Project and Freedom 筹划与自由

“我们都有点神经症“——用精神分析理论看《危险方法》

http://movie.douban.com/subject/4221515/

今天和同学一起看了这部我们期待已久的电影。我们几个都是哲学系学生，但是对于弗洛伊德、荣格、拉康等人的精神分析理论有很大兴趣。我这学期第一次系统读了点弗洛伊德和拉普朗虚（Laplanche，台译），所以看这部电影觉得像看侦探片一样，充满了值得琢磨的细节。虽然自己并不是专业的心理学学生，还是愿意把自己的一些想法抛砖出来，希望更多的精神分析学朋友可以指正和讨论。片中弗洛伊德与荣格的分歧越来越大的时候，荣格曾写信让弗洛伊德正视自己的神经症（neurosis）和对他人的控制欲，而弗洛伊德回信说：“我们每个人都有点神经症。“需要说明的是，在接下来的分析中，我讨论的更多是电影中的角色，以及电影中的故事所具有的典型意义，而不是历史中的人物。

（不知道有哪些敏感词，实在是发不出来，只好截屏做成图片发了……）

http://book.douban.com/subject/2556907/

　　In my reading Freud, I always feel the lack of the other, that is, the other people, who stand clearly different from my person, seem not having an irreducible role in my mental life. In this essay, I’ll examine the role of the other in Freud’s and Laplanche’s understanding of instincts, especially sexual instincts, and argue that while Freud gives primary role to auto-eroticism and thus cannot give a full account of the role of the others in sexual instinct, Laplanche’s theory of primary seduction and source-object can be seen as a way out. 
　　 
　　In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”, Freud defines the object of instincts as “the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim.” (SE, XIV, 122) The object, as to an instinct, is not essentially connected to the latter, is prone to change however frequently, and is not necessary “something extraneous: it may equally well be part of the subject’s own body”. (SE, XIV, s122) The source of an instinct is strictly somatic, and the aim of an instinct is, in accordance, also somatic, “the attainment of ‘organ pleasure’”. (SE, XIV, 126) This implies that even when external object is needed or used, the source and the aim of instincts are still not external, independent from the other, and fundamentally belonging to the self. 
　　 
　　The self-referring tendency of instincts in Freud may be explained that his claim that the ego has went through an early developmental phase of “auto-erotic”, or “narcissism”. The distinction between self and the other, is therefore reduced to the relation between subject and object, active and passive, and is further reducible to that between the narcissistic subject and narcissistic object. Even in those passive forms of instincts (for example, masochism and exhibitionism) that by definition require another as the acting role (respectively, sadism and scopophilia), Freud claims that here the “narcissistic subject … through identification, replaced by another, extraneous ego”. (SE, XIV, 130) The primal narcissistic state cannot transform and develop if it were not for the primal dependent state of human, “during which his pressing needs are satisfied by an external agency and are thus prevented from becoming greater” (SE, XIV, 134, fn2) Though the others are on whom we depend, they constitute a part of the impenetrable and inaccessible external world for us, there is no way to distinguish them from other things; the arbitrariness of whether they decide to fulfill my needs might seem to me as impenetrable as the arbitrariness of weather. 
　　 
　　The “leaning-on”, as Laplanche would call it, of sexual instincts to ego-instincts seems to make the sexual instincts more self-referring. “To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to one of the functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later.” (SE, VII, 181-2) To Freud, sexual instincts, like its earlier leaning on self-preservation, always seeks the repetition of the satisfaction that is enjoyed in the early age. While it requires the external world to provide this satisfaction, the satisfaction itself is ultimately my own. It is hard to detect when in Freud the other human agents are distinguished from the overarching notion of “external world”. Therefore, it leaves open where Laplanche can bring in his theory of instincts and his notion of source-objects. 
　　 
　　Laplanche considers it as a problem that in Freud’s biological notion of instincts (drives), “the contingency of the object is total”, and this theory treats both the outside world and the others as something to anchor the floating energy, without endowing them with a sense of necessity on their part. (EO, 124) For Laplanche, rather, the drive comes from two sources: apart from the endogenous, somatic source that Freud acknowledges, Laplanche points out that “an adult cultural world in which the child is totally immersed from the outset”, which should also be considered as an antecedence of drive. (EO, 126) This is the world, full of sexualized messages and significations, which no child or adult can escape being overwhelmed by, nor can anyone fully grasp. To Laplanche, what is lacking in Freud is the fact that infants and adults are at the same time existent, and are all in a cultural environment where unconscious sexualized messages are sent with any seemingly non-sexual gestures. Thus, the adults’ unconscious gestures to the infants constitute what Laplanche calls “the primal seduction”, which causes the bifurcation of sexual instinct and self-preservation instinct to happen. For Freud, it is because we are dependent on the others for our subsistence that we develop out of the narcissistic state, and the autoerotic narcissism is explained by the infants’ incapability of controlling the external world. For Laplanche, the seduction from the other is primary; the adults’ gestures, carrying unconscious sexualized messages with them, cause auto-erotic activity. “The obligatory vehicle of auto-eroticism … is the intrusion and then repression of the enigmatic signifiers supplied by the adult.” (EO, 129) The unconscious messages received but not decoded by the infant will remain as mental presentations of things, and will then constitute the id. And these “thing-presentations” are ultimately the “source-object” of the drive. The drive is neither fully mental nor fully biological; it is the impact from these repressed source-object to the ego. 
　　 
　　In Laplanche’s account of sexual drive, the role of the other human (rather than a mere “external world”) is clearer than that in Freud’s theory of instinct. As human beings also immersed in the whole of unconscious significance and communications, they make gestures and send messages to infants while they themselves can never fully understand, and this unknown communication has a central influence in the development of sexual drive. 
　　 
　　 
　　 
　　Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Standard Edition, Volume VII, 123-246. 
　　 
　　Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Standard Edition,Volume XIV, 109-140. 
　　 
　　Laplanche, The Drive and its Source-Object, Essays on Otherness, 117-132.

