Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

A Little Lingua Trauma

This is the post where I get nailed to a tree: if I've learned nothing else it's that Lacanians will be certain to correct your reading of Lacan and they will be adamant in announcing the insufficiency of one's poor reading. But I gotta start some where and what's below is from the floor of the editing room of a piece I've recently submitted at another blog. That said, I apologize for the [egregiously] disjointed nature of what follows and also apologize for the glaring inaccuracies and superficial understandings that likely will be found below.

In his essay “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996, Hal Foster seeks to present an understanding of postmodernist art of the 1990s. He sees the tendency within contemporary art practices to unite both the imaginary and symbolic against reality. Foster sees this conflict as possible because of the wide-reception of Jacques Lacan's work.

Lacan, another early psychoanalyst and perhaps the first incarnation of the philosopher-as-rockstar (he was something of a national treasure in France before 1968 where he was even on TV). In Lacanian psychoanalysis the human psyche is vulnerable to impingement from the world (as we have read in Melanie Klein elsewhere), but for Lacan reality itself is a special kinda terrifying all its own. Somewhat similar to Freud's suggestion in his essay “The Uncanny” that which is most terrifying is what is most familiar but never quite seen.

As illustration to Freud's point: that moment in the film The Grudge when the woman, being pursued by the angry demon, runs into her apartment, locks the door, runs to her bedroom (SAFE!) and hides under her sheets. Is there nowhere more safe than your own bed? The real horror comes when the demon slithers its way up the bed, just under the sheets making that awful croaking sound.

It is a horrifying scene because the bedroom has ceased to be that familiar place of rest and now is revealed as a place that contains more than we thought it did. The bed prior to the demon had been only so big, and now the demon has revealed to us that it is much more than just what we thought.

But for Lacan this is not impressive – literally child's play – an attempt by children to mask the horror of the Real by covering reality with signs and symbols. The symbolic order, “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work” signs, the size of notebook paper, all that culture stuff – all of this is to mitigate the ever-present danger of the psyche being left vulnerable to the Real. If Lacan is correct, we never experience the Real because of the terror that the Real reality provokes in us.

Again, if Lacan is correct in explaining the symbolic order, then the artist is clearly implicated and perhaps has a unique responsibility to consider the question, “what is the nature of the Real and how might we come into contact with it?” This is the base assumption in Hal Foster's essay and he finds an excellent example in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. (Untitled Film Still no. 21. 1978. above right)

Foster finds effective illustration of the terrifying gaze of the Real and the subsequent investigations into the nature of the Real through abject imagery in the work of Cindy Sherman:

[Sherman's] subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze. Often, in the film stills and the centerfolds, this gaze seems to come from another subject, with whom the viewer may be implicated [….] Sherman shows her female subjects as self surveyed, not in phenomenological reflexivity (I see myself seeing myself) but in psychological estrangement (I am not what I imagined myself to be). (110)

As Foster points out in his exploration of themes in '90s art practices, “Today there is a general tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma: a lingua trauma is spoken in popular culture, academic discourse, and art and literary worlds.” (123)

(Left: Untitled Film Still no. 92. 1982)
Perhaps the best representation of this lingua trauma can be found in Atom Egoyan's 2009 film Adoration. Egoyan's film explores this phenomenon, perhaps to point-out that trauma has become the new authenticity: one cannot be trusted without having publicly discussed and exposing one's traumatic experiences.

This is well presented with Simon watching as the passengers of a flight that had, not unlike the “underwear bomber” incident of December 25, 2009, been the target of a potential bombing. Those, now middle aged, passengers argue over the possibility that one can be traumatized by an event that did not occur, after all, no one was even aware of the potential attack until they had landed. Can we call this a new trauma? Is trauma not an impingement in this moment that we must then learn to contain? Or is the traumatic something that happens in our minds alone and expresses itself corporally as we recall and meditate upon the event now remembered as traumatizing.

(Right: Untitled 1531. 1981.)

Larry Rickels Day 6

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Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Romero says that the Tales of Hoffmann was a primary influence on Night of the Living Dead.

The Winnicott psychology of adolescence is one that is always passing; it seems we can relate. This transience is related to the barrier of psychosis, this is perhaps how we can understand the Freddie Krueger experiment.

Fetishism
Lacan changed his views, but they were within the field of Freud's. Winnicott refers to the maternal phallus, thus one gets around the gap of loss.

