Colloquium: Judith Butler, Larry Rickels, and Avital Ronell

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Today's class was a special joint session with Avital Ronell's morning class (those of us in Larry Rickels' morning class also had Judith Butler in the afternoon). In this, perhaps, symposium is another fold into what it means to be together and to live together. We will be discussing Heidegger's What Is Thinking?, some Melanie Klein, and viewing an interview (Zur Person, a German TV program from 1964) with Hannah Arendt while discussing her ideas on judgement.

We begin with Judith Butler:

Butler offers us some light translation from the above video:

• "Political philosophy - which I avoid - there is always a tension between man as thinking being and man as acting being. Natural philosophy does not allow this."
• Arendt is introduced by Günter Gaus as a major thinker, but she says she doesn't feel like she is a philosopher and points out that she is not accepted as such.

In The Human Condition Arendt distinguishes public and private with forms of speech which belong to the public sphere and those that belong to the private domain.

• The private domain has no speech, it is an arena in which bodies labor; defined by repetitive and transient actions
• To have speech properly means it must be done in the public domain
• These distinctions are based on the Greek polis but they are nonexclusionary; the public depends on the private to exist and yet this dependency is never theorized as a political issue because the public contains the private.

As we listen Arendt's interview, if we think of philosophy as not being a public action, but a private activity, we wonder if the public/private dichotomy is tenable? Can thinking and acting mutually exist?

• Arendt states in the interview, "Heidegger is a philosopher (and solitary), I am a political theorist (and public), thus I do something different," this seems like some sort of gossipy speculation
• There is a shift in her interview where she goes from talking about philosophy to talking about giving commands
• She must the interpellation of philosopher if she is to protect her femininity; perhaps one day there will be a philosopher that does not give commands
• Is she becoming feminine in this move or is she becoming hyper-masculine by becoming a political theorist which takes the public sphere as central, a sphere from which women have historically been excluded (a woman's place being in the home, a private domain)?
• Eichmann's failure to think was a failure not only to maintain an inner dialogue but also a failure to think of somebody else.

Avital Ronell
How are we to understand these phantom diacritical marks (fluttering her eyes, blowing her cigarette smoke into Gaus' face) in her talk about not being welcome into the community of (male) philosophers?

• Heidegger says that TV is an expression of his form of solitary thinking
• Arendt says we are more dependent upon our silence, a partner for thinking, a call she is having that is difficult
• that consciousness is more than being with myself alone but has something to do with being responsible
• Levinas says you are never responsible enough, Derrida says that we must stand against what is unethical, even if alone, even if alone with a friend

Larry Rickels
Here we might have a psychoanalytic reading of Arendt's relationship with Heidegger within this interview using the figure of loneliness, Melanie Klein's On the Sense of Loneliness to suggest where we can detect the relationship to Heidegger

Arendt discusses being alone in her essay Some Questions of Moral Philosophy

(100) I mention these various forms of being alone, or the various ways in which human singularity articulates and actualizes itself, because it is so very easy to confuse them, not only because we tend to be sloppy and unconcerned with distinctions, but also because we they invariably and almost unnoticeably change into one another. The concern with the self as the ultimate standard of moral conduct exists of course only in solitude. Its demonstrable validity is found in the general formula "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong," which, as we saw, rests on the insight that it is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself. This validity can therefore be maintained only for man insofar as he is a thinking being, needing himself for company for the sake of the thought process.

Earlier in the same essay Arendt discusses the distinctions between solitude and isolation:

(98) Solitude means that though alone, I am together with somebody (myself, that is). It means that I am two-in-one, whereas loneliness as well as isolation do not know this kind of schism, this inner dichotomy in which I can ask questions of myself and receive answers. Solitude and its corresponding activity, which is thinking, can be interrupted either by somebody else addressing me or, like every other activity, by doing something else, or by sheer exhaustion. In any of these cases, the two that I was in thought become one again. If somebody addresses me, I must now talk to him, and not to myself, and in talking to him, I change. [...] Because this one who I now am is without company, I may reach out for company of others - people, books, music - and if they fail me or if I am unable to establish contact with them, I am overcome by boredom and loneliness. For this I do not have to be alone: I can be very bored and very lonely in the midst of a crowd, but not in actual solitude, that is, in my own company, or together with a friend, in the sense of another self. That is why it is much harder to bear being alone in a crowd than in solitude - as Meister Eckhart once remarked.

Isolation, on the other hand:

(99) [O]ccurs when I am neither together with myself nor in the company of others but concerned with things in the world. Isolation can be the natural condition for all kinds of work where I am so concentrated on what I am doing that the presence of others, including myself, can only disturb me. Such work may be productive, the actual fabrication of some new object, but need not be so.... Isolation can also occur as a negative phenomenon....[I]t is the enforced leisure of the politician, or rather of the man who is himself a citizen but has lost contact with his fellow citizens. Isolation in this second negative sense can be borne only if it is transformed into solitude, and every one who is acquainted with Latin literature will know how the Romans, in contrast to the Greeks, discovered solitude and with it philosophy as a way of life in the enforced leisure which accompanies removal from public affairs.

NOTE TO SELF: Does Lynch's talk about Jay-Z's hegemony becomes strained if we start discussing the solitude of hiphop? Is there solitude in hiphop? It seems that the only successful rappers to "leave the game" were Biggie and 2Pac, and clearly these aren't tenable exit strategies.

ALSO: Cato quote at end of the above section: "Never am I more active than when I do nothing, never am I less alone than when I am by myself." In contrast to the 圣人 shengren (sage) who does nothing and in doing nothing leaves nothing undone.

