In response to a a previous post, my good friend Michael and one of my most valued interlocutors cites Merleau-Ponty and writes:
“Everything I see is on principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the “I can.” Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are both total parts of the same Being.
“Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world. And for its part, that world of which he is a part is not in itself, or matter. My movement is not a decision made by the mind, an absolute doing which would decree, from the depths of a subjective retreat, some change of place miraculously executed in extended space. It is the natural sequel to, and maturation of, vision. I say of a thing that it is moved; but my body moves itself; my movement is self-moved. It is not ignorance of self, blind to itself; it radiates from a self….
“The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self, not by transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought—but a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the see-er in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt—a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future….
“This initial paradox cannot but produce others. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.3 Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomies,4 are different ways of saying that vision is caught or comes to be in things—in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible to itself and in the sight of all things, in that place where there persists, like the original solution still present within crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed…
“A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do…
“Once this strange system of exchanges is given, we find before us all the problems of painting. These problems illustrate the enigma of the body, which enigma in turn legitimates them. Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. “Nature is on the inside,” says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.” [Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, p.3]
There is a “carnal formula” of presence. Things have a consistent presence in/through our bodies – beyond all thetic codings – which forces us to confront structural (material) consequences. Life and politics are no less than this.
Among the other things I wish to say in the post to which Michael is responding, is that phenomenology is constitutively unable to think the real of the body. This is the root of my debate with Sara Ahmed, as well. While phenomenology can certainly describe how we experience our bodies, it never manages to get at the fundamental opacity of body and affect. The body, as real, is not something given to consciousness or lived experience. Put differently, our bodies are something we never experience. At most, we experience the effects of our bodies, never our bodies as such.
In an earlier post on the opacity of affect, I make this point in terms of Spinoza. As Spinoza writes, in the Ethics, “[t]he idea of any affection of the human body does not involve adequate knowledge of the human body” (2p27). For Spinoza, the cause of any affect is never given to consciousness. Is my depression the result of a neuro-chemical process, a bad diet, a lack of nicotine, or something else besides, or is it the result of something pertaining to my existential life project at the level of experience and lived consciousness? This question can never be answered from the standpoint of lived experience. Lived experience tells me of all sorts of affects that inhabit my embodied life, but tells me nothing of their causes.
read on!
This is why phenomenology cannot but be epiphenomenology. Descriptively it tells us all sorts of important and interesting things about how we experience the world– assuming that it’s legitimate to ever use the royal “we” in a world characterized by neural-diversity –but it cannot answer questions about causes and the veracity of these experiences. As a consequence, phenomenology can never have the foundationalist role that phenomenologists, up to and including Merleau-Ponty, would like to claim for it. Far from providing us with a ground upon which other phenomena are to be explained as the phenomenologists would say, phenomenology gives us a set of effects or descriptions, that are in need of an explanation. Often those explanations are wildly misleading when taken in their own terms or when treated as a ground.
This is one of the points of what I’ve recently been proposing as “Borromean critical theory“. It’s not a question of rejecting phenomenology, but of blunting its pretensions. Likewise with semiotics. Phenomenology is, of course, valid as a description of how we experience ourselves and the world. It’s shortcomings are two-fold: First, it remains too humanistic, focusing on a phenomenology of human experience, while failing to recognize the experience of other beings. This is problematic for two reasons. On the one hand, it overly generalizes in speaking of “the human” while failing to recognize the neuro-diversity of homo sapiens (e.g., Temple Grandin). This problem can only be surmounted through comparative phenomenology, such as thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Cary Wolf practice in their queer and disability studies respectively. On the other hand, more radically, we need comparative phenomenology across species, as thinkers such as Jakob von Uexkull, Ian Bogost, and Donna Haraway have taught us to do with their “alien phenomenologies”. If you’re still restricting yourself to what cats are for us– and engaging in vomit inducing discussions of glances and winks and all the other silliness (replete with Greek etymologies and references to Pseudo-Dionysus) that appears at Continental phenomenology conferences (I’ll be so glad when this irrelevant crap ends, viz. tacky) –rather than what we are for cats, you’re on the wrong track. Second, these descriptions are, at best, descriptions. The prohibition against the natural attitude has made us all idiots by preventing us from recognizing that these are things to be explained (sometimes culturally, sometimes neurologically/biologically, sometimes in terms of consciousness) rather than things to be explained. They’ve instituted a new dogmatism that prevents us from exploring causes, a new ignorance, a new denialism that has been an impediment to philosophy and thought within Continental circles. This is why, for the time being, the most ethical strategy might consist in temporarily shaming phenomenologists and laughing them out of the room until they’re willing to begin taking findings pertaining to causes seriously, rather than smugly– and self-servingly, from the standpoint of academic politics and power –dismissing them as relics of the natural attitude.
