In Defense of Lost Causes

I just finished Zizek's "In Defense of Lost Causes"; now the plan is to backtrack and read Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy." I just thought I would share the last page of Zizek's book.

It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

1. strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, namely, one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);

2. terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal "freedoms," technological control of prospective law-breakers);

3. voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development);

4. and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people (the wager that a large majority of people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine rightly celebrated the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the "eternal Idea" of egalitarian terror?

Eian Kantor (and the philosophical discipline)

Metaphilosophy is an interest primarily to two separate demographics: the new and the old. The young student of philosophy, in their unbridled enthusiasm at just recently have been introduced/initiated into a new mode of investigation, reflects on the parameters and qualities of philosophical thought because they (a) find themselves in uncharted territory, and seek to find the coordinates by which they can move forward in their studies, and because they (b) are pressured to articulate their interests and concerns specifically so they can both be identified (in terms of their position) and so that philosophical dialogue can be properly framed (for the addressee of an essay, a classmate, a colleague, etc). The old student of philosophy reflects on metaphilosophical issues because, after having devoted so much time and energy to a field, it behooves her to justify/identify just what the hell she's been doing with her life (see the introduction to "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?" by Deleuze and Guattari).

Eian Kantor and myself are new students, so I can immediately identify with some of his high, drunken, sleep-deprived musings:

I've been thinking a lot about weird issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of language lately. I don't even know if my thoughts can even be classified in either of those two categories, because I don't usually like to categorize the philosophy/thoughts that I hold into such arbitrary categories. Almost all areas of philosophy (in my opinion, of course) can be/are conflated with other areas of philosophy (and other areas of academic disciplines)

This is something that has always rubbed me the wrong way about analytic philosophy: however useful it may be for organizing course offerings or editing coherent anthologies, the separate "branches" of philosophy seem awfully contrived. I have to agree that such areas of philosophy are already conflated, althought--being the proponent of Theory (capital "T") that I am--I have to make a distinction when it comes to the boundaries of philosophy of an academic discipline (and not just a mode or area of inquiry).

How can one study ethics without necessarily presupposing or articulating a metaphysical conception of the ethical subjects and the world they inhabit? Is the philosophy of mind all that separate from metaphysics and epistemology? From philosophy of language? Do not propositions on mind, matter, and language also have strict consequences for the way in which we approach ethics? I'd include the philosophy of religion here, but for the most part I have trouble understanding just what philosophical subject the philosophy of religion is supposed to treat. But if it is legitimate, it seems impossible to conceive of a discussion of god, spirit, etc. without taking the above into account. This is why discussions of "consequentialism" will never impress me--the fact that graduate applicants list "the trolley problem" as an "interest" on their CV's and statements of purpose should embarrass us.

And as far as other, external academic disciplines are considered, I'd like to sum up the paper that our colleague here at Missouri State presented at the Mid-South undergraduate philosophy conference (in regard to his proposed "three placements" of the importance of philosophy as an academic discipline):

Placement #1: Philosophy is the university's most important major and should be preserved.

Placement #2: Philosophy, on equal footing with other academic studies, has insights or advantages that are particular to its methodology and to the content of its conclusions, and should be preserved just as other studies are preserved.

Placement #3: Philosophy's methods and conclusions are covered equally well in other departments. Philosophy departments should be liquidated and the responsibility of teaching what is worthwhile in philosophy be redistributed among faculty in other departments.

I maintain, as I did at the conference, that the second position is undoubtedly the most shameful of these three options, and that due to the nature of philosophy one can only with good conscience choose the first or third position.

