Slavoj Žižek: Events and Encounters Explain Our Fear of Falling in Love

Slightgeist (more on Slow Thought)

We are living not so much a discernible zeitgeist as an amorphous, evanescent “slightgeist.” This is a very slim “spirit of the times,” indeed! All pronouncements evaporate by mid-day like the morning dew! They must make way for new pronouncements, for the next person’s fifteen minutes of fame.  Of all the paltry contributions of the slightgeist artist Andy Warhol, this one I predict will last, but with a speedy twist: Everyone will be famous for fifteen seconds! Or as Milan Kundera put it in one of his short stories, “Let the old dead make room for the new dead.”[1]

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We are stuck in the slightgeist of fast forward.[2]

And it has two elements: self and speed.

The slightgeist is a two-stroke engine of self and speed, in a hurry to be somebody on the road to somewhere, but in reality making us all nobodies going nowhere. And we all write obsessively, compulsively with more and more “news from nowhere.”[3]

“I always thought that it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” says the psychopathic protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley.[4]  That’s what makes our times so slight: pretentiousness authenticity is opposed to a feared vapidness.

“EVERYBODY has won and all must have prizes,” announces the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland. Being a fake somebody is to live in the same wonderland as Alice and Dodo where everybody wins.

Combined with the relentless entitlements accorded to the saturated self, this means we are living ever more isolated lives, meaninglessly connected to distant “friends,” with the empty demand to “Like” this or that and add more and more contacts, friends, and connections to an already saturated social network.

This is perfectly embodied by wikipedia.

Nothing that exists off the grid, including intimate personal knowledge or well-crafted professional opinions can be included in wikipedia articles. If it’s not already on the web, it doesn’t exist for wikipedia. But here’s the paradox: all the achievements that are logged on wikipedia are elsewhere! It is a self-referential and absurd logic. It is solipsistic. It creates its own autistic world.

Andy Warhol: Slightgeist – Sleightgiest – I-Con-ic Artist

Warhol is known for the happening, for capturing the moment, for the accelerated notion of art by cultural quotation. Pop art, turning popular items like the Campbell soup can and icons like Marilyn Monroe into images, created a culture of branding. Art as concept and performance. No originality or talent needed. Warhol as an “artist” is like an exhibition of book covers or record album covers, with only implicit reference to the contents of the writing or the music. A recent exhibition in Montreal did just that – Warhol’s record covers were on display. He “created” the Velvet Underground by making them his house band and “produced” their record, imposing Nico on them. Warhol is a producer of images which creates a market of consumers. No quality, no reflection, no second thoughts are necessary. This is “art” as mere consumption from the “artist” as mere producer.

He is now one of the most high-priced producers of images in history. Imagine that! The slightgeist is getting slighter. And worse, Warhol’s legacy is to turn the already paltry slightgeist into a sleightgeist. Warhol is outlasting his fifteen minutes of fame to become the i-con-ic artist of the 21^st century. I-CON-IC: Cunning and deceitful. With no hint of the creativity of Apollinaire and Marinetti, the playfulness of Marcel Duchamp or the irony and satire of Ionesco and Stoppard. Just a straight-faced “I-con” job with that humourless face topped by an absurd wig that functions like a mask.

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[1] Milan Kundera, “Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead,” in Laughable Loves, trans. by Suzanne Rapaport, intro. by Philip Roth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 163-194.

[2] This is a reference to Damien Broderick’s and Rory Barnes’ Science Fiction novel, Stuck in Fast Forward (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

[3] This is a reference to William Morris’ 1890 utopian Science Fiction novel, News from Nowhere. See: News from Nowhere and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

[4] Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (New York: Coward-McCann, 1955).

WPA Symposium Contribution - "Belonging Without Boundaries: Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers in the 21st Century"

World Psychiatric Association Congress  

Bucharest, Romania - April 10, 2013

“Symposium on Belonging”

Co-chairs:             Vincenzo Di Nicola and Rachid Bennegadi

Discussant:            Rachid Bennegadi

Abstract (word count: 384)

Belonging Without Boundaries:

Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers in the 21^st Century

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FAPA

Professor of Psychiatry, University of Montreal

“The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the Church of God sojourning in Corinth.”

—Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians

In Clement’s letter, the Greek paroikousa (sojourning) means a provisional abode as opposed to katokein, the citizen with residence, from which we may derive two modes of living: parokein (to sojourn like a stranger) and katokein (to reside like a citizen). His message was that the Church was not a permanent structure but a sojourn and that Christians live in messianic time.

The 20^th century saw so many displacements of peoples across borders, languages and cultures that the terms emigrants, immigrants and migrants are sprinkled across the literature of every field of human endeavour from law to literature, from politics to philosophy, and certainly from psychiatry to psychoanalysis. Things have only gotten more complex in the 21^st century where the bipolar world of the Cold War and “the end of history” has given way to a multicentric, polyglot cacaphony where culture has replaced class as the dominant signifier and language has become the major expressive vehicle of that shift. In the European Union alone, there are 23 official languages, the UN has 6 official languages, and battles over language as the emblem of culture are evident among peoples affirming their identity everywhere—from Quebec to Catalonia, Rwanda to East Timor.

Whither belonging in all this? The author argues that belonging has become a critical issue for sociocultural psychiatry and for global mental health. Belonging has a bi-valent, ambiguous, deeply unresolved/unresolvable quality, what philosophy calls an aporia, a puzzle. We can begin to describe this puzzle with the dichotomy settlers or sojourners—those who are “here” to settle and those who stay for work or other reasons, for shorter or longer periods, but do not make their home “there.” There is, however, a third state of being, intermediate between sojourners who merely stay a while and settlers who plant roots, and that is those who are still on the journey, in transit, “betwixt and between,” as anthropologist Victor Turner described it, neither here nor there, travellers on the threshold.

Whether it accompanies a language, a nation, a profession, or other organizing system of meaning, the construct of belonging can be more than an aporia for imagining identity and the very definition of subject and subjectivity. “Belonging” is a way of rethinking relational being, how we define mental health, how we understand the expression of its vicissitudes, and how we organize care and healing for sufferers. To do this, we need to recognize how belonging is experienced and negotiated, free of the constraints of our habitual patterns of practice and thought, to imagine belonging without borders for settlers, sojourners and travellers in the 21^st century.

References

Di Nicola, Vincenzo F. (1997). A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. New York, NY and London, UK: W.W. Norton.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2004). Famiglie sulla soglia. Città invisibili, identità invisibili [Families on the threshold: Invisible cities, invisible identities]. In: Maurizio Andolfi, ed., Famiglie Immigrate e Psicoterapia Transculturale [Immigrant Families and Transcultural Psychotherapy]. Milano: FrancoAngeli, pp. 34-47.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2011). Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York, NY and Dresden, Germany: Atropos Press.

WPA Symposium on Belonging - "Belonging Without Boundaries: Social Psychiatry in the 21st Century"

World Psychiatric Association Congress  

Bucharest, Romania - April 10, 2013

“Symposium on Belonging”

Co-chairs:             Vincenzo Di Nicola and Rachid Bennegadi

Presenters:            Vincenzo Di Nicola, Ileana Botezat-Antonescu, Drozdstoj Stoyanov, and Annelle Primm

Discussant:           Rachid Bennegadi

Abstract (word count: 498)

Belonging Without Boundaries:  

Social Psychiatry in the 21^st Century

The symposium will open with a discourse by the co-chair, Vincenzo Di Nicola, on “Belonging Without Boundaries: Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers in the 21^st Century.” Di Nicola argues that “the 20^th century saw so many displacements of peoples across borders, languages and cultures that the terms emigrants, immigrants and migrants are sprinkled across the literature of every field of human endeavour from law to literature, from politics to philosophy, and certainly from psychiatry to psychoanalysis. Things have only gotten more complex in the 21^st century where the bipolar world of the Cold War and “the end of history” has given way to a multicentric, polyglot cacaphony where culture has replaced class as the dominant signifier and language has become the major expressive vehicle of that shift. In the European Union alone, there are 23 official languages, the UN has 6 official languages, and battles over language as the emblem of culture are evident among peoples affirming their identity everywhere—from Quebec to Catalonia, Rwanda to East Timor.”