At any rate, the body is not something you experience, though it is something whose effects you experience. No one has ever experienced metabolism, though everyone has experienced wakefulness and fatigue, and no one has ever felt their brain or the impact of omega-3 fatty acids on their body. A body simply can’t be experienced because every body is constitutively withdrawn from its effects. This is why descriptive analysis, whenever treated is a ground, is always so misleading and reactionary. A mere Foucaultian or phenomenological descriptive/semiotic of the body does not a materialism makes. Materiality is always constitutively withdrawn from all signification and lived experience.
Larval Subjects . 
May 13, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Dr. Bryant, I do not see the validity of your critique of the scope of phenomenology from within psychoanalysis as being a strong one, apropos the former’s inability to conceive the real of the body. Given that the symbolic and the imaginary pre-fabricate the real, even as they obfuscate it due to semantic enervation and by their collision with the melancholic remembrance of jouissance, psycho-analysis is not in any ontologically privileged position to explicate the real in any a priori way because it succumbs to the narrativising impulsion of phenomenology, only in another register; now, there is a specific path way which opens only with the basic phenomenological insight that the adequacy of reason is not its apodicity, and develops this insight develops through its radicalisation by becoming reflexive, by rejecting the quilting force of the symbolic and its appropriation of pure immanence as the imaginary prefiguring the real: the inversion imposes itself upon psycho-analysis, and it cannot be elided, and we must admit that the real in its ineluctability, yet, is a pre-fabrication that demands an a priori capitulation to the symptomatic Trieb of the symbolic order in persisting beyond our capacity for imaginary rapprochement with the real. There is a circularity between psychoanalytic evidentiality and phenomenological embodiment that is neither synchronic nor capable of being sublated.
Rather than asserting the inability of phenomenology to conceive of the real of the body one is compelled to, now, question the psycho-analytic process: where does the symbolic and its cathexis with the imaginary relation to the letter in the psyche ends and where the real begins?
May 13, 2013 at 9:30 pm
http://www.ici-berlin.org/docu/forms-of-attachment/?tx_bddbflvvideogallery_pi1%5Bvideo%5D=2
May 13, 2013 at 10:14 pm
laquesjacan,
I think psychoanalysis moves in the right direction here, though I also think it falls short. It moves in the right direction as it at least recognizes the existence of a non-subjectifiable unconscious. In that respect, it’s a powerful critique of the phenomenological tradition. It falls short, however, in treating this unconscious as hermeneutic. It does a poor job of dealing with things such as depression, alzheimer’s, and strokes, for example, that can’t be theorized in terms of the dynamics of the signifier and the real as Lacan conceives it. The most we can say with Lacan and Freud is that biology and the signifier co-determine each other. The problem is– and hopefully you recognize that I have the utmost respect for psychoanalytic thought –that psychoanalysis grants the symbolic or hermenutic as having primacy in the borromean knot despite Lacan’s later efforts. Remember, we’re supposed to think the knot on a flat plane without one order determining all the others. Yet again and again we get the analytic tradition treating the symbolic has having the pride of place (and don’t forget that within the Lacanian tradition the “real” is an effect of the symbolic, and doesn’t refer to the genuinely material and organic; no weasel words here). If you treat the symbolic as structuring everything else and the real as a formal effect of the symbolic you fall under this critique and are not thinking genuine co-determination. You can use words like “materiality” and “real” until you’re blue in the face, but they’re still just rhetoric in this case. Psychoanalysis is every bit as in need of hobbling as is phenomenology in this respect. Malabou’s done great work here. The good post-Lacanian Lacanian, for example, should be able to explain the effects of a nicotine fit or partial frontal lobotomy without talk of hermeneutics or the signifier and should have an important place for these things and know where the talking cure is irrelevant.
