December 01, 2004

Klossowski, unconscious, language

Joe,
A quick note. You wrote in an earlier post here that:


"The unconscious/ conscious distinction is one way of approaching Klossowski's schema. Or, alternatively, it can be divided into the body and language—which more or less align to unconscious/conscious for both Klossowski and Nietzsche anyway. The code of everyday signs [le code des signes quotidiens] is language, and so average, exchangable between every member of one's cultural group."

What we have here is the classic psychoanalytic human subject, which is always split between a conscious side, a mind that is accessible, and an unconscious side, a series of drives and forces which remain inaccessible.

What I find refreshing about Klossowsski is that thsi understanding of our subjectivities undermines the therapeutic pretensions of ego psychology, which conceive of the ego as the origin and basis of psychic stability.

The problem I have with Klossowski is the unconscious, body, non-language side of the duality.

Why?

Well, if unconscious desires, are revealed through free associations and dreams, then our unconscious desires emerge through words and images.If so then why cannot the unconscious be a form of social being? Why cannot the unconscious be structured like a language?

The duality claim needs to be qualified. For Klossowski the fluctuating intensities of desire do have an image, or a phantasme. I presume that the father against whom one rebels is such an a phantasme; and this shapes our intense emotions and the various simulacra we use to express our desires. These various phantasme's form a vocabulary of the unconscious.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 1, 2004 09:41 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Post a comment