Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays - Softcover

Johns, Charles William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782798757 ISBN 13: 9781782798750

Verlag: IFF BOOKS, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

An ontological and epistemological framework and foundation for the psychological symptom 'neurosis'.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles William Johns is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Lincoln. He is interested in liberating the psychotic, neurotic and 'in-human' tendencies from within the ostensibly intellectual and moral desires found in philosophical disciplines. He is a founding member of the Lincoln Philosophy Forum UK.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays

By Charles William Johns

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Charles William Johns
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-875-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Forewords:, 
Neurotic Ontology by Graham Freestone, 
Ballet as Sleeping Beauty by Kirsten Wilkinson, 
Preface: A Philosophy of Neurosis/Four Fireworks, 
Humiliation, Idealism or What Forces Us to Think From Consciousness?, 
Rebellion: or what Man can do with desire, 
Immanence, 
The consequence of creativity, 
Desire, 
Being, 
Vertigo: the lost and the lonely, 
I Obsession, 
II Words, 
III The 'Lost' and the 'Lonely', 
IV The Vertiginous Subject, 
Incompatible Ballerina: A Meditation on Desire, Meaning and Beauty, 
End Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Humiliation, Idealism, or what forces us to think from consciousness?

Humiliation is first philosophy in the sense that one must participate as learner or seeker in relation to the 'knowledge' that they so ignorantly desire. The vulnerable process of standing face-to-face and 'open' to 'knowledge' also has a brutish violence to it – "I purport to want to know, I purport to not yet know, but I also purport that I know that this process will lead me to knowledge and that the seduction of the goal of a particular knowledge connects to my equivocal desire, is legitimate, honest, transparent and true.

The construct of knowledge and its method (asceticism) automatically posits the subject as slave to knowledge, slave to the assimilation (order/law) of the particular discourse that this knowledge has found expression in. To read or listen is to have made time for it (labour), to abide by it (law), to accept and assert such as signifying/significant, and finally the construct of knowledge and its method makes us slave to the ideal of knowledge i.e. we not only sublimate ourselves in the process of trying to know, we also believe that there is saviour, truth or the real in the very acquisition and exposition of knowledge (there must be some kind of comeuppance for our little struggles). In fact we do not know this: we may have constructed institutions, caricatures, values and rewards for persons that we identify as knowers, their knowledge may have achieved a level of construction whereby we can utilize this construct in esoteric or exoteric situations, but we do not know – outside of utility and desire – where this ostensible knowledge really leads, whether it enters the real.

Hence we are humiliated by the vulnerable act of seeking knowledge (asking for help) as opposed to the sovereign impossibility of 'thinking for oneself', we are humiliated that we even believe that knowledge will help us, we are humiliated by the 'forced' labour that 'knowledge' seems to require – that forces us to become one of knowledge's workers (but doesn't knowledge also need its knowers)?

It may be helpful to describe the sources of this humiliation as in a sense antithetical. Part of the subject's humiliation could be described as stemming from religion and the other part as stemming from its counterpart, its enemy, the sovereign ego. What I have here termed 'religion' and the 'ego' have not always been seen as antithetical, in- fact why should they be? The ego finds power in the religious order of things, s/he just needs to find his place (or is given his place) within this order. The operation of religion, institutionally and within its texts is the naming and designating of the ego within its political and metaphysical power-relations (the bishops role and status in relation to the Church, Paul's role and status in relation to the operation of Christianity etc.). Isn't the ego a type of theologizing of itself, turning its status into something above and beyond the sum of its parts, its characteristics and its biological constraints? Is not the concept of religion also an extension of the ego, the desire to construct a world where subjects are both the centre of importance (care, love, pity, our saviour Jesus Christ, our God that loves and looks over us etc.) and are also given the possibility to transcend this original structure of signification by sinning, over-ruling Christianity. The Ego and Religions inextricability can cause somewhat contradictory results; the ego enjoys the security of being posited within a larger theological system; the Christian does not need to struggle to keep the authority of his ego in-tact because its reality lies in 'the starry heavens above and the moral law below'. However, the ego reminds us of Descartes 'doubt' (or the doubt of Thomas); s/he asks 'could there be more reality elsewhere?', 'could I accumulate more power somehow?' and 'is my father really alive ... is he mocking me?!'. In order for the ego to be truly sovereign it had to kill its maker, overcome him and take the entire universe for itself; we can see this notion already in the New Testament and also in its demise encapsulated by Nietzsche's proclamation 'God is Dead ... who killed him?!'. We could aptly describe this contradictory characteristic of the ego – via the terrains or religion – as dialectical ( ... as neurotically dialectical).

Does the concept of the ego not depend on the very presupposition that it requires something outside of it to give it admission into signification i.e. Jacques Lacan's notion of the subject emerging from out of a symbolically coded society/ reality and the need for the subject to identify with this society/ reality in order for it to gain selfhood?

Through this trajectory of thought we could say that all designations of any kind depend on both a context and on the Other that co-creates and sanctifies the identification/bond of the designation. A far too crude example would be the designation of an 'I' that is also partially constructed and embedded within a larger social convention of language and a 'logic' of taxonomy/ classification of 'things' and their distinctions.

Now, my polemic here, apart from instantiating humiliation as a certain paradigm in which forms of knowledge take shape and are desired, is to explore the double-bind/contradiction of humiliation, to show that humiliation moves both in the direction of the self (ego) and in the direction of the Other (religion). This is not just true of humiliation but of knowledge itself. On the one hand there is a characterisation of knowledge that desires to be truly sceptical of all constructs of pre-existing knowledge i.e. criticality/scepticism. It is sceptical of knowledge's 'foundations', but also (in an extremely philosophical manner) it is sceptical of the knowledge that guarantees perceptions' 'reality'; the ostensible 'gift' or 'myth of the given'. On the other hand, however subconsciously or naturally, there is a humiliation/knowledge that accepts (and perhaps affirms) the relation between a faith in experience and a 'truth-of-the-matter' that causes and reflects such faith/experience, even in such practices of scepticism (Hume accepted this belief as a sceptic). After all, the gift of the 'I' that thinks, which apparently cannot be refuted, must be seen as a gift that the sceptic must affirm before mobilizing his many complaints as to the apparent reality of the external world and the constructs of knowledge and certainty. There is also a sovereign humility within the sceptic when s/he asks "what can I do?", and then there is the humility that touches the Other when s/he asks "what can I do in the presence of life/knowledge"? The first subordinates his faith in a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: IFF BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782798757
• ISBN 13: 9781782798750
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar