TRICOTER: An Essay in Philosophical Archaeology

Tricoter

Wiktionnaire

tricoter transitif 1^er groupe (conjugaison)

1. Exécuter un tissu à mailles, soit à la main, à l’aide d’aiguilles longues et émoussées, soit avec un métier spécial.

False relation with “tricher” which gave, in the XV and XVI centuries: trichot, tricotement, tricoter, tricoteur which mean chicaneur, chicaner, chicane

Came more likely from trique, the wooden needle having been named un tricot or petite trique

English: knit

German: stricken

Portuguese: fazer meias, fazer renda

tricot

Déverbal de tricoter formé sur trique et le suffixe diminutif -ot (soit « bâtonnet », « aiguille à tricoter »).

*

http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/tricoter

Étymol. et Hist. A. 1. Mil. xv^e s. « courir, sauter » (Banquet du boys, Poésies fr. des XV^e et XVI^e s., X, 219 ds Gdf.); 2. 1677 (d'un cheval) « faire des mouvements de jambes très rapides, mais sans ampleur » (Solleysel, Nouv. méthode pour dresser les chevaux, p. 231); 3. a) av. 1741 « remuer vivement les jambes ou les pattes pour courir, danser, etc. » (J.-B. Rousseau, Allég., I, 2 ds Littré); b) 1819 tricoter des jambes (L. Balzac, let. in Balzac, Corresp., I, p. 56 ds Quem. DDL t. 34); c) 1891 « pédaler vivement à bicyclette » (Le Cycliste, avr. ds Petiot); d) 1950 (en parlant d'un facteur) « aller d'un trottoir à l'autre pour desservir une rue » (d'apr. Esn.). B. 1. Fin du xvi^e s. « exécuter un ouvrage en mailles entrelacées, avec des aiguilles spéciales » (Christophe de Bordeaux, Chambrière à louer ds Rec. de poésies fr. des XV^e et XVI^e s., éd. A. de Montaiglon, t. 1, p. 101); 2. 1611 intrans. (Cotgr.). Dér. de tricot²*; dés. -er. Les jambes, puis les aiguilles à tricoter, ont été comparées à des bâtons que l'on agite (A, B). Au sens B, tricoter a remplacé l'anc. verbe brocher.

*

Tricotage: Knitting Together Philosophy

I also have my crochet.

It dates from when I began to think.

Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole …

Crochet, souls, philosophy …

All the religions of the world ….

All that entertains us in the leisure hours of our existence

—Fernando Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos

(Ref: Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Ed. and trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 1998, p. 17)

There is a lovely French verb, tricoter, meaning in the plain sense to knit or to pedal a bicycle. Derived from tricot, it’s origin is speculative and perhaps comes from the word trique, a large stick, and the diminutive suffix –ot, a variant of estrique, from the Frankish strikan, related to “strike” in English. There is a false etymological relation to tricher (to trick, cheat or deceive) which in the XV and XVI centuries gave trichot, tricotement, tricoter, tricoteur meaning chicane, chicaner, chicaneur  (argument, to argue, one who argues). As with many words derived from concrete objects and actions, tricot has a surfeit of metaphoric associations, from “quick repetitive action” and “strike” to “erection” (avoir la trique).

My own associations to it are fanciful. With one ear, I hear the tri of triage, from the French trier, “to sort, select, choose,” used since WWI to mean the sorting of wounded soldiers into three groups: those who needed immediate care to survive, the walking wounded who could wait, and those who would die anyway. With the other, I hear the tri of tricolore, France’s three-coloured flag with its symbolism and the ideals of the French Revolution, brought together in moderation. As an Italian, il tricolore italiano of the Cispadane Republic after Napoleone crossed into Italy in 1797 also comes to mind.

So, without threatening violence (strikan) or deception (tricher) and with as little unpleasantness as possible (chicane), much less an excess of passion (avoir la trique), I propose to tricoter, to knit together three major thinkers in this work: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault. All three are fluent if not native speakers of French and share important philosophical traditions. I read them in their original languages (French, Italian) but will use readily available English translations here for the purposes of communication, with frequent reference to the originals which I hold to be authoritative. All three are—in varying measures—scholars of etymology, history, philology, and philosophy with ready access to the Latin and Greek sources of European thought and to French, German and Italian philosophical traditions. Agamben adds to this a scholarly interest in the Hebrew sources of Church history through both Latin and Greek (see my translation of his essay, “The Church and the Kingdom”). Here, I must confess my scholarly limitations, as my four years of study in Latin and single year each of studies in Greek, German and Arabic allow me only a passive understanding of those rich worlds, so that I must rely on translations. My immersion in Hebrew, both biblical and modern, is more profound and longlasting but not systematic so that, again, I prefer to trust scholarly renditions. 

I understand Agamben to be simply the most careful contemporary reader of Foucault, much as Lacan read Freud, advancing the Foucauldian project in the areas of law and liturgy (as he quipped, the only two fields that Foucault did not investigate), and take from him a methodology he proposes as philosophical archaeology. With a lineage that includes Foucault and Freud, not least with the invocation of archaelogy, this method refreshes thought to make it contemporary. It is a new form of critical theory. Foucault engages me most on the question of madness, the end of man, and methodologies for understanding discourses. It is a new way to think about ideology. Badiou is in a line of major thinkers who have rethought being and its implications and like his predecessors has things to tell us about psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. That is largely because event means novation, the bringing of change, new possibilities into being. Unlike his predecessors, the professionals in those domains have hardly bothered to engage him seriously. This work proposes to do just that.

So this is my tricotage, a knitting together and a sorting out of a troika or triumviri of philosophers I call to task to forge new anwers to some rather well-tread aporias about trauma and event: the philosophical archaeology of the disruption of the discourse of being and the evental opening or traumatic closing of possibilities in the coming community.

*

Note: As I write this, I hear the notes of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Troika,” the fourth movement of a symphonic suite composed in 1933 for the Soviet film, “Lieutenant Kijé” (1934) based on Yuri Tynyanov’s story. Two fine performances are by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Seiji Ozawa. 

*

The philosophers of being have given us new vistas in psychiatry:

Philosopher/Major Work                   Psychiatrist/Key Ideas                       

Edmund Husserl                               Influenced the entire school of phenomenological

Subjective/                                          and existential psychology, psychiatry and

intentional phenomenology                psychoanalysis – from Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig             Binswanger, to RD Laing, Rollo May and Irvin Yalom; Cf. Rollo May, ed., Existence

Martin Heidegger                             Ludwig Binswanger

Being and Time                                   “The Case of Ellen West”

(dedicated to Husserl)                         Daseinanalyse—“existential analysis”

                                                            Foucault wrote the preface to 

                                                            Dream and Existence     

                                                                  

Jean-Paul Sartre                               R.D. Laing

Being and Nothingness                       The Divided Self, Self and Others,

Wrote Preface for:                               Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s

Philosophy 1950-1960

“Existential psychoanalysis                “Ontological insecurity,” “mystification,”

has not yet had its Freud” (1943)       “disqualification”

                                                           

Frantz Fanon

                                                            Black Skins, White Masks

A new theory of consciousness, combining the psychiatric and  the political

Wrote Preface with the famous line:  The Wretched of the Earth,

“Violence, like Achilles’ spear,                                                            

can heal the wounds it inflicts.”

                                                            A Dying Colonialism

                       

Alain Badiou                                     Vincenzo Di Nicola

Being and Event                                 “Trauma and Event”

(doctoral dissertation)                        

Objective phenomenology                  “Evental psychiatry”           

Multiplicity                                         “Relational psychology”                       

Evental site                                         “Predicament”

Preoccupied with “the uncounted”     “Liminality,” “threshold people”

*

I am grateful to Alain Badiou for his “blessing” to entitle my work, “Trauma and Event,” in the spirit of this line of inquiry.