Melanie Klein peruses loneliness as the inevitable break-out of the therapeutic practice; the need to mitigate between hate and love is at the center of integration

• While lack of integration has its pains, the process of integration (in analysis) brings its own pains
• Klein valorizes idealization and seeks to preserve the cleavage between the good and the bad - not the good preserved - this is a Nietzschean moment that separates her from Freud
• Idealization is already marked by Klein as disposable, as integration is never permanent, the glamor of idealization (as the Good Object) is gone, though, at some point.
  
• When it leaves, it leaves us with the loneliness of transference

Arendt moves from the couple (thinking) to the group (acting) through solitude:

(104) ...Socratic morality is politically relevant only in times of crisis and that the self as the ultimate criterion of moral conduct is politically a kind of emergency measure. And this implies that the invocation of allegedly moral principles for matters of everyday conduct is usually a fraud; we hardly need experience to tell us that the narrow moralists who constantly appeal to higher moral principles and fixed standards are usually the first to adhere to whatever fixed standards they are offered....

We catch a whiff of Heidegger just prior to the above quote:

(104) This ambiguity, that the same act will make good men better and bad men worse, was once alluded to by Nietzsche who complained of having been misunderstood by a woman: "She told me that she had no morality - and I thought that she had, like myself, a more severe morality." The misunderstanding is common although the reproach in this particular case (Lou Andreas Salome) was far off the mark.

Heidegger must have been the Good Object at one point: the two-in-one continues to threaten the none-in-one.

Butler
Avital mentioned Arendt not feeling welcome - this is the expression of a wound. Perhaps she might be anticipating a wounding, thus wounding herself so as to control the wounding.

• Did she not feel Heidegger was appreciative enough?
• Who is this other with whom I must think?
  
• Do I preserve the Other by a melancholic sense of loss?
  
• this cleavage (that Larry mentioned) as the precondition for thought?

Ronell
Derrida refers to Lot's offering to the strangers when discussing hospitality

Kant situates us so:

• we are hosting a guest and the cops come looking for the guest - do we tell the truth and give the guest over to them or do we lie?
• Kant says give the guest over
• Arendt says Kant did not have an ear fir the possibility of the horror that can occur in his truth-telling world

Arendt's address is to Heidegger's text on Hölderlin (Andenken) and is perhaps more concerned with remembrance; a bringing together of thinking and memory

• That which is mourned, homecomings, are toward the future; this loneliness is in this sense a two-in-one
• She is performing an excentric half, calls forward to the core of Heidegger's What Is Thinking? so as to aberrate it

Is Heidegger trying to birth Nietzsche? Is Nietzsche what Heidegger meant by home? Arendt screams Nietzsche, she is pregnant with the future.

Both Heidegger and Arendt state that they are not philosophers, they are both upset with philosophy

• Heidegger is now a thinker
• The will to listening and obeying are both intimately connected for Heidegger as was pointed out by Nietzsche -
  

  (What Is Called Thinking?, 48) "You just wait - I'll teach you what we call obedience!" a mother might say to her boy who won't come home. Does she promise him a definition of obedience? No. Or is she going to give him a lecture? No again, if she is a proper mother. Rather, she will convey to him what obedience is. Or better, the other way around: she will bring him to obey. Her success will be more lasting the less she scolds him; it will be easier, the more directly she can get him to listen - not just condescend to listen, but listen in such a way that he can no longer stop wanting to do it. And why? Because his ears have been opened and he now can hear what is in accord with his nature. Learning, then, cannot be brought about by scolding.
  

  
  
• What does he who is taught by the proper mother hear?
• The son who is not present - is Heidegger calling Nietzsche home? not to keep him but to lose him?
• The mother of muses, remembrance and memory, is first invoked in What Is Called Thinking?

Rickels
Adorno is the figure in Germany in 1964 (during the Zur Person interview), Arendt at this time is editing Benjamin's Illuminations where she says Adorno was Benjamin's best student [Ronell here quips, "And then Arendt put her cigarette out!"]

Ronell
Zen-like practice so as to maintain a relationship with the self; an ethical injunction

NOTE TO SELF: if we're to follow this thought out we should consider ningen 人間 (the betweenness of humanity)

Butler

(99) If somebody addresses me, I must now talk to him, and not to myself, and in talking to him, I change. I become one, possessing of course self-awareness, that is, consciousness, but no longer fully and articulately in possession of myself.

There is a dynamic movement between me and the Other in thinking - I can only be within the context between us.

Ronell
One is defanged as a philosopher at points - what does one take recourse to in an emergency? What is a person vs. personality?

Rickels
There is the ability now, through mass technologization, to self-administer the shock so as to survive

NOTE TO SELF: overcoming by undergoing the work of being together - as transformative

Ronell
from What Is Thinking? (54) "[N]o thinker can be overcome by our refuting him and stacking up around him a literature of refutation. What a thinker has thought can be mastered only if we refer everything in his thought that is still unthought back to its originary truth."

Rickels
It's as though her training is immersed in the political as finitude

Ronell
from Some Questions of Moral Philosophy

(95) The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and without remembrance, nothing can hold them back. For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur - the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.

Butler
Speech as radical self-generation:

(SQMP, 95) Taking our cue from Socrates' justification of his moral proposition, we may now say that in this process of thought in which I actualize the specifically human difference of speech, I explicitly constitute myself a person, and I shall remain one to the extent that I am capable of such constitution ever again and anew. If this is what we commonly call personality, and it has nothing to do with gifts and intelligence, it is the simple, almost automatic result of thoughtfullness. To put it another way, in granting pardon, it is the person not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive.