Freud wrote about the fetish after the War, thus his second phase. He brings two examples that don't have anything to do with sexuality:

• the two sons, they both know and did not know that their father was dead - an oscillation between knowing and not knowing the loss of the object of desire.
  
• An oscillation between neurosis and psychosis; for the first time locating neurosis within psychosis itself.
• This disassociation can also be seen in Benjamin's notion of "gadget love"

An imaginative way of living and an ambivalent relationship to the mother can be seen in Winnicott's patient who continues saying she can't feel sorry for the dead. It turns out her mother left her jewelery that she won't wear because she as a rule doesn't wear jewelery.

Both Michael Myers and Freddie Krueger have this moment after killing where they cock their heads to the side and look at the dead as if in that animal startle response

• With Myers we are in the early field of hunting where he doesn't know what to do with the bodies. He experiments with one body but hides the others so that another predator can't track him
• Winnicott refers to this as room for absence, this shift between mourning and melancholia. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, writes about his grandson playing fort/da: it's a game that teaches a child to deal with the absence of the mother, it's about control. This is how the death wish first arises, the child wants the mother to be gone, a goner.
• Until the child can collect memories, there is no room for the mother, thus room for absence. The break in continuity for the child, when the mother is not there, is an impingement such that the child, in reaction, develops a false self, a masked, compliant self.

Winnicott works with regression analysis to relive these moments. A lot of what he has to say deals with timing.

• Out of the gap emerges the impossibility of the absence.
  
• Playing is an interweaving which prepares us for the socius.
  
• Sublimation is placed at the heart of creative and scientific activity because it brackets-out sexuality and so is an alternative to repression in Freud's terms.
  
• The avoidance of repression is an ongoing race against loss of "energy" that gets devoted to repression.

Freud, in his essay on Leonardo DaVinci sees that at the end, his journal is more and more a record of how much he pays his assistant.

Dressed to Kill Brian DiPalma's contribution to the "Psycho Effect"

Freud says that what Schreber loses in his recovery phase is his wealth of sublimations. Whereas our melancholia might lead to our withdrawal such that we don't leave the bed, in Schreber the withdrawal is extreme.

Winnicottian reading of the end of Halloween
"The individual exists by not being found"

The drive to know: seemingly instant desire within humans. How this is afforded, according to Freud, is directly related to sublimation. This cataloging activity is like a foreign body ... this is an attempt to delay the impingement.

• The intellect seeks to protect the psyche, it may even go out and meet offenses so as to collect them and prepare the psyche
• How does not knowing emerge? Winnicott calls it the gap of consciousness, a form of not knowing that Winnicott wants to re-emerge in the course of regression therapy

In Halloween we had to hear Laurie's breathing, like Winnicott's patient that talks about watching the still bird breathing. It is an affirmation of vital life from which the psyche can develop anew.

• Thus the breathing and staring at the houses might be read as not a threat of violence from Myers but the survivor is still breathing! An affirmation of the vital life and while we might have a future encounter, we also can trust that survival is not contingent upon killing and that survival is possible.
• Something changed in the genre of slasher films with the closing sequence of Halloween and this is what motivates Rickels' reading.

The Sandman E.T.A. Hoffmann (1816)

• Freud reads the problem of Nathaniel as being the witness to the primal scene and thus brings the Sandman into being.
  
• Lacan says it is his failure to incorporate his father into the world of objects.
  
• At three different times Nathaniel tries to realize romance and each time the Sandman arrives, a threat of castration.

Another read would focus on the details of the comparison between the father and the Devilish work he does (working on the human body)

• Here we see this story as exemplary of the serial killer
• It builds with the reception of the Sandman early on
• The story of the Sandman isn't traumatic but rather the mother's "melancholic face"
  

On such evenings as these my mother was very melancholy, and immediately the clock struck nine she would say: 'Now, children, to bed - to bed! The Sandman's coming, I can see.' And indeed on each occasion I used to hear something with a heavy, slow step come thudding up the stairs. That I thought must be the Sandman. (1)

From my father's silence and my mother's melancholy face I perceived one evening that the Sandman was coming. I, therefore, feigned great weariness, left the room before nine o'clock, and hid myself in a corner close to the door.(2)

• She is unable to contain what she feels when the Sandman comes and this is what Nathaniel is reading on her face.

Like so many serial killers, we have the sense that the body that is killed is the body that is controlled, contained, and for sexual reasons.

