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Charles William Johns

Neurosis and AssimilationContemporary Revisions on The Lifeof the Concept

123

Charles William JohnsLincoln UniversityLincolnUK

ISSN 2211-4548 ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic)SpringerBriefs in PhilosophyISBN 978-3-319-47541-7 ISBN 978-3-319-47542-4 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47542-4

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What People Are Saying About Neurosisand Assimilation: Contemporary Revisionson The Life of The Concept

This is a book that certainly breaks new ground for all ofliterature, psychology and psychoanalysis, andphilosophy. Its thesis about neuroses is both novel andinteresting.

Leon Niemoczynski

Writer of the renowned blog After Nature and Professorof Philosophy at Moravian College.

Johns’ debut book is not only interesting, it is anintensification of thinking.

Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy PennState University (USA).

This is a compelling entry into the field of philosophicalliterature that marks out Charles Johns as an exciting,innovative and perspicacious thinker.

Nik Farrell Fox, author of The New Sartre (ContinuumPress, 2003).

Nobody likes to be neurotic; but neurosis is aninescapable fact of our experience. Charles Johns thinksthrough the consequences of this.

Steven Shaviro, author of Without Criteria: Kant,Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge,MA: The MIT Press (2009) and The Universe of Things:On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press (2014).

Absolutely essential reading.

OKNO Magazine

A great project!

Adrian Johnston—Professor in the Department ofPhilosophy at the University of New Mexico. Author ofProlegomena to Any Future Materialism (NorthwesternUniversity Press, 2013).

Foreword

Charles William Johns’ Neurosis and Assimilation: Contemporary Revisions onThe Life of The Concept is one of the finest philosophy books of the year—a gemof the Anglo-American renaissance in continental philosophy.

Johns’ work does not need justification—it would suffice to read it in its entirety,to discuss it, to discretely pilfer its ideas. Hegel defined this dilemma most clearly.For how can prefatory material truly compliment a work without compromising itsintegrity as a whole? Form and content call out for adequation—an adequation thatis not necessarily enhanced by trawling through a book’s contents and exhorting thereader to be enthusiastic.

However, this raises the question. For if Hegel believed that one could only dodisservice to a work by introducing it, why did he include introductory material inall of his major works? The answer may lie in Bataille’s conception of “generaleconomy”: of an excess; of a nonrecuperable part of an economy that must be spentknowingly and without gain—such as through war or artistic works. Bataille waswrong about the altruistic nature of the expenditure of excess—a wrongness mostevident in his assessment of the altruism of the Marshall Plan. But shorn of thisassumption, the concept of “excess” can be seen as thoroughly dialectical. Thepreface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, while ostensibly disowning its ownfunction, nevertheless amounts to an admission of the necessity of such a gesture;such a recompense for excess—whereby the vastness of a book’s contents is dis-tilled and qualified. It is therefore the ultimate gesture of reflexive humility: anacknowledgement that every introduction is an apology for its author. And becauseevery book is excessive, every book deserves one.

The goal of this foreword, then, will not be to serve as a promotional addendumfor Johns’ book or to tediously reprise its contents point by point (it is not merely“continental” philosophy). Instead, it will be to rectify its excess—its fragmentary,mercurial structure—without betraying that same excess, which is so essential to itsuniqueness.

Whether this endeavour is successful, Johns—the philosopher of assimilation—would be better poised to answer. But it is a perk of working with an author so

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steeped in questions that I don’t see, based on the philosophy he explicates here,how he could have an answer…

The central theme of Johns’ book is neurosis. This is not the neurosis of Freud—the “substitute gratifications for unfulfilled sexual wishes”. Rather, for Johns,neurosis refers to the way that we elect, consciously or not, to assimilate certainsymbols. The provocative example Johns provides—of a woman singing a popsong while sipping her latte and texting, aware in a way of the sexuality of hergestures—is adequately demonstrative. We find here that the woman in questionhas neurotically assimilated herself to these gestures: the hushed mimicry of thesong’s singer; the rhythmic elevation of the cup to her lips; the frantic, syncopatedtexting.