May 13, 2013 at 10:44 pm
” as structuring everything else and the real as a formal effect of the symbolic you fall under this critique and are not thinking genuine co-determination. You can use words like “materiality” and “real” until you’re blue in the face, but they’re still just rhetoric in this case. Psychoanalysis is every bit as in need of hobbling as is phenomenology in this respect. Malabou’s done great work here. The good post-Lacanian Lacanian, for example, should be able to explain the effects of a nicotine fit or partial frontal lobotomy without talk of hermeneutics or the signifier and should have an important place for these things and know where the talking cure is irrelevant.”
I appreciate your reply, but I must respectfully disagree with your explication. The formal effect of the symbolic, if it is not moored in the analytic self-evidence of the ‘spatio-temporal complex’, or the epoche of phenomenology, is nugatory and even paraconsistent with the probability of coherence, or analytic adequacy of the signifying regime as it is makes itself apparent in the Borromean knot’s topological proclivity; for, one must remember, the univocity of Freudian space, or the topological realm of the id, ego, superego are planar constants such that their expanse is irrelevant, only their intersectionality matters.
This means that the ‘real’, which we all agree is the traumatic excess that eludes the symbolic register and contains within it the possible actualisational propensity of its semblable, is a semantic entity that is without determination; in Hegelian terms, it is the negative side of the reflexive psychism of the analytical ego-cathexis; the coherence this object has both for psycho-analysis and phenomenology, or any reasonable interlocutor, rests plainly on a discursive field that is the product of a semantic conventionalism with respect to the connotations of the ‘real’, inclusive of its nonintuitable features. This problem stems from Lacan’s adherence to his own temeration of the Freudian postulate that ‘language is a preconscious order’, which means that language is determined by an imaginary relationship with one’s own body [as in the ‘Fort da’ game] and this field of discursivity that constitutes the constellation of signifiers that are product of the relation between the body as passive jouissance and the body as symptomatically conscious, or egotic, is already the imaginary crystallisation of the univocity of being with the symbolic authority of the letter, or the body as unconscious repository of jouissance: in the escape of ‘reality’ between the semblable of the body and the limitations of the symbolic register we are thrust back to the mere sufficiency of correlation between adequacy and jouissance, thereby complicating the nature of the symbolic twofold: if language is structured like the unconscious then the superego would be incomprehensible; we never speak of the ‘unconscious proper’, only of the preconscious: thus, symbols are pre-conscious and cathexed in an imaginary relation with the body and thereby creating/deferring the ‘real’ materiality of the psycho-analytic object.
The irony is, this embodiement of the occult psycho-analytic gestalt rests on the phenomenological insight that the body in its absence is the world of its correlates; the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious does not problematise this insight because the ‘unreflexive’ opposite of thought and embodiement in phenomenology is precisely what allows Freud and Lacan to assert that the past trauma of the patients bears a relation to their symptomatic present behaviour.
