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Freud, so to Speak
[excerpt]

 

 

Jean-Luc Nancy

translated by Liz Wendelbo

 

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Depression...
J
- A MILLER

Philippe Sollers,
un vrai roman
J
- A MILLER

A Political Variant of the Subject-of-Truth
A
LAIN BADIOU

What is to Live?
A
LAIN BADIOU

A Spectacular Health
M
ARCO FOCCHI

A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other III
J
- A MILLER

Freud, so to Speak
J
EAN-LUC NANCY

Eugene Onegin,
a Russian Gay Gentleman
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

Gispert,
Mellor, Neshat
C
ATHY LEBOWITZ
interviews
JOSEFINA AYERZA

Intercepts
A
LAIN BADIOU / THOMAS SVOLOS

[...]

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud directs the first storyteller, the first mythologist. He tells his horde he has killed the father: it is an impossible story, because the father exists only because of the murder, which means he would have only killed a pre-paternal animal. The myth, writes Freud, is how the individual separates itself from the psychology of the masses. In other words, the myth is how a structure appears, which allows for the “ ego” to separate itself from the id in the background—and this separation occurs thanks to the mythical creation of the “hero”, or the “ego” in other words. The Freudian invention begins here: the subject tells itself, it becomes through its story. It is not an imaginary tale, because it is not the “speaking subject” at work here, rather it is what speech gives birth to—speech, better defined as signification, which is an opening to the possibility of meaning.
Freud knew not to ask for the meaning (of life); according to him this question was already pathological. But he knew that signification demanded it from us. To be pressured by meaning signifies that one must appear as if carried away by what one is meant to carry. This is what speech abides by as myth: it does not invent stories, it does not create fiction, and it tries to let what precedes speech speak, which is signification at its statu nascendi. Trieb - growth, movement, pulsation, passion, being carried away - is the “name” found by Freud (explicitly against “instinct”) to talk about an effort, or forced meaning before and after signification: the power of desire, which carries man beyond himself.

[...]


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Art: Liz Wendelbo
Opticks XVI - serigraphs, 2007
courtesy of the artist, NYC.


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