The Origin of Repression; Part 5 of The Scene of Writing

If Writing is the origin of memory and all it's machinery (apparatuses), the writing that writes onto the Mystic Pad, or the psyche, then there is also a place of non-writing. We can speak of this space of non-writing phenomenologically as a happening between point A and point B where a "subject" is doing something without any regard for the points or awareness of their "natural inclination". Still even without consciousness, writing finds a way to write something onto what is called "consciousness", essentially in it's passive nature, that is still active. According to Husserl, an "Active Passivity". With this being said, as we learned earlier, there are gaps in-between periods, in-between periodicity that form the trace. The whole structure of gaps and periods within something called the psych, Derrida will refer to as the arche-trace, but he signifies that the concept of the arche-trace is not a concept because it isn't simply the static phenomenology of gaps and periods within the "memory", but the process of gaping and memory, and within this present participle, the concept always eludes itself beyond the fact of an "imaginative variation" of a linerar sequence of it happening. One lesson learned from Husserlian phenomenology though is the idea that there are somethings entering into consciousness that aren't perfected, in other words, are not idealized into "objectivities". From the last post though we saw that writing was always and already writing perception before being acted on. That writing is always writing it's own history, it's own empirical-historical history, it's own scientific history of perception, does not mean however that the writing mechanism inside something called a "subject" can be not writing at times, and is this not exactly what the gap in-between periods is? If we are to find an analogy for this theoretical attitude in something more understandable by the guidance of the praxis of empiricism, it can be found in the psychoanalytical idea of repression. And make no doubt about it, it's influence it's extreme; more specifically, Freud's influence has been extreme. "Thus perhaps argued, in the Freudian breakthrough, a beyond and a beneath of the closure we might term "Platonic". In that moment of world history 'subsumed' by the name Freud, by means of an unbelievable mythology...a relationship to itself of the historico-transcendental stage of writing was spoken without being said, thought without being though..it was represented". The mythology of psychoanalysis had an abrupt strike in the stage of transcendental history as a breakthrough and difference from classical metaphysics. That breakthrough we went into as writing as a metaphor of psychical writing, the more primary writing that couldn't be read in terms of a simple code (refer to dream interpretation essay). The influence of Freud through his concept of repression has lead man to unequivocally privileged whatever is called "the unconscious" as the code to ones soul, much like Plato, except the breakthrough that analysis could be done in regards to this unconscious repression, unlike Platonism which saw the "unconscious" as already written, not in a state of tabula rasa. With the simple idea of repression, that we all know and that we all use to criticize others when they are appearably "not acting honest", there is a grounds to it that dives beyond the idea of some concept of "free will" being able to awaken this repression, to be free from it's state of at one time being repressed. By grounding repression in somewhat transcendental terms, the fate of repression is sealed as something that is always and already the situation. "This erasure is death itself, and it is within its horizon that we must conceive not only the 'present', but also what Freud doubtless believed to be the indelibility of certain traces in the unconscious, where 'nothing ends', nothing happens, nothing is forgotten'". Here is where an analogy between Husserl and Freud can be posed, or rather a simple similarity in their theoretical/hypothetical conceptions of the psyche. Very simply, the idea that Writing is not catching anything in a process, and for Husserl, the idea that consciousness has it's times of respites where it's not catching anything that would be exterior to it, usually called a "perception". The erasure is the metaphor of not-catching. Certain traces within the unconscious don't end, which mean they don't become idealized as objectivities in Husserlian terms, and in this sense nothing happens to us even though in the unconscious something happens. If it doesn't fully catch an idealized intention of the unconscious, nothing happens to me. Here at least is further proof for how ambiguous the nature of the unconscious is and a further repudiation of simple dream-coding. Because nothing ends and nothing happens, nothing is forgotten. I can't forget something that at first didn't come to me. I need to have what is called an "object" or concept or notion first to be able to forget that idealized objectivity. If I don't the possibility of it being forgotten is impossible. That being said, Freud still attributes an indelible trace to this process. Not just a trace, but an indelible trace: Something that happens to us that can't be erased but we will never have any idea of. Husserl explained this perfectly in his Analysis concerning Passive and Active Synthesis as "perceptions" not becoming "perfected". Hypothetically, it's still the case that the trace or memory has made an impression on me, it's just also the fact that at the same time I have no idea on it, and would have to erase the concept of an impression being made upon "me" in this case. To put it simply, this indelible trace is erased from unconsciousness because it hypothetically never gets to consciousness. "This