http://book.douban.com/subject/6058861/

　　Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger 
　　 
　　(This presentation is not quite clear; you won’t find enough Heidegger; I don’t get all the ideas because it requires a theory context of Irigaray’s own oeuvre and other resources, for example, Lacan and Derrida.) 
　　 
　　The first difficulty of reading this book is the style of writing. It is an experimental attempt of writing philosophy in a poetic language, which makes it very vague and impenetrable. It does not contain arguments, commentaries or even quotations as to our expectation. Fragments of sentences, sentences that go against grammatical rules, metaphors and even allegories, juxtaposed phrases with a rhythm of their own, and word play, constitute most part of this book. However, Irigaray is very aware of, and actually draws our attention to the fact that she is using these rather heterodoxical way of writing, she said: 
　　 
　　“Do not think I am amusing myself with wordplay. I haven’t come to that. I have not yet found the place from which I could begin to say anything whatsoever. Here and now. I am trying, rather, to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably.” (FA, 29) 
　　 
　　Here, Irigaray claims that “I” am not using the standard, rigorously logical, academic language, precisely because, and indicates the fact that, “I” have been exiled as well as enclosed in this language – the language of “his”. I retain the pronouns because the “I” is not Irigaray, nor is the “he” Heidegger; rather, the “I” here should be understood as speaking for the “she”, which Irigaray uses in this context, to indicate what she considers to be lost in man’s appropriation of everything related to him in his being, and in his logos. 
　　 
　　Irigaray uses the “she” (elle) in this context to cover a lot of words that are feminine in French, including the woman, the mother, the nature, the “elle” in “elle donne”, the region, and the things – in a word, almost everything that is opposed to the notion of “man”. And the man, the “he” that Irigaray is addressing and critiquing at the same time, is Heidegger sometimes; but more oftentimes, it is Heidegger as well as the man who is the subject of the logos, the one who is, who has names and being. In this sense, the “she” and the “he” cannot be understood as any concrete woman or man, or according to the biological or social sense of woman or man. 
　　 
　　(The symbolic structure which excludes women as living body.) 
　　 
　　“She gives – first – air, and does so irrecoverably, with the exception of the unfolding, from and within her, of whoever takes air from her. While this air is – first – fluid matter carried by the blood she gives, it can also be understood as voice and phenomenon.” 
　　 
　　“She gives first. She gives the possibility of that beginning from which the whole of man will be constituted. This gift is received with no possibility of a return. He cannot pay her back in kind.” (FA, 28) 
　　 
　　He takes from her an “unpaid” and “unpayable” “debt of life” (FA, 28). And with this debt, he starts to form logos, which leaves the debt in the state of not being able to be addressed. It is, in other words, “closed up – folded up in an unthinkable beginning of Being.” (FA, 30) Irigaray plays around the notion of fluid gift or debt, the blood from a pregnant woman to a fetus, the milk from a mother to an infant, and the air from the nature to human, and maybe much more. However, this is a gift destined to go through metamorphosis: “the gift of her body in fluid form having become, in and through him, that which now stand solidly raised up – erected.” (FA, 35) This gift is given in silence and before all speech, thus it is never spoken of; it is also given in fluid form and before all possibilities of solidification. 
　　 
　　Air is “the whole of our habitation as mortals”; nothing can be “more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful”. (FA, 8) Using Heidegger’s terminology, Irigaray claims that “no other element is as originarily constitutive of the whole of the world”. (FA, 8) As for our being, air is a necessary condition, by every sense of the word. Air is the condition for our talking, too: we breathe in and out air in order to make a sound. However, thinking seems to require different air, Irigaray defines it as ether. The reason is that for Irigaray, the beginning of thought in western philosophical tradition is a circle, in which air is not ideally fluid anymore. A controllable amount of air in an enclosed circle, that is a symbol of this tradition, as much as free air would be a challenge, symbolizing the impossibility of thinking about a “fluid truth” in this tradition. (FA, 12) Living, which needs air, and thinking, which needs ether, are thus from the outset separated. Air is presupposed and suppressed at the same time. Therefore, not only air lets itself to be ignored by senses, to be forgotten while all around, but also thinking rules out air. 