This neurotic assimilation does not arise in the vacuum of the individual psychebut arises from the woman’s relationship to other entities (it is only useful, in thecontext of Johns’ philosophy, to speak of subjects or objects heuristically—atbottom, there is no place for such a distinction in his work): to her coffee cup, herbody, the song, the chair she’s sitting in. But like for Roman Ingarden, or GrahamHarman’s eccentric Heidegger, Johns insists that intentionality—or, as he prefers tocall it, “assimilation”—is a two-way street. We assimilate objects, but objects alsoassimilate us (and each other).

Assimilation is not objective—when we assimilate objects, or objects assimilateus, there is always an interpretive dimension. The word “interpretive” here shouldbe qualified. For objects to assimilate—and consequently, interpret—one another, itis not necessary that they possess powers of cognition. Rather, it is merely that theentity (object or subject) in question is not exhausted by a single encounter. When Ilook at a coffee cup, it can also be seen from a virtually unending number ofdifferent angles. Like for Harman, for Johns, entities never literally encounter oneanother in their totality.

Johns’ conception of “assimilation” is clearly indebted to the phenomenologicaltradition. But he has reasons for utilizing the term instead of the more shopworn“intentionality”. Edmund Husserl, in his later texts, veered towards an unexcitingblend of Cartesianism and Kantianism—a move which sparked a revolt amongst hisformer students, while setting the stage for much of the decidedly idealist phe-nomenology to follow. Against this, Johns rejects the idea of the bourgeois phi-losophe, contemplating objects from the standpoint of total neutrality; constructingreality with the dispassion of an accountant filing a tax report. And this rejectionof the privileging of rational agency, like it has for many poststructuralists, draws itsinspiration from that most assimilated, and assimilatory, of all philosophers—Nietzsche.

Following in a proud tradition of imaginative interpreters of Nietzsche, Johns’develops his own, panpsychist edition of the German philosopher—one whose“drives” are not merely psychic but rather constitutive of all relations betweenentities. What past philosophers have called “objects” do not simply wait there,politely cueing for humans to arrive on the scene and describe them. On the con-trary, they are the firmament from which all rational agency springs—the very factthat one can think is only the by-product of a contingent chain of materially

viii Foreword

dependent evolutionary events—which continue to constantly assail, even pup-peteer, the subject; effectively annulling any claim we have to mental independence.Does the woman, sipping her latte, choose the latte? Or did the latte—brought toEngland by an editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and conspicuously advertised in whitelettering at the top of the café menu—choose her? Moreover, how will its dailyconsumption affect her thought? Will it have lasting cognitive implications? One canimagine a phenomenology of coffee. In this back and forth between “subject” and“object”, this refusal to view human agency as divorced from its environment,Johns’ work channels the sagacious philosophic achievements of CatherineMalabou, who used the term “plasticity” in her book L’Avenir de Hegel—in whichshe traded the Nietzschean lineage for the Hegelian—to refer to the constancy of thisinterplay, which she designated as a latent feature of Hegel’s thought.

Johns’ channelling of Malabou points to a deeper source, however—that ofAristotle. For it is Aristotle’s conception of “habit” [hexis]—in which we becomeaccustomed to the idea that A goes to B to C—that Hegel deploys, in theAnthropology section of the Philosophy of Spirit, as the foundation of theself-knowledge obtained above and beyond Logic and Nature (a contrast withthe more conventional view of language as the locus of human self-knowledge).

As Malabou observes, though, Hegel puts forth a particular “reading” ofAristotle—one in which Aristotle’s description of the assimilation of objects tosense actually changes the perceptual apparatus in question:

Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receivinginto itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece ofwax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold; what produces theimpression is a signet of bronze or gold, but not qua bronze or gold: in a similar way thesense is affected by what is coloured or flavoured or sounding not insofar as each is what itis, but insofar as it is of such and such a sort and according to its form.