• The mangling of Olympia leads to him revisiting that primal scene between the two fathers working on that alchemical project.
• Nathaniel is someone that has failed to transition from the Oedipal phase and cannot deal with the castration (the replacing of one object for another)
• Unheimlich is that which cannot be contained, unhousedness. Uncanny works on aesthetic registers, but here it is misleading in a wider view.

Derrida's problem of autoimmunity seems to be relevant to understanding Nightmare on Elm Street.


It's interesting to think reflect on the Freddie genesis story: the film is set in the early 1980s and we are told that the parents of the children being terrorized had actually murdered Freddie. It's noteworthy that the children are being punished for their parents' transgressions against the State during the 60s and 70s. That is, the parents, in becoming vigilantes, had transgressed the sovereignty of the State. During the climate of the Reagan and Bush 80s we can see that the State would not be tolerating these outbreaks of autonomous political action.

• We see in Freddie vs. Jason that drugs have been developed so that children can sleep without dreaming, which drains Freddie's life force
• So, Freddie hires Jason to remind children to be afraid of Freddie
• Thus Freddie is defined as a trauma that has to be recharged every once in a while in order to be successful
• Nancy is the only one that can drain Freddie of this, she can protect against this impingement
• In the absence of the "Psycho Effect" Freddie is only demonic - a quality perhaps shared by The Ring and Saw today

With the advent of Scream we have the possibility of mourning as seen in the third installment.

The door literally opens to suggest the possibility of another installation in the series, but we are not afraid because the possibility of overcoming what we've seen has been achieved.

Judith Butler Day 5

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Judith Butler taught a class entitled ETHICS AND POLITICS AFTER THE SUBJECT. The first half of the classes were focused on Hannah Arendt: performativity, politics, political theory (sovereignty, zionism), "Questions of Judgement."

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The first half of this class we discuss binationalism and Israel; the second half we discuss transgender and psychoanalysis things.

Why does she work on both of these issues?

• modes of address, how we are called, what are the names by which we are interpellated - "Am I that name?" a reference to Sojourner Truth, Fanon asks, "Am I a [white] man?"
• My son just calls me JB and I'm fine with whatever, which is lame, I guess.
• It is from the basis of my Jewish education I came to be vocally critical of Israel, which got me called a lot of names.
• This chills intellectual inquiry.
• I feel my work has been concerned with implicit and explicit censorship - Hannah Arendt was called a lot of names
• There are questions of fracturous co-habitation and community, which is part of the thinking in transgender thinking.

There is always in Israel the question of impingement, the border is part of the territory and exposed to the nonterritory and so it is an ethical question of alterity. We think of Levinas' face, but he explicitly said the Palestinians do not have a face. I know, it's a problem that we must deal with when thinking with Levinas.

• What would it mean to take this Levinasian idea, to take it to a place even he was unwilling to go? (we are referred to Jonathon N. Boyarin)
• Benjamin seems to have an idea of the messianic (youtube) that is not progressive and is sporadic and ...(temporary?)
• Scholem separates from Arendt and Benjamin by claiming that Messianism is progressive and based on an ancient claim that this is situated in time. See Raluca Eddon
• The Question of Zion, Jacqueline Rose - she blames Messianism stating the catastrophe of Israel is recreated so as to establish this Messianic narrative; but, she fails to account for the different forms of Messianism.

It's hard to say there is a religious movement in Arendt; at least, she would deny it. Gershom Scholem sent Arendt a letter after Eichmann in Jerusalem. They had worked together. He called her heartless. Primo Levi was also called heartless in 1982.

• Arendt is said to have no love for the Jewish people, to which she replied, "No, I have no love for nations, I love persons."
• Physis and not nomos (social order) - to say, "I am not a Jew," is to say, "I am a Man," is to talk about phusis, the natural order. It is a given and something to be thankful for.
• To understand her position we have to understand what she is doing with the nation-state: they inevitably create exiles and refugees for those that are not part of the nation
• A nation for Jews of Jews is problematic for Arendt because its similarities to Nazism. In her mind, when you base a state on a homogeneous population it is problematic because this leads to another Holocaust.
• This critique does not come from only outside of Israel (how subversive!) we can look to Idith Zertal (although mainly in French) and Adi Ophir

In Arendt's "Zionism Reconsidered" she terms it absurd that Israel be installed by superpowers that must inevitably, constantly, reinforce their interest and to not federate will inexorably lead to problems with their neighbors in the region.