　　 
　　[“Would his most radical intervention in nature be to transform it into a mirror for himself? Is not air the element that is most resistant to this operation? How could air, the mediation of all reflection, reflect itself?” (FA, 13)] 
　　 
　　To go back to the question of style: the style itself constitutes a critique of Heidegger, and even more writings in the western philosophical tradition. It is a style that employs Heidegger’s terminology (to name but a few, Being, being-there, encounter, set-forth, dwelling, care, clearing, opening, etc.), and thus more or less Heidegger’s structure of analyzing, but does not follow Heidegger in his path; rather, by always pointing to where Heidegger does not go, by suggesting the points in Heidegger’s terminological map where we can go astray from Heidegger, Irigaray uses his language to make her claim. Therefore, this book is changing the structure of what commentary would look like. Instead of either criticizing or agreeing with the author who is read here, Irigaray reads Heidegger, speaks to Heidegger, and asks Heidegger – she is encountering Heidegger, if I may say so. She offers a different background against which Heidegger can be seen, and within her background she depicts his limits and boundaries. 
　　 
　　However, encounter might not be the right word here. Irigaray questions the notion of encountering. 
　　 
　　“It … lets ‘things’ appear and meet, but always in the mode of a face-to-face encounter that excludes interpenetration and mixture. ‘Things’ go to meet each other, but they remain about-to-meet, facing each other. ” (FA, 40) 
　　 
　　“No gap, breach, spacing, or distancing is possible between the living organism and the blood that has always already nourished it, including with the oxygen. Nor is there any more of a gap between it and the ambient air it continuously breathes once born.” (FA, 84) 
　　 
　　Encountering, to Irigaray, is not sharing, thus is not enough for living. Our taking in beings that do not have boundaries, and our taking them into our bodies, Irigaray would say, is already forgotten here in the notion of encountering. (Metabolizable, non-metabolizable, Laplanche) In encountering, the distance always remains there, as Heidegger has already noted; but Irigaray reminds us that if we only encounter, we cannot be nourished. We assimilate, as he assimilates her into his being; we assimilate liquid for subsistence, as a primordial debt. This assimilation is a process of interpenetration, instead of encountering. This is a process of “sharing, this relation of indivisible proximity”, (FA, 84) and Irigaray considers it to be “prior to the constitution of Being-in-the-world” (FA, 83). 
　　 
　　 “Free air would thus be the material substratum of the region.” (FA, 41), says Irigaray. However, here is a statement that I found suspicious. If we assume the translation is accurate, then the “sub-” calls for our attention. If it is air that Irigaray wants to remind us of, why is it possible to be “sub-”? Why not another prefix, which is actually quite frequent in Heidegger, that is, “circum-” (“um-”)? This further leads us to ask, in trying to establish the place for air, is Irigaray doing the same thing as her predecessor metaphysicians? Or rather, to reverse the question, is Heidegger not responsible for what Irigaray blames? After all, for Heidegger, Dasein encounters beings in its taking care. Like the road under our feet and passing beneath our soles is phenomenologically further than our friends we meet “twenty steps away on the street” (BT: 104/SZ: 107), is air, for Heidegger, quite remote to Dasein, for Dasein never needs to take care of air? It might make sense, if we can convince ourselves that we do not take care of air all the time, we are not attentive to air in the way we are to water, sunlight, and we take care of odor, or the lack of air, or our running nose, but not air itself. Irigaray reminds Heidegger of the debt he owes to air, the debt of his own life and the very possibility for him to talk; however, Heidegger might be able to reply that air is something he does not encounter in the way of taking care of, it is not part of the useful things. 

　是我上的Being and Time课的presentation。我在找更多的可以连接这两本书的地方。Encounter，region，sexuated Dasein，希望能勾勒出来一个Irigaray对于Being and Time的解读。 
　　FA是Forgetting of Air的缩写，BT是Being and Time的缩写（Stambaugh版本http://book.douban.com/subject/5934046/），SZ是Sein und Zeit。