceable if there is a world without language. Stephen is constantly writing and re-writing himself, thus extending that text to the world around him. He calls himself a “changeling…I spoke to no-one: none to me” (38). For Stephen there is no coherent identity without language.
This changeling Stephen is the result of one who personifies the sexual relation in language. Lacan asserts: “We must break through into a new imaginary in relation to meaning.” This implies a discourse between language and the body. Stephen is perpetually involved in this, for language is his sole possession. Lacan furthers this: “One only recognizes oneself in what one has. One never recognizes oneself…in what one is” (46-7). Stephen is meant to be read, “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful…When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”(34). Stephen desires to be both father and son, to be “made not begotten” (32). It is only through words that this can take place.
Sheldon Brivic, in his book The Veil of Signs does a remarkable job of explicating Stephen’s condition. He describes Stephen’s creative drive by way of sin. Brivic explains, “sin becomes an activity through which he develops himself by being shaken loose from an established context in order to enter a realm of semiotic shifting that expands his range of linguistic structure…The more he possesses language and its devices the more mind he has.” It is “life as a process of self-creation” (37). Stephen may only create his own world, become the “Unfallen Adam” (U 39), by remaining an apostate. The Other, for Stephen, thus becomes the mind of the artist, “he tries to claim this mind as his own by foreseeing the artist who will give form to his life (Riquelme 84), but this artist must always remain beyond him” (Brivic 37). The mess of signifiers forced upon him ineluctably must all fit neatly into the universe he has created, yet this is impossible. There will always be that “word known to all men” that he can never know. There will always be a return to what he has forsaken, namely the Church and the family. Stephen refuses the return Lacan gives emphasis to when he states “this decided filth must be passed through, so that something in the order of the real may perhaps be found [retrouver]” (48). For Stephen, the knot of the R.S.I. is in constant danger of unraveling. His notion of navel chords as a unifying system, “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh” (32), is threatened by the word that he cannot know. Without this word, there may be no consistency to the knot.
Because Stephen is so self-contained he takes on the remarkable position of being both analyst and analysand. He exists entirely within himself, and lacks an adequate interlocutor with whom to convey his innermost self. The closest he had was Cranly, his only real friend in A Portrait. Buck Mulligan is no substitute. It is a mere touch that sets the two apart: “Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s…Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen…Cranly’s arm. His arm” (6). Thus Stephen’s only true analyses are within himself. The Proteus episode, consisting entirely of Stephen’s interior monologue, is he on the couch set against himself: “You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time…My two feet are in his boots are at the end of his legs” (31). He wanders, collecting sensations, and constructs his own reality so as to prevent any disruption in the unity of the world. He even desires the presence of another, namely Cranly, “Stanch friend, a brother soul…His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all” (41). His self-exile has isolated him. He has truly become the boy that can enjoy invisibility (9).
It is the enjoyment of invisibility, the being through words in a self-created world, which protects Stephen from the real. In the construction of his own reality, he may fully cohere the R.S.I. Yet Stephen’s real is inescapable. This real is characterized in the ghost of his mother, which twice affects him symptraumatically. Stephen suffers greatly for the loss of his mother. Indeed, he is blamed for her death, as he would not kneel and pray for her at her dying request. First she appears as a “Ghoul,” a “chewer of corpses” to which he implores to “Let me be and let me live” (9). The second and most striking of the apparitions takes place in the Circe episode. Written in play form, Joyce uses this as a means to institute a meta-fiction into the narrative. As the Bloomsday world is a fictionalized account of Dublin in 1904, the events in Circe unfold in Nighttown, a fictionalization of the Bloomsday world. In this, the world is grotesque and debased, hallucinatory and dreamlike. It is a realm without adequate language, and therefore without adequate signification. It is the perfect inverse to Stephen’s interior world in Proteus. The wanderers of Nighttown are forced to face the unface-able. In other words, Nighttown is the real. Stephen’s mother appears “emaciated…her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould” (473). She commands Stephen to repent or suffer the eternal fires of Hell. He pleads to her, states his case, yet still a “green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart” (475). Language is of no shelter in Nighttown. He is thrust into the real, that from which he is foreclosed. He asks of his mother, “Tell me the word…the word known to all men” (474). Unable to cloud the real through language, he smashes the light, “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (475). The exchange with his mother in Circe relates directly back to Proteus. In recalling his time in Paris, the phrase “Shattered glass and toppling masonry” (36) arises regarding a bombing committed by an IRA friend. As well, he asks himself “What is that word known to all men?” (41).Without the mediation of the symbolic, namely poetic language, Stephen’s world is at risk of total fragmentation.
