PARA O MUNDO QUE EU QUERO DESCER…

…OU PELO MENOS JOGAR O LULA PELA JANELA!!!

Amigos Leitores,

Ai que vergonha…sem comentários…

Boa leitura e triste constatação,

Um abraço,

Raul Avelino.

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Desmatamento na Amazônia é o menor em 20 anos

O governo anunciou nesta quinta-feira (12) o menor índice de desmatamento na Amazônia em duas décadas.

Jornal da Globo – Fábio William Brasília, DF

Entre agosto de 2008 e julho de 2009, foram desmatados sete mil quilômetros quadrados de floresta na Amazônia. Uma redução de 45% em relação ao período anterior.

Foi menor índice de desmatamento da Amazônia registrado nos últimos 20 anos. A notícia, o governo fez questão de dar numa solenidade que teve o tom de exaltação do verde e explicação curiosa para a questão do clima mundial.

Foram muitos os discursos em prol do desenvolvimento sustentável. O presidente Lula citou até o criador da psicanálise para tentar desvendar os mistérios da natureza. “Eu já disse várias vezes: Freud dizia que tinha algumas coisas que a humanidade não controlaria. Uma delas eram as intempéries”.

Em seguida, o presidente tentou explicar o porquê do clima ser tão imprevisível. “Então, essa questão do clima é delicada por quê? Porque o mundo é redondo. Se o mundo fosse quadrado ou retangular e a gente soubesse que o nosso território está a 14 mil quilômetros de distância dos centros mais poluidores, ótimo, vai ficar só lá. Mas como o mundo gira e a gente também passa lá embaixo onde está mais poluído, a responsabilidade é de todos”.

Após um dia repleto de atividades, o sujeito puxa o lençol e afunda a cabeça no travesseiro gelado. Em poucos minutos, essa sublime sensação de descanso se extingue e ele entra em um estado de sonolência. Não há restrições – o sujeito pode ser você ou qualquer outra pessoa –, é natural dormirmos e logo atravessarmos diversos estágios até o famoso sono REM (Movimento Rápido dos Olhos), em que o gatilho dos sonhos é disparado em nossas mentes. Um artigo publicado no jornal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, pelo Dr. J. Allan Hobson, psiquiatra e pesquisador do sono de Harvard, aponta que o principal papel desse estágio do sono é fortalecer as conexões neurais.

De acordo com o neurologista Rodrigo Ramos, que atende em Balneário Camboriú e Itajaí, o sono REM é a quinta fase do sono. O primeiro estágio é definido por uma leve sonolência quando, por exemplo, lemos um livro e começamos a embaralhar as letras.  Na segunda etapa, a pessoa pode estar assistindo à televisão e não dar atenção aos que falam com ela, pois já está dormindo. Da segunda para a terceira, ocorrem as chamadas mioclonias naturais, que são abalos musculares bruscos ou aquela sensação de estar caindo. Após a terceira fase, não há mais contato direto com o ambiente. A quarta é um sono mais profundo, e a teoria atribui ao quinto estágio a ocorrência de sonhos palpáveis, capazes de serem relembrados ao acordar.

Entretanto, a relação entre as cinco etapas do sono é muito variada. Ramos destaca que, ao longo da noite, podemos pular de um estágio para o outro, fazendo idas e retornos da primeira fase até a última. ”Os sonhos são a parte do inconsciente ativo. Eles estão relacionados diretamente às experiências vividas e aos desejos do ser humano”. Cada um sonha de acordo com seus conflitos pessoais, interesses e objetivos, e esses sonhos podem ter um perfil vívido no qual o indivíduo sonha e pode sentir aquilo que toca, que apalpa.

Afirmar que os sonhos agem em nossos organismos apenas psicologicamente, é algo incoerente segundo a publicação da revista Nature Reviews Neurocience. Ela defende que a principal função do sono REM é fisiológica, como aquecer circuitos, antecipar visões, sons e emoções. Desde a descoberta desse estado do sono, as bases do sonho puderam ser melhor compreendidas, e o artigo apresenta os detalhes desses mecanismos cerebrais com uma teoria da consciência, derivada do estudo do ato de sonhar. O sonho ajusta a mente para a consciência que vem em seguida.  Ele funciona como um estado paralelo a ela que opera sem interrupções, suprimido ao despertar.

Além das formas de epilepsia que atuam durante o sono e alteram sua qualidade, os pesadelos traduzem as angústias do inconsciente. A medida mais indicada para evitar sonhos que sobrecarreguem a mente é a higienização do sono. Ramos aconselha manter ao menos duas horas de intervalo entre a última refeição e a hora de dormir, evitando bebidas alcoólicas e tabagismo. A prática de atividades físicas durante o dia também é fundamental para que a adrenalina não seja liberada à noite, e um ambiente confortável ajuda a criar um sono saudável e benéfico para o cérebro.

Para a psicanálise de Freud, os sonhos possuem um sentido pessoal para cada sujeito. Basicamente, eles são narrativas importantes para que se abra uma via de acesso ao inconsciente. Segundo a psicanalista Rosane Mendonça, de Itajaí, o desejo burla a consciência através do sonho, pois há um baixo grau de repressão. Quando sonhamos, temos a liberdade de realizar feitos que teriam consequências se estivéssemos acordados. “O sonho é algo que tem a ver com a história do sujeito”. Por essa razão, não é possível generalizar o significado de objetos que aparecem em nossa mente, como se eles significassem sempre a mesma coisa, para todas as pessoas.

Priscilla Paese do Amaral

Bon, j’ai reçu plusieurs mails dans lesquels on me demandait de raconter un peu la suite de mes cours de psychocrimino. Alors j’ai décidé de m’y mettre. Je vais profiter des prochains jours pour te parler des 6 grands profils psychologiques criminels à travers des cas précis et stéréotypés, des anecdotes, des images, des traitement. Voilà le premier profil, Marc – 46 ans, marié, 2 enfants.

Mistake by thelittleidiot

Voilà Marc. Quand il était petit, c’était un gamin sage, pas vraiment turbulent. Son niveau à l’école était tout à fait correct et ses parents étaient plutôt fiers de lui. Plus tard, il se voyait bien avec une femme et deux enfants, un job sympa, pas trop prenant, stable et sans prise de tête. Tout le monde le voyait comme un gamin normal, sociable et agréable. Marc, c’est ton voisin, ton collègue, ton boucher, ton facteur. C’est quelqu’un de tout à fait normal, il est père de famille, il gagne pas trop mal sa vie. Il a pas mal d’amis avec lesquels sa femme et lui apprécient de passer leurs dimanches soirs, autour d’une bonne bouffe et d’une bonne bouteille de rouge.

Le seul problème, c’est qu’il a appris il y a deux jours que sa femme le trompait depuis presque 6 mois et qu’en plus de ça, il vient vraiment de passer une journée de merde. Il vient de se faire virer.

En rentrant à la maison en fin d’après-midi à l’improviste, il a surpris sa femme avec l’étranger en question dans le lit conjugal. Alors Marc, il a pété un câble. Jusque là, tout était bien réglé, rien n’allait vraiment de travers dans sa vie. Marc avait ses habitudes, tout fonctionnait comme bon lui semblait, sans problèmes. Ce soir là, il a pris un couteau qui traînait pas loin, il s’est jeté sur les deux amants et les a tués, l’un après l’autre.

Marc est ce que les criminologues appellent un criminel accidentel. Il n’aurait jamais tué personne, sauf aujourd’hui. Parce que depuis deux jours il accumule la tension due à l’adultère de sa femme, il vient en plus de perdre son job. Marc n’avait pas de problèmes, tout allait bien dans sa vie, jusqu’à ce qu’il perde le contrôle. Son crime n’était pas prémédité, c’est juste que la vision de sa femme dans leur lit avec cet homme l’a complètement retourné. Avec la routine dans laquelle il s’était installé, tous les éléments de sa vie étaient devenus mécaniques. Il ne réfléchissait plus, tout allait dans le bon sens, sans qu’il se pose de question. Sa vie était tellement réglée que ce choc a eu l’effet d’une bombe et l’a poussé à commettre ce meurtre, à retirer de son esprit toute trace de la perturbation. Le fait d’envisager une modification de son mode de vie était si impossible, que le seul moyen pour lui de tolérer la vision de ce bouleversement, c’était d’annuler l’adultère et donc d’en supprimer les acteurs. Ces criminels accidentels sont qualifiés d’environnementaux, dans le sens où la source de leur criminalité n’est pas située en eux, mais dans leur environnement.

Marc a des remords, il s’en veut terriblement. La culpabilité est quelque chose qui le ronge tous les jours, alors il cherche à se faire pardonner, à se repentir, c’est pourquoi les détenus comme Marc sont des détenus modèles, qui ne font pas de résistance. Ils s’en veulent déjà beaucoup trop pour les actes qu’ils ont commis, il n’est pas question qu’ils aggravent leurs cas.

Marc est le premier profil psychologique de l’échelle. Son profil est celui qui est le plus proche de chacuns des nôtres. Il n’est pas criminel de la même manière qu’un névrosé ou un psychotique peut le devenir. Marc est quelqu’un de normal. Contrairement aux autres profils que je te présenterai plus tard, c’ est un personnage inventé.

