objet petit update
alex karkar
Sirenised capital within the world...
Remember you must die - memento mori
There are three illegitimate uses of...
"...the next thing I know I get this little update: that it doesn't matter what I do. I still might die first."
–Community
Where is our problem?
It seems to lie in at least two registers:
1. the first, that of whether or not to write. It may be superposed with the obsessional's question: am I dead or alive.
• this insinuates another question, that of the hysteric: am I man or a woman? it is around this point that we may note*the appearence of a familiar cameo, a leit motif: "some things are better left unsaid"
2. the second concerns something I might call transfer. In the sense that, ignoring the above imperatives to not say or attempt to do, dpeak, or write, I persist, very often with the sense that of depletion in quality of the work. my hand becomes largely operated by silent operators, haywire indexical fragments.
As deleuze writes, at this point it is no longer a matter of the indexical corresponding to a "true" and "false", but to veracity and illusion.
By "transfer" I'm referring to the persistence of an interface into the aphanitic milieu, where tithe objects populating the previous mileu are "acted upon" in a manner that seems to resemble the non-committal atmosphere of porn browsing. One flips around from book to book in an attempt to hold onto to the object and to the jouissance that is its yield until the reserves of attention cannot sustain a focus or decide what to do with itself. One may write, but soon forgets what was to be written, ideas and motives flash into the queue: the misfire when acted upon, and when not acted upon produce no greater yield of absorption in an object.
As an example - or rather as an instance - of this, take the quote:
"the next thing I know I get this little update: that it doesn't matter what I do ... I still might die first."
Now where the ellipsis appears, the matter becomes clouded. Here I have forgotten a detail. Or I had been innatentive to it when memorising the surrounding vocables. Each time there is an ellipses invoked in the act of quoting something said or written, it inflames the turmoil of whether it is legitimate to do so, of whether I am leaving something out that may be salient. In this instance of having not remembered - rather than consciously having made a selection - I will wage war on myself over whether i ought to consult the original text, if it is sufficient to work with what is there for the time being, if producing a best guess is advisable... in short, I shovel shit into a sandwhich.
I suspect that no matter the cause, the relevance of the omitted content or its irrelevance, is largely irrelvant for the moment, while perhaps it itself irrelevant, making it very relevant at the same moment. Whatever the rabbit hole I happen to crawl into and die in, the hysteric's question, that which concerns sex, isn't coming out the other side alive?
What to do next provokes obsession(an)ality.
But the obsessional becomes a term in the discourse of hysteria. That is perhaps why Lacan did not speak of a discourse of the obsessional.
Could hysteria fumble where perversion otherwise succeeds, in parallel to psychoanalysis succeeding where the paranoiac failed?
I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Freud "contracted" psychoanalysis, or in Allouche’s terms, was bitten by the unconscious. This in fact is the only thing that makes it "of" Freud: that he contracted it, it bit him, and that he assumed a responsibility for it; He named it.
Freud then bites a series of others who then contracted his unconscious. The very best amongst those formed in transference knew to create and to name their own unconscious. Since no one but them - not even Freud or Lacan - except when it was them - had to traverse the trajectory that they traversed.
The field may be Freudian for all of us. But when Lacan says the unconscious is of Lacan, it could be said that this is to emphasize that it is singular, and that it has to be named. This is property that cannot be claimed by any other, or any one. Can you imagine if could?
As Oscar Zentner writes: "it is in our own difficulties, impasses and h esitations, that we can make any possible claim to a legacy that will be ours, only if we are prepared to do the work that this legacy demands."
It is around this point t that we may note*
Manifest and leit-ent... Where Freud says that he succeeded where the paranoiac failed, he places Psychoanalysis alongside the other clinical entities. Psychoanalysis is a disease state with a certain degree of eccentricity, rather than a state of normality or health. It's unthinkable that psychoanalysis, a subject in whom a psychoanalytic listening is functioning, could coincide with a state of absolute "psychical normality".
Psychoanalysis I said once could be considered a sexually transmitted disease. The scene of transmission, where sex was "related" to Freud, in the sense that one "relates a tale".
relate 3. give an account of; narrate. "various versions of the story have been related by the locals"
And thus it was. There, the sexual relation is to be found within the founding moment of psychoanalysis. Like a photograph in which a ghostly figure can be seen, despite having been lost to the present. Presentified?
Nevertheless, at the origin, Freud, A dis-eased transmission of the sexual contrasted with a sexual transmission of disease. Isn't this scene the best evidence we have of the fact that it was in his own very particular struggles, impasses and hesitations, that Freud could make any possible claim to a legacy that would be his: the unconscious. "Some comfort for the bad reception which my theory of the sexual etiology of the neuroses met with, even in the closer circle of my friends— a negative space was soon formed about my person-" A relation of this... "-I found in the thought that I had taken up the fight for a new and original idea." So, Freud is afflicted, and takes comfort in the thought of the implications of of the novelty and originality of his idea. Sounds pretty obsessive so far, or perverse-pathological in any case. Alienation. "One day, however, my memories grouped themselves in such a way that this satisfaction was disturbed, but in return I obtained an excellent insight into the origin of our activities and into the nature of our knowledge. The idea for which I was held responsible had not at all originated with me."
Here Freud effects a separation. The unconscious takes root in him as a legitimate concept of his creation - when he disowns it, attributes its source as other, in the neighbour. " It had come to me from three persons, whose opinions could count upon my deepest respect; from Breuer himself, from Charcot, and from Chrobak, the gynecologist of our university, probably the most prominent of our Vienna physicians. All three men had imparted to me an insight which, strictly speaking, they had not themselves possessed. Two of them denied their communication to me when later I reminded them of this: the third (Master Charcot) might also have done so, had it been granted me to see him again. But these identical communications, received without my grasping them, had lain dormant within me, until one day they awoke as an apparently original discovery." This separation grounds the unconscious as a discourse, (the uncs is the discourse of the Other) and thus crucially as a "social link".
it is
the sexual relation
Fliess lends himself to a negative concept, that of the impossibility and nonexistence of true self-analysis.
*it is around this point t that we may note * I'll use a full stop here and elsewhere if it comes up, to indicate one "vector" an eigenvector?, that this "better left unsaid" asserts itself: at the "not". It is effectively turned against its intention, and now reads "it is around this point that I may not. One "manifestation" after another tend to descend in a swarm. To the extent that these manifestations constitute the little update "it doesn't matter what I do".