A complete study of this line of inquiry would include, minimally, a dense review of the pioneering work of Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt as early philosophical psychologists, as well the thought of Franz Brentano (see Wolfgang Schirmacher’s excellent introductions to two volumes in The German Library on German Essays in Psychology (2001; the essays by Dilthey, Husserl and Wundt are essential) and German 20^th Century Philosophical Writings (2003; notably the essay by Jaspers on existential philosophy).

*

Excursus: The Ghost in the Machine or the Machine in the Ghost?

Not deus ex machina—the ghost in the machine (cf. Arthur Koestler)—but the machine in the ghost. If an earlier era of psychology and psychiatry struggled somehow to extract consciousness from the machinery of the brain, today’s neurosciences go directly to the machinery. To paraphrase the Latin, machina pace deus. Or, ghosts, consciousness and other ephemera notwithstanding, let us at the machine! The discovery of endorphins (Sol Snyder) and mirror neurons (Vittorio Gallese, et al) are perfect examples of this. We have a neuropharmacological or neurophysiological finding (“the machinery of the brain”)—now let’s look for clinical analogues (“the ghost,” subjective experience, phenomenology). With endorphins, it was endogenous mechanisms for pain relief or “pleasure centres” and their relevance to explain everything from addiction, pain, and self-mutilation; with mirror neurons, the speculative fury ranges from a neurophysiological basis for René Girard’s mimetic theory, to a biological substrate for empathy and language acquisition, all the way to modeling autism.

Let me put it differently. The two canonical images of the ghost in the machine, stories about the conflict between λόγος (logos) and ἦθος (ethos), are Frankenstein and the Golem. Today, if Mary Shelley were rewriting Frankenstein, she would have to offer at least a plausible (or crowd-pleasing) scientistic theory of how Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was actually created. Something to do with genetic engineering, no doubt. Not bodies stolen from the graveyard but grown from the petrie dish. The Maharal, Prague’s writer-rabbi who invented the Golem would have to rewrite the screenplay not as a metaphysical version of Tarantino’s kitschy Inglourious Basterds (2009; the Golem is in fact a revenge story built on anti-Semitic prejudice and persecution), but the Golem as a modern Trojan horse, a trojan virus in fact, called “Golemnet” (cf. Stuxnet), employed by the Israelis to defeat the Iranian nuclear menace. In Hollywood tropes—Munich meets The Matrix. The “scientific” backstory would become the drama. The ethical, moral or even political dimensions would be addressed with clever but one-dimensional plot devices with urgent warnings about technology out of control.

We don’t have to invent movies to make this case: Contagion (2011) has no point of view other than the mechanics of a pandemic, the global transmission of a virus, in a high-tech disaster movie. This is a minor plot device in a larger story in The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which also makes my point. In creating a new backstory for the planet of the apes, two scientific ideas are employed: genetic manipulation (the Frankenstein/Golem story, in effect) and when it goes awry, the spread of the mutation by global travel (the Contagion story told in a neat one-minute capsule at the end). To conclude, today’s popular narratives are more preoccupied with the machine than metaphysics, reflecting the dominant discourse of science and technology today. (Cf. Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés and Patricia Churchland’s neurophilosophy). An exception is The Matrix (1999), inspired by Baudrillard’s ideas—a real meeting of science fiction and philosophy.

When ghosts linger in the popular imagination, they are, as Badiou writes, aggressive phantoms. Like The Matrix, both Inception (2010) and Shutter Island (2010) are about the mind, memory and the spectral presence of the Other in what becomes in both films a return of the repressed. Neither film concerns an event. Both concern the reactive subject.

Is there a recent film that is about rupture that does not become a disaster or a moralizing tale about technology gone awry? Yes, the surprising film, The Adjustment Bureau (2011), based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Something that was not predictable and not according to “the plan” overseen by the “Chairman” occurs. Against all odds, David Norris the main character persists in his fidelity to this unforeseen event—meeting a woman with whom he falls in love—and stakes everything on making it happen again and maintaining it.

Badiou on the Event - “Only Nothing is Anonymous”

Besides being a philosopher and a literary and music critic, Alain Badiou is a poet, playwright and novelist. This brief excerpt from his novel, Calme bloc ici-bas - Calm Block Down Here, shows that events are contingent and must be named. Out of this, we become subjects in our fidelity to the event. 