erasure of the trace is not only an accident that can occur here or there, nor is it even the necessary structure of a determined censorship threatening a given presence; it is the very structure which makes possible, as movement of temporalization and pure auto-affection, something that can be called repression in general, the original synthesis of original repression and secondary repression, repression 'itself'". There are a ton of keys to this quote. Erasing in general is not censorship. Erasing is not something to be censored itself as being a threat to something that is "present" and the logos of some intention. Erasure instead, makes repression possible. Erasure in the abstract, meaning the fact that an indelible trace can sometimes never be realized in consciousness because of it never being thrown into or "intended" into consciousness creates the possibility for repression before any empirical fact of ones existence would be able to define their own repression, their ownership of their repression, their subtle delight in the things that they are "not Ok with". It's always the case that traces are being written to consciousness, or the Mystic Pad, but it's also the case that these traces (that are nonetheless "indelible") are where nothing happens and where nothing is forgotten. This original repression of not fullfillying what writing wants to fulfill, by writing itself into the historico-transcendental stage, firstly grounds the idea of repression in general before it's modern weight it gains in empiricism, and more noticeably, in ones existentiality (basically repression as a product of an individual ego). To further solidify this idea, Derrida defers an authority to phenomenology by explaining the operation of repression as a "movement of temporalization and pure auto-affection". This is what repression is in general. The movement of temporalization: the idea that a trace needs to happen under a certain amount of time, it has to be temporalized, a trace can't be repressed unless it's given the space of time to sink into nothingness, where certainly, it could have been much more than nothingness, according to Derridean verbiage, it could have developed into the death of itself as representation. After this basic phenomenology of temporality, it is also because of "pure" auto-affection that repression can happen. I can't repress something unless I write it to myself, no matter how much a trace according to Freud can have characteristics to it that resemble nothing; "where nothing ends, nothing happens and nothing is forgotten". By the space of time and the automatic affectation of the pysche, I write down something that is outside of myself. I write it down to my psyche slab, my Mystic Pad. So I'm always writing within the psyche, writing something that is outside of myself, and sometimes what I'm writing down becomes remembered, and sometimes it doesn't even exist except for postulating the hypothesis of traces that never become perfected, but are still indelible in the sense that they are absolutely happening; They are just not happening to "me" because "me" here is being equated with consciousness and unconsciousness is being equated with absence, or nothingness. An indelible mark within nothingness: A definition for the unconscious? "Such a radicalization of the thought of the trace (a thought because it escapes binarism and makes binarism possible on the basis of nothing)". Once thought gets laid out, for example, the thought of consciousness, it finds it's binary opposition in unconsciousness. But the radicalization of this thought of the trace, essentially as one that is completely empty, is nothing, in the sense that nothing can be said about it except by positing it hypothetically, grounds binarism, and in this sense grounds the classical psychoanalytical and existential concept of repression. For classical pyschology, dogmatic pyschology if you will, one is always being analyzed into a place where what needs to be "brought up from the depths of your unconsciousness" is something wholly opposite to what you're speaking about; "to let out your inner demons". To speak badly about your mother, means you really have an infatuation with your father. To speak badly about your father, means you really have a strong affection about them. Both the figures of the paternal figures and the concept of "speaking badly" refer to their binary oppositions of the opposite paternal figure and affection respectively. But the origins of repression don't happen from "experience", if "experience" means a person who enters into the world with a blank-slate consciousness who then experiences things they dislike and then subsumes them into their unconsciousness. On the contrary, the origins of repression start from the fact that one has the capacity for indelible traces where nothing happens and nothing is forgotten. Essentially, the psyche writing it's own history and erasing a part of that history before it even enters into your though process (consciousness). Already at work is a psychical apparatus that is distinguishing, sublimating, and repressing traces. That some of these traces are realized in consciousness is the case. That these realized traces (memories) are realized and then repressed is just a function of a much more fundamental operation of the psyche to want to erase things in general for unknown reasons because they operate from nowhere. The operation of repression is always the case. The existential neurosis for "solving" repression is a misplaced "task" of modern psychology because of 1. not being able to see that when one thing is "awakened" in a repression more will pop up because of the fundamental work of the psyche to write things it may want to erase in the first place and 2. not being able to see this ground work of the psyche as operating in a process of Freud's Mystic