Heidegger sounded the call:

(WICT? 49) ...[A] man who teaches must at times grow noisy. In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although the aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking. Nietzsche, most quiet and shiest of men, knew of this necessity. He endured the agony of having to scream. In a decade when the world at large still knew nothing of world wars, when faith in "progress" was virtually the religion of the civilized peoples and nations, Nietzsche screamed out into the world: "The wasteland grows..." [...] What was once the scream "The wasteland grows...," now threatens to turn into chatter. The threat of this perversion is part of what gives us food for thought. The threat is that perhaps this most thoughtful thought will today, and still more tomorrow, become suddenly no more than a platitude, and as platitude spread and circulate. This fashion of talking platitudes is at work in that endless profusion of books describing the state of the world today. They describe what its by nature is indescribable, because it lends itself to being thought about only in a thinking that is a kind of appeal, a call - and therefore must at times become a scream. Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men's imagination busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way.

[END OF CLASS]

Judith Butler, Day 3

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."

Some business before we being today's class: Tomorrow we will be discussing with Larry Rickels and Avital Ronell some of Arendt's moral philosophy and some of Heidegger's essay What Is Thinking? We'll talk a bit about gender as well by way of an interview Arendt did in 1964 - she seems to be suggesting that philosophy is a masculine activity.

(EiJ, 277) Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions "that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal" (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty.

She's arguing here for a distinction between justice (as vengeance in the archaic sense by bringing him to trial and issuing a death sentence) and judgement

• It seems she should be understood as opposing vengeance as justice and advocating that with the Eichmann trial we confront the unprecedented nature of the crime and then develop a notion of justice based not on vengeance but on judgement
• She called it, not murder but, administrative murder - what needs to appear here is something not enclosed but capable of being spoken of in the pursuit of justice based on judgement
• Even if it were the case that the Israeli court said that "We must be seen by all to be exacting our vengeance..." this is one way we could interpret this summoning of voices during the Epilogue to EiJ. If we were to understand it thus, we could then see that what was really occurring was that administrative noise was being overcoded on top of an archaic pursuit of vengeance called justice in the Eichmann case as an act of nation building.
• But there is this voicing in the text... Arendt as judge, an equivocation of what's being said? She's ventriloquizing the judge.

Is there a justification that is possible when considering death-dealing, rather than murder or execution?

There is a textual theatre at play in this book. At one point Arendt scripts for the judge and at another point she's using her own voice to ventriloquize and then dropping that again to allow the script to continue

It's true: she draws parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany, however, Nazi Germany had certain forms of bureaucratic administration and control such that political judgement was not possible.

• She refuses that this is a German problem, nor is it only a Jewish problem - it's not limited to this or that nation; this is an administrative problem endemic within Modernity
• A broader problem of technical administration, a transnational problem
• The Little Picture and Critique of Instrumental Reason - these are some arguments from the Frankfurt School

About Arendt's treatment of the Bible: she came from a lineage of German Jewry that gave preference to the messianic tradition rather than the Talmud because the former was seen as a more Reason-able religion whereas the latter was seen as old-fashioned.

Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship from Responsibility and Judgment

(26-7) To return to my personal reflections on who should be qualified to discuss such matters: is it those who have standards and norms which do not fit the experienc, or those who have nothing to fall back upon but their experience, an experience, moreover, unpatterned by preconceived concepts? How can you think, and even more important in our context, how can you judge without holding on to preconceived standards, norms, and general rules under which the particular cases and instances can be subsumed? Or to put it differently, what happens to the human faculty of judgement when it is faced with occurrences that spell the breakdown of all customary standards and hence are unprecedented in the sense that they are not foreseen in the general rules, not even as exceptions from such rules? A valid answer to these questions would have to start with an analysis of the still very mysterious nature of human judgement, of what can and what it cannot achieve. For only if we assume that there exists a human faculty which enables us to judge rationally without being carried away by either emotion or self-interest, and which at the same time functions spontaneously, that is to say, is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases are simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself; only under this assumption can we risk ourselves on this very slippery moral ground with some hope of finding a firm footing.

Foucault and I (Butler) would be turning in our graves at the suggestion that one might judge in this manner: based on pre-existing norms and not being carried away by emotion and self-interest...!

(41) They [the Nazis] acted under conditions in which every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime. Hence, the rather optimistic view of human nature, which speaks so clearly from the verdict not only of the judges in the Jerusalem trial but of all postwar trials, presupposes an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises. Perhaps we do possess such a faculty and are lawgivers, every single one of us, whenever we act: but this was not the opinion of the judges. Despite all the rhetoric, they meant hardly more than that a feeling for such things has been inbred in us for so many centuries that it could not suddenly have been lost. And this, I think, is very doubtful in view of the evidence we possess, and also in view of the fact that year in, year out, one "unlawful" order followed the other, all of them not haphazardly demanding just any crimes that were unconnected with each other, but building up with utter consistency and care the so-called new order. This "new order" was exactly what it said it was -- not only gruesomely novel, but also and above all, an order.

Why can't we appeal to a deep-seated morality latent within the individual? (Mengzi did) Why spontaneity? It seems to have something to do with freedom.

• If this is judgement, then who is entitled to judgement? We don't say, "I will judge freely and so not be held accountable to Law."
• There seems to be some form of sovereignty present here - to judge is to judge freely, it is the action of freedom in judgement. This is from Kant's Third Critique - all of us free and smart
• Arendt looks to Kant to understand freedom, Foucault also did this in his What Is Enlightenment? he sees Kant as Prussia
• The whole problem of culture is that when the law is criminal it is criminal to be moral

(34) For the simple truth of the matter is that only those who withdrew from public life altogether, who refused political responsibility of any sort, could avoid becoming implicated in crimes, that is, could avoid legal and moral responsibility. In the tumultuous discussion of moral issues which has been going on ever since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the disclosure of the total complicity in crimes of all ranks of official society, that is of the total collapse of normal moral standards....