Under the second placement, philosophy is deprived its universality--opposed to the alternatives in which philosophy has some meaningful relationship to other academic disciplines--and its utility depends upon it being "unique" from other fields of study. Yet against history, anthropology, physics, mathematics, literature, and various emerging cultural studies, it becomes increasingly difficult to make this sort of "case" for philosophy (at least, to an administrative board charged with trimming departmental budgets). I believe that philosophy has a "unique" method, but that its content is contained (I shouldn't say contained--maybe pertinent) within other fields. However, here the distribution is so broad that dissolving it as a discipline would mean unreasonable demands of professionals in countless specialized fields: would we honestly expect faculty to teach chemistry and Popper? This third placement doesn't cut the mustard because it is all the more likely that philosophy as we know it (be it analytic or continental) would disappear from the university, not just as an official department, but altogether.

My demand for the first placement, in opposition to Biondi's own conclusion, is due to the national trend in universities to emphasize interdisciplinarity--coordinating conferences with other departments, encouraging students to double major or to take a variety of electives or to create their own major, and collaborating on cross-listed coursework and publications, etc. I have heard that this is to continental philosophy's advantage since a many european thinkers and writers have always looked to literature, art, history, sociology, politics, physics, biology, psychology and mathematics for inspiration. However, I'm totally opposed here--this formulation has it completely backwards. It is not that philosophy should strive to become more interdisciplinary in its approach; philosophy should identify itself as the only means by which separate disciplines can enter into dialogue. Theory is the interstitial glue for otherwise disconnected arts and sciences. This is why I chose to apply for admission to a PhD program in philosophy (and not literature, or cultural studies, or what have you); because I believe Theory (capital "T") is what irreducibly belongs to philosophy, and that this is much more than any particular "unique" element among other disciplines with their own "unique" elements. Theory is at the bottom of any such discipline.

I don't know how I got off in this crazy direction, but that's life.

Collingwood and unknown history

[WARNING: When I started this post I had a thesis in mind and began with every intention to argue in its defense; by the end, however, it was clear that argument had collapsed into pure ramble. But it might still be an interesting ramble, in any case.]

This last weekend I attended a lecture titled “R. G. Collingwood’s Idealist Answer to the Kantian Question: How is Historical Knowledge Possible?” I will admit that I had never heard of Collingwood and my familiarity with Idealism is more or less limited to a few dead Germans from the 18^th and 19^th centuries; to be honest, I only attended the lecture at Patrick’s suggestion—and he was only intrigued by the word “history” in the title, the only such paper offered at the Midsouth Conference.

The details of the paper aren’t really relevant here—don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated to learn of an English philosopher who resisted the contemporary (and current, if my meager impression of Analytic philosophy is at all indicative) tendency to restrict epistemological discourse to treatments of scientific knowledge. In fact, his insistence upon the importance of and devotion to considerations historical knowledge are in my eyes characteristic of the sort of territory familiar to continentalists but relatively neglected—even uncharted—in the work and thought of most anglo-american philosophers whom I’ve encountered.

However, it was the Q&A portion of the presentation that really piqued my interest, the aftermath of which I hope to articulate and resolve here. The commentator offered the speaker a thought experiment: did the Rosetta Stone bear a meaningful relation to the symbols inscribed on its surface prior to its having been unearthed? The Kantian commentator, the Collingwoodian speaker, and a Hegelian audience member proposed, respectively, that…

…the Rosetta Stone ceaselessly translates the languages inscribed, with or without the human interpretation of an historian.

…the Rosetta Stone, after being forgotten and prior to being rediscovered, was unable to be interpreted, and thus did not belong to history. No such relation between it and its languages can be determined.

…any consideration of the undiscovered Rosetta Stone is a projection of subjectivity, the introduction of the historian. A history is interpreted and extended over the “gap” in the stone’s past.

While the latter two responses are compatible, the first on the part of the Kantian is problematic. In his comments, the Kantian expressed that, above all, the weasliest account of the Rosetta Stone is the position that the stone remains in-itself interpretable in the absence of an interpreter—the linguistic properties of its surface inward reflected as indeterminate matter indifferent to its particular form or external relation (the presence or absence of a human translator). But what does his own response mean—that the stone continues to translate, even if buried and forgotten—if not that the stone’s interpretability or being reflected into another remains indifferent to its particular external relation? Whether or not this response is correct in the final analysis, it is clear that, by the commentator’s standards, his own position is the weasliest.

The speaker’s reminder that Collingwood distinguishes the history from the past is particularly elucidating for Collingwood’s foremost contention: that scientific knowledge is always also historical knowledge. Well, maybe not so elucidating, because for me it only raises further questions: does he mean that, in the same way that things become historical evidence and signal a new space for meaningful relations, scientific evidence similarly introduces new dimension in what was benign, meaningless space? Does he mean that the logic of scientific discovery is itself historical in its development? Does he mean that—similar to Kuhn, Latour, Foucault—science is no neutral domain, but rather is conditioned and responsive to certain social/historical developments or paradigms? However we understand this relationship between history and science, the past is the real unknowable for consciousness—not because it is noumenal or obfuscated by appearance, but because it has already transpired. Whatever the amount of evidence or intensity of historical research, the angle of approach of thought towards the past is asymptotic. In addition to its capacity or actuality in the present, any given object carries a second capacity to document, to carry a trace of its present by which historical imagination creates a coherent, meaningful story in another present.

But I really like the Hegelian’s response to the Rosetta Stone—the mere speculation upon a buried, forgotten artifact automatically means that the artifact has been unearthed, remembered; to talk about an non-interpreted object is to project a historian into a blind spot in our history. This is what Hegel means when he says that the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, is the most abstract understanding of the thing, and thus the most subjective. In plumbing the depths of a substance, in seeking it as it is noumenally, one is surprised to find subjectivity at the core of this conception of objectivity. This is the best example—the Kantian speculates about the objective relations between things outside of any human involvement, and the Hegelian retorts that such an endeavor is itself human involvement.

But this doesn’t really address the problem; after all, there is a clear point in time in which the Rosetta Stone becomes a part of human history: one day the Stone didn’t exist and the next day it did. Or, more precisely: one day the Stone did not figure into our interpretation of history and the next day it bore a meaningful relation to the languages on its surface, it became evidence. What is thus remarkable about evidence is that it is at bottom a creation ex nihilo—this is why Bruno Latour is justified to talk about Boyle’s development of the vacuum as the creation of an object, not only in the sense of mere invention, but understood as a true Event. The Event is an impossibility, an irrevocable rupture in the present understanding, an unforeseen violent shift in paradigm. The Event is a point of no return. In less obscure terms, the development of the vacuum meant the creation of the laboratory. The laboratory as Event could not be undone—one can’t just return to a moment in which trust was not conferred upon repeatable experiments in controlled environments. Is this what Collingwood means when he says that all scientific knowledge is historical knowledge?

I don’t have the stamina for writing. I had planned on eventually making a case for psychoanalysis (because it takes as its point of departure the “(hi)stories” that we tell ourselves about ourselves). But this post is already getting too far afield—and I’d happily write about psychoanalysis on another occasion.

I don’t feel too bad for not having a conclusion—the whole point of this blog is just to get into the habit of writing, right?

Leitkultur and Utopia

[Unfortunately I'm going to be lazy and not provide links--if anyone's interested in the blogs/books/sources mentioned below, drop me a line]

I'm going to echo others in saying that Zizek's commentary on multiculturalism and anti-racism apropos tensions between majority culture and Roma communities shouldn't surprise anyone--or, if anything surprises me, it is that he's taken an even more radical stance elsewhere and yet it's relatively mild comments like these which cause the most grief:

It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. Nobody clearly answered the local "racists" what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.