Writing Machine where at the same time something is written, something is erased with some marks on it that can be recognized. Without a theoretical attitude towards the psyche, psychology can operate under a really misguided teleology of "solving peoples problems". That classical and modern psychology would need to operate under the idea of the trace (or memory) whose structure allows for something to be repressed in the first place would give new grounds to psychology. First and foremost, to not think that the patient is some sort of static identity where all the analyst would have to do is "solve their problem" by bringing out a repression as if other repressions wouldn't manifest once this one repression was "brought up". A change in thinking would have to occur, and that change would be the indefinite repressions with the human psyche. Would this be of consolation to "the patient"? Maybe not in the moment. Would it make them think afterwards about the indefinite state of imbalance that envelops their existence? Maybe so. Either way, psychology without a theoretical foundation of how memory works is strange, strange not just because it's lacking in explanation, but strange because of how popularized the science has become without really needing to know anything about itself.
As a final note to this text on Derrida, I wanted to elaborate on the fields that Derrida sees that could be opened up by psychoanalysis that haven't been opened up yet.
1. A pyschopathology of everyday life. Not simply interpreting lapsus calami (The Freudian Slip, or more literally, The Slip of the Pen) in it's specific encounter, but how it's possible for a slip to happen. If the traces of memory are able to be nothing which constitute a primal repression, then a slip perhaps has a theoretical space in the unconsciousness; perhaps where traces are being allowed into the consciousness not by some empirical-existential slip, but by a slip where what was once an "indelible trace of nothing" slipped into "becoming something". Beyond this, Freud doesn't address responsibility for the slip. In an existential sense, when the slip happens, what is the responsibility of the one who makes the slip, and what is even the responsibility of the receiver of this slip? It must be said though, that Freud, as a person, was probably not the person to concern himself with these ethical issues between "others" where slips manifested into issues of guilt and responsibility.
2. A history of writing: A history of writing that is not empirical, that is not of the speculation of Rousseau works on what possibly was natural man, in his romantic sense of it, and one senses, his thoughts on it that were manifested from an opulent surrounding. Only the most opulent surroundings produce thinkers who "champion nature in it's purity", and the same would go for writing. The history of writing not as some innocuous process that was at once "pure", but maybe always sedimented by a non-altruistic motivation which Derrida takes to task with Claude Levi-Strauss later on in Writing and Difference in the text "Structure, Sign, and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". A history of writing that follow the unconscious factors in the reading would be the task.
3. A becoming literary of the literal: The task of psychoanalysis to not focus so much on the signified concept as the transcendental object for thinking, but the play of signifiers which constitute the signified itself. In Zizek's terms, "the fictions that create reality". A focus on the literary signifier, the signs that point towards something, where whatever was being pointed to, the intentional object was being bracketed out itself. While Husserl would bracket out his existentiality to find a pure intentionality leading to something called an "objectivity", this objectivity (the intentional object) would be braketed out for how signifiers operate independent of their ostensible teleology to the direct object, or the signified, or the intended substance. As Derrida states "the history of literary forms was destined precisely to authorize this disdain of the signifier".
4. Finally, a psychoanalysis of the "forms of gestures, movements, letters, lines, points, the elements of the writing apparatus (instrument, surface, substance, ect.)" For example, The Role of the School in the Libindinal Development of the Child where analysis would happen not just by analyzing "adult disorders", but would follow how school brings about force to a child. What is education doing for a child that allow them to be themselves or not be themselves, essentially as libindinal beings, as beings with drives, often insatiable drives that an educator would either curtail or accentuate in the school. Also, Strachey's Some Unconscious Factors in Reading. What is happening in reading? What are parts that are being forgotten and remembered and why? Why at a very early stage are certain things of no interest to a reader and others are? When reading, what does the writing of the unconscious want to grab onto? And how does it influence the entire interpretation of the text that leads to all the multivariant interpretations of texts in general? By laying out these unconscious factors, it would certain ground ambiguity in some possibly invariant structures of how reading happens in general. Psychoanalytically, what is that man wants from reading? In Numbers, with the parched woman drinking the inky dust of the law, what is the motivation for the drinking of the law, and how does this communicate with the writing of the law as an excrement of writing? Writing being excreted as law to be swallowed by a woman who feels parched...by not having a law in their life.
Psychoanalysis has an enormous amount of avenues it can traverse to not only flesh out its own theory, but to flesh out the ontological state of being in general.

