Universal Truth II

Is Psychoanalysis a framework available for universal truth?

However at the backend of human existence, there is always the haunting spirit of our own desire. Psychoanalysis tells us about desire – originated from primitive lack which is our memory of primitive love toward parental unity.  What is it? The parental unity is what exists before we are (being). The lack is what haunting us since the day we acquire the partial characteristic of being – the materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real (for this partial being has not yet fulfilled the validation of the symbolic which is the structuration of language). That is when being is not yet being, or not yet full validated as being, as in the stage of pre-being, in the stage when lack, fear and jouissance embody yet hinder the awareness of beingness. This is also the time when being as being is still unthinkable or only partial. This is also the time when the haunting spirit of the Real constitutes the basic of the Subjectivitiy as an I upon the background of our primitive fear. In the pursue for Subjectivity, what is at stake is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline.

In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love, fear is a question posed to itself and is never have an answer except we see our own death face to face.  That is the impossibility of being as object, for object is not a priori knowledge and it is an impossible agent.  For an object can never be an object without already being assigned the position of the Subject as a subject. But the argument is who authorizes the Subject as a subject while the position of being as being has to be worked through the background of the lack as the Real.  If at the end of our human existence, we see only lack and emptiness, what is the value of being if put into the framework of a universal truth as lack.

Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth?

Philosophy has no idea what lack is and how it drives our cultural artifact to constitute human subjectivitiy through language. As philosophy is the truth to knowledge which inborn tendency is to violate the status of the Real by hindering the lack as the Universal truth. The Real is indifferent to emotional, sensitive change in human psychoanalytic field, but it will answer to our call with message. Environmental issue is at the core of this aspect of the Real. The destruction of the natural environment shall warn us to recall the effect of surplus jouissance upon the very existence of the earth as the Real.  That’s why we have no way to access to environmental issue by philosophy for the latter is based upon human knowledge which has no ideas what the Real as lack is.  Knowledge can not access to emptiness for knowledge itself is to defend the status of being/truth in unity, the Da-sein as the characteristic of beingness.

The Real has the ability and integrity to maintain its own balance as it has always already embodied the Universal truth as its final resort that links up the web of existence. The imaginary, as reflected on the surface of the Real has tried every means to invade the Real (as a paranoia psychic structure) – making possible by the fatal “foreclosure” of the symbolic law which has been dominated by ideological truth that reflects only the logics of the post-industrial world. For the culture of modern world is itself a paranoid structure. The symbolic law is not constructed for the betterment of the Real as a Universal truth; it provides only a partial understanding of the Real as serving the industrial needs for producing surplus jouissance.

If we want to understand environment issue based on the ideological truth as constructed for industrial age, we may miss the reason why non-stop production of surplus jouissance is based on a rationale to reinforce the status of ego as a unified entity.

The Real is direct reflection of the primitive lack – this lack is always there before the subject is constituted as the first cause. It is lack that is substantiated into the cause for any possible duplicating, multiplying, mutating, effact or performance. The lack is the basis of human being as an animal that does not have the capacity to exist in the Real only through his inborn capacity by his mobility, hunting technique, ethnicity. For he cannot live within the world that animal rules. He can only create what can be said as intellectuality to protect himself from the invasion of the Real. Intellectuality is the basis for linguistic communication. Intellectuality creates the mechanist talent and knowledge that facilitates the living of the human beings. But paradoxically at the end, it is intellectuality created out of lack constituted the production of surplus jouissance that has explored and drive the world into destruction.

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan , environment issue, Lacan, psychoanalysis, truth

Universal Truth I

Is philosophy a valid theoretical framework for the access to Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis is not the philosophy of human psyche for it tells us nothing about the truth that a philosopher would be interested in. Upon the couch, Freud has opened up the space for imagination, fantasy, lie and joke, but he has never required his patient to tell the truth.  Truth is not the imperative, for what psychoanalyst interests is the unconscious truth which may always be beyond the daily articulation.

