No Hegel this week; Update on the Plan.

I won’t give any excuses, but I was unable to finish the required 130-something sections of Hegel. And because of my math midterm Friday, I probably won’t have much time to read until, at least, the weekend. After this week, and before finals week, I have barely any homework that I need to actually *do*, so I will be focusing on catching up. Similarly, I may delay the 2nd week’s Hegel just so that I can do a bit more Lacan. Let me explain.

I’ve decided that attempting to do Anti-Oedipus before school ended is a bit too ambitious. In addition, doing D+G prematurely might be bad for my understanding of the concepts, blah blah blah. So I’ve altered the following things about the plan:
I’ve decided, after further research, to include the following books:

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [Lacan, to add to the Ecrits reading.]

The Transcendence of the Ego [Sartre, to help with B+N.]

An Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics [Soll, to go along with Hegel.]

Difference + Repetition; Logic of Sense [Deleuze, to begin work with Deleuze's concepts.]

And I’ve decided to take out Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus for now [ATP not even being in my original plan at all, except for 300 pages on the last week. whew. what poor planning!], but I plan to keep just about everything else. Really, the only other thing I may consider dropping is Sartre, since I have no real invested interest in it and it’s a LONG book. We’ll see.

So, week one is over, and I’m 1 for 2. So now, the schedule looks like this:

Week 2 - This will be a week which is heavy on Lacan and Hegel.

(E) On My Antecedents. (pg. 52)

(E) Beyond the Reality Principle. (pg. 58)

(Ph) 1 – 196. [left over from last week. this is the introduction, plus the first two parts.]

Week 3 - This week begins two long projects that will finish up next week. This is a lot of reading, and I’d like to take my time with each of these.

(FFCP) [the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis] Chapters 1 — 5.

(Ph) Catch up on Hegel from last week. Aim for 230.

Zizek!

Also, during my looking-things-up, I found this series of videos, which is pretty good.

Spinoza: Short Online Introduction.

I’ve been told that it’s good to know Aristotle’s Metaphysics before reading Spinoza.  So here it is.

 The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Spinoza.

Professor Steven Nadler lectures on Spinoza.  Part 1, Part 2.

Digression: Bodies Without Organs, Change in Reading List?

Before I go onto Hegel’s Introduction and first part of the book [which, I think, I will do as two separate posts], I found this really fantastic website on “the internet”.  A Body Without Organs is something that I’ve struggled with for a while, since I’m far too lazy to read any of Deleuze’s older works, and the definition in AO is entirely too difficult for me to understand at this point.

This is a wonderful [or, at the very least, somewhat CLEAR] answer to the question: what the hell is a body without organs?

There’s a small debate online in the Deleuze + Guattari community regarding the reading of AO.  A few people are saying you need to read Marx\Freud\Lacan\Spinoza\Nietzsche\Kant before you read AO, which is okay for me minus Kant and Spinoza and Lacan — but then there are a few people who say that it’s not necessary.  I have AO on my reading list now, but because it takes up a huge hunk of time and space, and because I may not even be able to understand it at all, I may replace it with two books by Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense — and a book by Kant [or maybe ON Kant] and a book by Spinoza [or maybe ON Spinoza].  What do you guys think?  I need input.  Overall, it might be good to start with some of the more basic stuff that is necessary for many things as opposed to diving into AO with no idea where I’m going or what they’re talking about.  I’ve also heard Deleuze’s Nietzsche book is pretty boss.  I’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

Seminar on the Purloined Letter.

The seminar is available online here or here, at nosubject.com, which I shamelessly steal definitions from at times. Thank you, nosubject.com. Let me just preface this by saying that I am, by no means, a scholar of Lacan, Freud, Poe, etc. and so many details below may be inexact, unenlightening, and possibly, just plain wrong. If you see something, scream at me about it.

Reading the title is relatively easy — this is just a seminar on the Purloined Letter — but as soon as we get to the first sentence, something just feels wrong. What is Repetition Automatism? And how does it find its basis in insistence of signifying chains?