Through all of his introspection, his need to attain the Other of the mind of the artist, and to shed the fetters of the world that he has tried to forsake, all Stephen can do is write. He is a crippled creator, neutered by the inability to fully cohere the knot of the R.S.I. Despite all of the creation that takes place in Proteus, it culminates as “he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (40). Language cannot save him. His understanding of signifiers is what he injects into them, not their true meaning. What he does not understand is that his system only allows for a nature that is indeed a hodge-podge, it becomes a senseless blabbering and nothing more. Furthermore, Stephen’s perception is stunted as the day before he had broken his glasses. He is by no means clear-sighted, neither physically or as creator. He is unable to focus on a unity because he has separated himself from any semblance of such. Only when he allows himself to fully understand the signification he creates may he achieve the consistency he so severely lacks.
What's in a name, anyway?
Thanks to Twitter proper names have been reduced to a symbol (@). Whereas in the past the elevation of the name into a proper noun was centripetal to the formation of the identity, it is now a matter of deconstructing the name - a return to the indistinguishable.
Perhaps tomorrow we'll all be grunting.
More on this soon.
Special thanks to Renee Romeo for inspiring me to even think of this.
Perhaps tomorrow we'll all be grunting.
Special thanks to Renee Romeo for inspiring me to even think of this.
Transcendental Pornography: Lacanian Feminine Sexuality in 'The Devil in Miss Jones' now in print
An excerpt from my article, 'Transcendental Pornography: Lacanian Feminine Sexuality in The Devil in Miss Jones,' which is included in this quarter's issue of Paracinema Magazine:
"Her sexuation continues with a roll around with another woman. What is most striking in this encounter is its resonance to the Mirror Stage. Lacan believed humans to be born prematurely, and it is through mimicry that the identity is founded. This mimicry is fostered in language (“She’ll grow up to be like her mother”) and an actual image of another (be it another child, or merely a reflection in a mirror). It is from this that the speaking being is written. The formation of the specular image, the reflection of one’s body which is simultaneously one’s self and the object of desire, is central to the Mirror Stage. Miss Jones’ lesbian experience is her coming into contact with a woman’s body so as to learn her own. This is emphasized the moment the other woman begins to paint her. Where her experience with the Teacher is focused primarily on the language of sex, this is the crucial moment in the formation of the body."
The magazine is available at Jim Hanley's Universe, located across the street from the Empire State Building, or online at: www.paracinema.net.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
From Descartes to Analysis: Throwing a Wrench in the Gears of the Body Machine
In his work Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio states: "This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind...the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body" (249-50).
In brief, Descartes asserts that the mind, independent of the senses, must turn the intellect inward, realizing the "I am" as pure mind (cogiton) so as to construct an external reality, as well as one's relationship with said extended reality. For Descartes, the only union that exists between the mind and the body is that of the mind as a pilot to the body machine, capable of existing quite independently of it.
While reading Damasio, I was urged by three issues:
* The mutuality of the mind and the body in regard to emotion, namely suffering.
* If there is a mutuality, there must be a mediator.
* What does all of this mean for analysis?
Damasio dives into the neutral underpinning of emotions in regard to the body which echo (much more scientifically) the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia. Damasio, in a nutshell, explains that emotions are not elusive, but rather images of the landscape of the body. Furthermore, they are mechanisms of life itself. If this is the case, Damasio rightly notes the corporeal body as a yardstick to the mind.
Elisabeth presents one of the earliest, most genuine critiques of the Cartesian system. By way of an extensive correspondence, she admitted an inability to logically grasp Descartes' mind/body dualism. How, she constantly asked, can there be a union of two utterly separate, utterly distinct things? With this, how can the soul, something entirely immaterial, move the entirely material body?
She manages to understand the union only through the senses, namely suffering. She breaks down quite well that one can grasp clearly and distinctly the ideas of res extensa and res cogitons, yet cannot clearly and distinctly the union of the two, suggesting that the soul of the mind is itself extended.