Habit—or hexis in Ancient Greek—is the basis of the human acquisition ofknowledge and exercise of choice, as distinct from the merely instinctual ororganic. And this faculty is not restricted to humans: animals also demonstrate alimited capacity to exercise cognitive choice with respect to their surroundings. Butin Hegel’s reading of Aristotle, these habits, having been adopted, actually changetheir adoptee. And while convenient, habits can also be deceiving—they cause us toomit information as a means of expediting our adaptive process.

What is most important to distil from the exegesis above—one which may be ofmore interest to the “anoraks” Johns purports to be inspired by is that, in theNietzschean-Hegelian tradition Johns subscribes to, objects (whether real or fictive)are never innocent. They always threaten to upend the world; to assimilate it. Andneurosis is the fuse which drives, and directs, their interaction. The thrust of humanhistory, moving it as it has towards the “nonnatural” domain described by Johns,only radicalizes the complexity of our interaction with objects, requiring us tomarshal our neuroses as never before. We are living in the neurotic age.

Foreword ix

It is interesting to conceive of neurosis historically. Johns has a nice line on this,when he refers to Newtonian thought as being based on a neurotic obsession withorder, in which all atoms must bow, in fealty to space-time’s container. We mightadd that Newton’s metaphysics, at once monistic and absolute in its polarity, seemsto reflect the values of the Reformation—in which all men were equalized in theeyes of God, just as the nation state emerged to usurp God, and assist in thebanishment of idols deemed incompatible with this new order.

If Kant partially revealed the structuring power of neurosis—but fell short,ultimately restricting its powers to the domain of “metaphysics”—it is Hegel, aboveall, who showed how history is the history of assimilation. For is not each sectionof the Phenomenology of Spirit an attempt to show how human perceptionreconfigures its own development retrospectively? And does not Hegel repeat thesame gesture for non-human entities in the Philosophy of Nature? The emergenceof time reconfigures space, showing that its entire history was in fact one of tangibleplaces. Similarly, the emergence of animal life hierarchizes plants—reducing themto mere ur-animals, or objects of consumption.

Frederic Jameson has spoken of Hegel as being a philosophical exponent of theRomantic idea of “variation”—that the performance of a musical piece can in factreconfigure its source, causing it to emerge as a new entity. Catherine Malabou hasmade a similar claim that within Hegel’s system the sublative process [Aufhebung]undergoes its own Aufhebung, progressively changing overtime—what she calls“plasticity”. They could have used another word to describe this: assimilation.

Hegel’s influence looms over Sections “The Beginnings of AneurysmalPhilosophy” and “Hegel and Neurosis: Idealism, Phenomenology and Realism”—and in my mind, the best—of this book. In the fifth, Johns discusses what he terms“aneurysmal philosophy”—the idea that the cancellation of thought due to biologicalprocesses lays bare the falsity of the notion that reality is somehow a syntheticconstruct. “Reality” is indifferent towards us. It does not care whether you haveconceptualized it or not. The aneurysms blood-filled, balloon-like bulge can annul itregardless.

What we have here, repackaged by Johns, is the ancient problem of being andnothingness—and how, if at all, we can access the latter. This is a significantproblem for Hegel. For within his system, there is always an outside, albeit one thatcannot be comprehended by thought. If thought were to designate the outside as an“outside”, this outside would thereby cease to be an outside.

Part of Hegel’s critique of Kant is that the things he designates as a priori must,by the very nature of their designation, have arisen through the accumulation ofknowledge. How can we say, as Kant does, that Euclidean geometry is an inevitablecomponent of our spatial intuition when it took humans 198,000 of our 200,000years on Earth to posit it? To say that it was always there, but merely latent, leads usto a logical dead end. For if knowledge of Euclidean geometry was always there,intuitively, why didn’t someone bother to explicate it? Was it because of theabsence of writing? But isn’t it more likely that writing is itself a condition of theunderstanding of geometry? This is a prime example of assimilation. In Kant’soeuvre, Euclidean geometry has assimilated the past—and the future.

x Foreword

So what is outside of outside? Nothing—because it is immune to specification. Itis in this sense that Hegel is radically adverse to teleology. For while he fullybelieves that predictions can be made about processes, he acknowledges that thesepredictions are in fact conditional, and thus potentially subject to cancellation:

But also, the object that is supposed to contain the realized purpose and showitself to be its objectivity is perishable; it likewise fulfils its purpose not by atranquil, self-preserving existence, but only to the extent that it is worn out, for onlyto this extent does it conform to the unity of the concept, namely in so far as itsexternality, that is, its objectivity, sublates itself in that unity. A house, a clock, mayappear as purposes with respect to the instruments employed in their production;but the stones, the cross-beams, or the wheels, the axles, and the rest that make upthe actuality of the purpose, fulfil this purpose only through the pressure which theysuffer, through the chemical processes to which they are exposed with air, light,and water, and from which they shield the human being; through their friction,and so on.

While the purposiveness of a clock can be understood, it is always conditional—if one smashes the clock with a hammer, it will no longer behave purposively. Thesame can be said of our mental apparatus, with respect to the aneurysm. Its rupture,this geyser of blood, challenges Kant’s conception of reality as necessarily syn-thetic: “To take Kant’s operation of synthesis seriously is to accept that theostensibly ‘conceptual’ interpretation of ‘the world’ is simultaneously also thecreation of its own reality/legitimation”. The very possibility of the aneurysm,violently and unexpectedly emerging to rupture our pretensions to synthesis, showsthe insistence of an exteriority that is always impossible to circumscribe.

Hegel’s denial of the predictive power of thought has led many to declare, fol-lowing the metaphor of the owl of Minerva in the Philosophy of Right, that Hegel’ssystem does not permit futurity. But this is going too far. Hegel did not think that—because purposes are always mutable—there was no point in attempting to describethem. This dichotomy—the acknowledgement of the importance of accounting forpurposiveness while still maintaining its violability—is described by CatherineMalabou as “voir venir”: to see the future, and to not see it. It is also the essence ofJohns’ conception of “aneurysmal philosophy”: not a campy epiphenomenalism, butan eidos; or rather, a mutable science of essences. The aneurysm—the accident ofAristotle’s accident—always threatens to swallow up all thought, and non-thought.

The question of essence, or substance, is addressedmore directly in Section “Hegeland Neurosis: Idealism, Phenomenology and Realism” of the book—“Hegel andNeurosis”. In it, Johns patly rejects the vision of Hegel as a conventional monist—and, by extension, the idea that Hegel’s system is one in which the specificationsimputed to reality by the understanding [Verstand] aremerely exposed as a projection,leave nothing behind but the solitary, and wholly autonomous, mind (a view pro-mulgated both by post-war French scholars, who assigned undue importance to thePhenomenology of Spirit, as well as more recent Anglo-American Hegel revisionists,who want Hegel in a suit and tie). Instead, Johns’ view is closer to the one put forth byRobert Stern—that the ontological clearing house of the Phenomenology of Spirit ismerely a springboard for the subsequent Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia, in

Foreword xi

which thought enters externality via the syllogistic structure, culminating in the“disjunctive syllogism”. What it returns with is a grasp of the “ontologically primarywholes”—those unshakable substances which resist predication. Certainly, it is hardto reconcile the reading of Hegel as an idealist, which Quentin Meillassoux carica-tured as “strong correlationism” in his seminal work After Finitude, with the thinkerwho wrote that:

To speak of thought or objective thought as the heart and soul of the world, may seem to beascribing consciousness to the things of nature. We feel a certain repugnance againstmaking thought the inward function of things, especially as we speak of thought as markingthe divergence of man from nature. It would be necessary, therefore, if we use the termthought at all, to speak of nature as the system of unconscious thought, or, to useSchelling’s expression, a petrified intelligence. And in order to prevent misconception,“thought−form” or “thought−type” should be substituted for the ambiguous term thought.

Both Stern and Johns, then, share the view that Hegel is not an idealist, in thesense that his system gropes towards the differentiation of substance, rather than theconsolidation of them as authored by the mind, and having no basis in externality.The above quote, from the Encyclopaedia Logic, represents merely one example ofHegel’s flirtation with ideas which are practically panpsychist: the natural world,which empiricism wrongly reduced to mere inanimate “stuff” governed bymechanical laws, is in fact part of the same logical matrix which structures humanthought, and its contents are thus in a certain sense intentional. The achievement ofgravitational singularity by the clumps of dust which amass into planetesimals, aswell as the instinctual self-preservation of animals, is part of the same thrusttowards self-constitution that eventually manifests in human cognition.