Repetition Automatism is the compulsive repetition or reproduction of an internalized social structure. Such a structure is defined by the [emotional(?)] relationship between the actors in the subjects social (or perhaps only familial?) sphere.

Freud noted that for a neurotic patient who is becoming less repressed, there is a kind of paradoxical outcome: the patient becomes less neurotic, but has a tendency to continue to re-act the processes that lead to the neurosis in the first place. The repetition of this act caused the patient to relive the pain induced by the neurosis. Therefore, on one hand, the patient was being cured. On the other hand, the patient was becoming neurotic due to the repetition of these acts. This is what Freud referred to as Repetition Automatism.

Lacan notes that repetition automatism somehow has its basis in signifying chains — in other words, in a series of signifiers which are linked up together. I’m not exactly sure where he derives this from, though. At any rate, this is only the first sentence.

The next sentence is regarding repetition automatism as a kind of ex-sistence. Ex-sistence is a term used to describe the continual projection of oneself into the world. For Heidegger, consciousness wasn’t a whole bunch of inner-thoughts and ideas put together — but rather, it was a projection of the self onto the world. I’m not exactly sure how this works. Nor do I really understand how it fits into repetition automatism. It’s possible that because one must re-act events which lead to the neurosis that a constant projection and re-projection of the self onto the world would be implied by this — but this relation seems almost trivial, so I’m not quite sure. In any event, Lacan notes that we’d need to find the subject of the unconscious in order to take the discovery [of r. automatism?] seriously. Honestly, at this point, I’m a bit confused. Either way, he ends with noting that psychoanalysis work is done in a symbolic dimension with respect to the patient — and then, thankfully, begins the seminar, which (hopefully) won’t be as difficult as this first paragraph. Let’s begin the essay by quoting Lacan:

Nevertheless, I posit that that it is the law specific to this chain [of signifiers] which governs the psychoanalytic effects that are determinant for the subject — effects such as forclosure, repression, and negation itself — and I add with the appropriate emphasis that these effects follow the displacement of the signifiers so faithfully that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, figure only as shadows and reflections therein.

Lacan, here, if I’m not mistaken, is trying to emphasize that psychoanalytic effects are governed by laws determined nearly (if not entirely) completely by the symbolic, despite what the imaginary “mask” details. It may be worth taking a minor detour to explain the three orders which structure human existence: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

The symbolic is generally used as we’d expect it to be used: it’s the realm of symbols. One thing stands for another thing. The importance of the realm of the symbolic is that the relationship between an individual subject and his relationship with the symbolic is “the heart of psychoanalysis.” It is the most critical order out of the three for psychoanalysis.

The imaginary is the order of “images, imagination, deception and lure.” Included is sight, sound, etc., and sensory input. This is up to the interpretation of the subject, so it’s possible for images to “trick” the subject into being something they are not. Anorexia, (in Using Lacanian Clinical Technique by Phillip Hill) is given as a mainly imaginary problem — not in the sense that it does not exist, but in the sense that it is based on the “image” of the subject seeing themselves as overweight. One could, possibly, argue that this overweightedness is symbolic, to the subject, as it is associated strongly with unattractiveness to the individual. This last connection is mine, and may be incorrect — but the rest illustrates an example of a problem which is, for the most part, imaginary.

The real is anything not imaginary or symbolic. Yeah.

So why the Purloined Letter? Lacan says that he wants to demonstrait using a story where the major determination of the subject is governed by the symbolic signifier — which, in this case, is the letter itself.

Lacan defines two scenes that will come into play when he describes the story’s link to repetition automatism: the first, which he calls the ‘primal scene’, is the scene where the minister sees that the queen is distracted, and sees who the letter is from, and quickly manipulates the situation so that the letter can be taken with the queen knowing exactly who took it, but without the ability to interact for fear of alerting the king. The second scene is the Minister’s office when Dupin comes to find the letter and is able to take the original and deposit a fake as the Minister is distracted by an event outside.