She's trying to escape relativism, that we are all responsible, she doesn't think that external circumstances should dictate.

[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]

Chris Fynsk Evening Lecture

Chris Fynsk gave an evening lecture wherein he discussed how Jean-Luc Nancy might inform our thinking about cuisine. If memory serves the title of the talk was Image en Cuisine, and the ideas came to him after having the rare opportunity to dine at elBulli, voted the best restaurant in the world numerous times over the last several years.

He's working with Nancy's propositions concerning art as well as the image of the food itself with its suggestions of mimesis and participation.

We begin with the image because Ferran Adrià (the head chef of elBulli) is primarily concerned with deconstruction - particularly how the image is mobilized in the distended time of the meal.

• an image appears in its presentation of itself, through its sameness - an uneven dissemblance that unattaches from itself
• the image comes upon us by detachment of its traits, its trace - a play of approach and withdrawal and overcoming

There are two forms of dissemblance in Heidegger:

1. withdrawal (Nancy's favorite)
2. a play of dissemblance, where we can't tell

• the latter gives art its ambiguity or opacity as art, dissembles itself, it remarks

We enter into a savory world with elBulli, an infusion through penetration which touches our own intimacy. There is a sixth sense that is enticed when Adrià touches upon our terroir.

In order to understand gourmandise we must first understand hospitality

• the real presence of the image in cuisine obliges us to practice a new form of hospitality
• with Adrià's approach there is an interruption of the taking of the Host (referencing Communion)
• There is a double play of participation and mimesis which brings about a synesthesia
• Stimmel - you can't think a ground effectively without the stimmel of Dasein according to Heidegger

There are two phases of the culinary image:

1. visual and olfactory - a visual form of brilliance; often the visual presentation gives one pause because we don't want to disturb its presence
2. the moment of truth - an experience of vast ...

The element of hesitation: "Can I eat this?" is always present in cuisine.

• "Is this thing edible?" Upon putting into our mouth, after disrupting presentation, when the culinary habitus is disrupted, it occurs to us that we might not be able to digest this.
• That we might not be able to digest this, or that it may kill us
  

We appreciate what exceeds our expectations in presentation

• elBulli can't avoid whether it's good or bad tasting
• the guests were forced to rethink their expectations of what taste can be

If there is a rhythm in the image of the dish, there is also a rhythm in the sequence of the presentation of the dishes

• Can we align this rhythm with the rhythm of hospitality in mitsein?
• How would we describe the end of the meal?

What is the meaning of this meal?

• an intellectual stimulation which touches on memory and perception
• Groundlessness in the empty-centered bread which is shattered before we eat our dessert

[END OF LECTURE]

Judith Butler, Day 2

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." The last two classes were shared with Avital Ronell, Larry Rickels, and Giorgio Agamben.

Butler studied with Gadamer at the University of Heidelberg (where he was the successor to Jaspers, who moved to Switzerland in 1948). She earned a PhD in philosophy, but feels the term is problematic for her; she prefers interdisciplinarity.

This interdisciplinarity is shared with Hannah Arendt who was a: journalist, philosopher (a student of Heidegger along with Gadamer), public diplomat, and historian. We must accept that philosophy takes place in many places, journalism (as Eichmann in Jerusalem shows) is one of those places.

Responsibility and Judgement was written after EiJ, and in the wake of the anger that arose from the publication from it.

• This book is a collection of essays on moral theory that are responses to the Eichmann trial and the criticisms she received from her reporting on the trial
• Her last book (incomplete) Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy deals with the question of how one judges without precedent

What is judgement after all?

• We know that Eichmann failed to think, so this has something to do with judging.
  
• What are the abilities to judge when society is ruled by coercion?
• Arendt faults Eichmann for failing to perform freedom

Freedom only comes to be in its exercise, Eichmann failed to bring forward freedom and chose to maintain the coercion that was rampant within his society

• he remains responsible for what he did, one does not need to be a thinking being in order to be responsible
• his failure to think (given there is a normativity to thinking) is part of his crime (his crime is in part his failure to think)
• Thinking has a duality: I think in the company of myself (a position not dissimilar to Bakhtin); thinking implies the presence of others - alterity cannot be located in a singular other, this is a plural other

2 Large Problems:

1. the status of sovereignty - here we have an appeal to sovereign mind, but also calls for plurality
2. the relation between thinking and action (judgement is action) - thinking seems to require sociality

It seems thinking and action cannot be successfully separated

Judgement
What sort of action is this exactly? How'd she get from Eichmann to Kant's Third Critique?

• Arendt seems upset that Eichmann tried to invoke Kant in his defense (Eichmann stated he tried to live his life according to Kant's categorical imperative) and thus was not guilty for the murder of millions
• The object of beauty imposes upon the viewer such that the viewer must form structures by which to judge that which is being viewed
• Thus, the beautiful relies upon the historically-unprecedented

The unprecedented requires us to form new ways to judge, this is obvious also in the case of what is horrible and monstrous

Judgement is more in line with poiesis, a manner of making, than it is an instrument

The kind of judgement we are to make is dependent upon the context in which we encounter the unprecedented

If a radically-new condition arises, spontaneity is implicated in judging

• Eichmann was operating within a condition where the Law (established precedent) requires one to be criminal
• thus, we must enervate arguments about why it is necessary to break the Law
• This seems to be Arendt's anarchist moment, she's saying that there is neither universal nor natural Law;
  
• judgement is to bring Justice into being.

It is through the writing of her text that she enacts her judgement

There has to be a moral basis for condemning genocide and it cannot rest upon existing law

The Israeli courts didn't do a good job judging because Eichmann was tried in many ways as a substitute for all Nazis: is the trial of an individual man the right place to put on trial all those that supported Nazism?