The second hurdle to your answer is that the unconscious in Freudian terms is atelic, but the very possibility of psycho-analytic intervention depends on the imagined symbolic adequacy of time, both as an abstract concept as in age and as a concrete idea as in the analytic session. Then, if the symbolic adequacy of time is related to the present symptoms of the analysand it must be the case that the very hurdles in the realisation, or mediate experience, of time depends on the psycho-analytically a priori commitment to the adequacy of the ego-cathexis governed by the reality principle. What does the reality principle say: that reality is the normal man, the normal institutions of life and the everyday common-sense of everyman. We may say that ‘reality’ is the adequacy of the symbolic order to explicate the semantic commitments of psycho-analytic theory: this leaves the question of boundaries unresolved: where does is the symbolic end if the psycho-analytic intervention rests on the Lacanian avowal that the unconscious is structured like the language.
It has been a great pleasure to converse with you, I hope to read your reply to my objections, thanks.
Cheers,
Lacques Jacan.
May 13, 2013 at 11:22 pm
We don’t all, in fact, agree on what the real is, though we do agree that that’s what Lacan means by the real.
May 13, 2013 at 11:24 pm
So, there’s ultimately a conflict of understanding between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘imaginary’ in terms of their formal relationality.
It was great talking to you Larvalsubjects, thanks for your promptness and comradely demeanor.
Cheers!
May 14, 2013 at 9:39 am
Hello Levi,
Interesting post, but it doesn’t seem to me adequate for at least two reasons. First, phenomenology isn’t reducible to lived experience or to a descriptive analysis of phenomena. Second, the body in question isn’t reducible to a strictly “human” form.
You’ll know from Merleau-Ponty that the account of the body undercuts the Husserlian distinction between the lived and the objective body with his idea of the prepersonal or anonymous body. This complicates the account one tends to find in SR/OOO/OOP, etc where the body is somehow equivalent to the experience of affectivity in the present. Merleau-Ponty himself moves way beyond this. Take the later works on nature, where he describes the body less in terms of its descriptive content and more in terms of an archaeological entity.
The point is to move beyond transcendental phenomenology to what he will term “non-phenomenology.” So he writes in the late essay on Husserl: “What resists phenomenology within us—natural being, the ‘barbarous’ source Schelling spoke of—cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.” All of which is an attempt at capture the real that phenomenology in its classical humanistic guise indeed retains a blind spot in relation to. But Merleau-Ponty, who you quote, does not fit into this phenomenological humanism by a long shot. (Hence he speaks in the Visible and Invisible that nature and the body “must be presented without any compromise with humanism.”)
On this point, I’m very sympathetic to your Lacanian persuasions, and see Merleau-Ponty as encircling the object petit a that plays a part in Lacan’s 10th seminar. By the time Merleau-Ponty is writing toward the end of the 1950s, his phenomenology is slowly beginning to morph into an archaeological psychoanalysis (he will speak of phenomenology and psychoanalysis as aiming at the “same latency.”) MP is speaking of Freudian analysis, but there’s space here for a relation between Lacan and MP in terms of attending to the notion of a real that “gives body to jouissance.” Indeed, even in the early stuff, MP’s realism is clear in his attempt to account for that which constitutes perception without ever being open to perception (speaking of things as being “hostile and foreign…a resolutely silent Other”).
No time to go into this now, but I point all this out as I’m suspicious of the way phenomenology is presented in certain branches of SR/OOO. Either it’s a disingenuous reading in order to fulfil a particular theoretical objective (probably), or just bad scholarship. (Not thinking so much of your work, but more of others on the latter point). Meillassoux, in the least, has the merit of consulting the late works of Husserl where some of these issues come up, and thus diverts from the rather hackneyed presentation of phenomenology to be found in other works (even if his reading is off the mark). But for the most part, I’ve yet to see a rigorous engagement with phenomenology that moves beyond the level of caricature.