Les profils que je vais exposer ici sont des stéréotypes, il existe une multitude de profils singuliers pour chacune des catégories de criminels dont il sera fait mention dans les prochains billets.

A basic guide to some Freudian theories

http://www.freudfile.org/theory.html

Personality Pedagogy Newsletter Volume 4, Number 3, November, 2009

Hello and welcome to the thirty-ninth Personality Pedagogy newsletter highlighting what’s new at http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu.

What’s new this month? Lots!!

Did you know that elders who go online show increased brain function and less depression than elders who do not use the internet to learn about new things, reminisce, play games, and connect with family and friends? You can read the whole article here: http://tinyurl.com/yh7pgo2

Are your students looking for a study abroad internship experience in psychology? AIDE, a not-for-profit organization which provides international internships and volunteer experiences, is offering a special 2-for-1 discount on deposits until November 30. Check it out: http://www.aideabroad.org/index.asp

Do you teach other classes in psychology? The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology, just debuted a wiki for the Teaching of Psychology (http://teachpsych.pbworks.com/). Here’s your chance to jump in to the wonderful world of wikis!

Are you familiar with Discovery Education? A division of Discovery Communications, i.e., they of the TV and magazine, designed a series of lesson plans for the k-12 classroom (but which can be easily beefed up for an intro-level college course). Though they seem to have many topics except for psychology (language arts, history, astronomy, ecology, economics, fine arts, biology, literature, mathematics and more) we found some gems for genetics, evolution and even Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams hidden in these pages. Check them out via the links below.

Do you own the ill-fated 6th edition of the APA manual? We have word from Ted Bosack (via the PsychTeacher listserv) about the APA Manual exchange program:

”The leadership of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA, Division 2)
wants to be sure that as many of its members as possible are aware of APA’s
decision to replace copies of the recently published Publication Manual revision
that contained a number of errors and inconsistencies. APA will replace these
purchased manuals with corrected copies. However, there are a number of
requirements that must be met prior to a December 15, 2009, deadline if
purchasers are to receive a replacement copy. These requirements are as
follows:

APA has agreed to replace copies of the Publication Manual (1st printing). If
you wish to take advantage of this opportunity, you must follow these steps:
* Call 1-800-374-2721, ext. 5510 between 9:00 and 6:00 EST.
* State your desire to exchange your manual for a new printing and be
prepared to answer some questions.
* You will get an e-mail with an instruction sheet and pre-paid mailing label to
send your old manual back.
* REMEMBER, THE DEADLINE IS DECEMBER 15!!

These requirements are also detailed on the STP Web site at
http://teachpsych.org/news/news.php ”

Of course, if you’re fed up with the manual and the entire brouhaha, then check out the first link to a free, online, APA style sheet for the current (2009) style guidelines.

As ever, please pass this newsletter on to interested colleagues and invite them to sign up for future issues. Remember, you can read old newsletters, comment on newsletters, view the current newsletter or you can even re-read what you missed in last month’s newsletter by checking out our new blog: http://personalitypedagogy.wordpress.com/ You can even receive Personality Pedagogy newsletters via an RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) feed as soon as they are posted.

I, personally, am very thankful for the community of teachers which have helped me with my teaching throughout the years and especially to the readers and subscribers who support Personality Pedagogy. We wish a bountiful and restful Thanksgiving holiday to you all!!

Cheers,
Marianne

Marianne Miserandino
miserandino@arcadia.edu

1. Free APA Style Sheet

From the website: ”APA Lite for College Papers” is a concise guide to crafting research papers in the style of the American Psychological Association (APA). It is based on the current edition of the APA Publication Manual (2009) while incorporating guidelines for ”Material Other Than Journal Articles” found in the last edition. Specifically covers writing scientific papers at the undergraduate level.

2. OTRP Teaching of Psychology Wiki

The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology, just debuted this wiki. Wiki-Master Sue Frantz, Highline Community College, Des Moines, WA, explains: ”This brand new resource is completely dependent on you to build it. In the spirit of reciprocity, we ask that if you take something, you leave something. To be able to write to this wiki, you will need to request access from the Wiki-Master.”

3. Statistics Glossary

The STEPS (STatistical Education through Problem Solving) consortium has developed problem-based modules to support the teaching of Statistics in various fields including Psychology. As part of their online support, Valerie J. Easton and John H. McColl maintain this statistics glossary for all of the terms covered in a basic course. The glossary is arranged alphabetically or organized around key topics including presenting data, sampling, probability, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, categorical data, nonparametric methods, time series data, design of experiments, ANOVA, paired data, correlation, regression, and random variables and probability distributions

4. Psychobiography

This website, maintained by William Todd Schultz, Pacific University Oregon, describes psychobiography (the application of psychological theory and research to individual lives of historical importance), the influential people in the field, an annotated bibliography and lots more.

5. Nova: Stem Cell Breakthrough

Three separate teams overcome a biomedical hurdle—creating stem cells without the use of human embryos. Learn about their research here and much more about stem cells including related science news, links and books, transcript, and a teacher’s guide The program, 13 minutes and 39 seconds long, originally aired on PBS July 23, 2008 and is available in closed captioning. Click through to the teacher’s guide for a shortened version 5 minutes and 16 seconds long.

6. A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

A new theory suggests that dreams are a warm-up for the day ahead. In a paper published last month in the journal ”Nature Reviews Neuroscience”, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. Read all about his research in this ”New York Times” article by Benedict Carey, from November 10, 2009. (Remember that access to the New York Times is free, but you may need to sign up for a free account).

7. Henry Murray: 20 Needs

Summarizes Henry Murray’s theory of needs and describes the original 20 needs he wrote about including nAchievement, nPower, and nAffiliation.

8. Otto Rank (1914). The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. New York: Vintage.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mbh/index.htm

The full-text version of his book is available from this website: ”In this study Rank looks at a a wide variety of Eurasian hero birth narratives, including Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian, Indian, and Germanic legendary figures. He uses the methodology and vocabulary of classic Freudian psychoanalysis to do so. The middle part of this book, where Rank enumerates some of these tales, will be the most useful for modern readers, as he draws on a wide range of sources, some of them fairly obscure. In the last part he puts these myths ‘on the couch’ as it were, and ties up his thesis very coherently.”

9. Dr. Matthew Fox: The Stanford Lectures: An Immersion in Creation Spirituality
What is the Creation Spirituality lineage and Why does it strike fear in the hearts of Inquisitors and Fundamentalists? What does it mean to be Spiritual and adult in the 21st century? What is the future of spirituality, religion and interfaith in our time? Fox answers these questions is a series of videos, using the theories of Otto Rank, ”the youngest and the most brilliant” of Freud’s students:

a) Otto Rank Overview of his theory (9 minutes, 57 seconds)

b) Otto Rank on Art (6 minutes, 50 seconds)

10. Genetic Screening: Ethical issues

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, London, prepared this report to encourage debate about the ethical issues raised by research on genes associated with psychological and behavioral traits. Read their report, reviews of the evidence, and other materials here.

11. An interview with Dr. Klaus-Peter Lesch

From the website: ”In-cites talks with Dr. Klaus-Peter Lesch about his paper, “Association of anxiety-related traits with a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region,” (Science 274[5292]: 1527-31, 29 November 1996), as well as his related research. This paper has been named a Highly Cited Paper in the field of Neuroscience & Behavior by  Essential Science Indicators, and currently has a total of 1,160 citations to its credit.” Includes a summary of the paper and a description of his current work.

12. Human Genome Project
http://genomics.energy.gov/
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/education/education.shtml

Find information about the Human Genome Project including project facts; educational materials; medicine and the new genetics; and ethical, legal and social issues. The second link brings you to resources for teachers.

13. Lesson Plan: Evolution

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson on Evolution, students will: demonstrate an understanding of the theory of evolution, study how the theory of evolution has been received by society over time and consider why it has been so controversial and compare the theory of evolution to other ideas about how different life forms emerged and assess which ideas should be taught in science class.

14. Lesson Plan: The Interpretation of Dreams

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, students will understand that Freud argued that our dreams contain clues to our hopes, fears, and fantasies and that Freud claimed that developments in our childhood affect the way we act and the kinds of dreams we have.

15. Lesson Plan: Genetics

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson on Genetics, student will: Describe the technologies make that make genetic manipulation possible, identify situations in which genetic manipulation could solve a problem and debate the positive or negative arguments of the ethical issues surrounding the use of genetic manipulation.

16. Lesson Plan: Understanding the Power of Genes

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson on genetics students will discuss new scientific information about genes; consider how that information is changing thoughts about human behavior and scientific research; and write essays about how information about genetics affects private homes, the research laboratory, and hospitals and clinics.

17. Lesson Plan: Genetic Engineering

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson on genetics students will: discover ethical issues surrounding the practice of genetic engineering in reproductive medicine; and understand key terms and concepts related to the science of genetic engineering.

18. Lesson Plan: Nature versus Nurture

Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, provides a Lesson Plans Library of hundreds of original lesson plans written by teachers for teachers for elementary, middle, and high school students. Some lesson plans include suggestions for adaptations for older or younger audiences. Borrow them as-is or use them to spark your own lesson plans. In this lesson, students will learn that environment can influence some personality traits, while others are genetic; understand that the most effective way to study the concept of nature versus nurture is by conducting research with identical and fraternal twins reared separately and together; and discover that the issues of nature versus nurture are still debated in the scientific community.

