Friday, October 19, 2012

Two Trauma Communities: A Philosophical Reconciliation of Cultural and Psychiatric Trauma Theories


by Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FRCPC, FAPA
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Montreal

Presented at the Harvard Program for Refugee Trauma
Massachusetts General Hospital - Harvard Medical School
Cambridge, MA, USA
Monday, October 15, 2012

This presentation is based on my doctoral dissertation,
"Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology" (EGS, August 2012).

ABSTRACT

After a brief introduction to the theme of my doctoral investigation into trauma and event, with an overview of the main assertions about origins of trauma and event in the rupture or experiential cut in the discourse of being, a dichotomy in trauma theories is identified. We cannot characterize trauma as a unified discourse or as a spectrum even within one discipline. What brings conceptual order to the concept of trauma and to trauma studies is to discern a dichotomy as a separator or marker that divides the discourses along different axes and conceptualizations. This is a meta-concept that creates two groups or two poles around which certain notions or studies or traditions congeal. Yet, any given separator that creates a dichotomy is shifting, porous and unstable. In describing two theories of trauma she names mimetic and antimimetic theories, Ruth Leys lucidly demonstrates that, "from the turn of the century to the present there has been a continual oscillation between them, indeed that interpenetration of one by the other or alternatively the collapse of one into the other has been recurrent and unstoppable." Furthermore, Leys notes that historically, the mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy constantly invites and defeats all attempts to resolve it. Leys is consistent on this to the point that she predicts that our current debates are "fated to end in an impasse." Leys' own analysis becomes part of the meta-concept of trauma, such that her mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy confirms the notion of a dichotomy but does not exhaust it. Other dichotomies come into play and while we can separate their poles, they do not match evenly with each other and are sometimes even incongruent and incompatible. Trauma in fact has a historical structure, an idea that is congruent with Michel Foucault's notion of a discursive formation or episteme.

Trauma, as a concept or theory with its associated practices, has become an apparatus. Not only has "trauma" been constructed and put in play as an apparatus describing we want to name and explain but it is hard not to reach for this apparatus as an explanatory model, with all its conflations and confusions. The two trauma theories are intertwined not only across but even within each individual theory or group of researchers, rendering the dichotomy intractable in Leys' view. My own meta-concept places Leys' approach within a larger one: hers is one dichotomy among others. This is not to say that we can stand above the dichotomy but that if we see it as an apparatus, which is a discourse with a strategic function, we cna discern that it functions not as one dichotomy, one particular difference, but an epistemological cut in any possible discourse about trauma. We see this in the bivalence in this archaeology, from the word trauma itself, to the metaphors used to describe it, to the ways in which "wound" is deployed in Western culture. From Achilles' spear that both cuts and heals, to Plato's pharmakon which is both a poison and a remedy, this bivalence reaches its apogee in the current cultural theory of trauma which I call trauma as event. I do not share Leys' pessimistic conclusion that the dichotomy in trauma theories is intractable but rather that it will remain so as long as we unwittingly repeat it, as evidenced by the fact that we each generation rediscovers the notion of traumatic stress in different but structurally similar guises. Once we are aware of trauma as an apparatus, we may more consciously entertain other theories and find a new lexicon for trauma.

My own proposal is modest: first, I believe that trauma has accrued a supplementarity or excess (cf. Jacques Derrida). In Freudian terms, this supplementarity is overdetermined or multiply-determined. I maintain that a great proportion of the variation may be attributed precisely to the "looping effects" between the clinical use of trauma and its cultural avatar. Second, we must separate the various ways in which the word trauma is deployed and differentiate our vocabulary for different aspects of the trauma process. Third, and most salient, trauma must be separated radically from event, which is the subtext of cultural trauma theory.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

TRAUMA and EVENT - Doctoral dissertation abstract


TRAUMA and EVENT
A Philosophical Archaeology

Vincenzo Di Nicola
Doctoral Dissertation  
European Graduate School
 Defended 12 August 2012 and awarded Summa cum laude

This investigation examines the notion of psychic trauma as it has worked through professional discourses in psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry and entered broader public discourses in contemporary cultures to become the emblematic condition of our age, which we may discern as the age of trauma. Badiou’s philosophy of the event provides a stark contrast and precise counterweight for trauma theory. The basic premise of the investigation is that while the event opens possibilities, trauma closes them. As therapeutic discourses and scientific research have become polarized around shifting dichotomous discourses about trauma, cutting across all theories and cultures throughout the last century, we turn to philosophy, its methods and tools to redefine the aporias of trauma and event.