Merleau-Ponty's "The Visible and the Invisible".

At the end of the weighty interpretation of Derrida on Husserl, I thought it would be a good idea to tackle a text that was slightly less weighty, but still phenomenological is a 'strong' sense. I also thought it would be good to exit out of problems of genesis in general that Derrida took up with Husserl's Origin's of Geometry. While problems of genesis and the circularity of the problems involved always seem like the philosophical issues with the greatest importance, they can be cumbersome after awhile. I certainly felt the effects of it. Regardless, Husserl's jump from static to genetic phenomenology is something we will come back to in later posts and in other texts. For now though I thought it was a good idea to go into something more tangible than problems of consciousness and the transcendental ego. This tangibility is found in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While taking on his Phenomenology of Perception would certainly be too large of a task for this site, I thought his The Visible and the Invisible would be a good work to extract.

As far as a little background, was born in 1908 and died in 1961. He was a thorough disciple of Husserl and Heidegger. Specifically in regards to Husserl, he was an ardent student of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts and often refers to them more in his work than Husserl's published work. He's different from Husserl in that he's more apt to give specific examples, specifically examples in art where he found the work of Cézanne to be the most penetration into his phenomenology of perception. Beyond this though, he gives concrete examples in his Phenomenology of Perception of patients with certain cognitive disabilities after World War 2. For example, he explores Anosognosia; a disability where the patient seems to be unaware of their disability. He explores a patient who is always trying to reach out for something as if he had his amputated arm and never realizing that he didn't have him arm. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher of embodiment. He gives concrete examples of the body and certain art to establish the fact that perception is the grounding axiom of the phenomenological attitude. So it's obvious to say that perception for Merleau-Ponty is different from perception in Husserl. Perception in Husserl is often at the disposal of a consciousness making it's own mind up and it's own theme that create reality. Merleau-Ponty on the other hand is much less of an "idealist" than Husserl. He gives credence to the fact that one is already thrown into a world (lessons from Heidegger) and can't escape the fact that their body is "meant" to do certain things and to the extreme that the body is meant to do these things, one is never able to escape them. With this in mind, the mind and it's sense is always tied to the worldly body. It's not as if Husserl didn't encounter this in his Crises, especially with his concept of the Lebenswelt (Lifeworld), but he never went far with it because how much he was always concerned with the logic of experience in general independent of everything via his bracketing method and Cartesian epoch. Merleau-Ponty on the other hand is a thinker who finds phenomenology in the primacy of perception, specifically body's perception and it's lack of dependence on consciousness pure and simple. He finds them tied together, but most importantly, he sees the body as a subject and an object at the same time unlike Husserl who saw the body only as the intentional object of thought that was to be disregarded if one was to gain an idea of what "pure sense" was independent of it's noema (object of thought). With this in mind, one understands why this will be less weighty to understand because we will actually have access to things, body's, and perceptions when doing phenomenological analysis. A great quote to exemplify this is in his Phenomenology of Perception when he states “Insofar as I have hands, feet; a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose”. By way of limiting himself to the obviousness of his body he becomes a sort of anti-idealist in the phenomenological field. While Husserl would find transcendental consciousness in pure sense's logic of temporality and activity/passivity, Merleau-Ponty would find it in what the body does and is always and already doing regardless of intentionality-logic.