Zizek is correct here in opposing the indeterminate compromise forwarded by standard liberal multiculturalism--that the real problems of violence, destruction of property, theft, etc. can be reduced to differences in culture and resolved by opening the minds and worldviews of the parties involved. One recalls his oft-repeated critique of the multiculturalist mantra: "An enemy is someone whose story you haven't yet heard." Of course this approach is illuminating insofar as it demonstrates that (let's say within the context of a theft, for example) different parties have different perspectives or interpretations of the same event. What is a crime for me may be for you a desperate last-ditch effort to put food on the table. What this liberal multi-culturalism lacks, however, is any indication that this broadening of cultural horizons does anything to redress the situation. This is why I don't find Zizek's comments on anti-Roma racism scandalous in the least--even if members of the majority community made more of an effort to "understand" the Roma way of life, it remains to be seen how this addresses the "real problems" these camps pose for them.

My issue in all of this is more a question of internal consistency apropos (my admittedly limited familiarity with) Zizek's redefinition of utopianism and his discourse on civility and Leitkultur.

Zizek defends the spirit revolution against charges of utopianism by qualifying Utopia (henceforth capitalized) as a political term. Opposed to the popular understanding of utopian enterprises, which are products of a privileged imagination with the freedom and leisure to speculate on how its situation might be improved, Utopia is a state of political desperation. The Utopian constitutes for Zizek a moment of no return, wherein one lacks the very coordinates for a stable position in a socio-political environment. These are subjects who have lost any Symbolic meaning (Agamben's political category of homo sacer). Utopia is thus the spontaneous reaction to such a situation: the demand for a new environment in which the denied subject may be redeemed.

Cosubstantial to this, in much of Zizek's work, is a discussion of civility and ethical substance. Concerning the discussion of the organic unity of the polis in Hegel's early work, civility is the body of knowledge and assumptions that orient the behavior and ethical dispositions of individual members of a community. People on the other side of the fence are uncivilized, i.e. they do not share our unspoken principles. An example that Zizek has given has been that of the physically handicapped. Suppose that a man in crutches trips and falls and I laugh at him. Most of us will spontaneously agree that this was a cruel act, that it was something I shouldn't have done. However, the instant that this is articulated as a formal rule, it no longer belongs the sphere of civility which acts as a cohesive element in the symbolic unity of a culture. Civility is such than it cannot be enforced or formally instructed (one may insert a discussion of Bourdieu's habitus here); this is what Zizek identifies as a failure of political-correctness.

Zizek claims that this sense of civility is rendered in modern terms as Leitkultur ("leading culture"), a term some may recognize from the anti-immigration rhetoric of emerging right-wing parties in Germany. It is with regards to the notion of Leitkultur that he is able to sympathize with anti-Roma racism; anti-immigrant Germans appeal to Leitkultur as the backdrop which gives grants the state as political organization a status of nation-statehood--a political or administrative state whose citizens thereby identify themselves and each other. While the choice between this or that particular culture is arbitrary, the consensus on the part of its inhabitants maximizes centripetal and minimizes centrifugal political forces--Leitkultur acts as the cultural medium by which individuals express themselves and relate to each other. Immigrants may enter the state with their own culture, but this must be adapted to "fit" into the matrix of the Leitkultur if these immigrants are to be considered universalized as proper citizens. This is the very definition of civility, so Zizek is justified for making this connection. In the same article cited at the beginning of this post, Zizek argues that our frustration with this sort of anti-immigrant racism is misguided, that our efforts should instead be directed at negotiating a new Leitkultur in which both Roma and racist might identify themselves and each other--a more emancipatory Leitkultur.

But wait a minute here: if Leitkultur is synonymous with civility, and if civility precludes being formally dictated or enforced, how can one negotiate or establish a new Leitkultur? Would this "new Leitkultur" that Zizek attributes to the heart of the communist revolutionary spirit not be merely utopian? Rather than being the unconscious sense of civility that discretely binds the constituents of a culture or the desperate Utopian attempt to find new coordinates for living, this negotiation for a Leitkultur is more akin to the legislated political correctness that Zizek takes exception to. What does this mean for the nature of revolution? We can agree that veritable revolution is spontaneous and desperate as Zizek describes the Utopian event, but whether or not this explosion results in a more emancipatory Leitkultur--or in a rejuvenated sense of civility--remains to be seen. Here Egypt may prove instructive.