But there is a crucial difference between Johns and Stern. For whereas Sternemphasizes the fixity of substance (and consequently falls short of the breakthroughhis work portends), what intrigues Johns is the inexorability of its ongoingreconfiguration. On the one hand, a plant has a kind of fixed substance, that can beinvestigated scientifically—and Hegel emphasizes repeatedly, throughout thePhilosophy of Nature, the indispensability of empirical data. Yet on the other hand,even if we fail to grasp this structure, and assess the plant merely superficially, weare nevertheless isomorphically conjoined in a structure (Idea) with it. For asAristotle says, all related things must share a relation. There are Ideas. But there arealso the Ideas of the Ideas. And the Ideas of the Ideas of the Ideas. An infiniteproliferation—a Hegelianism that Harmanizes the multitude of possible relations.This, too, is assimilation.

It is not clear then that there is, for Johns, any simple way to escape theassimilatory process. For unlike Kant, whose work suggests the possibility ofstepping back from it through the employment of transcendental deduction—orHeidegger, for whom the failure of tools ruins their unobtrusive quality—Johnscontends that neurosis, even when it loses its object or collapses into self-scrutiny,nevertheless persists: there is still a Christmas without Christ, and without mass.And far from being an idealist move, the basis for this rejection of the “KantianHeideggerean problematic” is, for Johns, a belief in the agency of “exotic” entities:the way that “the meshing of both concept and object into ‘use’” precludes the

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simplistic, psychological annulment of their relation. Put another way, we could saythat—because the relationship between concept and object is progressively culti-vated, involving the agency of the latter just as much as the former—no philosophycan be put forth which tidily prescribes how we can emancipate ourselves fromobjects. Yet there is still a glimmer of hope: those elusive, Deleuzian “lines offlight”, which fall between the encountering of an object and our neurotic assimi-lation of it, and that Johns mentions passingly…

Towards the end of neurosis, Johns discusses the role of the “last instance” inassimilation, before—in the final section—reprising and expanding his achieve-ments. Yet perhaps it is better to turn this question back on the book itself. WillJohns’ work manage to assimilate the ideas it confronts, striking too streamlined forany obstruction to deflect? In other words, will it prevail in the “last instance”? Mymotives for writing this are not entirely unselfish—I have cast my lot in with Johnsbecause I believe that his work has, in the future, the potential to define the present.After all, if the term “correct” is redundant, as Johns claims, what else can I do butpick the side I think is going to win?

August 2015 Conrad Hamilton

Foreword xiii

Contents

Neurosis and Assimilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Assimilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Assimilation, Neurosis and Tautology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Two Forms of Assimilation: The Tautological and the Exotic . . . . . . . . . 8Philosophy of Neurosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Neurosis: Against Mechanistic and Teleological Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . 22The Beginnings of Aneurysmal Philosophy: A Philosophyfor Aneurysms or the Aneurysm of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Nietzsche. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34Meillassoux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34The Aneurysm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35Embodiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Hegel and Neurosis: Idealism, Phenomenology and Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Hegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Neurosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43The Last Instance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Against the Idea: Composition and the Last Instance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46Where Is the Space for Neurosis Within Experience? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53Concept, Object, Phenomenology, Assimilation, Neurosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

The Age of Tautology and Unbinding Concept from Object. . . . . . . . . . . 63Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

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Authors Introduction: The Neurotic Turn

As far as I know—at least in the 21st century—it has been in vogue for lessacademic journals and books to work on re-definitions of hackneyed or redundantterms (such is ‘neurosis’1). Weighty terms such as ‘Being’, the ‘Subject’, ‘Nature’,have always brought with them the spectre or impetus of a neurosis which aims atbroadening, re-instantiating, re-claiming and redefining these terms, and we are wellaware of those philosophers that have been part of this process. It is in many waysinevitable but also not without corruption, digression and plain ignorance to thegenealogical, etymological and philological continuity of words and their ‘uses’. Inthis century we possibly have a ‘lighter’ and more liberal philological and ety-mological desire to appropriate terms (in praise of words but also in a spirit totraverse them through this exercise).