Dylan
May 14, 2013 at 2:12 pm
Dylan,
I think Merleau-Ponty is the best of the bunch, but look at his concrete analyses in his actual texts: They all proceed from the standpoint of the lived experience of the body. We never really get the natural body and it’s not clear that what he means by the natural body would ever be recognizable by the neurologist or biologists (in much the same way that what Heidegger calls “world” and “earth” are unrecognizable to the physicist). It’s important to distinguish between how philosophers describe their positions and what they actually do when executing their thought. Again, my point is not to reject phenomenology. It’s one dimension of the borromean knot I’ve been talking about. It’s a question of recognizing its limits and what is unthinkable within that framework (likewise with Lacan).
May 14, 2013 at 2:33 pm
But that’s exactly what we do get in the lectures on nature – an account of the natural body that calls as much upon biology (Uexküll esp) as it does philosophy (David Morris writes a lot on this).
Final thing – his thinking is grounded in the limit you mention, hence he can write in The Visible & Invisible: “Philosophy has nothing to do with the privilege of the Erlebnisse [lived experience], with the psychology of lived experience.” Precisely the limit where Merleau-Ponty meets Lacan.
Anyway, it’s not my role to attempt to convert people. I just find the reading of phenomenology odd.
Cheers.
May 14, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Dylan,
I don’t know that I would characterize Uexkull as a biologist, but rather as a posthuman phenomenologist. He’s still working at the descriptive level of lived experiences. There’s no talk here about cellular processes, bodily chemistry, metabolism, etc. This just isn’t the domain of nature in the robust, non-subjectifiable sense; but is still nature as experienced. That’s the problem. There are certain things that can only be understood within the natural attitude and that cannot be grasped or even broached through phenomenological methodology.
Building on my previous remark, I also don’t think your discussion of the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl is accurate. Early on, Merleau-Ponty spent a couple years at the Husserl archive. What you describe as unique to M-P is almost taken verbatum from Husserl’s later work such as Ideas II and III, Cartesian Meditations, the lectures on space and passive synthesis, Experience and Judgment and so on. In all these places Husserl speaks of syntheses that precede intentional nature, that are “anonymous”, and all the rest. M-P’s attitude towards Husserl is less one of critique than admiring popularization. Husserl gets a bad rap.
I think you overgeneralize about SR/OOO with respect to phenomenology. I suspect that Harman, for example, would vehemently disagree with claims I’ve made here, claiming that I’m undermining objects. His OOO works squarely within the phenomenological tradition and presents it, I think, in a sophisticated and accurate fashion.
May 14, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Oh certainly, I’m not denying that Merleau-Ponty remains indebted to Husserl right to the end (though taking Husserl verbatim may be a bit too much), and there’s also no denying that much of what unfolds in Merleau-Ponty is already incipient in Husserl (Merleau-Ponty had already read Husserl’s late fragments which gesture toward a post-phenomenology during the trip you mention to Louvain). The late essay “Philosopher and His Shadow” is evidence of this ambivalent relationship between them. That said, Merleau-Ponty is clearly moving beyond the transcendental framework of Husserl in that – simply – Merleau-Ponty is able to do an ontology whereas Husserl is not. “Admiring popularization” – Husserl is an enduring influence on Merleau-Ponty, an influence that he’s never quite able to surmount, but it’s very far from a sycophantic popularization (the whole point of the above essay is to turn Husserl on his head).
I’ve read the earlier books of Harman, and they’re not really my cup of tea. His reading of Merleau-Ponty (and Levinas) doesn’t really cut it for me. People like Len Lawlor, Robert Vallier, and Ted Toadvine are circling around this threshold between phenomenology and non-phenomenology in a more satisfying way, I find.
May 14, 2013 at 3:28 pm
Like I said, I think M-P is the best of the bunch. Had he lived longer, he would have completely exploded the phenomenological framework. This was true across the entirety of his career. Unlike a number of his comrades, he always attempted to integrated disciplines organized around “non-presence” in his work (his engagements with psychoanalysis, structuralism, and Marxism are excellent examples; especially when compared to someone like Schutz trying to talk about society, or Sartre’s allergic reaction to the unconscious). Lawlor is definitely one of my favorites, though he accused me of scientism last year for merely suggesting that we need to take things like energetic requirements of life and cities into account when discussing social and political issues. I was disappointed by this.