Three key philosophers are tasked by this investigation into trauma and event. Michel Foucault, philosopher of discourses and systems of thought, has documented how subjectivation occurs in society. Adapting Foucault’s work on the apparatus and the paradigm to create a new method of inquiry called philosophical archaeology, Giorgio Agamben is our philosopher of the threshold, carefully documenting desubjectivation in states of exception. Alain Badiou, our contemporary Platonist, philosopher of the exception called event, elaborates a typology of bodies-of-truth and subjectizable bodies. The work of this triumviri of philosophers is knit together to forge new answers to the aporias of trauma and event: the philosophical archaeology of the disruption of the discourse of being and the traumatic closing or evental opening of possibilities in the coming community.

This investigation is divided into three parts. Part I is a prolegomena to a philosophical archaeology of trauma. The aporias of trauma studies are defined by rewriting specific histories of the philosophical, political and professional discourses that have announced the age of trauma. A reading of the Akedah, the “binding” of Isaac by his father Abraham, frames the aporias of trauma and lends it name to an apparatus that allows the sacrifice of the sons in the name of the father, one generation in the interests of another: Isaac-Machine.

Part II conducts a philosophical archaeology of trauma’s estate in three sections,  examining first the rupture that creates discontinuity leading to trauma or event. Predicament (which parallels Badiou’s evental site) and porosity (which complements Badiou’s novation, which opens the possibility of change) are notions taken from psychiatry and philosophy. The dichotomous theories of trauma, organized around two ad hoc lists—aleph: trauma as a cultural trope, and beth: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a psychiatric disorder—allow us to understand and define trauma psychiatry contrasted to trauma as distributed phenomena. Trauma is defined as the destruction of experience which is investigated through a series of annotations and excursuses on its cultural origins, from the pharmakon, the skandalon and the scapegoat to a rhetorical reformulation of trauma as catachresis/apostrophe. A new model employing the truth tables of scientific research offers a new vocabulary for trauma and event and their simulacra. Second, the ruins of trauma’s estate are explored by reading three classic novels about trauma and children in wartime—Grass’ Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Morante’s La Storia/History—showing how Isaac-Machine is deployed as an apparatus, and concludes with excursuses on the text as a form-of-life and a theory of the machine in contemporary society. Third, philosophical excavations reveal and allow us to define nested hegemonies as complex apparatuses operating in society. This is applied to Agamben’s reading of the Muselmänner of Auschwitz as a new paradigm of desubjectivation. Two contrasting readings of the child Hurbinek, witnessed in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and read by Agamben, are polemically left unsutured.

Part III responds to a challenge from Badiou to abandon subjective phenomenology as a pillar of modern phenomenological psychiatry to announce a prospectus for an evental psychiatry which will embrace a new phenomenology for psychiatry. The rationale for an evental psychiatry is elaborated by identifying the orphan cases of trauma psychiatry: the threshold people whose suffering is silent and invisible, Badiou’s “uncounted” in Agamben’s “state of exception.” Badiou’s contribution to thought is enshrined in the announcement of Badiou’s Sickle as an instrument of discernment to separate philosophy or psychiatry from its conditions. A detailed case review of “Ellen West,” Binswanger’s foundational case of Daseinanalyse demonstrates the failures of subjective phenomenology in psychiatry. The wagers of phenomenological psychiatry and evental psychiatry are made clear along with an outline for a theory and practice of an evental psychiatry of the threshold. This investigation closes on a new definition of the subject and of the subject of psychiatry. Rejecting the descent into the spiral staircase of the self of classical psychoanalysis and of trauma psychiatry, an evental psychiatry allows subjects to come into view through others, where we are subject to truth. Where trauma psychiatry essentializes the atomized individual, a psychiatry of the event offers an opening outward, to bloom towards worlds and nature, towards community and others, where one becomes two, and more …

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Doctorate in Philosophy Awarded Summa Cum Laude

This blog is based on research I was doing for my doctorate in philosophy. 

On 12 August 2012, I defended my dissertation entitled, "Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology," with Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Wolfgang Schirmacher at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland.

The doctorate was awarded Summa Cum Laude.

After my holidays, I will post some excerpts from my dissertation and decide how to continue this blog.
 


Saturday, June 16, 2012

Excursus: Badiou’s Sickle—Philosophy Against its Conditions



Whereas some thinkers have sutured or fused philosophy to one of its four generic procedures or conditions—art, love, science or politics—Badiou’s gesture is to separate philosophy from its conditions in a principled act of separation and discernment which I hereby name Badiou’s sickle. An argument could be made to call this gesture a scythe or shears—all three tools involving cutting or pruning. It is a cognate of Ockham’s razor (lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony) and Hume’s fork, other instruments of thought denoting distinction and separation. There is a family resemblance,[i] too, to Wittgenstein’s ladder, invoked as an argument one uses like steps or a ladder to “climb beyond them.” The reference is to be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)[ii]

The difference is that the conditions from which we wish to separate philosophy are not merely stepping stones, instruments or means to an end which can be discarded once we arrive at the end. Neither are they “lies-to-children” in an update on Plato’s Noble Lie. The conditions have the force of suturing philosophy precisely because they are truth-procedures in themselves, hence it would be a mistake to dismiss them like so many “useful idiots.”[iii]

On the other hand, there is the temptation to make philosophy itself one of its conditions. This is the proposal of Slovenian theoretical psychoanalyst Alenka Zupancic in her essay on the “fifth condition.”[iv] To recapitulate, Zupancic argues the following: philosophy’s  conditions do not provide a foundation for philosophy, because if they did this would “suture” philosophy and lead to its “suspension,” or abandoning itself to one of its conditions. Nonetheless, she posits that:

One could thus say that there is also a fifth condition of philosophy: philosophy has to pull away from the immediate grip of its own conditions, while nevertheless remaining inder the effect of these conditions.[v]

She arrives at this by acknowledging that Badiou is the first philosopher to conceptualize the singular notion of the Two. Acknowledging that philosophy must “take place within the space of the infinite process of truth without itself becoming a process of truth” that is, “situated on the same level as generic procedures yet a certain distance from them,”[vi] Zupancic argues that philosophy must rely on the “immanent count-for-two.” Zupancic concludes that the count-for-two is also a fifth condition which “defines the very relationship of philosophy with its conditions and keeps it from merging with them, as well as from appearing as their independent sum.”[vii]

In a discussion of Badiou’s politics, Oliver Feltham poses the parallel problem of inhabiting philosophy, that is, “how to take a position within its field, how to even identify its domain via a ‘front,’ a line of conflict, while at the same time completely renaming and refiguring it.”[viii] Feltham calls it “the renovator’s problem[ix]: how do you inhabit what you want to tear down and rebuild?” Citing Althusser’s failed project of trying to fuse politics and philosophy, Feltham argues that philosophy must rigorously separate its own names from the immanent names of a truth procedure and avoid the trap of (con)fusing procedures or conditions with one another (e.g., political art). On the other hand, if these procedures do not intersect or have a common language (Badiou does not present Cantorian set theory or discuss a poem by Mallarmé in the same way), just how does philosophy discern their truths?

While I am aware of this aporia in Badiou’s thought and sympathetic to her argument, I think Zupancic’s resolution is not altogether coherent with Badiou’s approach, in part for the larger problems that Feltham poses. The problem with Zupancic’s elaboration of Badiou’s argument about conditions is that Badiou has posited an instrument of absolute separation, not of degrees. He draws a sharp line—an epistemological cut—between philosophy and its conditions that will be among his lasting gifts to thought. To this cut,  I give the name Badiou’s sickle or scythe, an instrument we will apply to other fields, notaby psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In this analysis, psychiatry cannot be reduced, fused or sutured to one of its conditions—be they the chimeras named  “cognitive behaviour therapy,” “existential analysis,” “neuroscience and genetics,” “phenomenological psychiatry,” “systemic family therapy” or “sociocultural studies.” It is in this sense that RD Laing eschewed the label “antipsychiatry” and described himself as an “orthodox psychiatrist,” affirming the key mission of psychiatry as clinical.   

In Jewish religious observance, there is a ritual called havdalah, meaning the separation of the sacred from the profane.[x],[xi] Badiou’s sickle functions as a rite of separation of philosophy, which is consacrated to pure thought, from its important, even necessary but subordinate, not to say profane, conditions.