Whither belonging in all this? The symposium presents belonging as a critical issue for sociocultural psychiatry and for global mental health. The notion of belonging sutures together the social questions of identity and affiliation to psychoanalytic questions of memory and representation to build a crucial construct for social psychiatry and psychotherapy in the 21^st century.

Ileana Botezat-Antonescu’s presentation, “Belonging to the group of psychotherapy professionals: Between interdiction and proliferation in different political contexts in Romania,” demonstrates that “Belonging to a professional group just as psychotherapists do from other part of the world (Western Europe or the Americas), was a cherished dream for many Romanian psychiatrists or clinical psychologists before December 1989. We try to follow the developmental process of psychotherapy from the belonging concept perspective toward the cultural and political context in a communist–totalitarian and a democratic society and examine its evolution.”

Drozdstoj Stoyanov’s contribution is an empirical study of “Belonging dimensions in psychological climate and personality as predictors of vulnerability to burn-out.” His discussion highlights that, “The evidence from our pilot study as well as complementary case studies reveal the relevance of belonging as embedded in personality and psychological climate to the emergence of burn out. The following inter-connected study dimensions may elicit belonging: cooperativeness and self-transcendence in personality; cohesion and fairness in the psychological climate at work place and depersonalization as measurement of burn out.”

The final presenter, Annelle Primm, discusses the concept of “belonging” from the perspective of an African American woman psychiatrist born in Switzerland of American parents and raised in the northeast region of the United States.  Her experiences of difference and “otherness” in Europe and the U.S. demonstrate

how she navigated the culturally complicated terrain of “ivory towers” and “ebony communities”. This presentation will focus on the panelist’s journey, her collaborative work as an ambassador across disparate worlds, and her sense of belonging in divergent worlds, supported by mentors of varied racial and cultural backgrounds.

References

Di Nicola, Vincenzo F. (1997). A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. New York, NY and London, UK: W.W. Norton.

Primm, Annelle (2012). A Community Psychiatrist Straddling Worlds and Bridging Chasms. In: Women in Psychiatry:  Personal Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, Inc., pp. 131-145.

Badiou, Foucault, Freire, Zizek: Steps Towards a Pedagogy of the Event

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Chapter in: Zizek and Education, edited by Antonio Garcia

Foreword by Creston Davis, Afterword by Slavoj Zizek

Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishing, "Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education" Series, in press.

Abstract

The author engages a group of critical thinkers and practitioners, from Boal and Freire to Derrida, Foucault and Agamben to Badiou, Lacan and Zizek, as steps towards a pedagogy of the event. A central aporia or problematic of pedagogy is posed as the paradox of authority versus novation. In much thinking and practice, pedagogy risks the traumatic transmission of authority. This is problematicized as authority as trauma.

The event is proposed as an alternative to such pedagogical trauma. The event in thinkers as diverse as Derrida, Lacan and Zizek has already occured and we are just repeating, substituting symptoms. This is an almost deterministic, structural view of the event. In Foucault, the event may be imagined as discourse, an articulation of dispositifs or apparatuses. In Agamben, the event is even more indeterminate, located in a zone of indifference, potentiality, beautifully described as porosity in Benjamin’s essay on Naples.

Badiou opens the ultimate possibility: an ontology based on the event, including the event defined in the broadest, least deterministic and most radically open way, giving way to novation. With this, we can imagine a pedagogy of the event. This is a Badiouian pedagogy. Without a theory of the event and of change, there can neither be the genuine transmission of knowledge nor the possibility of novation, new explorations of knowledge by bringing new things into the world.

A pedagogy that prepares us for novation and is open to the event which creates the possibilities of genuine subjects who are faithful to the event is a pedagogy of truth. A pedagogy of the event is a pedagogy of truth. Such a pedagogy will not invoke tradition as authority and traumatically shut down possibilities but will rather open possibilities, in what Badiou calls novation, to create a pedagogy of truth.

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.

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 …