File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 68


Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 14:56:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Tony Michael Roberts <roberts-AT-mail.msen.com>
Subject: new .sig


  I always said I don't have a .sig for the same reason I don't have
tattoos. I've got one of those diffuse postmodern selves Sherry Turkle
writes about. The tattoo or .sig which might seem to be really me at one
momemt can lose all resonance in the next as my mood/mode shifts in the
coyote-like way typical of me.  I don't think I'll ever psychologically
shape shift out from under this one.
  The first denial, the Great Existential Denial which makes all smaller,
more local denials possible, is the denial of all such psychical energies
as do not get coded as representation in the ego. The alterity of the
other evokes the threat of extinction to the extent that this very
alterity speaks to that which is in us more than we are in ourselves. The
alterity of the other represents by proxy the lack in us. This lack is the
distance or differance between this symptom which we think we are and the
un-nameable something which has this symptom. This lack and our reponse to
its representation by proxy in the other is the source of all
ideologically based violence. Striking out at the other is denying at the
top of our lungs what we are but can not know.

"The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the
subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par
excellence, the mental illiness of man."  Jacques Lacan



   

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