One large difference between these two scenes is that while the queen knows that the letter has been taken by the Minister, the Minister has no idea that the letter has been taken at all, let alone by Dupin. But Lacan wants to point out some not-so-obvious similarities:

First, the decision of the Minister and Dupin to take the letters is based on a glance — the glance allows the Minister to see who the letter was from and realize the importance, whereas Dupin’s glance allowed him to locate the letter itself and realize that it was hidden-in-plain-sight, just changed slightly. Similarly, the glance that does not see is illustrated first by the king (who has no idea what is happening during the first transaction) and then the prefect (who has no idea where the letter could be placed, but tries to look for something which is “not there”). The third glance is that of the queen and the Minister: the glance which assumes that the second group of people (the king and the prefect) do not see the letter, and so it must be safe. The problem with the third glance is that the individuals neglect those individuals who are NOT the king and the prefect, respectively — namely, the minister and dupin, again, respectively.

Lacan goes on to say that, at this point, since we have described the intersubjective module (his words) and the action which repeats, we need to indicate this in a repetition automatism. We will find that the subjects’ displacement is based entirely on the (symbolic) signifier’s displacement onto a subject.

Lacan addresses one point, here, which has bothered me since my first year at this school: namely, if the Prefect has looked everywhere, then why wasn’t the letter found, seeing as how the letter was somewhere. There seems to be some sort of problem with qualifiers, to begin with, but Lacan states that — it is not the incompetence of the police force, but rather the alteration of the image (the letter is disguised in order to look like a letter of the Minister’s and to not look like the letter that they are searching for) which prevents the police from finding it. They may have actually looked AT the letter, but not realized that (as the image was altered) that it was exactly that letter which held the symbolic importance. It is the property of a symbol to “look different” and, yet, be the same.

Some of the rest becomes somewhat tedious and just to illustrate that events are “what they seem like” from the perspective of the psychoanalytic, so I intend to skip over some points that Lacan makes about this. They are important, but I don’t have the time to go over every single detail in the Lecture. For instance, Lacan goes over the structure of language, the relation of a group to a signifier, and the question of to whom does a letter “belong”. These are all important concepts (pgs. 12 — 18) but I will not go into them right now.

As we mentioned before, the basis of the repetition automatism lies in the idea that the subjects not only force themselves back into a role relative to the signifying letter, but, in addition, change their position relative to the general power structure based on the letter’s relation to each subject, and each subject’s relation to each other subject. This is detailed in a bit more depth by Lacan [and relates to the previous things I didn't mention], but this, I feel, is essentially the relationship that defines the repetition automatism. Lacan spends the next few pages showing that it is “the letter and its detour which governs their entrances and roles (pg. 21),” but I will not go into this either, since I feel that it is relatively basic and easy-to-understand. One thing that I will point out, though: it is clever of Dupin to note that all of the power is in having the note, as opposed to using the note — since, in the latter, it forces all of the power of the note to become exhausted, and, therefore, useless except in the instant in which it is used.

The last pages are used to show a few things about Dupin and the signifier which is devoid of signification which, honestly, I was a bit lost on. I didn’t understand where it fit in or why it was necessary to repetition automatism.

After this, Lacan has a much more difficult essay which uses his matheme-type logic which I’ve, so far, failed to decode. I may attempt to look at it in the future and decode it on here (the alpha, beta, gamma, delta things as well as the L-schema, etc.) but for now, I’ve decided to leave it alone.

Summary of the Purloined Letter.

You can find an online copy of the Purloined Letter by E. A. Poe right here if you are curious about it.

To sum up the story, so that I don’t have to later when I write up the summery for Lacan’s essay on it, we first introduce some characters:

Dupin — the Holmesian detective. Really, clever guy.

The Prefect — the head of the Parisian police force.

The Minister — who took the letter.

The King — The party that cannot, under any circumstances, see that letter!

The Queen — the person who received the letter.

The letter — that which cannot be seen by the king, and which is hidden by the minister.

Yeah, okay, so to sum up the story:

The Prefect comes to Dupin with a problem. It seems that the Queen received a letter that she does not want the King to see. When it is received , it is out in the open, and when the Queen is distracted, the Minister takes the letter, allowing the Queen to know that it was him who took it. The Queen cannot say anything, as the King would then know about the letter, which is bad. So, then the Prefect and Dupin come to the conclusion that the minister must still have it on him [as it's a source of power over the queen!] but where would it be?