There is also a peculiarly modern urge to usurp theories in the making andproduce them prematurely under some slogan, conference or shared polemic2 (…with the hope that this prematurity may create a monster of intervention, subver-sion, immanance, ‘the real’)? The impulse to make-into-product something thatmight only work on registers outside of labour and production can be seen as both amiddle finger to the fastidiousness of thinking which has its ‘proper place’, ‘propertime’, ‘proper criteria’ and ‘proper audience’ but also—and not without concern—hints at some reconciliation or mutation of the practices of theory with the practicesof fashion—conflating different temporal criteria where The production of the New3

and The Shock of the New4 become the same thing. The Dublin Unit of SpeculativeThought (D.U.S.T) have characterized and affirmed their work as existing within apolemical space of conflicts, negotiations, inclusion and exclusion, as a place where

1The term neurosis has been dismissed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of MentalDisorders as a valid term for 35 years now.2The collation of such varied thinkers as Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze, Land and Brassier under theterm ‘accelerationism’ holds true to this desire running through our time. The AccelerationistReader, 2014.3O’Sullivan/Simon, Zepke/Stephen, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, 2011.4Hughes (1991).

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work MUST be done in order for us to ‘weoponise’ ourselves from the prevailingdogmas, despotic forces and downright facism overwhelming the orthodox aca-demic institution. In this sense, ‘time and place’ are not just the criteria for thecoherence of a piece of academic work in relation to its tradition but also acts as thespontaneous and revolutionary conditions for an ‘event’, disclosing the power ofintellectual intervention (as well as showcasing fashions effects and humour’sfunction).

I for one definitely discern some friction between a Deleuzian affirmation of‘styles of thought’, ‘nomenclatures’, a ‘pragmatics of language’ that aspires toreconcile itself with the imminence and potentiality of existence and, on the otherhand, a desire for ‘correct’ context, ‘correct’ intention and ‘correct’ use of words.Both have different attitudes similar to different personalities (different neuroses).

Written as an apologia or as a tautological statement about neurosis itself, couldwe not say that all the inclinations that drive the values and presentational methodsof knowledge above are driven by neuroses? This is not without a Nietzscheanundertone—that there is essentially no true or absolute knowledge but rather themaking-to-be-true of the neurotic (whether personal or collective). Would a bookon neurosis save us from hypocrisy and allow us to reflect on our own prejudices,not only to reflect but to ‘speculate’ that these neuroses are the cause or operation ofhuman consciousness itself?

Regardless of these abstract provocations I give you, we do see (or certainpeople have discerned) neuroses as a category, symptom, characteristic, process,metaphor disclosed in contemporary existence. It is a natural consequence ofneurosis itself to hunt out phenomena and return such to ‘itself’, ‘in the lastinstance’ (Laruelle), in the ‘counting as one’ (Badiou),5 under the ‘id’ (Freud),under the ‘I that accompanies all experience’ (Kant) or the ‘family resemblance’that links words or concepts (Wittgenstein) and perceptions (empiricism). Theentirety of the phenomenological school lays claim to this almost common-sensicaldiscovery; that within the manifestation of any appearance, the desire to appear, orthe correlate of human consciousness which desires to turn things into appearances,cannot be separated from the appearance itself. As we shall discover in this book,this neurotic desire (of sense-making, form-making, of certainty and clarity) is notalways commensurate with our other neuroses (“I never asked to see such and suchin this way”!).

To describe things in the empirical world (humans, non-humans, objects, pro-cesses etc.) as neurotic, let alone as conditions for experience, apprehension andcomprehension itself (see my essays), is quite a new phenomenon altogether. Whatwas once used to describe or diagnose the identity of certain human states inconsciousness is now used to point to things outside of this ‘disfunctionality’ in thehuman psyche.6 The result is—however—not due to some imaginative human

5See Badiou (2011).6In no way does this extension of neurosis have to be seen as conventionally ‘materialist’. In-fact ithas its roots in the most ‘idealist’ of philosophers (Berkeley, Kant, Hegel).

