The uncanny

"Abstract: How might the body know? Well, there is something distinctly uncanny about the canniness of our bodily being that becomes especially apparent when our bodies are taken beyond what we are accustomed to; when they become ineffectual or interact with, and are supported by techniques and technologies.

My experience, and those that are offered here, draw attention to the usually uncannily canny body becoming uncannily unusual, echoing Sacks’s [1986] association between Wittgenstein’s On Certainty [1969], the uncanny and bodily knowing. That is, finding oneself questioning that which should not be in question; namely the accustomed familiarity of one’s embodied experience, which until then has in most respects been taken for granted, and to all intents and purposes has been below one’s awareness.

Whatever one’s accustomed embodiment may be, when this is disrupted and, or ‘supported’ by medical intervention, then expressing one’s bodily knowledge of these experiences is not necessarily easy or de rigueur. Indeed expression may signify social deviance and provoke oppression; making this an issue for medical sociology, disability studies [Thomas 2007] and bioethics alike.

So, the following considers the possible nature of bodily knowing as being a canniness, a know-how, an ur-trust, an ontological security in bodily being in the world. What is offered, is the possibility of effectively acknowledging and engaging with bodily knowing in order to successfully appreciate all that ‘the bodily’ can tell us. To do this a transdisciplinary approach has been taken in order to provide a rigorous foundation for these aims. A case is made for acknowledging the validity and significance of bodily knowing as being clinically and ethically on a par with the ‘evidence base’ of medicine and ethics.
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""...I have selected the best papers that interrogate issues of gender and the body: physical, phenomenological, and literary....This philosophical inquiry into the gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Virgil Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  (From the "Editorial" to *Assuming Gender* 2:1 by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand."

""...Vergil W. Brower [sic]...provides a vivid demonstration of the variety and vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition in France and its theories of the incarnate word. Taking off in large part from Derrida's reading of Freud's essay on the mystic writing pad, Brower asks what do we mean by a slip of the tongue or slip of the pen, and in what way do the images that surround these notions privilege sight over the other senses. The tongue, moreover, is not just an organ of speech. It is also the site of taste. Taste seems immediate; it seems to be removed from the scene of writing, or from the ineradicable difference that Derrida detects in Husserlian phenomenology in *Speech and Phenomenon* [sic]. But to the extent that Derrida sees taste and touch as part of the future of psychoanalysis, then these senses too much be mediated, must be inscribed in the logic of the trace and hence subject to interpretation. Taste, and particularly self-taste, is never simply present, but always mediated by the voice of the Other..."
  (From the "Introduction" to FLS 38 by Paul Allen Miller, p. xvii)

Abstract:
Following one of Jacques Derrida’s early questions — namely, How is writing involved in speech? — this essay reconsiders the role of the tongue and the sense of taste in the oral phenomena of speaking and saying. The contact the tongue makes with the mouth or teeth is just as much a materialization of language as what is commonly called “writing.” The tongue acts as a pen and the mouth, as a blank page (or palimpsest). Mouthed writing is accompanied by sense experiences. There are various selftastes to the tastes of speaking, the tastes of words, or, even, the tastes of thoughts. Freud’s notes on speaking in one’s sleep, telepathy, the mystic writing-pad, and memory are revisited and sup- plemented with the writings of Hélène Cixous on the taste of words, telephoning, saying-to-oneself, and forgetting. The auto-affection of tasting-oneself-speakwriting is offered as an alternative to the meta- physical presumptions Derrida implicates in Husserl’s understanding of speech based on the auto-affection of hearing-oneself-speak. As such, writing (haunted by the trace of death) and speech (invested with living- presence) is now confronted with the selftastes of speakwriting with one’s stylangue in and on the mouth as the scene of writing (ever accompanied by tastes of life-death). "

""...Virgil Brower's piece offers a whimsically deconstructive reading of what it means to taste (the coming of, the justice of) the messiah in Luther and Derrida, among others..."
  (From the "Editorial" to *Postscripts 3.2-3 by Jay Twomey, p. 130)