Let us therefore add Badiou’s scythe to the tool-kit of the philosopher. Along with the workaday objects every thinker needs—a ladder (Wittgenstein), a razor (Ockham) and a fork (Hume)—we can now add instruments for cutting, pruning, and sometimes clear-cutting: Badiou’s shears, sickle, scythe.




[i] “Family resemblance” is a term introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953), §67, p. 32.
[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden (1922), p. 189.
[iii] The term is often attributed to V.I. Lenin but its provenance is not established.
[iv] Alenka Zupancic, “The fifth condition” in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (2004), pp. 191-201.
[v] Ibid., p. 191.
[vi] Ibid., p. 191.
[vii] Ibid., p. 201.
[viii] Oliver Feltham, op. cit., p. 17.
[ix] Ibid., p. 17 (emphasis added).
[x] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966).
[xi] Jean Soler, “The dietary prescriptions of the Hebrews,” trans. by Elborg Forster, The New York Review of Books, June 14, 1979.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Derrida on the Event, Part II: Derrida the “Yad”



Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of
the ghost.
Jacques Derrida (1994, p. 10)

For Derrida, the event, if we can call it that, is repetition.

There is always something spectral in Derrida, ghosts are everywhere. More deeply, with his theory of iteration, everything is iteration, repetition, dissemination. A paradox: if there is only repetition, but repetition as alterity such that things are not perfectly preserved, the original utterance can only have a ghostly presence.

There is something incremental, geological about this view of change …
If something is an iteration as repetition, even if it altered, distorted then change is slowed down, it is evolution not revolution, suggesting glacial, geological processes not ruptures and novation.

What anxieties are harboured here? Indeed, one is always left with the feeling of a profound apprehension in Derrida, what RD Laing called “ontological insecurity.”

I have never seen a photo of Derrida with eyes at rest – his eyes seem furtive, darting, almost avoidant. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem that begins:

Of three or four people in a room, one is always at the window

Derrida is the one at the window, always on the lookout.

If in Heidegger,1 we feel the thinker resigned (I hesitate to say reconciled) to serene solitude, blunting an ancient anguish, in Derrida, we sense something akin to Simone Weil’s uprootedness and together, their concerns create a new category, a new address for being, that is the non-address of non-place.

Real being can have no easy purchase here, only anxious repetitions of the word, fussy annotations of the text, philological dissections, ontological regressions, recapitulations and embellishments, glosses and supplements.

Both Derrida and Weil are propelled into the initiatory logos. For the ethereal Weil, a word that never quite takes flesh (she does not undertake the conversion to Catholicism, does not quite meet Christ in the flesh; she is as uncomfortable dans sa peau—in her skin, as the French say, as Pierre Janet’s “Nadia” or Ludwig Binswanger’s “Ellen West”).

For Derrida, the word can barely make it off the page let alone become flesh.
Like Jewish scholars whose respect for the written word is so great that they do not touch the page but rather use an avatar of the pointer called a yad (Hebrew: די, “hand”), so named because it is literally a small hand with the forefinger extended, to mark their place during a Torah reading, Derrida’s oeuvre can be imagined as a yad—pointing us, always “with patience and trembling, exact fingers” like the lovers that Amichai described in his poem, “Threading,” back to the word and its precise meanings and origins. Derrida the yad: who so loved the word that he could not bring himself to touch it, but only to point and to deconstruct our reading of it.

*

Footnote

In spite of everything, we can bracket Heidegger and Celan together, through Hölderlin if nothing else, for their anxiety about belonging, expressed physically (nature, the land) in Heidegger and Hölderlin and by almost schizophrenic “metaphors that are meant” in Celan (the ashes in the ground, the ashes rising with smoke to the sky). Anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson describes the peculiar analogical mind of both Catholic—“the communion host is the body”—and schizophrenic logic—he deftly deconstructs the psychotic “word salad” of a patient who starved himself, saying only “Manzanita wood.” Bateson is able to hear the message: “Man’s an eater (if the conditions were right, he) would.


References

Amichai, Yehuda. “Threading.” In Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (trans. by Harold Schimmel. New York: Harper &  Row, p. 42.

Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx (trans. by Peggy Kamuf). New York: Routledge.

*

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Excursus: Philosophy & Poetry as Prologue


Every work can be regarded as a prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represents only sketches or death masks.               —Giorgio Agamben (1993, p. 3)

In his preface to The Pages of Day and Night, Adonis states, “I write in a language that exiles me.” Exile is the mother-country of the Arab poet: “in the beginning was the exile, not the word” (p. xiii).