May 14, 2013 at 8:34 pm
I concur on virtually all points with Dylan here. There is more to M-P than you suggest Levi. M-P was indebted to Husserl no doubt, but what is great in M-P is where he departs from his predecessor, and where he takes what he has gleaned and mutates it later on. Carnal phenomenology is so much a departure from Husserl’s transcendentalism.
My point about the ‘lived body’, in short, is this: the body is first and foremost felt not understood. It is ‘auto-effective’ as Michel Henry put it Our consciousness is inherently affective and vulnerable viz. the body that I am. The ‘I am-ness’, or complete situatedness of awareness of bodily comportment, is a kind of givenness in consciousness that makes all other ‘presences’ possible. That is to say, the affecting/affected (touched/touching) body is that which encounters and is encounters. So the body itself comes to know itself as that which is experiencing. This is why I suggest we do have direct experience of the body. We feel it first as the site of experience as such and then later code it, or signify it as something special in the experience of “intertwining” that only self-touching brings. Thus enters Lacan’s “mirror stage” as the subsequent elaboration of this primary bodily awareness.
And the kind of explanatory knowledge you say phenomenology can’t get is secondary to this more basic awareness of the body-as-self (as site of experience) that phenomenological practice is best suited for. Descriptions are not explanations and experience primarily intentional.
May 14, 2013 at 8:48 pm
[…] ‘No one has ever experienced metabolism, though everyone has experienced wakefulness and fatigue, and no one has ever felt their brain or the impact of omega-3 fatty acids on their body’, as Levi Bryant states in one of his most recent posts. […]
May 14, 2013 at 10:17 pm
Michael,
I value phenomenology deeply, but simply attending a phenomenology conference or looking at the secondary literature shows how it generates its own form of dogmatism that forecloses discussion of the sorts of things I’ve been talking about in these recent posts on the grounds that they’re a form of scientism or fall into the naive natural attitude. The case is similar with Lacanianism (and you know how deeply I’m indebted to psychoanalysis). I recently read an article by a well-regarded Lacanian analyst that argued that cystic fibrosis is a symptom of “ordinary psychosis”. This is an astonishing claim to make that reflects a particular theoretical lens that forecloses the examination of certain features of the world. The case is similar with phenomenology. It’s not a question of abandoning phenomenological analysis, but of recognizing its limitations and blunting this dogmatism. To your credit, you’re not in academia so perhaps do not encounter dogmatic academic phenomenology and the real effects it has.
May 14, 2013 at 10:28 pm
Levi,
That is a fine distinction. As you say, I’m probably just spared the kind of dogmatic phenomenology you encounter. And I hear you when you say you do not want to abandon phenomenology. Recognizing limits is always good. And phenomenology generally has limits, as you point out in regards to explanation.
I think my particular disagreement here is about what a (non-Husserlian?) phenomenological approach can open in terms of the body. We feel the body from the ‘inside’ you might say. There is nothing more direct and experiential than that. And this ‘knowledge’ is descriptive before it is explanatory.
May 16, 2013 at 12:32 am
I’ve spoken from time to time on my blog of what I call a “vision of the Body” which resonates quite nicely with Michael’s idea of “feeling the body from the inside”. For what it’s worth, I am in agreement with him on many if not all of his remarks here.
Now, whether you (speaking now to Levi) are willing to entertain that option given what you perceive as the heightened-potential for dogmatic phenomenology is another question altogether. It is definitely a valid concern, as it is perhaps with most any perspective.
How does your displacement of the phenomenological tradition — while at the same time admittedly remaining “tied-up” (knotted, as it were) in the Lacanian one — help reduce this general tendency-to-dogmatism? Is there something about the Lacanian tradition in particular which you feel allows for a general push-back against instances of dogmatism in your eyes? Something in Lacan’s own development of thought, maybe?