This argument, for the in-extension of the soul as being contrary to Descartes' assertion that it moves the body (since there is no clear and distinct idea for their union in this) exposes a fundamental gap in his system.
What comes of this is the need for a mediator. Anne Finch Conway establishes a metaphysics that effectively serves as the mediator between Descartes and Elisabeth (and later, Damasio). Conway, through the use of religious terminology, conceived the following system:
God (incorporeal)
↕
Logos (Christ) → ouisos (essence, unsubstantiated, rational plan of the world)
Creatures (corporeal)
Conway establishes God as creator, for our purpose, the mind, at the top of the chain. At the bottom are creatures, bodies, all that is corporeal. Mediating between the two is the Logos, Christ, which is divided into two categories, ouisos and proforikos. The former is the essence, the latter the instance. The dual Logos perfectly illustrated in the figure of Christ, who was believed to be both fully human and fully divine, allows for creatures to have in them the essence of creation (God), or more suitably, the mind, or the incorporeal.
Creatures, in this system, operate on a continuum of vitality. This is a return to Elisabeth insofar as the passions of the soul serve to better the body, and that for this to be the case, the soul and the body cannot be distinct. Lady Conway states (much better than I can):
"For if a creature were entirely limited by its own individuality and totallty constrained and confined within the narrow boundaries of its own species to the point that there was no mediator through which one creature would change into another, then no creature could attain further perfection...nor could creatures act and react upon each other in different ways...
...Since the divine power, goodness and wisdom has created good creatures so that they may continually and infinitely move towards the good through their own mutability, the glory of their attributes shines more and more. And this is the nature of all creatures, namely that they be in continual motion or operation, which most certainly strives for their further good" (32).
Something tells me Lacan would have enjoyed Conway, there is a bit of Spinoza in her...
And finally, analysis.
Our hands are dirty. We sift constantly through dusty, old ideas. What for? What's the point?
It's simple. We still don't really understand the mind. The eternal S1 and S2, the mind and the body, will always be misunderstood. It's damned to it.
Elisabeth and Conway had suffering as the symptom. The power of emotion over the body, and of the body over emotion was so pressing that they could not, would not, logically accept a separation of the two. This goes in hand with what Jacques-Allain Miller states in The Symptom and the Body Event: "Lacan congratulated Aristotle for having on one hand isolated the subject of the signifier, but, on the other for not having totally separated it from the affected individual who should be corporeal substance...a body capable of jouissance...the parlêtre is the union of Aristotle's upokeimenon and ouisa, the union of the subjext and the substance, of the signifier and the body."
The body is vital to life. It shapes it, and is shaped by the mind. It is this cycle that demands mediation. In making matter entirely under the thumb of thought, jouissance of the body is out the window.
Even in the formation of the body image there is an inseparable, necessary knotting of the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. The form or structure (Gestalt) that emerges must be a unity. This knotting echoes Conway when she states: "Nevertheless creatures and the will that created them are so mutually present and happen one after the other so immediately that nothing can intervene, just as if two circles should immediately touch eachother."
The fundamental misunderstanding of the mind still defies science. What rises from this is a need for a mutuality between neuroscience and analysis. The "disembodied mind" remains beyond science. If we content ourselves with Cartesian dualism, there can be no accounting for the symptom or jouissance. Descartes left us with a body wholly contingent on the mind. Yet the body we possess, our corporeal form, is just one part of a cyclical structure.
Descartes denied it.
Elisabeth and Conway moved toward it.
We're stuck trying to make sense of it.
In brief, Descartes asserts that the mind, independent of the senses, must turn the intellect inward, realizing the "I am" as pure mind (cogiton) so as to construct an external reality, as well as one's relationship with said extended reality. For Descartes, the only union that exists between the mind and the body is that of the mind as a pilot to the body machine, capable of existing quite independently of it.
While reading Damasio, I was urged by three issues:
* The mutuality of the mind and the body in regard to emotion, namely suffering.
* If there is a mutuality, there must be a mediator.
* What does all of this mean for analysis?
Damasio dives into the neutral underpinning of emotions in regard to the body which echo (much more scientifically) the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia. Damasio, in a nutshell, explains that emotions are not elusive, but rather images of the landscape of the body. Furthermore, they are mechanisms of life itself. If this is the case, Damasio rightly notes the corporeal body as a yardstick to the mind.