This explains why the Arab poet embodies a double absence—and absence from himself as well as an absence from the Other. He lives between these two exiles: the internal one and the external one. To paraphrase Sartre, he lives between two hells: the I and the Other.
The I is not I, nor is it the Other.
Absence and exile constitute the only presence.
—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.”
—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

For a whole series of poets and philosophers, from Adonis to Agamben, from Hölderlin to Heidegger, the event is language, the utterance, the possibility of human speech, the reach for meaning perhaps, but above all the utterance. Both Adonis and Agamben express it unambiguously here: poetry is the promise of a beginning, a beginning never ended, iterated in perpetuity (with echoes of Derrida); every work is prologue, a broken cast, a death mask, for other works which are themselves only sketches. This is neither nihilism nor resignation but an affirmation that it is the utterance, not the dialogue (Bakhtin), nor the face-to-face encounter (Levinas), nor the received meaning (Gadamer, Ricouer), nor the construction (Searle) of what is said. Simply the endless (iterable, repeatable—Derrida, again) effort to say it. 

Adonis is firm: “To be means to be something. Meanings are only apprehended through words. I speak; therefore, I am. My existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, i.e., to write, to begin” (p. xv).

We may go further, recalling Primo Levi’s witnessing of the child Hurbinek in Auschwitz. A tremendous effort was expended to undertand his name—Hurbinek,  attributed to the child—and his one word, mastiklo. The stakes are not in what it means, but that it is said at all. This is a message from the concentration camp world, which we can neither understand nor ignore. And which simply demands of us that we listen to it, hear it, acknowledge it silently, lest we shatter all else that may follow …

If you do not witness what cannot be said, you will shatter what can be said.
al-Niffari, a Sufi mystic (cited by Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism, p. 212)


References

Adonis (2000). The Pages of Day and Night (trans. by Samuel Hazo). Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press.

Adonis (2005). Sufism and Surrealism (trans. by Judith Cumberbatch). London: Saqi Books.
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (trans. by Liz Heron). London: Verso.

“Homo Ludens” and the Event


From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

It may surprise my readers that in addressing as sombre and serious a question as trauma, I should refer to Johan Huizinga’s great work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, described by Martin Buber as “one of the few works informed about the problem of man.”

But it is almost impossible in fact to think about what trauma displaces, interrupts, closes down without considering the possibility that one of the characteristics that we may suspect is opposed to trauma is play. And as a corollary that Event would by definition be “in play” and open to play. Play is at the heart of the Event, as that which resists authority and which opens up discourse through a breaking, even a shattering at times, of rationality, order, logic. In any imaginable “logic of worlds,” to reference Badiou’s last great work, there must also be play …

In his chapter on “play-forms in philosophy,” Huizinga in fact traces play to the Greek sophists but eventually we encounter “at the centre of the circle” also Socrates and Plato. Who can forget the performative, playful, simultaneously mocking and deeply engaged dialogue of Socrates with  Lysias in Platos’s Phaedra? That rich, playful dialogue, the shelves of which have already stocked both Plato’s pharmacy and Derrida’s deconstruction.

From the theory of the riddle, especially the griphos, a joking “question-game” played for “rewards or forfeits” to the “pompous perorations of the sophist” to the Socratic dialogue, Huizinga holds (p. 148) that “the transition is always fluid.”

This is what interests us here—the elaboration of the dialogue as a form of play in the hands of Socrates and his scribe Plato. Describing the sophists, Huizinga says: “The argument goes back and forth like a shuttle and, in its flyings, epistemology takes on the appearance of a noble game.” Huizinga concludes: “It is not only the sophists that play—Socrates and Plato do likewise.” (p. 149)

Plato is supposed to have followed Sophron when composing his dialogues.
Aristotle declares the dialogue a form of mimos, which is an offshoot of comedy. It is not surprising then that Aristotle reckons Socrates and Plato among the jugglers and thaumaturges, along with the sophists (Huizinga, p. 150; Aristotle, Poetica 1147B; H. Reich, Der Mimus, 1903, p. 354).

Huizinga argues that the “dialogue is art-form, a fiction” and that no matter how polished “real conversation” was among the Greeks, “it could never have had the gloss of literary dialogue” (p. 150).