• she becomes concerned with the stateless in the late-40s early 50s; perhaps this is due to her own forced exile.
• we are recommended to read Edward Said's "Freud and the Non-European"
• By focusing on the problematic of the diaspora, Said takes up the idea of the political diaspora
• Arendt does call for home and belonging, but these can never be the basis of a polity b/c a plurality cannot have one part that is exemplary of the whole.
• To have a polity is to accept the unchosen stranger, perhaps an echo of Levinas

Seems to me, when thinkers are interested in sovereignty, as today, what Schmidt and Agamben call for does describe some of what's going on.

• Federated binationalism seems to be an experiment in critiquing sovereignty and perhaps federations resemble/result in smaller forms of self-determinism.
• Statelessness is a condition where there is an extreme distribution of power among a few
• This is not a metaphysical state, but metaphysics is under siege

Butler is very enthusiastic about Eyal Weizman, who sees the problem as an architectural one
She also recommends the film Arna's Children:


Note to Self: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" as a non-linguistic action which demonstrates how we might live adjacently?

Gender
Who counts as real or who has recognizable gender? This is a question that shows ontology changes the way in which we recognize the world.

• it's an Hegelian problem of recognition
• Whose lives are mournable? grew from this. There is an unequal distribution of grieve-ability and this is largely dependent upon the dominant framing among the media.
• Antigone's claim was that she wanted to bury her brother in public.
• Plato wanted to ban poets because the public would grieve voluptuously, they would fatten on grief.

To decide to become transman is not necessarily rooted in terms of repudiating one's gender, that there might be something positive in doing this issue has largely been ignored.

• Here Butler tells us a great story about attending an GLBT poetry slam in San Francisco during which one poet, who was working towards becoming male from female, recited a poem that ended with the lines "fuck the DSM-IV, and fuck you, Judith Butler." This has been told before, apparently.
• The poet rejected "Butler" (the interpellation) for being a representation of gender non-fixity, which does not meet her needs for being understood as a fixed-gender person.
• It is an unfortunate problem to have to address one that we no longer wish to address because it is often necessary to tell that person - we have this need to live within a name.
• We might think of Kate Borstein as a closet Deleuzean, where the transformation never ends, which brings her closer to my thinking.
• Can we think of transexuality without reinforcing sociological/psychological categories in our call for recognition?

Note to Self: ways this might relate to 荀子 Xunzi's "Proper Naming"

Melancholia
We're recommended to read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

• Mourning - where loss is accepted
• Melancholia - where loss is not allowed. Self-laceration is a way of preserving the other in our bodies. We are angry at the lost and strike-out at them, now housed in ourselves. This is the basis of Freud's idea of the superego.

Freud's way out of this bind is to say that there is a rage against the lost object;

• what would it take to disengage this formation?
• we must forget and let go of that other

What happens if we think of this as a cultural strategy?

• At a cultural level, where there are those that can't be mourned, we get a culturally-induced melancholia
  
• such that we don't have the vocabulary to describe the loss we have.

What is lost for transgendered people is the ability to be articulated because we are in a transphobic culture.

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 3

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

Let's return to these films and begin to examine the place of the failure of interpretation of the "psycho" moment

• Therapy and theory are coterminus in Winnicott, unlike in Freud where there is a distance between the transference moment and the theory of psychology
• Winnicott seeks to make the therapeutic session both the place of therapy and theory

Where Freud comes to be used for mass communication and technologization - we can see it in Benjamin's Themes and Motifs of Baudelaire and perhaps also in these films

• The masking of Michael Myers is a doubling; Leatherface is slightly different in that his is perhaps a melancholic collecting
• Freddie, Jason, Michael Myers - they become a cartoon, really, an expression of superegoic parenting that scolds against teenage sexuality
• They've become transcendentalized as evil and demonic and thus are encoded as part of the symbolic order

What's with vampire movies these days?

• The shift from zombies to vampires should be seen as a sign of hope: the eight years of the Bush Administration was to zombies as vampires is to the Obama Administration
• Saw should be understood, like Se7en, as a morality play for educational purposes, wherein the victim participates in the murder and they seek to find the CSI-styled DNA-certainty of why they are locked in that room.

Back to Benjamin
The essay on Baudelaire folds out a contrast of experience and memory from Freud and psychoanalysis as well as the German language itself

• Gedächtnis - memory that protects and preserves, commemoration, and it is linked to rote memory
• Erinnerung - remembering that is all about forgetting, remembering that over-records and thus erases; it protects against stimuli
• Consciousness defends against overstimulation and both Freud and Benjamin talk of these as shocks: the more often one is shocked the less affecting it becomes

But, traumatic shocks will occur, these breach our readiness and modes of preparedness and deeply affect us

• The traumatic event is revisited in the flashback and is linked with the serial dreaming of war neurotics
• The trauma victim sought to master the traumatic stimulus from the point when the traumatic event occurred
• This repetition might not be unlike Kierkegaard's idea of repetition, call it seriality, a return to remembering to forget

As Winnicott became more interested in regression therapy, he felt we had an in-born capacity to defend ourselves from impinging by cataloging which occurs in linear recording

• This categorizing and recording occurs so that they can be dealt with later (and forgotten)
• Remembering as defense and then remembering to forget

Illusion occupies different places for the transitional object:

• the loss of the original omnipotence is bridged or staggered through the use of illusion in the transitional object
• the transitional object gives the child a temporary rest stop in the constant onslaught of living
• The transitional object is always to be seen as an agreement that the question, "Did you conceive of this?" will not be asked - but isn't this an invitation to approach it?
• It shows how easily the social contract can be broken
• the purpose of the transitional object is for differentiation

Freud and Benjamin again

• The memory of "the shower scene" is constitutively disposable, the traumatic memory has been made disposable
• the more shocks we experience the more guarded our minds become

2 forms of experience in Benjamin:

1. Erlebnis - committed to a time line of working on it so it may be crossed-off the list
2. Erfahrung - open less under voluntary control

The shock is where we are most alive with our time, this is unfortunate as we are actively working against being shocked

• the hope of this work is that we might not become dead to our sensorium
• Canetti says of the crowd-feeling (which is destructive), that the dosed shock must be within a closed crowd
• Benjamin allows for an ingroup, a comfort zone that is provided by gadget-love; a connection with a control panel - massification becomes more intimate in the control panel
• He argues that the match marked the onset of the countless developments of technological innovation which would transform the human world where we are able to experience the shock
• "The camera gave the moment of posthumous shock," his understanding of how every gadget-lover can administer the shock in an intimate, ingroup setting

Prosthesis (Ernst Kapp) was shared or recycled by McLuhan when he read Freud or Buckminster Fuller. Kapp, while living in Texas said the axe in Texas was so much closer to the hand than the axes in Germany.

The film actor is fragmented, transported, and reassembled through film and the audience is fabricated in the sensorium.

• "The film image is separable and transportable" Benjamin wrote this at the time when Lacan was writing about the Mirror Stage
• The image is pitched first to the camera and the scene is only created upon editing

What underlies belief in surveillance?

• There is something comforting about it, right?
• None of our suffering will go unnoticed, as Nietzsche said
• But it's not a comfort that is available to us, something has been satisfied, though we might not enjoy it immediately
• Derrida pointed out that live media requires the belief that this live transmission from Baghdad is really from there and is live

Benjamin says Painter : Magician :: Surgeon : Cameraman

• What is skipped in the surgical approach is the interpersonal meditation. It is in that sense that the cut of editing is what guides us to this place of affirmation - that through technology we appreciate Nature
• The Delay of the Machine Age (Hanns Sachs) what separates Antiquity from the Industrial Age? There has been a shift from primary to secondary narcissism - the latter is shareable and always has to deal with managing ego
• The primary narcissism is like the zombie where the body is always decomposing and we walk around dead
• Every schizophrenic shows us the emergency exit through the uncanny use of technology (Judge Schreber)
• "The delusion is the act of recovery," Freud

Note to self: Canetti's "the living's sense of superiority to the dead," is not Confucian at all - what is the relationship between the dead and death in psychoanalysis and philosophy?

Looking at William Wilson (E.A.Poe, 1839)

• before the essay on "The Uncanny" Poe sees the uncanny doubling of the war veteran whose uncanny double is the Warrior
• In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he says the double can be reclaimed

We begin with an enormous sense of alienation

(WW, 3) Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! [...] hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? [...] I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.

• The psycho here is not a failure of interpretation but a want for successful interpretation
• What is it he sees? It is nothing. He reinstates the familiar story of sarcastic imitation. Is this the relic of parental identification (we draw sarcastic pictures of the Teacher, our parents, etc.), but this parental container is simply not enough and he leaves the academy
  

  (WW, 11) I looked; - and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable terror. [...] Not thus he appeared.... Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
  

  
  
• His immediate school fellows had never noticed this constant imitation
  

  (WW, 9) But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our school fellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent [the parent?]; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.
  

  
  

[END OF CLASS]