A congeries of intrapsychic imagoes

“The sense of Self is carried in a congeries of intrapsychic imagoes. Life is inherently traumatic. At birth we are ripped from primordial connection, beneficent belonging, are flung into an uncertain world, and end in annihiliation. The magnitude and qualitative character of the inevitable wounding shapes the sensibility of the person, that is, programs the intrapsychic imago in profound and reflexive ways, the imago through which we interpret the spectrum of experiences which come to us. From the child’s phenomenological reading of the environment and experiences, a sense of Self, a sense of Other, and acquired strategies of transactions between them are assembled. This assemblage constitutes the inevitable false self or provisional personality with which we enter the world. Invariably it is a misreading, for it lacks alternative experiences, lacks conscious reflectivity, and remains trapped in the fallacy of overgeneralization.”

(pages 105–106)

James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination. Houston: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.

Chanced on and borrowed from the Grande Bibliothèque, Montréal.

Respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated

JD: “Lévinas, more than anyone else, has emphasized the sovereign inaccessibility of the other. The other can never be understood as presence, but only with concepts like traces and exteriority. He has completely broken with the phenomenological metaphysics of presence—the other can never be understood in a theoretical act, but only by means of ethical responsibility: I take responsibility for the other. But this responsibility applies only to the other human being—Lévinas’ humanism is based on an exclusion of the animal, just as in Heidegger. The biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applies to humans, but leaves out animals. Our culture rests on a structure of sacrifice. We are all mixed up in an eating of flesh—real or symbolic. In the past, I have spoken about the West’s phallic “logocentrism.” Now I would like to broaden this with the prefix carno- (flesh): “carnophallogocentrism.” We are all—vegetarians as well—carnivores in the symbolic sense.

DB, AO: How is this massive project on eating related to deconstruction, as we have come to know it? If understanding can be compared to a kind of eating, what would a deconstructionist reading of a text be?

JD: It would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.”

Jacques Derrida in “An Interview with Jacques Derrida On the Limits of Digestion.” Interview in 1990, seen in e-flux 2013.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/an-interview-with-jacques-derrida-on-the-limits-of-digestion/

Creating myths shouldn’t happen at someone else’s expense

“The pursuit of truth needs no other purpose than the truth. This is evident in the well-defined truth that I first talked about: truth in fiction that represents or opens our eyes to what happened or could have happened. It also holds for the truth that I find difficult to define, for which I can give no criteria other than my feeling and the absence of an agenda. To be true in both senses is the only obligation I can see for fiction about the Holocaust or any other traumatic past. To be precise, it is the only obligation I can see having for myself. I don’t mean to say that others shouldn’t write myths, legends, and fairytales about the Holocaust. But I think that not everyone is entitled to the loose play with the truth that writing myths, legends and fairytales implies. Creating myths shouldn’t happen at someone else’s expense; the truth that is omitted or distorted shouldn’t be the truth that someone else rightly cares about.”

(page 64-65)

Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past. House of Anansi Press. E-publication, released April 15, 2010.

Borrowed, in digital format, from the Vancouver Public Library.

How then could you condemn the other

“It includes putting yourself in someone else’s place, putting yourself into someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s feelings and seeing the world through that person’s eyes. How then could you condemn the other, how could you not forgive, if you empathise with them on that level?”

“But understanding’s weakness is exactly its strength. Connecting ourselves with the thoughts and feelings of others, although they may be completely different than ours, establishes equality; just as interpreting their rationality in the light of our own, despite major differences, creates parity. Understanding allows us to see that we are equal with others and can experience, empathise and share in their rationality, empirical and normative expectations, thoughts and feelings. We make them equal to us and us to them; we build up society when we understand. Since understanding makes us more hesitant to pass judgement and more forbearing and tending toward forgiveness, understanding brings reconciliation a step closer. The foundation for reconciliation is laid by understanding because it works against all that separates us and toward all that would bring us together.”

(page 41)

Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past. House of Anansi Press. E-publication, released April 15, 2010.

Borrowed, in digital format, from the Vancouver Public Library.

The move through which a discipline turns towards the darkness that surrounds and precedes it

“What type of apparatus articulates the discourse in such a way that the discourse cannot make it its object?

[…]

But perhaps what is at stake is different and has to do rather with the otherness introduced by the move through which a discipline turns towards the darkness that surrounds and precedes it — not in order to eliminate it, but because it is inexpungeable and determining?

[…]

“Theoretical questioning, on the contrary, does not forget, cannot forget that in addition to the relationships of these scientific discourses to one another, there is also their common relation with that which they have taken care to exclude from their field in order to constitute it.”

(pages 49-61; mostly about Foucault and Bourdieu)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume I.

These trees of gestures are in movement everywhere

“[Walkers’] bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.

[…]

These “trees” of gestures are in movement everywhere. Their forests walk through the streets. They transform the scene, but they cannot be fixed in a certain place by images.

[…]

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place — an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens’ positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.”

(pages 93-103, excerpted; mostly about New York City)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume I.

Leaping over written spaces in an ephemeral dance

“A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.

[…]

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance.

[…]

“The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader’s) slips into the author’s place.”

(pages xix-xxi)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume I.

To begin to suspect the existence of unreconstructed desires

“The image of “the theatre” in the mind of the “contemporary visual artist” is clearly not a nuanced or historically correct one; rather, it consists of the theatre conceived theatrically. This is not merely a cliché or parodic imagining but a conventionalized image. Rather, I’d like to suggest that what a range of artists—including Catherine Sullivan, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Geoffrey Farmer, Alix Pearlstein, Jesper Just—are intuitively attracted to is the embarrassing quality of theatrical desire. It is a kink that contemporary art retraces its parentage to rigorous modernist self-criticality, yet this very mode of self-awareness has functioned to elevate artistic practice beyond moments of self-reflexive contraction we commonly call embarrassment. (Of course, general institutional and market success is the primary contributing factor to this well-tailored confidence, as well as its deepest source of shame.)

But to admit embarrassment is to begin to suspect the existence of unreconstructed desires—aspects of otherness at the core of a given project.”

Judy Radul, “I come to bury Caesar: The Image of Theatre in the Imagination of Visual Art.” In Art Lies, Issue 68.

Found via a friend’s recommendation on Facebook.