Classically understood: if Eichmann is criminal, there must be evidence of criminal intent; all the psychologists find that he's "normal."

• but this shouldn't be the point - Eichmann is a new kind of person, one that requires a new kind of judgement

(EiJ, 52) Yet Eichmann's case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eicmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.

The need to deceive oneself, it seems, had become globalized within German society; Eichmann had a systematic mendacity.

• He wanted "to make peace with his former enemies," etc....
  
• This suggests that he was living in a reality which hampered his ability to think outside the confines of his lived experience.
• Judgement doesn't seem possible in a world where cliches are so ubiquitous; rather, we have some sort of speech act
• Arendt is fairly dispassionate in her writing about the trial, this upset many and she was incendiary in what she arrives at by taking the time to think about what is being said at the trial
• This is the Modernist moment: when the radically new requires a new response.

Arendt's beef with the Israeli court

• Eichmann was kidnapped
• the court never rose to the challenge of the unprecedented:
  

  (EiJ, 263) The court, however, never rose to the challenge of the unprecedented, not even in regard to the unprecedented nature of the origins of the Israel state, which certainly was closest to its heart and thought. Instead, it buried the proceedings under a flood of precedents - during the sessions of the first week of the trial, to which the first fifty-three sections of the judgement correspond - many of which sounded, at least to the layman's ear, like elaborate sophisms.
  

  
  
• At the trial there were survivors of the Holocaust present and the State made this into a public discourse about there stories, but what happens when there is this over-testimonial quality and producing an ex post facto legitimacy of Israel as the suffering of the Jewish people?
• The man was overwhelmed by the suffering of the procession of suffering witnesses, while it is sensible to establish a public record of these survivors, but is this the place for the trial of Eichmann or is this the showcasing for the public a display of suffering?

The lesson of the Holocaust might be that, "we were made stateless and no one else should be rendered stateless," or that there ought not to be restrictive notions of being a citizen.

Maybe the victims shouldn't be the judges of Eichmann - perhaps, if this is a crime against humanity then an international court should sit in judgement?

(EiJ, 269) Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgement; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it.

(EiJ, 272) Moreover, the argument that the crime against the Jewish people was first of all a crime against mankind, upon which the valid proposals for an international tribunal rested, stood in flagrant contradiction to the law under which Eichmann was tried. [...] For just as a murderer is prosecuted because he has violated the law of the community, and not because he has deprived the Smith family of its husband, father, and breadwinner, so these modern, state-employed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of mankind, and not because they killed millions of people. Nothing is more pernicious to understanding new crimes, or sands more in the way of the emergence of an international penal code that could take care of them, than the common illusion that the crime of murder and the crime of genocide are essentially the same, and that the latter therefore is "no new crime properly speaking." The point of the latter is that an altogether different order is broken and an altogether different community is violated. (emphasis added)

Then there is an interesting moment in the text where Arendt starts speaking for people (emphases added):
For the judges-

(EiJ, 277) And if it is true that "justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done," then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address the defendant in something like the following terms: ...."

For the judges speaking for Eichmann -

(EiJ, 278) You said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.

Then she (the judges) state the central argument of the book, intentionality is not enough or adequate for this new type of crime:

(EiJ, 279) Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

She introduces the notion that cohabitation is pre-consensual and that cohabitation is possible in other ways. She also suggests that to murder in genocide surrenders your presence in humanity:

(EiJ, 279) And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 2

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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.

We began class with a discussion of Ulmer's evening lecture.

Back to Psycho

Norman as TV: he switches between stations (personalities), he's not able to cross over except on the audio track.

A genealogical digression: the train as conveyor belt of neurosis

• the first case of male hysteria was at the time of the use of trains and this symbolizes something
• the term "psycho" became slang after WWI; Freud, et al. called it war neurosis or shell shock - wherein the soldier endures an uncanny doubling of the ego
• psychoanalysis became famous because it was the only treatment at that time that could get the soldiers back out on the frontlines
• Freud was first included into the U.S. military after they saw that the Nazis were also employing psychoanalytic ideas
• now we call it Post-Traumatic Disorder

The "slasher" genre develops the "splatter" phase which is more oral and features cannibalism, etc.

Night of the Living Dead 1968, Romero:

• A reference to "The Shower Scene" is made in this film
• there is this need to show what ghouls eat in this film (when the daughter eats the father in the basement, 83 minutes in)
• this is a critical moment in the development of the horror genre as it is the removal of the invisibility of violence in the genre

Interesting to note the role of the TV in this film: they refuse to go into the basement because they believe their relationship to media will keep them alive

The zombie attack is called an epidemic of mass murder, their told not to pay their respects to the dead

It must be remembered that this film is released in the wake of the murder of MLK, and perhaps this film suggests to us today that everyone is implicated in his murder as society functioning as itself had created these conditions

• we are those posses, wandering around taking pleasure in the wanton killing

Romero introduces the terror of survival - those that die in the film do so because they are not worthy of the future.

The Psycho effect: the murderer and the victim redefine life as surviving, the status of surviving is altered in various films

"The survivor is mankind's worst character," Canetti stated in his Crowds and Power.

• The command is a suspended death sentence
  
• commands are older than speech and originate in flight
  
• the herd in fleeing a predator is the first crowd formation
  
• and it is the origin of the sacrifice
• Judge Schreber is the ultimate survivor because he has absorbed all the energy of those that have died

Cannibal Killers
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974, Hooper
"The film you are about to see is true," as the trailer informs us, was a direct response to the Watergate as well as Vietnam War lies of the contemporary moment. Hooper was in many ways responding to the brutality of his times:

Some college kids - loosely liberal, returning to the sticks, from which they came

Taxidermy (a nod to Psycho?) gone wild.