Abstract:
This article exploits a core defect in the phenomenology of sensation and self. Although phenomenology has made great strides in redeeming the body from cognitive solipisisms that often follow short-sighted readings of Descartes and Kant, it has not grappled with the specific kind of self-reflexivity that emerges in the sense of taste with the thoroughness it deserves. This path is illuminated by the works of Martin Luther, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida as they attempt to think through the specific phenomena accessible through the lips, tongue, and mouth. Their attempts are, in turn, supplemented with detours through Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The paper draws attention to the German distinction between Geschmack and Kosten as well as the role taste may play in relation to faith, the call to love, justice, and messianism. The messiah of love and justice will have been that one who proclaims: taste the flesh"

"                                              LUTECIUM                             
                                      “TRAUMA AND EVENT”:
                  “A PROSPECTUS FOR AN EVENTAL PSYCHIATRY"
                                    VINCENZO DI NICOLA

VINCENZO DI NICOLA accepted Alain Badiou's challenge to either declare the death of psychiatry as such or announce a new, evental psychiatry in order to transform the field. Badiou supervised Di Nicola's doctoral dissertation, "Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology," which Badiou declared "opens a broad new horizon for philosophy and psychiatry" and was awarded Summa Cum Laude at the European Graduate School. Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.Phil., M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and President-Elect of the Quebec & Eastern Canada Branch of the American Psychiatric Association.

Date: May 17, 2013
Time: 6:00-8:00 pm (California time)
Location: The Flood Building downtown San Francisco
Online availability for long distance participation on Webex

For more information regarding registration please go to
WWW. Luteciumfoundation.com/events
Rebeccas@peoplepc.com
"

Von Franz said restless is the great neurosis of our time. Does buying a house make you less restless? Are we afraid of commitment, settling down -- instead opting to live provisionally in a state of flux? And, does it matter if you rent or buy? This essay explores some of the complexities of buying versus renting, as well as the general idea of deindividuation as the root of problems in society. Deindividuation is seen in such phenomena internalized oppression, mass-consciousness which perpetuates normativity and those who would root out non-conformity from the social framework.

There are two aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis that may be particularly appealing to those on the critical margins of social psychology.  First, like discourse analysis and critical psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis incorporates a focus on language (Branney, 2008) and therefore the concerns of some critical psychologists and discourse analysts, such as with critiquing the social order or bringing the social within psychology, may be easily assimilated.  Second, Lacanian psychoanalysis would seem to be incompatible with psychology (Parker, 2003) and therefore provides an alternative perspective from which to consider, and perhaps undermine, the assumptions of psychology.  Attempts to utilise Lacanian psychoanalysis that could be brought together under a rubric of critical psychology and discourse analysis include analyses of the production of girls’ desire in comics (Walkerdine, 1987), of views of the self in long-term psychotherapy (Georgaca, 2001; 2003), and of understandings of domestic violence in government policy (Branney, 2006).  We shall use ‘critical psychology’ (or ‘critical psychologist’) and ‘discourse analysis’ (or ‘discourse analyst’) as separate terms because, while many aspects of critical psychology do draw upon discourse analysis, a discourse analytic approach may be neither necessary nor sufficient to be critical of psychology.  Hollway’s (1989) consideration of heterosexual subjectivity is perhaps the one most obviously aligned with attempts, from the margins, to use discourse analysis to be critical of psychology.  Along with Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (Henriques et al., 1984), Hollway’s Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning, and Science (1989) can be understood as an attempt to change the subject of psychology and the theory of subjectivity that psychology relied upon.  Hollway (ibid.) drew upon a mixture of discourse analysis, and Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine material from interviews and her journal.  But, as Hook so aptly puts it: the lack of engagement of critical social psychology with Lacanian psychoanalysis is an ‘oddity’ that is “striking inasmuch as Lacanian theory offers important insights into many of what we might consider the constituting problematics of social psychology” (Hook, 2008, p. 2), such as racism, ideology, and social identity.  If we are to combine Hook’s work (ibid.) with Georgaca (2005) and Parker (2003; 2005), we have what can be understood as a small body of work on the margins of psychology that elucidates Lacanian psychoanalysis for critical psychologists and discourse analysts.  Our focus is on Hook, Georgaca, and Parker, because they, whether explicitly or implicitly, explicate what Lacanian psychoanalysis would be if it were used in critical psychology and discourse analysis.  This small body of work is steadily growing and includes, for example, Frosh and Baraitser’s (in press) examination of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies, a special issue of the journal Subjectivities and other work in this volume.  In this paper, our first aim is to turn to this body of work to put a bit more flesh on what Lacanian psychoanalysis offers those critical of psychology...