-"Sign, symptom, and symbol are sustained not only by the unconscious meaning to be discovered in them, but also by the immediate meaning which they first seem to express" Pp.122- However schematic these considerations may be, they have never-the less a direct echo in our day-to-day practice.
"to apply a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities" (4)I love how Sedgwick's writing opens the field for alternative ways of reading! "An affect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplification; for this reason, any affect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological" (12)"What marks the paranoid impulse in these pages is, I would say, less the stress on re
“But I just have trouble getting interested in that….what would we know then that we don’t already know?”-Hmm, this kind of feels counterproductive. Just because we already know how awful something is (i.e., the prevailing influence of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in this country), does not devalue learning or examining situations which further provide support for evidence of such theories. There is value in these experiences and learning and documenting.
Sedgwick’s (2003) writing on paranoia and reparative reading utilizes paranoia as a lens for developing critical theory. Like most of the readings from this week, Sedgwick uses Klein’s theories to develop critical theory beyond the psychoanalytic field. “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?” (124).
This sentence speaks volumes: "for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppression does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (127).In other words, if the injustice you face does not anger you, it does not mobilize you, but you have critical consciousness anyway--how do you explain that? How is that some people (academics, activists, philosophers, politicians, educators) get motivated onto a specific train of epistemological or narrative consequence?
Five wolves on a tree of blight;Why have you come here,If not to suffer your sight?If loved and hated objects inhabit the habitus of familiarity, then the loss of that habitus, the symbolization of that pain through the formation of not only object relations, but psychological defenses, the constitution of the depressive position, is the cost of interiority (Britzman 2017). What makes someone crave that loss over and over again?
1- “Clad in Mourning: Violence, Subjugation and the Struggle of the Soul,”“My considerations are rooted in my ethnographic work in Morocco, and in the insistent questions raised by my interlocutors to me, as well as in thepredicaments of their lives.
"The key feature of Loewald's understanding of language is his challenge of that separation [between the verbal and non-verbal]" (7)."It is language that provides that life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality, and language is deeply embedded in its original relational context" (10). "It may be that many intense emotional experiences, not just in infancy but in later life as well, are organized not only in terms of secondary process, in which internal and external, self and other are clearly deliniated, but also in terms of a primary process in w
"Most philosophers and psychologists of language regard early human development as bifurcated by a fundamental and perhaps unbridgeable divide between the preverbal and the verbal... Following Wittgenstein and Ryle, thinking is often discussed as interiorized speech; following Lacan, many understand the unconscious itself in terms of linguistic structures...
Mitchell’s first chapter on “Language and Reality” highlights the ongoing importance of language in psychoanalytic theories. Mitchell examines prominent psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Loewald’s writing on language and psychoanalysis. “The centrality of language in the psychoanalytic experience makes possible a reanimation of psychic life through the excavation and revitalization of words in their original dense, sensory context in the early years of the patient's life” (12). This chapter emphasizes the dichotomy of development between preverbal and verbal childhood development.
