All posts filed under: unconscious

Dream

Friday, February 20, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
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coding / Deleuze and Guattari / dream / freud / joyce / production / psychoanalysis / unconscious / writing

    “When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes.” Joyce, Finnegans Wake     Dream-analysis does not necessitate an affirmation of the existence of universal structures of expression; it need not amount to the tiresome interpretation of the same hidden message over and over again, wherein the forms of thinking and speaking and finally reality itself are rendered identical, cruelly reduced to a single and all-encompassing formula. It suffices […]

Wandering Shadows: Reflections on Morality and Madness

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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architecture / banquet / language / machine / metaphysics / Nietzsche / ontology / Politics / time / unconscious / violence / wisdom

In the disparity between the awareness of unreason and the awareness of madness, we have, at the end of the eighteenth century, the point of departure for a decisive movement: that by which the experience of unreason will continue, with Holderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, to proceed ever deeper towards the roots of time — unreason thus becoming, par excellence, the world’s contratempo — and the knowledge of madness seeking on the contrary to situate it […]

On Learning

Saturday, March 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / code / Cognition / diagram / difference / energy / entropy / identity / knowledge / learning / memory / problem / structure / Thought / unconscious / wittgenstein

One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting […]

For Lacan

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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attention / barrier / deconstruction / lacan / language / metaphor / signifier / structure / subject / Thought / unconscious

The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your attention [lit. “watchfulness.”] Lacan To identify a “subject” is not only difficult, but truly impossible: we always only ‘nominate’ in the last instance one of its barriers; or rather, we indicate only what is barred, but we do so by signifying the barrier. How can we understand this barrier — this imaginary line of symbolic exchange? In what […]

Notes on Eros and Civilization

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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alienation / death drive / Eros / eros and civilzation / freud / herbert marcuse / metaphysics / pleasure / psychology / reality / superego / unconscious

Notes on Eros and Civilization In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse presents Freud at the level of metaphysical psychology. That is: we find Freud engaged in overturning “conventional” metaphysics through psychoanalysis — methodically substituting pleasure and imagination for reason and logic — but paradoxically in so doing he produces a “theoretical” practice which, through its “diagnostic” methodologies and even in its “axiomatic” structure, still reflect profoundly traditional conceptions of humanity. For example, Freud analyzes the […]

Beyond Desire: Remarks on Nietzsche and Becoming

Monday, December 10, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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Anaxagoras / becoming / being / chaos / cosmos / desire / discourse / freedom / infinity / intensity / lacan / morality / morphology / Nietzsche / nous / ontology / phenomenology / psychology / Theory / Philosophy / unconscious

    Topos (biocosm)     In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order. Anaxagoras [1] What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new […]

Cyborg Nietzsche: Conscience, Affect, Transvaluation

Saturday, November 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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algebra / complexity / decay / diagnosis / ethics / insanity / language / literature / machine / mathematics / Nietzsche / Politics / prejudice / psychoanalysis / schizophrenia / Science / Mathematics / Technology / society / structure / transformation / truth / unconscious

Part One: Criticism and Untruth-Machines A. Neurosis and Transcendence: the Algebra of Bad Conscience We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.  Marcel Proust For Nietzsche, uncovering the peculiar logic of the unconscious, revealing the function of this or that unobserved striving, would only form part of the analysts’ role. A rich, analytic transformation of the real space of mental (political) activity is the full meaning of diagnostic criticism. Any real […]

Translation from Gilles Deleuze’s Ontology: Véronique Bergen on the Syntheses of the Unconscious in Difference and Repetition

Monday, November 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Deleuze / Difference and Repetition / differenciation / Eros / French Translation / habit / memory / ontology / Psyche / syntheses of the unconscious / Thanatos / unconscious / Untranslated Theory / virtual

The following is an excerpt on the syntheses of the unconscious in Difference and Repetition from Véronique Bergen’s L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 325-327. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 11/05/07. The three syntheses of the unconscious in the times developed in Difference and Repetition, the three “beyonds of the pleasure principle”[1] organizing bio-psychic life “correspond to figures of repetition, which appear in the work of a great novelist: the binding, the ever […]

The Genealogy of the Unconscious: Evolution, Awareness, Creativity

Thursday, October 18, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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affirmation / creativity / Dionysos / drives / evolution / human / libido / metaphor / morality / Nietzsche / reality / relation / truth / unconscious / will

“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw […]

Time and the Cultural Unconscious: Nietzsche and the Future

Sunday, October 14, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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chaos / culture / freud / materiality / metaphysics / Nietzsche / resistance / society / subject-group / time / unconscious / value

Woman at the Window Salvador Dalí, oil on board (1925) What do we understand to be the boundaries of our neighbor: I mean that which he as it were engraves and impresses himself into and upon us? We understand nothing of him except the change in us of which he is cause — our knowledge of him is like the hollow space which has been shaped. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak 118) Stripped of its social connotations, […]

Reconstructing Reality

Monday, October 8, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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capitalism / geometry / God / ideology / power / revolution / simulation / state / subversion / technology / unconscious / war

Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are […]

Nietzsche and the Unconscious: Ethics, Desire, Politics

Sunday, September 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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daybreak / desire / difference / ethics / freud / joy / Nietzsche / Politics / style / text / unconscious / Zen

Cy Twombly, Untitled [1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: © 2004 Matthew Septimus] Granted that nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other ‘reality’ than the reality of our drives – for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another: is it not permitted to make the experiment and […]

Bachelard and the Psychoanalysis of Affective Stereotypes

Wednesday, September 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Bachelard / Deleuze / image of thought / philosophy of science / problematics / psychoanalysis / unconscious / value

A word will suddenly reverberate in us and find too lingering an echo in cherished, old ideas; an image will light up and persuade us outright, abruptly, and all at once. In reality, a serious, weighty word, a key word, only carries everyday conviction, conviction that stems more from the linguistic past or from the naivety of primary images than from objective truth…All description nucleates in this way and collects about centres that are too […]