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of  the mind.”

Sigmund Freud

“Dreams are just repetitions of the crap you’re telling yourself during the day. They are hardly the royal road to the unconscious but seem to be rather distorted and muddled representations of the same kind of thinking and feeling that the individual tends to do during his waking life”.

Albert Ellis

So… Freud and Ellis didn’t have the same opinion about dreams. You’ve got to love Ellis for his bluntness So I can imagine the following scene: Freud and Ellis in heaven (although I think they were both pretty much atheists ).

Freud: Al, last night I had the most awkward of dreams.

Ellis: Damn it, Sigi! We’ re dead. Dead don’t dream. And there’s no night in heaven.

Freud: Still… I am quite convinced that it was a dream.

Ellis: Where’s the evidence for your claim?

Freud: Whatever …. Have you checked your irrational beliefs lately?

Ellis:  So you’re turning the tables, eh? You’re no fun, Sigi.

Freud: Watch out, that’s overgeneralization

Ellis: Can’t mess with the Sigmeister (sighs). But dreams are still crap!

Even if they’re not all about sex and agressiveness as Freud claimed,  I do think dreams can be pretty interesting though. Paraphrasing both Ellis and Freud, I’d say they are the muddy path to the conscious. I guess now and then one has to get dirty anyway

]]> http://pontolacaniano.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/jean-allouch-em-bsb-abril-de-2010/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:25:41 +0000 Flávia Albuquerque http://pontolacaniano.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/jean-allouch-em-bsb-abril-de-2010/

Livros de Jean Allouch: http://www.submarino.com.br/portal/Artista/1114/+jean+allouch/?franq=262638

NO HAY PRODUCCIÓN DE SUJETOS FUERA DE LA PRODUCCIÓN GRUPAL

El programa de este Seminario está estructurado en tres ciclos.

Al abordar los temas de cada ciclo nos encontramos de frente con una cuestión fundamental para la producción de un grupo: La diferencia radical entre actividad y tarea, tan radical como en psicoanálisis es la diferencia entre consciente e inconsciente.

Para que cada uno sea atravesado por el tiempo grupal, tiempo lógico más que cronológico, se hace necesario, estructuralmente, la producción del grupo, un grupo que nos determine como sujetos y que como sujetos seamos su soporte.

Así como sabemos que no hay estructura sin sujeto, ni sujeto sin estructura del lenguaje, es decir, que los significantes determinan al sujeto y el sujeto es el soporte de los significantes. El grupo no es un conjunto de sujetos sino que produce sujetos que a su vez son su soporte material.

Sigue leyendo en Extensión Universitaria Nº 109

By Columnist Harry Trunckles

The other day, I was talking to my wife Anna about that no good asshole she left me for and she said “He’s light years beyond you Harry, don’t even compare yourself to him!”

I just slapped her face right there. First of all, anyone who thinks that light years are a unit of measurement for how poor of a husband I am clearly doesn’t understand the basics of physics. Light years describe how time is relative to light. This is similar to using “dog years” to describe your beloved pet’s rapid decrepidation. And a light year is roughly the length of time it takes for the universe to begin and then end. Kind of a useless measurement for us humans in my opinion.

Particle Physicists (More like particle suckacists! Zing!) have debated about the nature of light for the last few years. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Since this question isn’t being hotly debated by wave physicists, I am going to assume that the particle physicists are a bunch of biased bastards. There has actually been a number of rigorous studies done to determine this. Some indicated it was a wave. Some indicated it was a particle. The lazy conclusion they came to was that light was both a particle AND a wave. Ok, before you call them all idiots for arriving at such a counterintuitive notion, let me tell you about how they found this out. You’ll laugh even harder.

Anyway, let me go into the detail of this horrible Freudian-projected nightmare. The scientist would tell you that if you have a photon entering two slits, then it could theoretically interfere with itself if you do not observe it. If you do observe it, then the photon will not interfere with itself. This is all just some bullshit fantasy that if your wife doesn’t observe you having sex with two other women, it’s okay, since there’s some kind of penile (represented by photons) interference. Jeez scientists, grow up!

Its so patently obvious that this is the Freudian expression of the scientist’s desire for an adulterous threesome. One in which his penis interferes with itself. Guess what science guys, I tried that excuse, but my wife still won’t return my calls. Kind of punches a hole in your logic, don’t you think?

Back in the day, scientists wanted to know if there was this luminiferous ether that light travelled through. They never found the luminiferous ether! No shit, you particle dumbassicists! Didn’t you read Genesis chapter 1? God spoke and He bespoke light. Clearly light is supernatural in origin. You dipshiticists. However, to be fair, science was right about there needing to be a medium for light to travel through. You see, sound can’t travel in a vacuum. And since light is composed of God Voice Particles (GVP), any over-arching theory of cosmology has to include something like deity air (not some stupid ether!) for the sound particles to travel through.

My colleagues, occasionally secular godless science can be right. One thing physicists got right was when they said that at the speed of light (you know, 9,999 miles per hour), time does not pass, so light experiences no aging just like God. So clearly light could have only originated from God. My goodness, what do these jerks at MIT do all day not to realize that ageless particles prove their own origin – their own origin being that of God!

Speaking of time coming to a stop, there’s this stupid theory called Relativation Theory (you’d think it would be about relatives or something) that says that time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Let me tell you, I tried driving really fast in my car, and not only did time not slow down, but it actually seemed to pass faster as it didn’t take as long to get to my work. I was 20 minutes early! Wow, who came up with such a terrible theory?

Another claim by physicists is that light can’t escape a black hole. How absurd! Being the natural skeptic that I am, I went into my backyard where there are plenty of holes. I tossed a mirror down one and shone my flashlight into the hole. The beam of photons bounced right back out. Maybe the scientist that came up with this theory fell down a crevasse as a kid or was just really scared of the dark. Seems like astronomy might be a bad field to work in for you guys.

Light is actually not as complex as people think it is. The mainstream opinion is that humans only percieve a limited spectrum of light known as the “visible” and that there is also “Infrared”, “Ultraviolet,” “Radio,” “X-Rays,” and a bunch of other satanic beams of light rays. The truth is that scientists saw their funding drying up after they discovered Red through Purple and went ahead and made up some new kinds of light.

Let me conclude on this note. A particle physicist once asked me if a cat in some box was dead or alive due to some quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo aptly named Schumaker’s Cat. What a stupid question. I kill my neighbor’s cats routinely by boxing them up and tossing them into a river. So I’m fairly certain that most of the time when a cat is in a box, it is dead. Especially after I run it over with my Ford truck! In the interest of testing this ridiculous claim, I took the litter of kittens my neighbor was trying to find a home for and put them all in a box. Well, big disappointment. They took a whole day and a half to die, and no matter how many times I observed them they never came back to life.

Do you really want to believe a bunch of eggheads who are afraid of the dark, like to cheat on their wives, think cats can come back to life literally, and ask you stupid riddles about dead cats?

Daughter of Christmas past, clearly ashamed of mommy of Christmas present

I present to my reader(s) an excerpt from my last post, written not twelve hours ago:

3 – “Make a pie crust from scratch.  This doesn’t need further explanation.  I will say that I am not even going to buy a freezer crust as a back up; that way, I don’t have a last-minute excuse to wimp out.  (The plan is to make a lovely chocolate bourbon pecan pie over the Thanksgiving weekend.)”

Allow me to revise this:

3 – “Make a pie crust from scratch.  This doesn’t need further explanation.  I will say that I am not even going to buy a freezer crust as a back up; that way, I don’t have a last-minute excuse to wimp out.  (The plan is to make a lovely chocolate bourbon pecan pie over the Thanksgiving weekend.)”

So much for this one.  As I was making my Thanksgiving meal shopping list tonight, I realized that to make a pie crust the “right” way, I need a food processor.  I have a two-cup food processor, but that little guy isn’t anywhere near the right size for making a pie crust.

If there is a better way to make a pie crust, one that does not require a large food processor, please don’t share it with me.  I must admit that I was quite thrilled that  I didn’t own the piece of equipment necessary for making a proper pie crust.  I’m sure Freud would say I purposely forgot to buy a food processor; he’s probably right.  Tomorrow, when I’m battling the grocery crowds, I will buy my frozen, prepared pie crust and I’ll try not to feel too bad about failing to fulfill my goal.

(Incidentally, I will still be making the chocolate-bourbon-pecan filling; I’ll just be pouring it into a ready-made crust.  I doubt most of my guests will notice.)

Let’s all hope I do a much better job on my other nine goals.  I think most of the other nine are more important than making my own pie crust.  If the only goal I fail to meet is number three, I’ll actually be pretty proud of myself at the end of the holiday season.

Now, I could buy a food processor tomorrow.  But then I would have to make a pie crust.

A menudo me hago esta pregunta… ¿se archivan las palabras enteras? ¿o más bien se archivan en trozos, sílabas y letras cada una por su lado? A veces, me inclino por la segunda opción, sobre todo cuando no recuerdo una palabra y sin embargo soy capaz de recordar que tiene tal o tal sílaba…

Para recordar ciertas palabras, tengo que recurrir a la asociación de ideas. Nunca recordaba la palabra “estornino” hasta que pensé en un estor de ventana y se solucionó el problema.