*

… Élizabeth Cathely et Céline Isaïa, masquées et puant l’essence, galopent sur le pavé à trois heures du matin. Elles viennent d’incendier une camionette judiciaire dans la cour d’une annexe de la Légation. « Merde, dit Élizabeth, enchantant le mot dans le sombre orage de sa voix, on a oublié de larguer le tract. »  « C’est pas très important, dit Céline, ce genre de truc est signé “robertiste” automatiquement. » Mais Élizabeth se fâche : « Ce qui arrive, tout ce qui arrive vraiment, doit être signé. Il n’y a que rien qui est anonyme. »

—Alain Badiou, Calme bloc ici-bas, p. 383

Alain Badiou. Calme bloc ici-bas: Roman. Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1997.

… Elizabeth Cathely and Celine Isaïa, masked and smelling of gasoline, are running on the road at three o’clock in the morning. They have just set fire to a police van in the parking lot of a police station. “Shit,” says Elizabeth, savoring the word in the dark thunder of her voice, “we forgot to drop off the pamphlet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Celine, “this kind of thing is automatically signed, ‘For Robert’.”

But Elizabeth bristles: “What happens, everything that really happens, should be signed. Only nothing is anonymous.”

—Alain Badiou, Calm Block Down Here (my translation)

*

In this short exchange in his novel Calm Block Down Here, Badiou’s view of the event is in full evidence: an event must be named—“Only nothing is anonymous.”

“The Revolution Will Not Be Traumatized”

This mini-essay is a response to the seminars with Drucilla Cornell and Étienne Balibar at the Birkbeck College Critical Theory Summer School in London in 2011. I was rereading Sartre to better understand his support for violent revolution and wrote this ...

“The Revolution Will Not Be Traumatized”

            On se revolte par haine, on devient révolutionnaire par raison. Les deux en même temps.          

            —Jean-Paul Sartre

            We rebel out of hate, we become revolutionary through reason. Both at once.

—Jean-Paul Sartre (my translation)

My insight into why revolution will not happen until we address the question of the intergenerational transmission of trauma explains why I chose a career in psychology and psychiatry rather than in politics and philosophy. My disquiet stems precisely from the way Sartre expresses his ambivalence in the word-pairs, “rebel-revolutionary” and “hate-reason”—experienced simultaneously. Trauma will not yield event and hate will not be transformed into reason. We will have much hate and much rebellion and revolt, with intifadahs and uprisings to spare. Mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism (cf. René Girard) will ensure that the hate will be propagated and disseminated. But they will create a chasm that will not be breached.

When all of the conditions are met for a revolution (cf. Étienne Balibar), we will still be left with our hate, as Sartre stated, our ressentiment—about which Nietzsche wrote so forcefully—and our traumas, as the contemporary world teaches us, will reduce us irredeemably to bare life in a perpetual state of exception (cf. Giorgio Agamben).

“The revolution will not be televised,” wrote Gil Scott-Heron in a famous American poem and song of the 1970s. You will not be able to stay home, there will be no instant replay, slow motion or still life and no re-run, he advised his listeners. In a brilliant riff on Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the revolution will not “be right back after a message,” and no one will be concerned about “a dove in your bedroom,” “a tiger in your tank,” “the giant in your toilet bowl” or “germs that may cause bad breath.” It will, however, “put you in the driver’s seat” because “the revolution will be live.” Scott-Heron’s song was a wake-up call to all those who were asleep in the mediatized, pacified life of television where traumas are passively relived: “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay.” A revolution has to be lived, has to become an event that we must name and be faithful to, not vicariously experienced on television (cf. Alain Badiou). The traumatized subject is not “a kind of survivor” (cf. George Steiner), nor is the revolutionary “a bourgeois reformer,” as Sartre had the courage to admit about his political activities in his later years (Gerassi, 2009/2011). You have to be there to risk being traumatized; you have to show up for the revolution. That is why I say, the revolution will neither be televised (passive), nor traumatized (foreclosing change)—or it will not be a revolution.