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Sara Sun
Language and the Flesh: Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Discourse
By Derek W. Hook
I. Introduction:
--language and the flesh
--the limits of signification and the body
--an ontological domain
--the domain of the symbolic
--the problematic nature of the body as limit-case of social and discursive meaning
II. Uncanny:
A. Definition:
Uncanny is “that which is both familiar and unfamiliar, that which had been
known, then hidden from sight, which then returns.” (p.46)
B. Anxieties Concerning—“an ontological concern over the status of the human
object and its authenticity” (p.45)
1. embodied absence and disembodies presence
(separated from rational agents—uncertainty/anxiety)
2. “recurrence”, “a creation dating back”
(the fear of something repressed makes its return”)
C. Ego-Disturbance: (p.46)
1. two primitive sources of uncanny:
a. the phylogenic source—“induces massive anxiety’
b. the ontogenetic variety of the uncanny—“question the basic
structures of meaning”
2. problems of ego-formation—question of body
body: the “multi-zonal site for culture exchange and socialization”, the
“surface of emergence”, and hence “template of the developing ego”
☆ “The uncanny as the destabilization of the ego, and,… of the ego’s
practices of identification.” (p.47)
3. momentary destabilization— the boundaries between ego and objects are
threat to collapse (the problem of ego-distinction)
F. The threat on ego: (p.47)
1. the collapse of ontological distinctness between ego and objects
2. the “underlying mechanism”: experiences are traumatically repeated
3. “the fear of the ego’s dissolution”: “the demise of life”
☆ “In the uncanny experience we are dealing not only with the dividing
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lines between soul and object, but also with the dividing lines of life
and death.”
III. The Abject:
A. Distinguish:
1. between abject and abjection: (p.48)
a. abject: “the anomalous, undeniable thing which indices fear”
—cannot to be identified
b. abjection: “a powerful and irrational reaction of dread”
2. between abject and object:
a. abject: “excluded thing”; “detestable element of waste or filth”;
“radically jettisoned”; drawing power to collapse
b. object: something put people in a desire for meaning
B. the Threat to the Continuity of Ego and Continuity of Body Image: (p.49)
1. Freud’s injunction: “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego”
2. “ego’s attempt to achieve separation-individuation and autonomy”
(against borderline objects) ex: cut-off hair, sweat, etc.
3. the limit case of abjection(the experience of uncanny)-- death:
a. the experience of corpse at the border— the necessary
foundational role of abjection
b. abjection as an irresistible avowal of the death drive
D. the intersection of processes subject-formation and exclusion: (p.50)
1. a part of process of abjection is a expulsion
ex: vomiting out food
(“a desire for separation and autonomy”)
2. the impossibility—the reason why abject need to be repressed
E. The Semiotic and The Symbolic:
1. the Semiotic: (p.51-2)
a. “murky”; “undifferentiated”; “lack of distinct borders and clear
separations”
b. similar to Kristeva’s chora –“pre-signifying”; “no objects”; “no
separation”
c. Herbst’s distinction (between choras and semotic):
(1) chora—“preverbal place”
(2) the semiotic : mode of subjectivity
d. “the return of the repressed” (similarity with uncanny)
2. the Symbolic: (p.53-5)
a. “grammatical”; “linguistic and social structural”
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b. threat by “memories”
c. the inauguration of the experience of abjection— establishment
of bodily boundaries (imperative)
☆ “The achievement of the Symbolic, language and identity—all of
which are interrelated—require a primal form of differentiation and or
separation to end the experience of syncretic unity until now shared
with the mother.”
d. the expulsion of abject
(1) “a precondition of the Symbolic”
(2) “a certain mastery of the abject”
e. the abject is necessary precondition of the subject, which
“continually attempts to expel”
f. the mechanism of abjection—exclusion
(1) three-part threat
(2) “never-stop demarcating”
(3)”insistence on the subject’s necessary relation to death, to
animality, and to materiality”
g. “To each ego its object, to each superego its abject”
h. The horror and sickness of the abject is “each individual’s
personalized guardian of the Symbolic”
3. the collapse of language—because of the “insignifiable” characteristic of
abject
IV. The Real:
--structure as language
A. Common with the Uncanny, the Abject: (p.56)
1.“dynamic of presence”:
a. persistent return-- a threatening force
b. being inescapable and inducing anxiety (like the uncanny)
2. pre-Symbolic-- “possesses no single object”
3. impossibility
4. repetition—“the death—drive’s mechanism”
5. paradoxical statue—may be manifest by Symbolic (p.57)
B. Traumatic qualities: (p.57-9)
1. “a radical and threatening formlessness”:
a. being outsides of language
b. impossibility to imagine or engage
c. “as the foundation of all that is human”
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2. exists both in mental and material world
3. “in-built with the primary process”—“the ‘meshes’ of pleasure principle”
☆ “Trauma,..., is above all, the breaking apart of meaning, structure, form,
cohesion, the fragmentation of experience and subjectivity which breaks the
subject apart and pushes toward what factors as an unrecoverable loss.”
4. foreclosure “constitutes what is expelled” (parallels with abjection)
5. “the rejecting mechanism integral”—“setting aside in order to live”
V. The body of signification:
A. Impossibility of Representation—the limits of discourse (p.60-1)
1. only approximate
2. the domain of ontological primacy—oceanic lack of distinctions
(uncanny, abject, and the Real)
3. blind-spots of discourse-- doughnut and penumbra
4. “the horror is never in the representation, but around it, like a glow or a
scent”
5. merely momentary obstacle to discourse—“reaffirm the ascendancy of the
Symbolic”
B. “an Outsider Within One’s Own Body” (p.62)
1. signification as the domain of prior meditation
2. conceal of “constitutive weakness”
3. the threaten force—the “ontological anxiety”
C. Interpretation:
1. the material of conscious experience “based on distortion, replacement,
analogues”
2. entire field of signification itself
VI. Conclusion:
A. body—nature; signification-- culture
1. their conflict produce various articulations
2. not plausibly separated
3. possibility and impossibility