The "Shower Scene" is alluded to here with the extreme close-up of the eye, she seems to be literally vivisected by the camera

Follow this link to view the ending

She is rescued by a truck, named Black Maria, which is the same name as Thomas Edison (the father of film)'s theater and lab.

What we are exposed to here is the economy of the recording of destruction.

The inspiration for Psycho was the true story of Ed Gein, he was also the inspiration for Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, as well as the inspiration for the Leatherface character in this film.
We were fully inside Ed Gein's home with this film.

This machine of destruction and recording (the whirring of the chainsaw as an allusion to the camera recording) is finally interrupted.

Her survival begs the question, this was alluded to in the trailer: Must we be chained to what we have seen?
What kind of work must we do to shake-off that impact?

The problem of the slaughterhouse is the problem of food and death.

[END OF CLASS]

Gregory Ulmer Evening Lecture

Gregory Ulmer gave an excellent lecture entitled "ON A TOOT"

The talk, if memory serves, was inspired by a lengthy meditation on the term Der Zug and culminated in a Eureka! moment when looking at a wooden train whistle. This whistle then featured prominently in the talk.

"If memory serves" is an important statement - as I am "friends" with Ulmer (on Facebook, and I look forward to becoming more friendly as we get to know one another), I am a bit embarrassed about the notes I have here. If you think what I present here is only so-so, I assure you this is entirely a reflection on me as a student and in no way is a proper introduction to Ulmer's thinking.

For a better introduction, see Ulmer's own site, or perhaps Michael Jarrett's pages

Der Zug means a lot of things: drawing, pulling, move, draught animal, railroad train, passage, drift of clouds...section, yoke of oxen, lineament, disposition, draught of a drink, rifling of a gun barrel..., trait... (just google the term)

Electracy : electronic devices :: literacy : texts

This talk about der zug: the trait as blues train whistle

Derrida's deconstructionism caught on, but his On Grammatology didn't.

• Grammatology is a social machine attempting to overcome technological determinism.
• Grammatology as a philosophy of techik
• We should keep to Bashō's motto: do not follow the master's footsteps but seek what they sought

Heuretics is the science of inventing the new

Today the situation is interesting: in Socrates' day he would ask his partners to define terms, that would be like us walking down into Saas-Fee and asking the locals to program our computers - it's just not in their skill set.

What was Aristotle's metaphysical insight? Entelechy. What was observed in the Real that suggested this?

Khôra - potential in the acorn, immanent in the material - the tree becomes what it already is says Aristotle

It's at the intersection of two semantic fields

Has philosophy been talking about anything other than what Aristotle was arguing with Plato? about khôra? Mary's womb was khôra, a place for the birth of God.

Whenever Heidegger says metaphysics, substitute literacy - this is what grammatology gives us.

Der Zug is an affect in music, the procession of tension and the progression of chords; Der Zug is the tension at the interlinking point between trains and its incumbent pulling

What are the political implications of Der Zug?

Judith Butler, Day 1

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." The last two classes were shared with Avital Ronell, Larry Rickels, and Giorgio Agamben.

The rudiments of thinking, then. Arendt's biography and the biography of her thought:

• First publications were in the 1930s and focused on being a Jew in Germany; she fled to Paris and then New York City in response to the Nazis
• She was concerned with assimilation ("One does not escape Jewishness," she wrote), as well as modes of thinking, she wrote about jewish politics
• Always concerned with cultural zionism, believed in binationalism and saw it as a mistake that Israel would base its citizenship on religion
• Sought to separate the nation from the State and was against a homogeneous State

German Jewishness

• She was an intimate student of Heidegger - to understand her social theory we have to recognize that mitsein is insufficient, but the idea does continue in Arendt, who supplements his thinking and sees his thinking as a relationship between the subject and the world.
• She moves away from Dasein and expands mitsein

Hermann Cohen's essays (1890s) argue in favor of German-Jewish alliance and quarreled with Zionism because he did not see a need for a Jewish State because Jews belong to Germany

• He was mostly thinking in terms of Kant and was a key neo-Kantian thinker
• Benjamin and Arendt both read Cohen, what Arendt drew from Cohen was that the concept of nation had come to a fundamental crisis
• She advocated the development of a Jewish Army in Europe that would work in concert with other European armies; so in this sense there might be a Jewish nation, but it would be a European one - this might be similar to how the Romani have been talking - didn't want a polity but an army.
• There is, however, an intense geopolitical precondition in order for one to think in Arendt's terms, and it means accepting European sociality
• She was post-Liberal but not Marxist

What does it mean to be mitsein?
What is it to live?
What is it to judge?

Like Cohen, she accepts that the Jews should stay in Germany and sees the Jews as a nation, but it is a German nation.

• Her antipolitical Zionism is based on her belief that Europe is the proper place of Jewry.
• Jews from Arab traditions (Mizrahim), the Spanish Sephardim, both are clearly inferior to European Jews in her mind (we read this in the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem); she's clearly brutal about this
• By 1947 she's thinking that Israel should be a binational federation and was adamantly against the dislocation of the Palestinians

As you can imagine, this has made Arendt a problematic thinker for Israel, in fact, Eichmann in Jerusalem was only recently translated (2000) and The Origins Totalitarianism is still not translated into Hebrew (2009).

How essential is her social ontology? Can thinking occur alone or is it always in the company of others?

• Arendt distinguishes between the vita contemplativa (includes philosophy) and the vita activa
• Lacan, "the soliloquy is always already with another in mind"
• Derrida (at Levinas' funeral), "every gesture is always to the Other"

Am I an "I" if I am not already with an Other?