So the next posts will be moving from the mind independent of everything to the mind and body not being distinct from each other both with their "unconscious" states of being. The Visible and the Invisible was Merleau-Ponty's last work. It will be an invigorating work to write on since the examples he gives are always lucid and incredibly descriptive. We are allowed the luxury of our body in Merleau-Ponty. The issue at hand in this specific text though is how the invisible "lines" the visible itself and how each would not exist without the other. Other issues will also arise, regarding the fact if he's really doing phenomenology when he enters into the inter-subjective zone when he goes into the fact that communication transcends his previous work of a pre-reflective cogito where one is limited to their pre-given body and perception. During these posts we will certainly go back to Husserl's criticism of science, sociology, Heidegger's ontology, existentialism, romantic prose, and everything else that doesn't fall under the "noble task of philosophy"; to understand it's pure sense. So while Mearleau-Ponty will be a good juxtaposition to Husserl, it will also enlighten Husserl's Crises as an absolute call to arms for what philosophy should be...in Husserl's terms, which for better or worse, I find justified. That being said, we will take the rigorous thought of Merleau-Ponty and try to expatiate on it as faithfully as Derrida did with Husserl. I hope we can succeed.

Until the introduction to Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, I've been commissioned for some more writing at Old-Wizard.com. This week I get to have fun with lists titled "Top 10 ways to tell you're not as smart as you think you are" and "Top 10 Swedish Songs" among others. Until the introduction of the Merleau-Ponty text, have fun watching Zizek's "spontaneous attitude toward the concept of love".

Re-establishing "History"; Part 3 of Derrida's interpretation of Husserl

In Husserl's last published work, The Crises of the European Sciences, we find Husserl taking his first leap into the idea of history itself. That this would become a theme for Husserl isn't something that could have been predicted as something that would happen or wouldn't happen in his thought. Certainly, with the honesty of Husserl's work, you could think of him "letting the life-world" into his thought. That being said, no one before or after in western philosophy had so rigorously distanced himself from any sort of existentialiality, even one that would be considered abstract (except for Wittgenstein writing at the same time of Husserl. Refer to Wittgenstein's 'problem' with Karl Popper on Ethics and Philosophy). Husserl though who had thoroughly elaborated Phenomenology from everything that could be studied (Time, Activity, Passivity, Logic, ect.) entered into the problem of history, and in doing so entered into the problem of language (which will be discussed in a post after this).