Elisabeth presents one of the earliest, most genuine critiques of the Cartesian system. By way of an extensive correspondence, she admitted an inability to logically grasp Descartes' mind/body dualism. How, she constantly asked, can there be a union of two utterly separate, utterly distinct things? With this, how can the soul, something entirely immaterial, move the entirely material body?
She manages to understand the union only through the senses, namely suffering. She breaks down quite well that one can grasp clearly and distinctly the ideas of res extensa and res cogitons, yet cannot clearly and distinctly the union of the two, suggesting that the soul of the mind is itself extended.
This argument, for the in-extension of the soul as being contrary to Descartes' assertion that it moves the body (since there is no clear and distinct idea for their union in this) exposes a fundamental gap in his system.
What comes of this is the need for a mediator. Anne Finch Conway establishes a metaphysics that effectively serves as the mediator between Descartes and Elisabeth (and later, Damasio). Conway, through the use of religious terminology, conceived the following system:
God (incorporeal)
↕
Logos (Christ) → ouisos (essence, unsubstantiated, rational plan of the world)
→ proforikos (revealed nature of God, soul, instantiated)
↕Creatures (corporeal)
Conway establishes God as creator, for our purpose, the mind, at the top of the chain. At the bottom are creatures, bodies, all that is corporeal. Mediating between the two is the Logos, Christ, which is divided into two categories, ouisos and proforikos. The former is the essence, the latter the instance. The dual Logos perfectly illustrated in the figure of Christ, who was believed to be both fully human and fully divine, allows for creatures to have in them the essence of creation (God), or more suitably, the mind, or the incorporeal.
Creatures, in this system, operate on a continuum of vitality. This is a return to Elisabeth insofar as the passions of the soul serve to better the body, and that for this to be the case, the soul and the body cannot be distinct. Lady Conway states (much better than I can):
"For if a creature were entirely limited by its own individuality and totallty constrained and confined within the narrow boundaries of its own species to the point that there was no mediator through which one creature would change into another, then no creature could attain further perfection...nor could creatures act and react upon each other in different ways...
...Since the divine power, goodness and wisdom has created good creatures so that they may continually and infinitely move towards the good through their own mutability, the glory of their attributes shines more and more. And this is the nature of all creatures, namely that they be in continual motion or operation, which most certainly strives for their further good" (32).
Something tells me Lacan would have enjoyed Conway, there is a bit of Spinoza in her...
And finally, analysis.
Our hands are dirty. We sift constantly through dusty, old ideas. What for? What's the point?
It's simple. We still don't really understand the mind. The eternal S1 and S2, the mind and the body, will always be misunderstood. It's damned to it.
Elisabeth and Conway had suffering as the symptom. The power of emotion over the body, and of the body over emotion was so pressing that they could not, would not, logically accept a separation of the two. This goes in hand with what Jacques-Allain Miller states in The Symptom and the Body Event: "Lacan congratulated Aristotle for having on one hand isolated the subject of the signifier, but, on the other for not having totally separated it from the affected individual who should be corporeal substance...a body capable of jouissance...the parlêtre is the union of Aristotle's upokeimenon and ouisa, the union of the subjext and the substance, of the signifier and the body."
The body is vital to life. It shapes it, and is shaped by the mind. It is this cycle that demands mediation. In making matter entirely under the thumb of thought, jouissance of the body is out the window.
Even in the formation of the body image there is an inseparable, necessary knotting of the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. The form or structure (Gestalt) that emerges must be a unity. This knotting echoes Conway when she states: "Nevertheless creatures and the will that created them are so mutually present and happen one after the other so immediately that nothing can intervene, just as if two circles should immediately touch eachother."
The fundamental misunderstanding of the mind still defies science. What rises from this is a need for a mutuality between neuroscience and analysis. The "disembodied mind" remains beyond science. If we content ourselves with Cartesian dualism, there can be no accounting for the symptom or jouissance. Descartes left us with a body wholly contingent on the mind. Yet the body we possess, our corporeal form, is just one part of a cyclical structure.
Descartes denied it.
Elisabeth and Conway moved toward it.
We're stuck trying to make sense of it.
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