I have come to see Michael’s understanding of a “non-Husserlian phenomenology” if you wish to call it that as a worthy project through my own experience, but then again I am only speaking from my own limited experience here. You see, we non-phenomenologists can (theoretically at least) undermine our own dogmatisms, too. ;)
My fear is simply: Is there not a lingering Lacanian dogmatism in your approach? Or is it not that kind of dogmatism if, as Zizek says, one is a “card-carrying” Lacanian (i.e. that “Lacanian dogmatism” somehow undermines itself through its own explicitness/visibility)? Or, what is your view of the Lacanian tradition as it pertains to such questions of dogmatism?
Just some general thoughts of mine. Thanks for this post and discussion, the both of you! David.
May 16, 2013 at 12:45 am
inthesaltmine,
I think this is a problem with the Lacanian tradition as well and have said so in a number of comments in posts and in remarks on the blog. In fact, in a recent post I talked about how my Lacanian analysis was completely impotent in dealing with my depression (though I benefited from it massively in other ways) because my depression, I think, is not of the order of the signifier but my neuro-chemistry. The problem is that the foundational assumptions of these approaches blind us to an entire realm of causality that simply can’t be accessed through these methodologies. I don’t take myself to be “displacing” phenomenology (or Lacan), but rather pointing to their limitations and the need to also embrace other methodologies and findings (it is, however, a question of displacing the imperial pretensions of phenomenology and psychoanalysis that renders them blind to other causes). It’s not a question of choosing neurology over psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Nor is it a question of choosing phenomenology and Lacan over neurology. It’s a question of understanding that all are limited perspectives and that they can all correct the short-comings of one another. Again, this is an issue of a both/and logic, rather than an either/or logic. That both/and logic, as I’ve been arguing, is behind the strategy of borromean critical theory that things the interpenetration between the symbolic (Lacan), the imaginary (phenomenology), and the real (biology and neurology).
May 16, 2013 at 1:13 am
Certainly I would not dispute any of that at least in terms of underlying substance.
Perhaps I am taking fault more so with your thematic insistence upon “materialism”, “machines”, etc. which takes on it seems a distinctly Lacanian flavor inasmuch as you choose to present it in this, however ingenious, refined Borromean R-S-I fashion. Put otherwise, there is to me a clear Lacanian “inheritance” or in any event tone that you’re picking up on throughout your work or at least in your blogging. I am asking how this differs from, say, a similar phenomenological inheritance (e.g. Gadamer or whomever else) in terms of dogmatism.
If there is indeed an inheritance at work, do I inadequately overestimate your “indebtedness” so to speak to Lacan and the Lacanian tradition? Or, is there a self-negating trait within this tradition which fights back against dogmatism? What is it about L. in particular? Am I making any sense to you?
Speaking of either/or, and for a more explicit consideration, cue Kierkegaard’s title “On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates”. Your project strikes me more often than not as “On the Concept of Materialism with Continual Reference to Lacan”. Perhaps this is too harsh a thing to say, but to me at least your work has always carried a certain rhetorical force (…manifest now very clearly in your axioms…) with which many of us now seem to be taking fault. Of course, I used here the term “many of us”, which has a certain strength of its own — for it could just be me acting alone. ;)
I’m sure we could talk more, but I will limit my words and meet you instead at a future post some day soon. Thank you for your responses, & all my best goes out to you and your family.
May 16, 2013 at 1:30 am
We all have the soil within which we’ve grown and I’d argue I’m every bit as much indebted to phenomenology as I am to Deleuze and Lacan.
May 16, 2013 at 1:33 am
And thanks for the complement about rhetorical force! I think we should be forceful about these things as the stakes are very high. We need materialism more than ever for a variety of ethical and political reasons, and anything that rejects it should be shamed.