Author: elena petersen

I'm a goddamn professional

God & the Unconscious Part One: Spinoza

We arrive at a conception of the unconscious through the God of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. The Ethics supports the integration of the unconscious into specific actions of a person’s life by emphasizing the importance of the body’s movement, as it will be shown that the body is the site of unconscious production and expression. I will be using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rendition, that the unconscious is a productive force that generates ideas and flows that are ever-creating, interconnecting, and at each moment rise anew. Despite its various definitions, the unconscious is that realm of existence we do not have immediate, conscious access to; the unconscious is immanent and requires mediation. For Spinoza a similar definition follows with what he calls substance: a productive immanent force that is Being, or God, containing all beings and producing all movement in the world. In the Ethics, beings are those things that mediate the ideas of God and put them into motion, or express them — with the body being the apparatus of God and the vessel of God’s creation. I will demonstrate how the unconscious and Spinoza’s substance operate similarly and will argue that the unconscious is immanent — is involved in and sustains everything.

God & the Unconscious Part Two: Further Applications of Spinoza

This section is organized as a conceptual roadmap to demonstrate the applicability of a substance-unconscious for a contemporary diagnosis. It begins with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of the plane of consistency and becoming-animal, connecting through Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhistorical man and horizonality to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s caution of a third unconscious arising out of the post-coronavirus crisis, which is encapsulated by Catherine Malabou’s idea of destructive plasticity that underscores the depressive and depersonalized states of the body when the mind is in distress. To conclude, I will speculate what could arise as the third unconscious. Each concept carries forward, implicitly or explicitly, Spinoza’s insistence of the body and affect, and the importance of creation with regard to the unconscious, and each philosopher offers a stepping-stone to a larger and integrated understanding of how we can conceptualize a substance-unconscious. 

A Historical Horizon: Beyond Metaphysics

Man becomes the object of his own study: the more he exerts his energy on his approach to himself the further he cleaves thinking from material activity by means of intensifying scrutiny on his own said activity. He makes himself a concept, sees how certain behaviors play out, believes he can divine the future by studying the past: he wants to master thinking, but in the process halts his own authentic being. His project is all too human.

Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part 2: The Second Subject

“I am innately genital […] There are some fools who think of themselves as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping this sort of non-existent kennel, O bitches of impossibility! … Underneath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infinitely more shrewdish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed.” – Antonin Artaud

Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part One: The Dogmatic Image

Deleuze contends that philosophy requires a pure beginning not indebted to a presupposition. There is a difference between true philosophical thinking and an Image of thought. Thinking is movement, creation, it is the real as in real experience and is the participle of individuation. The Image of thought is representational, it involves an act of recognition and constructs identity. Deleuze argues that the majority of philosophers participating in so-called philosophical thought have done nothing but promote an Image through subjective presuppositions that direct the thinker towards a recognition of an object and furthermore into a predetermined representational field. Deleuze demands philosophy to start unbeholden to any presuppositions in order to witness true thinking—a movement alongside the real.

Ethics as Optics – Emmanuel Levinas

“The first ‘vision’ of eschatology […] reveals the very possibility of a eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type.”

‘Health’ is More like a Pilgrimage to the City of God – St. Augustine

We exist earthside, fragmented from the unity of God. Health is how the individual choses to walk off his pilgrimage while he exists—of greater import, while he can still progress. Health in the world is the movement and the practice of faith. It will be shown that health is something akin to a phenomenological relationship, is essentially a modality of thinking, and contains within it the reverse process of individuation.

The Oedipal Complex & The Unconscious & Love

The Oedipal complex is a hardwired pattern that commits me to the world, it forces me to latch onto another object besides myself. It is a mechanism of the unconscious; that subliminal yet perpetually active region of the brain that instinctively, inherently drives me towards a particular way of operating and comporting myself within the world. As opposed to my conscious, ego-self, in which I feel a sense of will that opens to me the choice of objects I wish to urge myself towards with the expectation of opportunistically achieving satisfaction.[1] The Oedipal complex is the mechanism within the unconscious that commits me towards another, it is the bridge in which I cross in order to be able to love the other.