El actor Mel Gibson tiene un nombre que me resultaba muy escurridizo hasta que lo relacioné con la miel y ya siempre me acuerdo de su nombre.

Pero hoy he rizado el rizo con la palabra, siempre difícilísima de recordar para mi, “hipocondríaco”. Un día hace tiempo decidí que para recordarla tenía que pensar en hipopótamo. Pero la uso muy de tanto en tanto así que se me había olvidado, en parte, la asociación… Y digo en parte porque lo que me vino a la mente fue “obesidad”. Dándole vueltas a obesidad, pensé en un hipopótamo y ya por fín me acordé de la palabra que buscaba…

Nuestro buen amigo Freud seguramente tendría mucho que decir sobre este tema.

I often attribute every thing out-of-the-ordinary that happens to me as some sort of psychic experience or sign.  A few days ago, for example, I was working (mental-exercising) on some psychic tests and the ice cubes in the water-glass sitting next to me shifted with a loud “clunk”. When something moves like that, I always think “earthquake” before I even think “psychic” but in this instance, the glass didn’t move, just the large ice cubes. No earthquake. Loudly. I said “hello” as is my practice when books fall off the  shelves or strange noises, like paper crinkling, are heard in my office/study.  This doesn’t happen daily, but often. It’s happened so many times, I seek no explanation, I just accept and move on.  However, I can still be surprised. Once a Star Trek drinking glass full of vintage pencils, scissors and a  cocktail stirrer or two took a flying leap off a near-by book shelf and ended upright, all by itself. That was one of those times I said “whoa…..” and then moved on.

Having said that (as Larry David would say), sometimes a noise is just a noise. Clinking ice cubes, sounding like a drum beat, are just ice cubes settling. Nothing more. A glass leaping off a shelf – well it’s just a leaping glass. That could happen.There is no need to assign a “sign” or psychic label to any movement that has no explanation.   Though Dr. Freud most likely did not say, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.…” his much-repeated mis-quote is relevant when it comes to my so-called psychic (PK) events.

I need to keep Freud in mind lest I start believing reality is other than concrete. Sometimes a cigar is just something to smoke.

We as a species are only half-baked.  We’re mostly animal, and only partly rational, only partly godlike.  And yet, once we become aware of the possibility of achieving godliness–i.e., to become like ancients imagined their gods were like, which in fact we have moved a long way towards over the past 500 years, then we realize, instinctually, that our noblest goal now becomes to continue on this journey – to eventually make ourselves like gods.  This, in essence, is the job of the medical profession (creating ideal bodies–i.e., making us immortal), and of the liberal arts professoriate (creating an ideal society, and an ideal political system, making us omniscient regarding the nature of society) and the psychological profession (creating ideal, strong, rational, healthy minds), of the science profession (making us omniscient regarding the nature of the universe) and of the engineering profession (making us omnipotent).  As a society, in other words, we already have our best minds dedicated to this task, which I call, in a phrase borrowed from Michelangelo and other renaissance thinkers,  ’making men like gods.’  In this post I would just like to detail, to make manifest, and to articulate, exactly what our task is, that we are already performing, and also to ask why we are doing this, even though it is something that we all participate in every day, and the nature of the human mind is that we are still 90% animal, i.e.,  most of us do things without self-awareness, most of the time (this being a function of the fact that, though some of us have become self-aware, most of the species still lags behind, most of the time). So in this light you can think of the history of the human species like this:

We evolved for a few hundred million years from blue green algae, through apeishness, through to becoming neanderthals, and finally, about 100,000 B.C., homo sapiens–meaning, that at that point, our brains were essentially about as big as they are today.

The problem is–we became self-aware.  The terminator people are playing on this thought, which is something that most of us have realized, even if we don’t consciously dwell on it very often.  Animals don’t lament their fates, because they don’t know any better.  They just wake up, find that they have been born, and in their very limited way.

But in a way, God screwed up.  When we became self-aware, we slowly came to the realization that all was not right with the world–the ancients thought of this life as a place of battle, and possible glory, but essentially one of hardship, sorrow, and lament.  One need only read “the wanderer” and ”the seafarer” to get this sense, or else the Orpheus legend in its various forms, to get a sense of how pagan europeans viewed this world and the next. 

The earliest humans did not have gods per se, but we get a sense that they probably worshipped the forces of nature.  Slowly, these evolved into actual gods:  i.e., anthropomorphizations of these natural forces.  They gave their gods human bodies, and they gave them names.  This was by about 8000 B.C., in the places where agriculture first began.  On the fringes of ‘civilization’ the older ways prevailed for longer.  Then, about 1500 B.C., the egyptians toyed with monotheism, and some still believe that the Jews learned their monotheism there.  At any rate, they invented monotheism, and later, some jewish heretics (aka christians) modified the religion to allow all roman citizens (gentiles) into the religion.  And then another person influenced by judeochristianity founded islam, and spread monotheism even further, so that still to this day, almost half of the world population professes to be monotheistic.  

The reason why monotheism was so popular, was that it promised, for the first time, a salvation for all people (not just kings, like with most pagan religions) – a happiness in the next life which was supposedly even better than this life – and this made sense for most people, since their lives generally sucked (and perhaps 1/3 of them were slaves, in most societies, excepting that of western europe after the year 1000 – when most were serfs or at least peasants anyway, which was slightly better). 

Interestingly for our present purposes, the hebrew scripture (also used by christians and muslims) begins with the garden of eden, which contains a parable of mankind waking up from ignorance – i.e., becoming self-aware, in the exact way that the cyberdine systems machines in the terminator movies are supposed to have done.  They realized that they had just been doing – acting– more or less like animals, more or less like automatons, but not having any idea that they were doing what they were doing – i.e., they lacked the capacity for introspection, for self-awareness, for self-criticism, for doing what theorists today call “being meta.”  They could step outside themselves, imaginatively, and see what their society was, and theorize about what it meant, etc.  This is the first step towards taking control of one’s environment.  It is prerequesite.  When adam and eve ate the apple:  they realized they were naked – i.e., they gained a sense of morality, of intellection, and a knowledge of good and evil – they realized, in short, the existence of the platonic ideals:  truth, beauty, justice, etc.  And according to the book of genesis, this meant that they now had access to the same knowledge as god:  to the mind of god itself.  They could, in essence, equal god in terms of the quality of their thought (if not the quantity).

If we relinquish the eden myth, however, and concentrate on historical fact:  on the fact of evolution, and the fact of our eventually becoming self aware, we see that biology has left us with a number of serious limitations.  Since there is no god, or at least, no micro-managing god of the type which the monotheists would like to believe in (and believe me, i wish there was any reason to do so), this means that once we became self aware, then it became possible for us to really begin to take over where nature had left off.

I’ve already written about this a bit in other posts, so i won’t detail it here, but we actually didn’t ‘wake up’ as a species, fully, until about the 1880s, when nietzsche finally dispensed with the notion of god.  Of course, many people still refuse to open their eyes (because this is very scary), but most of the critical-thinking-capable populace has for over a hundred years realized that, darwin and freud and einstein are right, about the nature of biology, the nature of the mind, and the nature of the universe, respectively.  And nietzsche is therefore right about the nature of morality – to a degree (though he was mostly a nutcase – but he did get the fact that sine god, there is no absolute backing for morality – though i have argued elsewhere that this shouldn’t stop us from embracing a human-anchored absolutism–).

So, we’ve only had about a hundred years, then to begin formulating, clearly, and with no interference from the notion that god was guiding things, which caused people to balk, a sense of what we should do, now that we have woken up as a species.  I’ve also talked about this somewhat in my post “what are our goals as a species,” but here I want to point out quite specifically what a mess biology has left us with, and from there point out the obvious challenges that we as a species now face, if we want to improve ourselves and make ourselves into our potential ideal.

1)  Mortality.  This is obvious.  For evolving species, it makes perfect sense to have individuals mate, and then die, to leave room for the next generation to improve the gene pool, and presumably, the adaptability of the species.  Once you become self-aware, however, this is brutal.  The only thing is:  if we didn’t have mortality, then we would seldom evolve as a species in terms of thought.  One nice thing about European republican thought is that is has evolved, every generation tending to improve on the next in some way or another.  If people didn’t die, then this would happen much slower.  I do think, however, that we have reached a stage of culture where we could produce a pretty ideal world with the ideas that are just now emerging in terms of equality.  So, this means that even the moral imperative towards mortality is now no longer compelling, so much.  And besides, even if we ‘fixed’ mortality, people would still die, and could still have kids.  You’d just have to wait.  Which is no big deal, since you’d have a while to life, and plenty of things to do.

2)  Procreation– men, due to the prescriptions of evolution, and the fact that he who mates most wins, in an ape-like tribal situation, naturally want to spew their goo, as they say, far too often for civilized society — thus the profusion of porn; most dudes i know tend to relieve themselves on a daily basis.  Ultimately, we’d want guys’ sex drives to at least be on a par with that of women–it would make domestic tranquility that much greater, for one thing, if the guy wasn’t always bugging the girl, and the girl not always having to come up with excuses and or give in to far more demands than she would like.  Arguably, this one factoid, is a major cause of disharmony in society as a whole.   

