From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas & Freud: creation, discovery, genesis
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 19:40:56 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)


On Thu, 28 Dec 2000 00:35:01 +0100 gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de wrote:

> The odd aspect of PA is that an understanding of its theories  depends on 
having experienced it concretely in one's own life.  Adorno speaks in this 
context of a 'logic of subsumption' as  opposed to a perception of the 'object 
in itself'.

I'm not completely convinced by this. Experience is not epistemology. I think 
familiarity with case studies helps a great deal though, and ignoring the 
clinical side altogether is simply... well... particularly unhelpful. I'm not 
quite sure what it would mean to "experience" metapsychology (please let me 
know if I'm misunderstanding you here). There is a provocative article about 
this by Joan Scott, "Experience" in Feminists Theorize the Political (ed. 
Butler and Scott).

> > Unlike empirical or hermeneutic interests, psychoanalysis
> > provides cognitive resources to extricate the Hegelian "causality of
> > fate"

> I've pondered this reference several times myself. Hegel at any rate  was 
referring to 'macro'-events: antiquity/feudalism, middle  ages/french 
revolution. i.e. not *individual*, biographic experiences of *this* or that 
client.

Jay Bernstein quotes Hegel, "In the hostile power of fate, universal is not 
severed from particular in the way in which the law, as universal, is opposed 
to man or his inclination as the particular. Fate is just the enemy, and man 
stands over against it as a power fighting against it... Only through a 
departure from that united life which is neither regulated by law nor at 
variance with law, only through the killing of life, is something alien 
produced. Destruction of life is not the nullification of life but its 
diremption and the destruction consists in its transformation into an enemy" 
(from Hegel's The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, in Bernstein, Recovering 
Ethical Life, 83).

[what follows is cut and pasted from diss]

The struggle for recognition, for Habermas, meets up with the "causality of 
fate" through ideological distortions of intersubjective relations. Habermas 
illustrates this point with reference to Hegel's discussion of a "criminal" 
from his fragment on the Spirit of Christianity. The "criminal" is one who 
"revokes the moral basis" (the complementary interchange of noncompulsory 
communication and the mutual satisfaction of interests) by putting himself as 
individual in the place of the totality. The criminal, then, sets himself up as 
the universal. This assumption triggers the process of fate which strikes back 
at him. The struggle engendered by the actions of the criminal ignite 
hostility, which marks a loss of complementary interchange and generates what 
Habermas will eventually call moral consciousness. The criminal, then, is 
confronted by the power of deficient life and experiences guilt" (Habermas, 
Theory and Practice, 148). The guilt suffered by the criminal emanates from the 
repression of the "departed life" which the criminal himself has provoked. The 
"causality of fate" is the power of suppressed life at work, which can only be 
reconciled when, out of the experience of the negativity of a sundered life, 
the longing ("the passion for critique") for that which has been lost arises 
and necessitates identifying one's own denied identity in the alien existence 
one fights against (Habermas, TP, 148). The struggle for recognition, in 
Hegel's early work, depicts the relation between subjects who attach their 
whole being to each detail of a possession they have laboured to gain: a 
struggle of life-and-death. The abstract self-assertion of parties contemptuous 
of each other is resolved by the combatants risking their lives and thus 
overcoming resolving and revoking the singularity they have inflated into a 
totality. As in the case of the criminal, although in a different way, fate 
avenges itself on the combatants, as punishment; as the destruction of the 
self-assertion which severs itself from the moral totality. The result, 
Habermas notes, is not the immediate recognition of oneself in the other 
(reconciliation) but a position of the subject with respect to each other on 
the basis of mutual recognition; the basis of the knowledge that the identity 
of the "I" is possible solely by means of the identity of the other...


> At its best PA sticks to managable experiences: dreams, desires, 
disappointments, fears. The 'macro'-events not only have no *place* here, they 
are counterproductive. It is *this* hesitation, *this* dream, *this* specific 
formulation, *this* silence or embarrassment. To integrate all this into a 
glorious macro-synthesis on God/the universe/ the human race/the future loses 
what is specific about the kind of empiricism which PA has developed. Benjamin 
called it 'micro-logic'.

Hmmm... So what do you think of using concepts like "disavowal" or "repression" 
for providing insight into nationalism? or a particular public discourse? For 
instance: in the film Fight Club, the "first rule of Fight Club is... you do 
not talk about Fight Club" - here the reference is obvious - you don't talk 
about Fight Club because the 'experience' of Fight Club (jouissance) is 
*closed* to non-members... it isn't just that you don't spread the word - you 
also covet with pride the 'mystical' union... The "rules" in other words are 
established on the basis of a particular disavowal... which is constitutive of 
the entire social activity...

> We should at some point get back to our proposed discussion of the difference 
between the words 'transference' and 'validity claim'.

Good, Ok.

> Re: discovery (the production of scientific knowledge), creation (the 
production of a new means of self-knowledge and self-identity within a larger 
community), and genesis (the question of origin and the thematic possibility of 
making meaningful distinctions between discovery and creation).


> They seem to be two kinds of enterprises: (a) what does Habermas *mean*; (b) 
is what he *means* also *true*?

To be a bit glib, this schema requires a "vanishing mediator" - the idea that 
in order to "see" anything at all, you have to make something disappear. In 
doing so we accomplish a discovery... which is simultaneously a creation... but 
as for the genesis... there is always a "leap" or a logical "gap" ... Some 
thoughts from Zizek's Tarrying With the Negative might help here: For instance, 
any choice is an act which retroactively grounds its own reasons. Between the 
causal chain of reasons provided by knowledge and the act of the choice to see 
something, there is always a leap which cannot be accounted for by the 
preceding chain. This gap between reasons and their effect is the very 
foundation of what we can call transference, the transferential relationship, 
epitomized by love: an example from Readers' Digest: "On the first date, I 
learned that he could ride out rought hours and stiff client demands. On the 
second, I learned that what he couldn't ride was a bicycle. That's when I 
decided to give him a chance" - the 'endearing foible' here is the idea that 
love is an index of imperfection; "for that very reason, he cannot ride a 
bicycle, he needs me even more"). So, as Habermas posits it, I would argue that 
there is a real problem here. Comprehending the 'origin' is always after the 
fact... and it only makes sense as 'the origin' insofar as we *choose* to 
constitute it as such, as the grounds for our later thought. In other words, 
through "creation" we "discover" our "genesis." With the irony here being that 
our "genesis" (the grounds of reason) are "created" - a manufactured object 
which "becomes us" through a choice....

ken



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