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analogy or anthropomorphisation—but due to the acceptance that the neurosis thathumans were experiencing came from a power that preceded human cognition andoutstretched it. Even the lightest research into animal psychology suggests both aneuroses preceding human cognition and independent from it.7

In traditional anthropocentric psychology there are ‘conditions’, ‘origins’ and‘effects’ to neurosis (the chaos of affairs vital to him/her, the conditions that haveacted immediately or gradually on him/her) but that they do not have gravity‘outside’ of this locus of disturbance should be of great philosophicalimport/significance (let alone that such neuroses can occur without influence onanother person). If the effects (and not simply ‘cause’) cannot be discerned in thesocial or natural sciences then what leads us to conclude that such neuroses camefrom there in the first place? This is not to say that neurosis cannot arise outsideof the human mind (quite the contrary) but that—whether in an object, organism orenvironmental condition—such neurosis cannot be reducible to a sphere of causalevents analyzable by the physical sciences or social positivism. The difference thatGilles Deleuze discerns between a process of nature (working on an A–B scale) anda process of production (working on an A–Z) scale8 is true of neurosis, its spon-taneous proliferation of psychic association’s and the ‘lines of flight’9 that esotericsignification ensues. Equally, that the subjects, objects and dynamics of neurosis arealways already ‘charged’ with characteristics (or a mode of being—in—the—world) evades any objective and neutral study of objects, their causes and theireffects which could be repeated or hypothesized. Finally, that the effectuation of anentity can appear more powerful than its putative cause (whether by determiningtransformation in the relation, the change between two states, or in an effect thatchanges its context/condition) denies the plausibility of an absolute, uniform ormechanistic ground which determines its objects. However, it will be a long timeuntil we may point at waves crashing into one another, climate cycles, diffusion’s ofprophecy, fear and paranoia proliferated by the media, and state that they areoperating on a neurotic basis and not merely mechanistic. Equally it is not just thequestion of where neurosis emerges in the field of human activity but why? IvanPetrovitch Pavlov asks—‘how and why do there arise changes in the normal pro-cesses of the nervous system? Are not these real prerequisites? And where are theyall satisfied’?10

Could we make an obscure relation between Kant’s transcendental philosophyand neurosis, explaining that neurosis is precisely that which guarantees experienceyet is not ontically found in experience? This characterizes ‘neurosis’ as an active

7See Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov’s lectures concerning human and animal neuroses. ConditionedReflexes and Psychiatry Vol 1 and 2.8Guattari and Deleuze (2004).9Lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control andshoot off on the diagonal. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces beyond thelimits of what exists. Tim Raynor, Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Nomadic Creativity, 2013.10Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, Volume II: Conditioned Reflexes andPsychiatry, translated and edited by W. Horsley Gantt, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., London 1941.

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(almost vital) power fundamental to the structure of consciousness and—if we wishto make such a metaphysical leap and equate thinking with being—also thestructure of Being. However, characterisation’s of ‘neurosis’ have also beeninstantiated on the passive side of cognition as well as the active side. There is avery loose legacy of thinkers that have—for lack of a better word—a more ‘ma-terialist’ view on neurosis which forefronts consciousness as ‘victim’ to the out-wardly neurotic affectivity of material life upon the nervous system and the humanorganism as a whole. Boris Sidis has written many journals on the psychopathologyof neurosis showing that what primarily starts as a science of anatomy and general‘natural selection’ (using Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard in particular) pavesthe way for a polemical exercise in showing how ‘immediate emotional impulse’11

rules the ‘principle of serviceable, associated habits in the world’12;

the manner in which the secretions of the alimentary canal and of certain glands as the liver,kidneys, or mammae are affected by strong emotions, is an excellent instance of the directaction of the sensorium on these organs … even the slightest excitement of sensory nervereacts through the pneumogastric nerve on the heart…directly acted on by the sensorium.13