More questions than answers! I'm just happy to have written something.

Unconscious-ly

Adam Kohler has asked an excellent question in regards to my post from this morning:

From a Sartrean perspective, if we are able to become aware of the unconscious in the form of its influences, would that not then be a logical contradiction? To be conscious of an unconscious?

I know this may come across as silly, seeing as I just posted my first entry and am already responding to comments, but I have two motivations for doing so: (1) Lacanian psychoanalysis is something near and dear to my heart and does not get a proper reception in the States, even in "Continental" programs; (2) it gives me the chance to engage (albeit indirectly) with Sartre, with whom I'm not very familiar. If there's anything that torments a philosophy student (and I'd like to think I'm not alone), it's that there isn't time to read everything. So hopefully this will be a chance to meet in the middle; I can defend something I've read and conjecture about something I haven't.

Down to brass tacks: I feel this is why Lacan goes to such great lengths to redefine the field that Freud had established (Perhaps lengths too great--style is certainly not something I hope to inherit from his work. If anyone out there has seen Zizek!, you will recall the scene where watches the an old clip of Lacan's: "What interest me are his propositions. The underlying logic, not his style. His style is a total fake; I try to forget it." Which is certainly more honest than those Derrideans who feign ignorance, as Michael Naas from Depaul did when he visited my school: "I have no idea why people say [Derrida] is unclear. I find him very clear." But anyway, end parenthesis). This is why I find it much more helpful to stick with terminology that doesn't carry as much of a misleading connotation (e.g. the ego, the unconscious).

Rather than conscious and unconscious, let's distinguish between the Imaginary and the Symbolic order (in a way that won't force me to re-write Lacan's whole seminars). Our shortcut for making this distinction will be through the other/Other. I find this helpful because I can pickup right where a certain line in Adam Kohler's recent post on a common misunderstanding of existentialism here:

Sartre explains that our awareness of ourselves is contingent on other people. Whenever I reflect on who I am, that reflection is not without my awareness of what others think me to be. Essentially, "hell is other people" means that no matter how much I want to be something, I can never fully be considered as such if another has an opposing view. In that type of situation, I am constantly struggling to find a medium between what I want to be and how I am perceived to be.

I may not know Sartre, but there is something I spontaneously agree with here, in strictly Lacanian terms that I hope to develop here. If you are familiar with Jacques Lacan directly or indirectly through his following (Badiou, Miller, Kristeva, or more precisely in this case--Zizek), you have undoubtedly encountered two key terms: Autre et autre (big Other and little other, often as "the object petit a"). What is their distinction? The little other is that which is not really other, but is the product of transference: in othering ourselves we become subjects, finding ourselves in the external world. The assurance of our own figure reflected in the mirror. In the course of analysis, this transference finds its place in the "subject supposed to know," the analyst who supposedly carries the "truth" of the patient's symptoms even prior to their being discussed. Yet this inscription of images (of the Imaginary Order) is still structured by a more radical otherness.

The big Other is the Symbolic Order itself, the signifying chain that sets the coordinates or parameters of our experience (i.e. Law, the syntax of Language), or rather, this Symbolic as it is particularized for the subject. The Other thus has the form of any other subject, yet is also the order which mediates our relationship with this other subject (otherness as such).

To better answer Adam Kohler's question, one might say that "unconscious" is more helpful as an adverb than as an adjective. As an adjective--are we conscious?--the distinction falls apart just as Adam describes. But as an adverb--do we decide consciously?--we understand the term in its psychoanalytic sense. The point being that, even if we all become psychoanalysts and theorize the very details of the social effects on the individual personality, this would not provide us with any means of "escape." We are inextricably bound to language, or the Symbolic as such. That is to say, we conceive of ourselves as objects (Imaginary; other) and, in the performative dimension of linguistics, as subjects (Symbolic; Other). This is the split subject: the enunciated subject and the subject of the enunciation.