• is epistemology first a social ontology;
  
• my social condition is a necessary precondition for me to exist
• Plurality may have something tragic in her thinking as she presumes heterogeneity but she lives to preserve a certain geopolitical inscription

Eichmann's fatal mistake (what he must hang for at the end of EIJ) was to think that he would no longer live with Jews, homosexuals, communists, etc. and so no one should have to live with him

One of Arendt's strong contributions to political science is to insist that without sociality, thinking and political thinking are not possible

Plurality is not the same thing as pluralism:

• plurality is a constant fissuring of what seems identical
• a constant difference in these monolithic categories

She concerns herself with refugees and the stateless because there will always be people that are unwanted within the State

Hers is a differentiated social ontology

She sees political action as horizontal and is vehemently opposed to sovereign authority.

• there is an obligation to dismantle the idea of sovereignty
• Perhaps there are ways of collaborative authority?
• She's more a communaire than a communist

The action of judgement is crucial, the affective dimension -this is what Eichmann lacks, his lack of thinking is his central failure:

(EIJ, 25) The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do....This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as "normal".... (emphasis added)

(EIJ, 26) [T]he judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, "normal" person... could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. [...] Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all "normal persons," must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was "no exception within the Nazi regime." However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only "exceptions" could be expected to react "normally." This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.

In the above (EIJ, 26) we see that Arendt is not only reporting on the trial but also she is calling into question the very capacity for how we understand law. We are compelled to know question how Justice is possible, if it is possible, when the Laws which govern our laws are not Just.

• To object to these social conditions would mean that Eichmann would have to become the exception to the rule
• Arendt sees this as illustrative of an unprecedented character: someone that has never been to trial before, in the history of Law. We have entered into a new era.
• (EIJ, 47-48) "But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann's character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view."

(EIJ, 49) ...Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented cliches (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliche) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. [...] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Eichmann is speaking, but he's not communicating in the manner that Arendt would insist upon:

• the ability to think is dependent upon thinking
  
• to think is to think in terms of the Other
  
• there is no thinking without the Other

What we see in Eichmann is not subjectivity but a person that is evacuated of subjectivity

• We cannot understand this form of evil without recognizing that evil had become normalized in Nazi Germany

Then we open for discussion

How can we understand Heidegger's Nazism without situating Heidegger in terms of his relationships to Jaspers and Arendt?

• Those relationships are marked by asymmetry and nonreciprocity
  
• Fanon points to Jaspers when trying to develop an ethics of decolonialization
• Heidegger never gave Arendt the proper recognition for being a thinker

What is the relationship between duality and plurality?

• It seems she suggests the need for duality (you-me) in order to think, but we need a plurality (us-them) in order to act
• Deleuze would say that we need an ethics that is not at the center because judgement has been overdetermined
• It's that this bureaucratic regimentation has overcome our sense of ethical thinking, this is what has become problematic

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 1

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.

The dominance of slasher/splatter films in the '80s is perhaps more indicative of trauma and therapeutic engagement with "The Shower Scene" but this Psycho effect is over.

• there can be the interminability of both therapy and film; the late '80s seemed to be the end of the Psycho effect.
• Benjamin's "surgical intervention" can be seen at Universal Studios where the shower scene is endlessly repeated such that the effect of that scene has been attenuated
• this has led to a mass preparedness in anticipation of the disaster with its incumbent energy

Perhaps the most horrible moment in the genre is the underrepresented: we turn to the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and we see nothing in that face.

Situating the Psycho

1. within the horror genre
2. within psychotherapy

With vampirism one encounters melancholic yearning, holding on to the dead, including unmournable deaths and being cut-off by the Oedipal

The Devil - the pre-Oedipal father or primitive Father - primarily this is a select-client relationship with the Devil. What does the client get from the Devil? They get the Father, but one becomes the child of an adopted, choice-marked Father.

• We can see the Devil-father as an absolute authority, not triangulating with the mother and the root of sexual difference
• The Devil is the only occult figure that doesn't grant immortal life (unlike the Vampire)
• This is because he celebrates finitude, it presupposes that it will be uninhibited - not stuck on this existence or attached.
• So the Client must substitute without stopping
• The Client gets quality time with the knowledge of a certain deadline in future

Freddy Krueger, a demonic figure, comes about at the rise of DNA testing, where it was first utilized in paternity suits; it's key moment at that time was when it was utilized in a British court case to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the father had abused his daughter.

• (The first use of DNA in this manner was proposed by Alec Jeffreys; Rickels has the story wrong: the first use of this technique was a paternity case, but there was no rape.)

The Psychopath is a completely tendentious term

• everywhere we have a sense that the "psycho" is untreatable
• the psychopath represents a failure of a whole tradition of interpretation that culminates in psychoanalysis

D.W. Winnicott has a reputation as being "psychoanalysis lite": being too agreeable

• He has reconstructed the psyche based on a belief that the "psycho" state is easily possible
• Early on he wouldn't treat adolescents, turning them over to incarceration, but he had a turning point wherein he noticed in antisocial children's behaviors a gesture for hope
• We shouldn't dismiss these bad behaviors as only that, but these are attempts made by the children to communicate a point:
  
• a signal of hope that illuminates the lost environment

What we have surrendered to the "psychopath" is precisely what the psychopath is looking for: ego-management, and this is cause for hope.

Quick etymology

• Hope - indoeuropean, has roots in hunting language; refers to startled hesitation where one rethinks the next move; the word in German hunting language (Jägerspache) refers to this hesitation
• Schauer - German; Horror, associated with the powerful storms from the North Sea

The horror genre has always this environment of survival, the best way to survive is to kill.