Eventually, the Prefect (and I think that this is because the Prefect thinks that the Minister is a poet, or something) searches every single inch of the Minister’s house looking for the letter — using clever techniques to look in between every nook and cranny.

Spoilers. Dupin notes that the Minister is also a mathematician, and (somehow?) realizes that the letter would be hidden in plain sight. Which is exactly where it is.

I think that I summed this up correctly — I haven’t read it in a while, but I’m sure that I got most of the details right. Anyhow, I may correct myself more after I read the details of Lacan’s essay.

Week 1 (ending the 24th) and Week 2.

Week 1 (ending the 24^th) – This is the first week, so I’ll start small.

(E) Seminar on the Purloined letter (pg. 6).

(Ph) Preface + Introduction (1 – 131). [note, hegel will be done by section, NOT PAGE.]

Week 2 – This will be a week which is heavy on Lacan and Hegel – this is an important introductory week!

(E) On My Antecedents. (pg. 52)

(E) Beyond the Reality Principle. (pg. 58)

(Ph) 132 – 196.

Reading list.

For now, my reading list is as follows:

Lacan – Ecrits (E)

D+G – Antioedipus (AO)

Sartre – Being and Nothingness (B+N)

Hegel – Phen of the Spirit (Ph)

D + G – A Thousand Plateaus (ATP)

Husserl – Idea of Phen (Idea)

Sartre – Transcendence of the Ego (TotE)

Also, I will be using this and this to supplement Sartre.

New Blog, New Style.

This is just going to be a personal-learning type blog. I find that the best way to learn something without being in a class is just to spout out critiques and summaries of what’cha just read — which is exactly what I plan on doing in this blog.

So, this is my reading list for the next 18 weeks. It may become somewhat shorter (and, in fact, I was hoping to finish by the time school lets out, which is something like 16 weeks — but I doubt this will even finish in 18 like I planned it) but it is what it is right now. My goal is to get through a large chunk of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Hegel’s Phenomenology (henceforth, Phen) of the Spirit, and Deleuze + Guattari’s AntiOedipus + A Thousand Plateaus.

Yeah, so I’m not even going to pretend that I have any kind of chance of doing this. Courses are taught about each of these topics, spanning many weeks with professors who know what they’re talking about — and still, much is left out. What I hope to accomplish is:

A BASIC UNDERSTANDING of Sartre — Since a large chunk of the reading will be Sartre, I will be skimming over parts that I do not feel are really important for my philosophy, are boring, etc, etc. Yeah, I’m cheating, but I don’t really care all that much about Sartre. I just want to know about him.

AN INTRODUCTION to Lacan — I will only be going through his Ecrits, so there will be much to be desired as far as a comprehensive look at Lacan. Yeah. I just would like a basis for future readings of Lacan, and I sort of want to see what a “new” psychoanalytic model looks like.

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF Deleuze + Guattari — I will be doing a lot more reading, hopefully, on D+G, but I wanted to start on AO and ATP since I’ve been wanting to read them since forever.

Anyhow, I will post my reading list and the general syllabus. Feel free to make comments, corrections, and objections on it — this was all essentially made on a whim and I only briefly went through the books and online [college course] resources which used the books. By the way, I’ve taken the syllabus for Hegel and Anti-Oedipus right from classes on the two books — so if the numbering seems a bit strange, it’s because they’re broken up for 15-week courses and then combine to make it a bit more reasonable, time-wise, for me.

So what the hell am I going to use the blog for? Well, I will be doing at most four things on this blog:

(1) Summarizing the text I have just read.

(2) Critiquing the text I have just read, based mainly on my own [ugh] thoughts and beliefs.

(3) Attempting to synthesize my thoughts with the thoughts of the author.

(4) Ask for help, reply to help, debate?

Esp. on 4 — if you would like to write on this blog, tell me. I will give you an account or something. If you only feel like commenting, feel free to do so anonymously. Okay, so. Without further ado –