We could very well turn this around and address the original question by reformulating the quote from Adam Kohler's blog, Epoché Today:

Sartre explains that our awareness of ourselves is contingent on other people (on both forms of otherness). Whenever I reflect on who I am, that reflection is not without my awareness of what others think me to be (towards the subject of otherness as such, the big Other). Essentially, "hell is other people" means that no matter how much I want to be something, I can never fully be considered as such if another has an opposing view. In that type of situation, I am constantly struggling to find a medium between what I want to be and how I am perceived to be (because there is a gap in the subject, splitting it as object and subject between its imaginary unity in the other and its symbolic position in the Other).

I know my posts here are a short and rushed. I would rather develop ideas later, in a string of such short, rushed entries, than bore you with a wall of text.

Kiss and make up

So I'm just getting around to posting on this thing and immediately I'm confronted with an uncomfortable pressure to explain myself, or at least to introduce myself (which amounts to the same thing). I'll try and spare you any obscene biographical post--isn't it enough for me to say that I'm a student of philosophy? A student, so that I can preemptively excuse myself for any shortcomings in my analysis (shameless cowardice); of philosophy, this blog's primary content. There, I hope you can forgive this very brief personal intrusion and that we can put this behind us.

I promised Joe Holmes (and myself) that I would write about James Cameron's "Avatar," but will put that off for later in the day so that I clear my head with a few thoughts about Gilles Deleuze. Although I've made it a project to follow Deleuze's work from beginning to end, and consider myself to be "Deleuzian" (although this is as ambiguous a term as "liberal"--perhaps my next post could be: "Who is Deleuze? What does that mean for me?"), I am by no means a faithful mistress. In a spontaneous way, I experience this as a problem. To quote a scene from Grey's Anatomy--and I'll go as far as to rank this television show in league with Gilmore Girls so that you won't mistake this for an endorsement--where Callie Torres, after having a thrilling sexual experience with a women, repeatedly cheats on her with a male colleague: "I guess I thought there should be a difference." Specifically, I'm referring to Hegel and Lacan, two other resources I find invaluable (perhaps just as important for me as Deleuze himself). I guess I thought there should be a difference: something incompatible in the content of their philosophical projects that would prevent such an alignment.

So I warn you: this is not an interesting blog post. Not interesting in the standard sense--this is really just an exposition of a certain experience I have of Deleuze's work and not to be confused with high scholarship, nor will it have any appeal to a general public. Fortunately for me, this is the internet, where the hysterical subject is most at home.

Before we begin (if we begin, at this rate) I’d like to provide another brief anecdote that should illustrate my frustration—and perhaps you’ll understand immediately if you’ve ever been gay: “coming out” is never easy, but circumstances often allow in high school for boys to exhibit all the tell-tale behaviors and mannerisms of being gay while still pressured to stay in the closet. After adapting completely to this survival method, these boys (I would add “skinny” and “Christian fundamentalist”) take it too far—they find a girlfriend. The mechanism falters. We become frustrated and shake them by the collar: “Get a hold of yourself! Listen to what you are saying! You like men!” This is a round-about way of illustrating my own frustration with Deleuze’s mixed signals:

“Listen to yourself, Gilly! How can you claim to depart from Freud’s conception of the unconscious? How can you claim to be opposed to dialectic procedure? Who are you trying to kid?”

I am not an idiot—as far as I can tell, there is a gap; that the Deleuzien individual is opposed to the Hegelian general concept; that Deleuze finds Lacan’s so-called structuralist approach too dependent upon the symbolic dimension of reality. I don’t believe any two thinkers are seamless, identical with no left over. All I am saying is that, at least in a few of his earlier monographs (Nietzsche and Philosophy and Bergsonism in particular) he appears to accomplish the very opposite in fact of what he claims explicitly. This becomes more palpable—almost comical—when it occurs within the span of a page or two.