3)  Disease– clearly, we have to address this, before we can address the mortality issue.  Again, disease is fine and dandy in a dog-eat-dog world of nature, where life is cheap, and disease helps to weed out the weak, to make room for the strong, but again, it’s brutal, and has no place in civilized society.  I am talking here of infectious disease, which is essentially micro life forms preying on others.  But when some of the said life forms are sentient beings, with the intellectual capacities of angels (see Pico – in my “our journey” page), it’s time for us to take charge, as medical science is now doing in earnest, and to kick those little bastards’ butts. 

4)  Memory – our memories work in a far too limited, far too impressionistic way, for the most part, to be of much use.  Ultimately, we’ll want to come up with ways to recall information better, in a more informed way.  Some of us can do that, and i suppose that that’s what we’d want the species to be like.  Some people, i’ve heard, can remember too much – all the time, without being able to suppress it.  That’s clearly not good either.  But it’s within the bounds of biology for us to create, for the majority of us, a much better system than we have now. 

5)  Dichotomies in looks.  Most of us are not that good looking, but some are beautiful, and these people are documented as having much easier and happier and generally more successful lives, because of it.  We should ultimately address this looks-gap, in the same way as we should address the IQ gap.  Clearly, we don’t want us all to look alike – but it would be far more democratic if we had a society where everyone could feel as though they were actually attractive, however one may choose to interpret this (which I do not think is futile, since almost everyone can agree that some people are beautiful, while others are ugly – so, yes, I believe that beauty is not entirely relative, but is based on some fundamental human norms, which are hardwired into the same DNA which makes us all ‘humans.’)

6)  Dichotomies in intelligence.  I’ve already detailed this in previous posts, but it’s here for completeness.  

7)  Emotions.  For the most part, men get angry too often, and people are too psychologically unbalanced.  Biology has left us with a situation where too many people are prone to depression, and, in general, happiness is too difficult to come by.  If we are talking about genetically engineering (and/or, hopefully just gradually working towards these types of goals) the species, then we should also put on our wish list a strong sense of reason for most people (i.e., having a high IQ), but also an emotional stability, which is capable of great feeling, and sensibility, but also capable of being happy and contented, and appreciating the small and great things of life, with the best possible attitude.

8)  Susceptability to mental illness.  Abuse of children, especially sexual abuse, causes many lives to be ruined.  Clearly, the first thing to do is to stop abuse, which we as a society are slowly working towards.  But ultimately we’d like to steer our minds away from the hangups that we can so easily get hung up on, as a result of the fact that our minds are essentially very primitive.  Psychologists who look for the root of mental illness are in essence doing just this:  they are working, ultimately, to solve the problems of weakness in our mental structures which nature has bequeathed to us – due to the fact that we, as a species, are half baked. 

The sooner we realize what our goals are, and rationally sit down and take stock of where we have been left, when we suddenly woke up and realized that mother nature had abandoned us here, sitting on a bench in a bus stop, with only one suitcase and very little money, the sooner we can figure out which bus we should take, and where our best prospects lie.  Nashville, New York, or LA?

Talk:

Thanks to René from backdoorbroadcasting.net for providing the link.

1. Cu Kiếm:

2. Cu Tú: trước khi nghỉ làm đã gài lại một quả bom to tướng. Trong lúc design lịch thi, cu cậu đã đổi dấu hỏi thành dấu huyền trong cụm từ “Buổi sáng”. Rất tiếc là quả bom này đã bị phát hiện trước khi đến tay mấy nghìn em gái xinh tươi trường ĐH CĐ. Nếu đây là hành động vô thức thì có lẽ tâm hồn non nớt của thằng bé đã bị bệnh thật rồi. Tội nghiệp.

Editor’s Note: This is part III in a series  of posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.  For part I of the series, scroll down or click here.  For part II, scroll down or click here.  As mentioned before the first post: I reveal many plot points from these films, so please watch them before reading.

In my previous posts on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I touched upon some of the ways in which these films exploit the uncanny feelings we experience in relation to our own bodies, as well as how these films may have a comment on the ways in which contemporary power structures terrorize and appropriate the female body.   In this continuation of the larger discussion on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I am interested in investigating how these films might also be mining some horror from the inherently uncomfortable disconnect we all have between our minds and our bodies.

In support of this notion, I will posit that the eeriest things in life are not often the things prowling around outside your home at night, nor are they the things coming down from outer space to apprehend unsuspecting sleepers, and certainly they are not pitchfork-wielding goblins reveling in a fiery orgy of sin below the earth.  On the contrary, the eeriest things in life often originate within the confines of our own skulls.  Throughout our history, we humans have made a habit of projecting the weird things going on in our own psyches outwardly, thereby attributing anomalous or unsavory behavior or phenomena to demons, witches and the like.  For instance, Mary Beth Norton makes a compelling argument in her 2002 book In the Devil’s Snare, that the Salem Witch Trials toward the end of the 17^th Century can be largely attributed to the anxieties and other psychological ramifications of frontier life, and specifically the fear of Native American attacks on European settlements.  The dark-skinned men lurking in the unfamiliar forests, along with the constant bloodshed that was inherent to that time and place, created a fear that was coupled with an already-present collective belief in witches, demons and unknown evils lurking in the shadows.  While these settlers did have actual danger prowling outside their homes, they were not aware that the reach of Native American influence reached through the walls of their homes into their minds, leading to irrational behavior and decision-making.  Those weren’t demons in the woods, those were people tired of being slaughtered and otherwise molested by strangely-dressed white people.

The point is that our own minds are the source of our greatest terrors.  And historically, as with the Salem Witch Trials example above, it has been  much easier to explain away the most uncomfortable or undesirable aspects of our lives with a little bit of supernatural belief and magical thinking.  The most powerful of these supernatural belief systems are the monotheistic religions which, although they are very much thriving to this day, are much more difficult to accept absolutely than they were, say, 500 years ago.  Magical thinking was a pat way to explain away events and circumstances that otherwise were baffling or anxiety-provoking.  With scientific knowledge skyrocketing in the latter half of the 19^th Century and through the 20^th Century, it became much more difficult to blame everything on witches, angels, demons and god(s).  In this vein, both Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist share a subtheme of religious faith and the loss thereof.  Father Karras, the central priest character in The Exorcist (although not the “Exorcist” referred to in the title), is wrestling with his own loss of faith.  Father Karras resides in a slummy area of Washington DC, with poverty and squalor constituting his day-to-day world and, along with this, he shares his small apartment with this ailing mother, who eventually is forced to move into a mental institution brimming with the psychologically anomalous.  Karras finds it difficult to rectify these realities with his Catholic beliefs and the demon possessing Regan exploits this fact.  In Rosemary’s Baby, one scene has the camera conspicuously linger on the April 8^th, 1966 cover of Time magazine.  The cover simply features the question “Is God Dead?” in bold red letters over a black background.  This was an actual cover of Time that was attached to an article that stated that the age of religion was essentially out the door.  Rosemary herself, when asked by Roman if she is religious, states, “I was brought up Catholic, but now I don’t know”.

Both films take as their setting a 20^th Century backdrop that is turning more toward medical, scientific and psychological knowledge to assist with problems of the body and mind instead of relying upon supernatural paradigms.  Until recent modern history, many of us have told ourselves stories about the ethereal soul and its dominion over the base, corrupted body.  The soul is said to be made of otherworldly material that is unfortunately tainted by the fleshy, gooey spaceship that it must possess in order to traverse through our inherently dirty world.  If one begins to accept the idea that we – every part of us – are of this world and then supplants the soul idea with this way of thinking, then the means by which one thinks of oneself and the world becomes dramatically altered.  This paradigmatic shift would be seismically uncomfortable, and it is my contention that Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist place themselves firmly in the fault line created from just such a shift.

In his wonderfully entertaining 2007 film The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, Slavoj Zizek shares some of his thoughts on modern cinema from a philosophical perspective that is rooted in the ideas of famed French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan.  In his film, Zizek pontificates on Ridley Scott’s Alien and claims that this film derives its power, particularly regarding the iconic scene in which an alien baby hatches from the stomach of its human host, from the idea that humans are essentially alien intelligences with a human body as a host.  We humans are uncomfortable in our own skins because of a fundamental disconnect; we tolerate our bodies, but we must also misrecognize our bodies as something different from ourselves in order to get by.  This disconnect is much easier to handle when one has, for instance, the Christian notion of the soul which advises comfortingly that there is no need to worry, that it’s right to fear your body, and that it’s really okay that you will die someday, for everything will be taken care of because your personality is actually not of this world to begin with.  For psychoanalysis as well as for Christianity, we are essentially ghosts inside a machine, or aliens inside of spaceships.  Christianity tells us that our alien souls will someday rejoin the Mothership (Fathership?)  in the sky, whereas psychoanalysis offers no such happy ending.  For psychoanalysis, life is weird and then you die.

Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist generate some wonderful creepiness by interjecting antiquated notions of Soul/Body and Good/Evil into a modern, scientifically-advanced setting.  One can have every priest and psychologist on call, but life will never cease to be strange.  It’s unfortunate that this basic concept is lost on many contemporary horror filmmakers.  These filmmakers spend too much time on computer graphics and convoluted story lines and not enough time looking into the mirror and contemplating the stranger staring back.