• The survivor is part of the psychopathic environment
• with each survivor, the scope of hope grows more and more

Delinquency as a Sign of Hope (Winnicott): to catch them as early as possible; the senselessness of the antisocial behaveior, pre-Winnicottian-intervention

• There is a break in good parenting, leading to confusion. Sometimes the parent will spoil the child (not always useful)
• from this antisocial behavior may appear and from this we can hope because the child is trying to find a way to reconcile
• Winnicott privileges the psychotic because the psychotic has protected his authentic self; given this, therapy can be used to recover

Because we're all doomed, good enough mothering always falls short, we're all antisocial and potentially psychopathic. His group therapy sessions mean that we can have these revisitings and we can work through it together.

Psycho, A. Hitchcock.

• There is something accusatory about the swooping camera in the beginning of the film.
• That this scene is in such a heavy-named town (Phoenix), we can easily imagine a slashed town where violence is hard to contain.
• She is the image of the mother turned around, to whom you show disrespect, "You make respectability sound disrespectful."
• The "Shower Scene" itself: the violence of having been eradicated so completely and quickly.

Does film mummify its subject? The stuffed birds in the parlor

• there is something about the film medium that destroys its subject in order to preserve it

[END OF CLASS]

Avital Ronell's Evening Lecture

Avital Ronell gave an evening lecture entitled Have I Been Destroyed? which is part of an on-going work on authority.

For Hannah Arendt, the disappearing of authority is a calamity, what follows in the evacuating of enmity is monstrous.

For Kojeve authority (God) is out because the loss of God means we cannot root ethics in transcendence.

• Authority is like an emergency supply in the absence of God
• Is authority replaceable?
• Questioning authority isn't enough, we must draw back authority

How does one know whether the University has not destroyed me?

Trauma is what structures you:

• Truth was once affiliated with ruin and the resolution of the traumatic
  
• We are more responsible for an untraceable cause than ever before with minimal signage and modest moral directives
• Nancy situates our moment at the moment of tragedy
• We'll consider the destiny of democracy in the loss of tragedy

How do we imbue meaning into "human dignity" post Kant?

• "I wobble in place without truth that is my only point"
• Kojeve insists authority is not about force, "it doesn't get down an' dirty," it supersedes force with a sovereign aloofness
• But Kojeve misses the violence of language (Lacan)

Where do we locate authority's domain? Kant removed it from people and offices because it would be abusive to leave authority there, so he relocated authority to Law.

Derrida sees Law as not docile but an internal relationship with violence and power

Psychoanalysis is crowded-out bu Kojeve, Freud is begrudgingly brought into political analysis:

• Kojeve brings out the pleasure of judging which troubles justice; it's become acute and sexual, the psyche is outfitted with a juridical [something...], thus all these tv dramas
• we can see Kant sent judgement to the aesthetic realm so as to make judging sexy

Modern politics is located in Martin Luther, who targets judgement:

• He was fearful of a libidinal abandon in judgement cutting into the field of authority both worldly and eternal
• Faith meant that one could judge for oneself in these times
• The problem for Luther and Calvin was that one could go as far as becoming a conscientious objector

The price of linking justice, judgement, and love are strictly constrained by Luther so as to avoid the whole system of worldly order:

• he thought there would be nothing but murder and bloodshed
• not everyone is able to judge but only those invested with the sovereignty of the sword (Arendt seems to also be afraid of everyone judging)
• peasants cannot be allowed to judge and mercy is neither here nor there; so, there is no reprieve from the authority
  
• there is a libidinal joy in judgement; as Kafka showed us, Luther's father was a total asshole and we're still paying for it.

There is the rush to/of judgement, in drug terms

Not only is there the enjoyment in judging, but we also put ourselves up for review because there is pleasure in being judged.

Why was the official prescription for the crisis in the banlieus from both Sarkozy and Royale to increase the paternal presence?

Arendt asked in '58, what is authority?

• traces it back to education and child-rearing
• this is where authority is seen as a natural prerequisite

Who invented authority? Plato in response to the murder of Socrates

For Kojeve, Japan was the future of the West

The Brothers Quay, Day 3

The Brothers Quay taught a class entitled ANIMATED FILM wherein we viewed a number of films, primarily from former soviet states.

They're not proud of it, but they did it: they made a few commercials for Monsanto's Roundup Weed Killer. We watched them, they were good.

They also made a commercial for Badoit, here.

They made a commercial for Murphy's beer as well, but I can't find a link.

We watched Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood:


We viewed Yuri Norstein's The Tale of Tales:


Why is it that dead-air is not allowed?

Is pathos a flattening-out whereas sadness has layers?

We watched their collaboration with Ralf Ralf, The Summit
not unlike Sigur Ros' ( ):

NOTE: the Brothers Quay had no part in the making of the above video.

The Brothers seek to split the text apart so as to allow movement through the image and not to be overwhelmed by the text, and sometimes to suspend it.

We viewed their Piano Tuner of Earthquakes:

which they say is an homage to Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel

They said of this, "We have a lot of reverence for the texts we use and we wonder if maybe as a secret revenge we hit the images hard, we explode the images."

We then watched Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge:


Following this with Borowczyk's adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's Rosalie:


Then we watched The Hedgehog and the Fog Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova:


[END OF CLASS]

The Brothers Quay, Evening Lecture

The Brothers were introduced by Siegfried Zielinski

We viewed sections of
Institute Benjamenta


Eurydice She, so Beloved (alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus):


Streets of Crocodiles:


Duet—Variations for the Convalescence of 'A'

and In Absentia (a collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, this was based on Robert Walser's The Pencil Fields)

Andre Habib has an excellent interview with the Brothers that we might want to enjoy, here.