“What Bergson calls ‘pure recollection’ has no psychological existence. That is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious. All these words are dangerous, in particular, the word “unconscious” which, since Freud, has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence. We will have occasion to compare the Freudian unconscious with the Bergsonian, since Bergson himself made the comparison. We must nevertheless be clear at this point that Bergson does not use the word “unconscious” to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality—being as it is in itself… has only ontological significance.” (Bergsonism, 55-56).

This is a beautiful definition of the unconscious—not the psychological reality that Deleuze attributes to Freud, but the very alternative nonpsychological reality that Deleuze admires in Bergson! This is a rather typical characterization of Freud—it is as if history forgot the falling out between Freud and Jung. Let me elaborate: we can understand the unconscious properly if we explore its development (briefly, I promise) between thinkers—Freud: Jung and Lacan. If Freud’s definition of the unconscious is less than unambiguous, we should be clear that it is because his project is psychopathology (consciousness), and thus its formulation was put in terms of consciousness. You could say that a preliminary formulation may have been: if consciousness is primarily a psychological existence, and it is structured unconsciously to meet certain nonpsychological parameters, these parameters are thus unconscious. Of course, I’m using Deleuze’s own terms. Lacan took Freud’s idea further, elaborating upon this symbolic order, the coordinates of the possible which engender any particular psychological form. It wasn’t Freud, but Jung who gave this unconscious a consciousness of its own (the “subconscious”). Under its new guise, the unconscious became a shadowy ghost, a second personality that subsisted our own—influencing our decisions, our aspirations, our destiny. Here Deleuze is directly aligned with Lacan and Freud (I am shamelessly biased against Jung).

Deleuze often provides better illustrations of the unconscious and of dialectics than many psychoanalysts and dialectians themselves (his case for a nonpsychological dimension is quite beautiful in Bergsonism). Many will remember Deleuze, often for no other reason, for declaring the intellectual environment of 20th Century France to be thoroughly "Anti-Hegelian." Stephen Houlgate mentions this in the preface to his acclaimed Hegel Reader. As you may know, Houlgate is himself both a Hegelian and a Nietzschean scholar, and his Criticism of Metaphysics begins significantly with, "Anyone attempting a comparison of the philosophies of Hegel and Nietzsche is immediately confronted with what seems to be an intractable difficulty, for the two men represent 'fundamentally divergent philosophical styles and temperament.'" In the final instance of his analysis, in a veritable head-to-head: Hegel wins. But the man is a Hegelian, so no one was holding their breath.

What does this have to do with anything? Aha, well, Deleuze's statement on anti-Hegelianism appears in the book entitled Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze keeps Hegel at arms' length, and throughout he reiterates that Nietzschean "affirmation" is preferable to the negative, contrived character of Hegelian dialectic. "Gilly, listen to yourself!" Do we not find, explicated beautifully, the spitting image of the dialectic in Deleuze's illustration of the "eternal return" vis-à-vis Nietzsche's last, posthumously published work The Will to Power? Dialectic properly understood--for if we follow Deleuze, we misunderstand eternal recurrence if we interpret it as the eternal "return of the same [content]". It is only in his hands that Hegel and Nietzsche can kiss and make up.

Despite all these mixed-signals (or, rather, because of them), I am inclined to believe that it may have been intentional. I shouldn't need to reproduce here the famous quote of Deleuze's that calls the history of philosophy a sort of "buggery" (probably the most polite translation). The master of critical second readings, of taking thinkers more seriously than they themselves do, of pushing ideas to their end, of re-appropriating narratives and concepts, could these mixed signals be red herrings, invitations for interpretation? Perhaps I refuse to believe that Deleuze just "didn't understand" Hegel or Freud. Students of Deleuze who do not carry back to Deleuze his own approach, his own spirit, do not recognize their master.

Like I said, nothing of any real consequence. Not interesting in the standard sense. But I needed a first post. Now I can start writing.