Note: I’m thinking there’s one more post on these two films on the way.  I’m thinking the next post will be about domestic spaces and antagonistic furniture in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

Förra veckan blev det inte så många kaffepauser, mest för att man har mycket annat att göra, men också för att jag höll på att läsa och smälta vad Eva Basch-Kåhre skriver i sin bok ”Bortom Drifterna – en bok om psykoanalys och tro”. Förutom att den på ett väldigt överskådligt sätt beskriver psykoanalysen enligt Freud, med tillägg och förändringar genom senare namn som Erikson, Lacan, Klein och Bion, så tar hon själv upp den utelämnade pusselbiten, Gud, genom en teologisk tolkningsmodell.

Psykoanalysen är från början ateistisk och saknar nämligen Gud i ekvationen. Någon måste sätta dit den saknade delen. Psykoanalytikerna vill kanske gärna se sig som lika vetenskapliga som fysikerna – och vill därför inte ta in teologisk empiri och erfarenhet som likvärdig vad man gängse klassar som “vetenskaplig” sådan. Detta är faktiskt lite märkligt då allt handlar om upplevelser vi har i vårt medvetande och i vårt övriga psykiska liv.

Nåväl. Vad psykologin inte tycks inte bry sig om är att fråga sig själv frågan – vad är vårt psykologiska liv bra för? Vad fyller det för mening?

Om vi, vilket bland annat ateister som Dawkins hävdar, bara är ”transportörer av vår själviska, genetiska kod” från en kropp till nästa och vars enda syfte är att reproducera och sprida sig, då blir hela psykologin meningslös. En gen behöver uppenbarligen inte en kropp med ett medvetande för att föröka sig. Det räcker nog att ställa upp i en dokusåpa, vilket man tycks behöva varken hjärna eller mycket annat för att nå “framgång” i.

Men hur kan vi säga att någonting verkligen har gått fel, att vi har en psykisk sjukdom, en psykos, om vi inte har en idé, en teori, om vad vårt medvetande är till för? En idé som också måste vara större än att enbart handla om fortplantning. Annars hade det inte ens varit meningsfullt för oss att tänka ut någon form materialistisk/ateistisk metafysik.

Vad man kan konstatera är i alla fall att det inte bara rent kroppsligt och biologiskt finns tusentals saker som kan gå fel och påverka oss negativt. Även inom det mänskliga psyket finns mycket som kan gå fel. Och tyvärr tycks grunden läggas, vilket ger upphov till de allvarligaste felen, när vi är som mest sårbara. Det vill säga som spädbarn och upp till någonstans efter genomgången pubertet. Central i människans hela utveckling är kärleken, uttryckt genom olika relationer (bindningar) till andra människor, först och främst föräldrarna. När den är knapp, missriktad, eller helt saknad, redan i relationen mellan förälder och barn, kommer inte bara barnet som vuxen att ha svårt att utvecklas till en egen fullständig personlighet, utan också garanterat föra vidare samma problem till sina barn.

Med tanke på det nyfödda barnets sårbarhet och totala oförmåga att överleva utan föräldrar så har detta också en aspekt av ren självbevarelse. De band som knyts mellan förälder, först och främst modern, och barn är nödvändiga för att barnet skall överleva. Att göra sig av med barn av diverse olika anledningar är absolut inget nytt fenomen som har med ”kvinnans frigörelse” att göra (i vår tid kallat för abort). Det har alltid varit extremt vanligt i alla forna kulturer, bara det att man då gjorde sig av med det barnet först efter att det blivit fött.

Men, som sagt, utan en teori om vad psyket är till för, så blir även hela frågan om sjuk/frisk meningslös. Hur kan någon förklaras ha en psykisk skada eller sjukdom om inte dennes psyke också har ett syfte? En maskin har ett syfte och måste fungera för att uppfylla det. Är vårt medvetande bara en meningslös slump, en parentes i ett dött universum utan mening – då finns det heller inget rätt eller fel i vår psykologi. Det finns heller ingen skola som kan säga utveckla en mer sann teori än någon annan, liksom vi inte kan utveckla några tankar eller filosofier om någonting annat och mena att de innehåller sanning. Är det jag som tror på Gud som är en hallucinerande galning, eller är det ateisten som psykologiskt blind och döv för en andlig värld?

Alla människor gör existentiella val, vissa är medvetna, andra mindre. Även den lilla bebisen, ja till och med fostret i magen, gör sådana val. Positiva val leder framåt och utvecklar individen, negativa hindrar samma utveckling. Eva Basch-Kåhre skriver att

”Man kan bruka tänkandet och språket för att söka sanningen om sig själv och världen. Eller man kan missbruka dem för att med hjälp av utsökta tankekonstruktioner och ordvändningar bygga sig en värld där man själv är gud.”

Negativa val leder till att någonting annat måste ta den plats som Gud lämnar i ens psyke. För en del kan det vara just en själv, men lika vanligt är att man också överför det gudomliga till någonting annat utanför en själv, som man sedan kan dyrka. Det blir likt ett vakuum som kan suga åt sig vad som helst som råkar komma i ens väg. Dawkins är typsikt den typen som dyrkar sig själv och sin egen intelligens. Andra dyrkar yttre ting som ”staten”, ett visst ”folkslag” eller ”ras”, ”partiet”, en viss ”samhällsklass”, den store ”ledaren”, ”politiken” i sig eller olika av människan skapade ”system”.

Nåväl. Vi har tidigare pratat om hur allt som rör det mänskliga sker genom relationer – och även Gud försöker ha en relation med oss. Enligt den kristna traditionen och läran så är det vi människor som trodde (och tror) att vi klarar oss lika själva bra, tack så mycket, och på grund av det negativa existentiella valet har vi inte längre tillgång till den direkta kommunikationen med Gud som vi först hade i paradisets trädgårdar. Vi har dock fortfarande del i det Gudomliga Varat eftersom vi är skapade i Guds avbild. Därför är vårt personliga vara och det gudomliga Varat samma sak och Bion, vars namn också har dykt upp flera gånger hos Bob kallade dessa båda Vara för samma sak, nämligen ”Origo” eller kort och gott O.

Detta är O, menade Bion, är den ”absoluta oartikulerbara sanningen om Gud och om människan” skriver Basch-Kåhre. Då O inte kan uttryckas med ord så måste det levas för upp-levas och förstås. Därför är religion och vetskap om Gud inte bara baserat på blind tro, utan på erfarenhet och kunskap – ”Ty Guds ord är levande och verksamt” (Hebr 4:12).

När vi inte kan sätta rena ord på något måste vi förmedla det genom andra vägar, som till exempel vetenskap, poesi, konst och musik. Vi kan bara försöka tänka oss hur våra förfäder upplevde det när de, i sitt psyke, för första gången blev medvetna som det yttersta varat och fångade en glimt av det gudomliga. När det subjektivt personliga bröt fram från det omedvetna till det medvetna… Vad och hur skulle de göra av med alla dessa känslor och all denna energi som nu stormade inom dem? Måla dem på första bästa grottvägg såklart!

Allt sedan dess (vilket tycks ha varit för si sådär 40 000 år sedan enligt de arkeologiska fynden) har människan sökt efter förklaringen på det egna varat, vilket enligt Bion alltså är samma sak som att söka efter Gud och det gudomliga – vilka båda är del av det totala O.

När vi tänker och talar i syfte att få veta mer om varat deltar vi i form av gudstjänst, därför att det då sker i form av kärlek till tänkandet och därmed en kärlek till språket. Problemet är alltså att vi inte kan formulera vad vi upplever i klara och tydliga ord – men det är här som religionen spelar sin  roll som förmedlare och uttrycksmedel.

I’ve had two recurring dreams in my life. The first was during the summer after 5th grade. My brother and I was spending the summer with my real dad while my mom and step-dad moved to Algood, Tennessee. The second has been over the past couple years.

In the first dream my family are in a house that I do not recognize but it is clearly my family’s house because my mom, step-dad, brother, and sister are all there. In the dream my family is being killed one by one by none other than Darth Vader. I am the only one spared because I am hiding behind this odd patterned chair and Darth Vader never finds me. I had this dream at least a couple of times a week while staying at my dad’s over that summer. When the summer was over my mom came to Mississippi to pick up my brother and I. Mom was very excited about the new house. She had gotten me and my siblings new bedroom suits. As we walked through the front door of the new house I stood for a few moments taking in what I saw. Then without being directed I went straight to my room. What is strange is that I wasn’t scared. At the time it was more of a confusion. I couldn’t understand how a house I had never been in and furniture I had not seen till that moment could have shown up in my dreams. The house was exactly, right down to the furniture pattern and arrangement, like in my dreams from that summer. I have never told my family about that first recurring dream. Needless to say, Darth Vader never showed up and killed my family, but I did hide behind that chair quite a bit when hiding from my siblings.

The second recurring dream always has a different location and different people in every dream, but the same action occurs. I am with someone that I don’t recognize and our vehicle (never the same vehicle) breaks down in the middle of the night. A couple always (never the same couple) stops to help us, but they take us to wherever they live. While we are at this house the couple that helped us begins to act strange. Ultimately, they drug the female I’m with and I’m trying to figure out a way to save her or find help. In the dream, the male character who helped us is always stalking me while I try to figure out a way to get away to get help or trying to help the female with me. It is a nightmare. It is in fact the most frightening dream I’ve ever had. I always wake up before I can save the female that is with me.

I had this dream again this past week, but this time two strange things happened. The dream began and is progressing as it always does. I don’t recognize the location and it is different from the past locations. I don’t recognize anyone in the dream except for the man who stops to help us. Still, all the people in the dream are different from those in previous dreams. When we (my companion and I) get to the couple’s house my dream jumps forward to the bad female sedating or drugging the female I’m with, but it is at this point that the first difference occurs. In the dream, I say, “this has happened to us before because I recognize the drugs.” When I say this in the dream I am looking at the bad female as she is prepping the syringe and at the metal tray containing all these medical instruments. As I’m looking at this tray and saying “this has happened to us before because I recognize the drugs” the second strange thing happens. As I’m looking at the tray of instruments and drugs there is a flicker. It was like in a TV show or movie and the police are looking at surveillance video and their is a flicker in the video because someone has stopped the camera and then turned it back on again later after the crime has been committed. Or somewhat like what JJ Abrams incorporates in the last episode of the first season of Fringe when Olivia Dunham is on the elevator. In the dream, after I say what I said and the flicker occurs I am outside being stalked by the bad guy. Then I wake up.

I find dreams very interesting. Throughout history the importance of dreams have been debated. This is seen in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. On the way to the Capulet’s masquerade ball there is a conversation between Romeo and his best friend Mercutio in Act I scene IV:
ROMEO:
And we mean well in going to this mask; But ’tis no wit to go.
MERCUTIO
Why, may one ask?
ROMEO
I dream’d a dream to-night.
MERCUTIO
And so did I.
ROMEO
Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO
That dreamers often lie.
ROMEO
In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.

The issue of dreams and their importance are seen in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, and also in Holy Scripture. Dreams are important in psychoanalysis thanks to Freud. It was a dream that inspired the Twilight Saga.

Do my dreams mean something? I have no idea! I just know that my experience with dreams, specifically recurring dreams, has been interesting.

Un cliché en ficción que ya ha alcanzado trascendencia a tal punto de superar el mero status de cliché es la idea de que toda psicología es freudiana. He oído que este fenómeno también se le conoce como “En algún lugar, un psicólogo está llorando”. Básicamente, que toda la psicología sigue el modelo arcaico y anticientífico de Sigmund Freud. Esto suele servir a la función de no confundir a la audiencia (que es tonta) al nunca salir de las fuentes de referencias populares, porque TODOS han oído hablar de Freud, y la psicología nunca avanzó más allá del subconsciente. Si los científicos se guiaran por esta lógica, los edificios todavía se medirían tirando cosas desde la azotea.

El problema es que hay un poco de verdad en esto: no importa cuan poco científico, cuan poco desarrollado o cuan inerte sea hoy en día, todavía existen muchas personas cuyo credo profesional se sienta en el postulado de que en el mundo hay dos tipos de personas: los que cuando chicos se aguantaban la caquita, y los que la dejaban escapar tipo chorro de cohete. No, en serio, así funciona la tontera del desarrollo psicosexual. Personas que se niegan a ver el proceso evolutivo detrás de cualquier ciencia, tratando de operar con un modelo reconocido por lo muerto y disecado que se encuentra. Sin mencionar que son unos jodidos insufribles. Venga, atrévete a contarles algo de tu vida personal. Y ni siquiera, porque verán abiertas tus parafilias por la forma de agarrar el cucurucho de helado.

Ocasionalmente se me abría el apetito de ser maestro pokemon freudiano. Leí el Freud para principiantes (esos que usan viñetas para explicarlo todo), asistí a unas clases de Introducción al psicoanálisis, me arriesgué con los textos originales. Y por fin me rendí, porque lo aprendido me era tan… no encuentro mejor palabra que estúpido. No hay ningún secreto para leer a Freud: El psicoanálisis freudiano es lo más simple del mundo, causa y efecto. Con razón Kafka y otros lo odiaban tanto. No hace más que una mente analítica y dotes conversacionales para triunfar en este mundo, y son estas características las que atraen a las gentes más idiotas. No pido un manual tan asquerosamente complejo que el tenerlo en mi repisa sea fuente de admiración entre mis conocidos[1], pero… por favor.

Tomen Nosotros y los otros, un libro del crítico búlgaro Tzvetan Todorov. Entre otras cosas, Todorov se pichulea a la mitad de los referentes que usó don Sigmundo. Fue brillante en su época, claro, pero ese es el problema. Freud ni siquiera era psicoanalista porque tal título no existía, él era medico. Con cero referentes, tuvo que crear el psicoanálisis de la nada. Y como se ve con Todorov, la mitad de sus referencias son racialistas al peo, aprovechados del boom científico victoriano para presentar sus teorías nada científicas. Así que, por favor, dejen de culpan a mamita por un momento.

Estoy siendo una forra. Si sé que se quiere enamorar, casar y tener familia ¿qué carajo hago jodiendo acá? No me parece justo, si tanto lo quiero como digo no corresponde que juegue de este modo. ¿Realmente necesito mimar mi ego de esta manera? ¿Todo para pensar que después de tanto tiempo no se me escapó? Lo conozco tanto a esta altura… sin darme cuenta, ya vamos un año y medio de idas y vueltas. Nunca fui honesta con él, incluso ahora no lo soy. Qué forra.
¿Qué es lo que quiero? ¿Cuánto puede durar? ¡Es soltero! Nunca vi a alguien hacer tanto esfuerzo por mantenerse lejos de la presa. Claro, porque él que es cazador, no se da cuenta (o sí) del jueguito perverso. ¿Cuántas noches pasamos juntos en la última semana? ¿Dos? ¿Y cuántas más que no me quedé a dormir… cuatro? Tengo libros, camisa, archivos y programas en la computadora, edulcorante, tazones; me falta el cepillo de dientes. Compartimos una serie que no podemos ver si no es juntos, le corrijo las notas antes que las envíe, le leo en voz alta cosas emotivas, y día de por medio lo corro, le dijo que no, que quiero que seamos amigos.
Era lógico que iba a implosionar, poco sano sería que pudiese dormir una sola noche más conmigo, después de todo sólo con novias duerme, da sexo oral, coge sin preservativo o las invita a salir. Pensar que de a poco fui ganando todos esos espacios, calladita, escuchando tonterías y dejándolo hacer.
Entonces empastillado antes de dormir escribe sobre que son todas putas y que las más terribles son las señoras casadas que miran con la frente en alto a sus cornudos maridos, y a ese texto le pone el nombre de otra chica que dice le encanta ¿sobre quién escribía realmente? Pero no lo va a pensar en voz alta, obvio que no. Sería incapaz, otra vez no podría enamorarse de una casada, otra vez no podría romper otra pareja porque sabe que el único que puede resultar roto es él. Y yo siento cierto placer en todo esto.
Nunca dejaría a mi esposo, no por él (ni por nadie), el futuro no está asegurado, pero seguro que no será trunco por alguna diversión pasatista. Aunque fuese soltera, tampoco es para mí, tampoco es el que quiero aunque alguna vez pude llegar a creer que sí, cuando era un ideal y no un concreto. Aún así quiero que esté conmigo, no una hora o dos, no tomando un café y hablando de libros, quiero que me abrace y mire series que le prohíbo continuar sin mí.
Sé cual es el origen de todo esto, porque no hay nada peor que un hombre despechado, con excepción de una mujer despechada. Lo lloré, lo lloré mucho, se abusó de mí y jugó a su antojo, me llevó a lo más bajo y ahí me dejó el día que encontró otra con la que jugar. Y lo lloré tanto que pensé me iba a secar por dentro. Y ahí me quedé, quietita, agazapada esperando el momento propicio sin darme cuenta que lo estaba haciendo.
Nos hicimos amigos, entre almuerzos y regalos nos empezamos ver a la luz del día y ante los ojos de todos, de todos menos de nuestras parejas, porque aunque públicos para los otros, nunca conocidos. Entonces nos rompieron el corazón al mismo tiempo y nos encontramos a llorar juntos, porque sólo el que es sumamente infeliz sabe del deseo de revolcarse en la miseria y no salir nunca de ella.
Ocupé más de un espacio, el de amiga, el de amante y el de geisha. Porque para él soy su geisha ¿quién lo adoraría tanto como para bañarlo? Lavo su cabeza con masajes, sin tocarlo siquiera recorro su cuerpo con la esponja y con jarra en mano derramo grandes cantidades de agua tibia para enjuagarlo. Y si me pide que se la chupe lo hago. Después pasamos a la habitación donde lo recorro con masajes y dejo que acabe en mi boca. Tanto le gusta que lo cuide que lo vuelve recíproco y me prepara el baño con espuma, me lee sentado a un costado y me masajea apoyándome de lleno hasta que doblada por el deseo le pida que me penetre, hasta el fondo, bien adentro, porque a él le gusta escuchar.
Me cocina, pone la mesa y me prepara café mientras espero que mi vida se ordene. Me apura con mis proyectos, me ayuda con mis ideas y me presta su regazo para que pueda llorar tranquila.
Cuando pienso esto lo vuelvo a querer y me alejo, le pido que seamos amigos, porque si hay alguien a quien me gusta escuchar es a él queriéndome sanamente y diciéndome te amo. Ese te amo sin cargas que viene de la alegría que da conocer y compartir con el otro por el simple placer de hacerlo.
Si lo quiero ¿por qué sigo jugando?