But what could be the truth in psychoanalysis if it could not within the discourse of the patient. Lacan says the truth in psychoanalysis can only be found in jouissance, in lack, in the place where we are not present.  This truth is possible only within the larger framework of the Universal truth as lack.

Living in the world (in Heidegger’s sense) that we are trained to play the role as a subject or an object (master or slave) and we have no idea this only reflects what would be our misconception of the inwardly circumcised mediation (logics) of our status as an unified order. If the master/slave dialectics is put onto the larger background of a Universal truth, (i.e. the order of physical existence puts into interaction with the order of human existence, either in the form psycho-theological way or as a Kantian transcendental) the interface can only be the field of the freudian. The Freudian field opens up the internal world that enables the human psychoanalytic field interact, reflect, change, engage or restructure the substantiality of the Real.

Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

This is what Heidegger taught us about the real and how it validates Da-sein as “objectively present”, as the basic of being.  And it also show us the importance of being “seen” or “discovered” as the basic of being/truth. Being as truth while it validates the connection between subject and object in discoveredness.

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen”in their discoveredness. The being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object). (Heidegger, Being and Time I vi 44)

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , Being as being, Derrida, environmental issue, Heidegger, Lacan

History in its partiality

History does not cease to be an empirical science of “facts” because it has reformed its methods and techniques, or because it has substituted a comprehensive structuralism for causalism, atomism and naturalism, or because it has become more attentive to cultural totalities. Its pretension to founding normativity on a better understood factuality does not become more legitimate, but only increases its powers of philosophical seduction. A confusion of value and existence, and more generally, of all types of realities and all types of idealities is sheltered beneath the equivocal category of the historical. (Derrida, “Genesis and Structure” in Writing and Difference, p161)

The mechanics that authenticates history is not only simply a system binded by normativity in the veil of factivity. We do believe in history because history seems to be responsible for recording (technicality) fact through media, publication, memory, imaginary artifact. However it is not the fact or merely fact to make one believe in what is being recorded in history or the logics of history itself.  Paradoxically, I am thinking that it is the very idea of alibi in the contrary to being as witness which makes history “historical”. Historicity presupposes alibi in future perfect: one could have been there or one should have junction with its language or simply one who have escaped from being “part” of the history. History negates all possible validity of being- in-the-event: as a witness, victim, observer or simply as gaze-in-a-machine. This is precisely the scenario of an escaped assassinate in the plot: those who escaped is the only one who can speak the whole truth. Derrida says that is the seduction of factivity that validates history, but the problematic is that fact itself is not at the location, is always in fugitive. Even the most powerful media machine maintained by CNN can not matter all aspects of an event even thought they do intent to play the transparent part of reporting fact. History itself is partial, fragmentary and has to be retold retroactively. Paradoxically, those who have been to the event will not be regarded as a substantial object (it simply does not allow to exist) within the discourse of the history. Even though one was made part of it but he will never be the witness, for witness can only exist as an onmipresent gaze that is panoramic and pluripotential. Many years ago in China, lot of people have been to the very location of the history in the TAM Square, but no one is validated and no history is being retold in the way it is supposed to be.

The ontological link between history and its own validity, for some reasons we believe, lies on the being as being. Being in the site is at the core of the event which “is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc.” It is “a fragment of being” that makes history possible. (Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being” in Theoretical Writing, p 98) If the philosophical seduction is a kind of paternal abuse in psychoanalytic sense, history has spatialized her desire upon the philosophical intrusion (seduction) and initiated the primal narcissism in philosophy thinking himself as the valid path to truth. It is philosophy himself trapped in the self indulgence of truth. Of course philosophy have never given up his inborn desire to seek support from his paternal relations with history, the domain that was supported by factivity of not being there.

Filed under: Badiou, Derrida, psychoanalysis, the Real , Deconstruction, History, philosophy