After taking us on a tour of the development of agonistic debates among the schoolmen (or Scholastics) in the Middle Ages with the invention of the University and the public debate as a form of intellectual jousting, with agonistic and playful elements, Huizinga introduces Erasmas, the great humanist who wielded humour, satire and play as deftly as a surgeon’s scalpel. And it is here that Huizinga, speaking through Erasmus, takes us on breathtaking leap from the origins of the dialogue among the sophists and in Socrates, through Aristotle and the Middle Ages, to arrive at this critical insight: that without play, there will not be novelty (what Badiou calls novation in French), there will not be the possibility of the Event …

Erasmus complains in “a letter to his stiff-necked opponent Noel Bédier, of the narrowness of the Schools which only deal with material handed down by their predecessors and, in a controversy, ban any point of view that does not conform to their own particular tenets.”

In my opinion, it is quite unnecessary to act in the Schools as you act when playing cards or dice, where any infringement of the rules spoils the game. In a learned discussion, however, there should be nothing outrageous or risky in putting forward a novel idea.
—Erasmus (cited in Huizinga, p. 156; Erasmi opus epist., ed. Allen, vi, No. 1581, 621 sq.)

Huizinga, Johan (1955). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Monday, May 28, 2012

Excursus: Psychoanalysis as a Paranoid Theory of Antiphilosophy


From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

Psychoanalysis has a paranoid substrate in its discourse …
not because it points to specific entities, things or even processes but because it believes that things and events are connected, that they have meaning, that they are discoverable and analyzable, as Freud says. Furthermore, psychoanalysis holds that there is a traumatic origin and core to symptoms. As a result of all this, psychoanalysis believes that anything and everything that happens inside or outside of therapy is “grist for the mill”—meaning discoverable, analyzable and connected.

Psychoanalysis has no theory of contingency.
This has many consequences, both for its capacity to account for daily life and reality and its capacity to account for change in the shape of non-deterministic events.

Psychoanalysis cannot have a theory of the Event:
it is a hermetic universe, filled at best with hermeneutic possibilities
but these interpretations do not—pace catharsis, insight, mentalization and other such processes—actually open possibilities, only give meaning to what is already there, in a deterministic and rather closed way.

This is why psychoanalysis is and must perforce remain a theory of trauma, the closing down of possibilities laid by early processes, Anna Freud’s (1936) “developmental lines,” the drive and its defenses, and the whole infrastructure that this produces.

It is not accidental that Lacan’s reading, rereading and reformulation of Freud is antiphilosophical and that Badiou has been snared in a decades-long entanglement with Lacan.

Lacan is Badiou’s “Tar Baby,” like the Uncle Remus tale … once you get your paws stuck on it, there is no changing the nature of tar, it sticks to anything!

Lacan in fact goes much further than Freud in locating paranoia at the heart of human development, arguing that the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge operates on a paranoiac principle (see Freedman, 1984, p. 17).

It is not only paranoia which is totalizing and hermeneutic but psychoanalysis itself.
This explains to me Freud’s investment in the Schreber case: the foundations of psychoanalysis were at stake in his making of this case both meaningful (as opposed to random, contingent) and canonical (emblematic, paradigmatic).

This project was bound to fail, above all because it is, in Freud’s own terms, overdetermined.

*

In his essay on Philip K. Dick, Freedman elaborates a theory of paranoia …

“But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of an especially systematic and ambitious type. In the essay ‘On Narcissism,’ Freud explicitly links paranoia with the formation of speculative systems (XIV: 96), and in the reading of Schreber he notes a profound affinity between paranoia and megalomaniacal delusions of world catastrophe (XII:68-71). The paranoiac is not only someone for whom every detail is meaningful - for whom nothing can be left uninterpreted or taken for granted – but someone who holds a conception of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thoroughgoing, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her own grand system. The totalizing closure of paranoia is, in fact, noted as lucidly by Dick as by Freud: in ‘Shell Game’ (one of Dick’s finest stories and the germ of ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon’ [19641]), the massive frustration of attempting to break down such closure is powerfully recorded, and the basic problem is clearly stated. ‘The paranoid is totally rigid,’ says one of the characters. ‘He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’ (Dick, 1977, p. 181). (My italics)

Carl Freedman (1984). Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Science Fiction Studies, 11: 15-24.

Philip K. Dick (1977). The Turning Wheel and Other Stories. London: Coronet Books.

Vincenzo Di Nicola