Los solteros son para problemas.

In the chapter entitled “The Critique of the Subject” in the volume Who Comes After the Subject (edited by Cadava, Connor, and Nancy), Michel Henry embarks on a critical history of the philosophy of the subject. While he claims that the history of the critique of the subject has “numerous convergent formulations” from which a detailed tome could be assembled, for the sake of space he limits his chapter to brief analyses of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Freud. Acknowledging the diversity of these thinkers, he nevertheless draws on a convergent point in the four; namely, what they have in common is the “critique of man conceived as a specific and autonomous reality” (157).

It is this specificity and autonomy that Henry claims must be understood. Accordingly, in the philosophy of the subject, man is identified as the subject “granted an exorbitant privilege in that there is in the end no Being nor being except in relation to him, for him and through him, and this insofar as he constitutes the a priori condition of possibility for all experience and thus for all that is and can be, at least for us” (157). Henry refers to this subject as a “super being,” one who has all beings at his disposal – as they are subjugated to him. As he goes on to remark, “These descriptions are those of our world – of the ravaging of Earth by Technology [... which] consists in the unconditional subjugation of the Whole of being, which becomes the Ob-ject, to man, who becomes the Subject” (158). Henry is not here concerned with how such a view of subjective-subjugation of the world can have power, although he does imply that this view of mastery over the world based on subjectivity is an illusion that needs to be addressed. Rather, his immediate concern lies elsewhere; namely that the philosophy of subjectivity does not know anything about the being of this subject. He poses two questions to begin his essay:

1. What is the Being of this subject that has to be eliminated, “evacuated,” from the problematic?
2. Who, contesting at once the right and the existence of such a subject – the right of man to identify with it – goes about its elimination?

At this point he deems it necessary to focus on the philosophies of the two greatest philosophers of the subject: Descartes and Kant – although he chooses to address them historically backward. His attentions swings first to Kant because Henry wishes to show how the Kantian paradigm is the pre-eminent philosophy of the groundless subject. In other words, the moment philosophy “sees itself clearly as a philosophy of the subject… the foundation on which it explicitly and thematically bases itself… escapes it and, slipping from its grasp, tips over into the void of inanity” (158). “Inane” because essentially what occurs is that the Being of the subject becomes understood as representation. Thus, “I think” is equal to “I represent to myself that I think.” As Henry elaborates,

“[This] means that the Being of the subject is classed as the object of a representation, an object that, on the one hand, presupposes this subject and, on the other, never contains by itself, insofar as it is represented any reality – just as to represent to oneself a thaler does not imply that one has one in one’s pocket. Thus the foundation of any conceivable Being is stricken with a profound ontological indigence that prevents us from attributing to Being itself and kind of Being. Like it or not, it is the philosophy of the subject itself that has raised the most serious objection to the subject, to the point of rendering its very existence problematic” (159).

Returning to the two questions above, Henry then asks, “which subject finds itself thrown out of existence, and by whom?” His answer is the subject of representation, and by itself. This is so because the subject-as-representation draws its essence, its Being, from representation, which thus prevents Being from being conferred upon it. According to Kant, because the structure of representation is intuition and concept – and because we have no intuition or concept of the “I think” – we cannot know anything about it. Thus, the subject-as-representation is not a phenomenon for us, nor can it be. In other words, the essence of Being itself cannot consist in representation because representation does not rest upon itself and cannot ground itself in itself – as it is always referential. Thus, “to be” does not mean “to be represented” (160).

For Descartes, the problematic takes a different form. Henry notes that in the Meditations two decisive traits emerge: (1) The Being of the subject is contested, unsettled and denied. The Being of the subject and hence Being itself is the issue; and (2) The foundation of the Being of the subject presupposes that representation be ruled out – this means all that is or can be represented and the very structure of representation itself. By doubting all things – all representations and the structure of representation – Descartes’ remaining inquiry was regarding what might “sub-sist, that is to say, what can still be when representation in its entirety has been blocked”? What can still be when being is not through representation? Descartes’ answer is the “anti-essence of representation” as being “precisely the essence of the ‘subject’” (161).

Henry then briefly describes Descartes’ epoche as found in the Passions of the Soul. In this text, Descartes imagines himself dreaming. As such, all that is represented to himself in his dream is understood as illusory – is not. However, if the dreamer happens to experience emotions of sadness or grief or the like, even though still in a dream, even thought the representation(s) are false, the feelings themselves are absolute. Thus, he concludes: this feeling does not occur through representation but independent of it. How does it then occur? Henry notes, “In and through its affectivity” (161, emphasis his). Accordingly, this affectivity of the subject, this “auto-affectivity”, is the self’s immediate and undistanced experience of itself. And as such, it is to be understood as the essence of the subject and of all possible Being. As Henry thus remarks at the conclusion of his brief discussion of Descartes: “It is only when, as happens at one moment in Descartes, the philosophy of the subject returns to this original essence of subjectivity and Being that the ‘subject’ can become the theme of a philosophical discussion” (162).

Leaving behind Descartes and Kant, Henry turns his attention to his favorite philosophical punching bag. As he states, “The most striking misunderstanding is Heidegger’s, who explicitly and repeatedly identifies the ‘I think’ as an ‘I represent myself to myself’” (162). This non-ground of subjectivity is the resultant model of most critiques of the subject post-Heidegger. With this being the case, as far as Henry is concerned, the Being of the subject has “lost… all possible philosophical meaning” (162). Although Heidegger’s critique of the essence of Being was assumed to be something different, according to Henry, all that really occurred in Heidegger’s problematic was a new schematic of representation-as-essence.

The one bright spot that Henry notes in the history of the critique of the subject is located in the thought of Freud. Although not completely endorsed, Henry claims that the Freudian subject is “capable of opening up new paths” in the history of the critique. Freud’s critique was aimed directly at the subject of representation, which he identified as “consciousness.” As Henry mentions, Freud was not concerned with redefining consciousness, but rather took the stock meaning as employed by common philosophical jargon: “Let us call ‘conscious’ the representation which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious.’”

As noted above, for Freud, consciousness was equal to representation. It is this level – the level of consciousness – that would become the ground of his study of the unconscious; for there are memories that we “possess” which are not immediately accessible in the consciousness, as representation. Therefore, the subject cannot be understood in terms of “I represent myself to myself” because the unconscious, which is unrepresented, is integral in the constitution of the subject. However, whatever is not conscious is capable of becoming conscious. This is the task of the psychoanalytic therapist: to bring to the “actuality of representation something nonconscious that is secretly homogeneous with representation and that can, for this reason, change into it – an unconscious constituted by ‘unconscious representations.’ i.e., those that are not yet represented and that, ontologically if not existentially, are only asking to be” (164). Thus,  according to Henry, “Classical thought calls out for the coming of psychoanalysis” (164).

It is therefore “anther subject that comes to light with the idea that the unrepresented is also representable, that the original Being of this subject is no longer represented but its anti-essence” (164). Henry continues:

“Freud in his turn runs up against such a subject, half perceived by Descartes, when he finds himself in the presence of an unconscious that is no longer provisional, no longer one phase in the history of representation, capable of completing itself in itself, in the actualization of it full essence. The history of our representations refers back to a force that allows them precisely to actualize themselves or that forbids them to do so. It is only this force itself that is irreducible to any representation. This force collapses in on itself in an immediation that is so radical, and in this immediation is submerged into itself in such a way that there is no room in it for any Difference, no distantiation thanks to which it would be possible for it to perceive itself, to represent itself – to be conscious in the mode of representation” (164-65, emphasis his).

However, all is not well in Henry’s eyes. At this point, right when Freud is divulging the most original dimension of Being – the unrepresented and unrepresentable force that directs all representations – that Freud “succumbs” to the presuppositions of this metaphysics and that force and affect fall back to the unconscious. Thus, the subject is led to its true Being, only to find itself removed from such Being.

In the final lines of the chapter, Henry focuses once again on Descartes and asks whether Descartes had perceived (or half-perceived) the Being of the subject as an anti-essence of representation, and that if such is the case why did consequent critiques of the subject so badly misunderstand the cogito in terms of representation? Well, Descartes is partly to blame for this. In the Meditations, Descartes does not completely disavow the subject as representation. In fact, it could be concluded that even after bracketing off all representations, the cogito that remains does so only as a representation to itself. Thus, the cogito is the “first truth and at the same time the prototype for all truth” (165). In this case, the cogito has nothing to do with the actual process of thought or with thought itself. Rather, the cogito is the subjective condition (understood as affectivity, as noted above), without which no appearing of the world would appear.

With that said, it is hence claimed that Descartes draws back at precisely this moment and states that affectivity, as the original essence of subjectivity, is a “disturbance brought into subjectivity by some foreign agent. Why? Because thought is light, the light of representation, the light of the world, the light in which things and their geometric shapes shine – Greek light” (166). It is here, according to Henry, where the problem of the philosophy of the subject lies: “absolute objectivism, whether it be the naive objectivism of the sciences, notably the human sciences, or the ek stasis of Being that, unbeknownst to them, serves as their foundation” (166).

While not setting out to resolve the problematic of the history of the critique of the subject in this chapter, Henry concludes the article by remarking that there is no past in the critique, there is no model that ought to be resurrected or restored. Rather, there is only the possibility of a “first coming”…