Well burrowed, old mole!

Essays on Philosophy

Category: Psychoanalysis

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 27, 2016

Laclau Seminar Notes Session 2: Floating Signifiers and Heterogeneity

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  • The Moment of Hegemony

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This is a simplified depiction of the moment of hegemony.  The X represents those on top of the frontier.  The antagonistic frontier can be said to be power, the X is sometimes a government.  It can also be the ruling class within a society.  The O’s below the frontier are the oppositional desires or the demands of those who are below the line.  The oval which is raised above the Os is the empty or hegemonic signifier, the arrow shows its origin from a particular desire or demand. These particular demands are arranged in an equivalential series by the emergence of the hegemonic signifier, the universalization or emptying of the hegemonic signifier is represented by the lines stretching from the oval to the chain of Os. 

This is a depiction of a situation in which those who are below the frontier of power have a series of demands which are unmet, and though their demands are different from one another, those who have these differing demands come to see them as equivalent and form a group under the articulation of one particular demand which comes to stand for opposition to X.  For instance, if many people have needs which are unmet in present day America, such as the need for affordable housing and health care, the desire to have more efficient garbage pickup in their neighborhood, the desire for a humane foreign policy and so on, they may end up campaigning for these diverse goals through the mediation of a group which articulates a different demand.  If these demands remain latent in the population, at any given moment if another group launches a large scale protest those with latent demands may join it even though it does not articulate their particular concern because it articulates unmet demand. 

     The X is in fact a group of people.  In order for them to maintain their position above the frontier, they must restrict the formation of such an equivalential logic.  If those who live under power can form a large enough equivalential chain they can overthrow those who are not meeting their demands.  There are two means by which the X will seek to keep the equivalential chain from forming, by articulating a logic of difference, or by constructing an alternative logic of equivalence. 

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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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March 9, 2016

Violence and History

Do we as a species have a compulsion to destroy our own history? No, not as a species. It is only a few of the pseudo-species that we call nations who do.

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Consider what the United States did and is doing to Iraq. Is it jealousy for their lack of history that motivates them? Perhaps, but it is possible to have a short and glorious history. In the case of the American oligarchy, it is the content of their history that motivates them. To them, history is something they have to run from, escape from, eradicate and so on. It counts as evidence against them. They bulldoze the libraries and monuments to build shopping malls. Beasts.

     Let’s think of this more concretely.  Imagine the United States are a person. He is born vulnerable and charming, but as he grows he becomes quite the troublemaker. In his youth and adolescence he murders one continent and enslaves a second. Coming to maturity, he builds the most destructive weapon of war in human history, uses it, and then proceeds to hold the entire world in subjugation. Now where do we find Mr. America?

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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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