Derrida is more than aware of this shift in Husserl's thinking and elaborates on the appropriate and not so paradoxically vacuous conception of history in his thinking. We learn immediately from Derrida that, "The historicity of ideal objects obeys different rules, which are neither the factual interconnections of empirical history, nor an ideal and a historic adding on". Where does that leave us then for history if it's neither an archiving of "facts", nor conciliatory gestures of Platonism? Something that is neither real nor unreal. As Zizek continually elaborates on the "reality of the virtual", Derrida and Husserl elaborate on neither being the case for history. This of course opens up a new conception of history that Husserl tried to explain that very few could grasp until they were rigorously interpreted (Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Farber). This attempt at an infinite trace "extended down to a precultural and prehistoric stratum of lived experience". So then, history without culture or history? While not being able to elaborate at all on something that never "was", nonetheless, Husserl can say with certainty that this infinite possibility alone "assures the possibility of historicity". You can't have something without nothing (Heidegger would find Phenomenology more appropriately grounded in Ontology because of this 'axiom/maxim'). "Materially determined ontologies are subordinates to formal ontology, which treats pure rules of Objectivity in general". What does this mean? It means to throw out the fact that any of the geological sciences can teach you anything about the this new version of history. Material conditions and teleological thoughts are not the history that broached into Husserl's Phenomenology. Knowledge and history were dependent on a "naivete of a priori self-evidence that keeps every normal geometrical project in motion". So far, this is nothing new except a reestablishing of Kant's transcendentalism within the context of Husserl's mind.

To further establish the privileging of the "naivete of a priori self-evidence", Husserl gives due time to the fact that Galileo never found it relevant to understand the "how" of origins which Husserl would nominate as "Universal Knowledge". Seeing how knowledge developed was not the problem for Husserl (epistemology) but how knowledge can originally appear. Derrida makes an important footnote in the text describing the fact that Husserl uses the word "origin" with the sense of "first" that is an undetermined primacy and at the same time an original sense; an undetermined origin which surely influenced Derrida's infinite conception of 'the trace"; an undetermined origin which paradoxically Husserl felt could be elaborated on like elaborating on anything.

Not to ever be confused, Husserl goes great lengths to distinguish this "history" from a sociological one, one that would consider what the first theoretical act was of man who found geometry or anything in general for that matter that could be considered ideal. At this point, you're really dealing with nothing when dealing with this new version of history. Here, the line between nothing and purity (a word that Husserl used through all his texts) is extremely thin. While this sociological adventure would "flatter our historical curiosity", "it would still leave us blind about the first sense of such a founding: a sense that is necessary and compared to which these facts have at best only an exemplary signification". Without sense, nothing can be elaborated on. So how is it possible to approach sense without expressible objectivity?

Asking about the sense of history can't be possible without first asking about anything in general. The possibility of the question itself comes second to the sense that Husserl wants to grasp and is there (abstract space) irreducible. He can only derive an answer from a non-answer; he can't "find" an "undetermined answer". Derrida's insightful contributions to this comes by way of stating that "I must already have a naive knowledge of geometry (facts in general) and must not begin at its origins" and this transcendental motif is "concealed each time by the very gesture that uncovers it". In other words, every time Husserl tries to elaborate on the sense of a historical origin, he's concealing that sense by linguistically stating it (more on language in a later post). To understand Husserl's conception of history would require allowing him the luxury of being able to say things without really meaning them, and accomplishing this methodology that attempts to grasp the sense of an origins. By right of the spectre of Kant; "to know something a priori, you have to attribute to things nothing but what necessarily followed from what you had put there yourself in accordance with your concept". For Kant, the space is always open for reducing geometry to an ideal history. It's not as if there is a no-space and no-time where a being is able to operate out of non-conceptuality. Spontaneous reduction is always and already done without giving sense it's due, and without even respecting it, or even being able to respect it because you have no chance at it. You have no way of elaborating on something that happened before elaboration, or the de facto. You can elaborate on it as an operation, but not a founding, because the moment that geometry, or any science, or any thinking is established, the possibility of going back to a non-explicative sense that constituted it is impossible. It's already revealed, and in this sense, already ideal. It's not a matter for subjectivity of what a priori "prescribed" for objectivity. It's beyond the fact that it's not a matter. You can't even say that it doesn't matter because nothing can be said of a sense independent of expression.

How will Husserl answer for establishing sense independent of expression in order to establish a pure logic of history? How will Derrida further approach Husserl's attempts?

Soon...to come, always on the way to a place that will there be on it's way, Soon...to come.