Well burrowed, old mole!

Essays on Philosophy

Category: Freud

April 6, 2016

Laclau Notes Session 3

Review of the History of Rhetoric in Relation to Philosophy

1. The Ancients-Form and Matter     

     For the Greeks, what is sayable of an object is universal, but we must ask, what is the “it” which receives the predications?  For the Greeks all predicables are universals; they make up the form or the rational and knowable part of the entity of the object.  The “it,” the irrational and unknowable individuation that remains when you take away all predicables, is called matter. The Greek thought of the universe as a scale.  At the bottom was the unnameable primary matter hyle.  The first principle of organization was the mineral world where form was imprinted on this primary matter.  The mineral world was as matter to the vegetable world, the vegetable to the animal, the animal world to man, and on top the Gods were pure form and stood as matter in relation to nothing.  

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March 19, 2016

Critical Notes on Ernesto Laclau’s Seminar on Rhetoric and Hegemony

Session 1: Introduction to Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony

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1. Illusions of Modern Bourgeois Philosophy

     At the beginning of the 20th century three new developments in philosophy were taking place.  Each was based on a strategy which its proponents felt could grant immediate access to the thing in itself. The three strategies were analytic philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism.   All of their key words (referent, phenomenon and sign) played the role of what Levinas called a “neutralizing third term” they appeared to efface themselves in the process of bringing forth the unmediated truth of the world.  As time passed, these third terms became increasingly visible to practitioners of the strategies which they founded.  In the work of the late Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida we see a realization that the founding notions of 20th century philosophy did not grant the immediacy that they had promised.

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February 28, 2016

Stockholm Syndrome And Political Subjectivity

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Wikipedia, drawing on the work of Nils Bejerot, defines Stockholm  syndrome as follows:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28 in 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.

In other words, Stockholm Syndrome is a response to a traumatic event wherein the subject forms a loyalty bond to the other that inflicts violence on it. This process also describes the constitution of political subjectivity through trauma—it is the logic of the social bond. The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines trauma as:

an event of such violence and suddenness that it occasions an inflow of excitation sufficiently strong to defeat normally successful defense mechanisms; as a general rule trauma stuns the subject and, sooner or later, brings about a disorganization of the psychic economy.

As politics is always as much about reproduction as production, political subjectivity is perpetually reproduced by new trauma and by events which trigger the return of old trauma. As Freud put it in one of his models of the traumatic process:

traumatic effect came into play only…on the occasion of a second scene that served to reactualize the repressed memory of the earlier one.

These events must continue to occur, or political subjects will begin to break down. This recurrence is accomplished externally and internally. Consider a subject who is ticketed for parking illegally and later reminds him or herself not to park in that spot again: there is a chain of events which begins outside the subject and continues inside of it.

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