The constant sensitivity to external stimuli and the attention to the organisms‘psychic’ (as opposed to merely ‘chemical’) assimilation gives us a picture of anorganism open like a wound or popped blister to the world, where the human‘sensorium’ is controlled through various semiotic and semantic synapses, where therepetitions of external stimuli create a reflex more akin to trauma than to adaptation,neutralisation, mastering or comprehension of an environment. That these reflexesare ‘learnt’ qua psychic cue’s shows us how pertinent psychology is to the study ofhuman functioning, perception, ‘reality’, epistemology and ontology (these psychiccues preceding ‘folk psychological’ evaluations such as the role of language and theostensible difference between intentional and non-intentional actions).

An intimate relation exists between the functions of the central nervous system on the onehand and the sensory, motor, glandular, and visceral functions on the other. This vitalrelation, though unobtrusive to the casual observer,stands out clear and distinct in thedomain of certain nervous and mental disturbances, such as hysteria, hystereoepilepsy,larval epilepsy, neurastenia, psychasthenia. All such conditions are mental disturbances,conscious or subconscious, and are termed by me psychopathies or recurrent mental states.Recurrence of the symptom complex is pathognomonic of psychopathies, or briefly,neurosis.14

The onslaught of external stimuli is given further purchase by Walter Benjamin’sinterpretation of ‘shock’ (respectfully influenced by Sigmund Freud); ‘for a livingorganism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than thereception of stimuli’.15 So far we have used animal psychology to point to the

11Richardson, Angelique, After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind, 2003, p. 123.12Darwin (1872).13Ibid.14The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology, Boris Sidis, 1914.15Freud (1922).

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perpetual/neurotic interplay between external environment, physical organs and thevarious psychic triggers that effect, monitor and orient our everyday lives, but hereconsciousness becomes the very thing that protects us from—as well as configures—reality, a reality full of external, impersonal ‘energies’. For Benjamin readingFreud “the threat of these energies is one of shocks” and “the more readily con-sciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumaticeffect”.16 What interests me here is that consciousness-as-neurosis now has someputative impetus; consciousness now has to act perpetually (neurotically) in order tobuffer/rationalize, neutralize and acclimatize itself to the trauma of the externalworld. This has obvious connections to traditional psychoanalytic theory whereby‘neurosis’ acts as a way to repeat traumatic events in order to somehow change theunchangeable event, to reconcile the irreconcilable, or more precisely:

…to repeat the moment of trauma so that one’s psyche can muster the anxiety required toachieve a successful cathexis or binding of the excess of the excitation concomitant with thetraumatic breaching of the organism’s psychic defenses. Thus, the compulsion to repeatconsists in an attempt on the part of the unconscious to relive the traumatic incident in acondition of anxious anticipation that goes some way to buffering the traumatic shock.17

Philosopher Ray Brassier allows us to make the leap from an immanent neurosiswhich acts as a novel theory in physiology to a transcendental neurosis acting bothspeculatively and retrospectively; retrospectively as thoughts obsession with itsown non-existent (or non-conceptual) origin (or non-origin), and speculatively asthoughts overcoming of its own illusory ‘horizon’ and very ‘real’ gradual extinc-tion. For Ray Brassier the overwhelming fact that our ‘terrestrial horizon will bewiped away in roughly 4.5 billion years from now’, when the sun is fully extin-guished,18 holds traumatic potency in that it does away with any infinite horizon ofthought that thinking ostensibly follows (‘God’, ‘Nature’/‘Vitalism’). Similar topsychological trauma—how is thought registering the ‘shock’ or impending can-cellation of its own thinking? Has this catastrophe already happened—the repetitionof this event driving a horizonless thought? Brassier goes on to say that such acatastrophe is ‘transcendental’ because it cannot be registered on the empiricallevel. In my own ill-informed way I interpret this fourfold: as the inability forexperience to register this extinction through any vehicle of appearance, that such acatastrophe does away with the possibility of experience and not simply theelimination of various content in experience, that it transcends the correlation ofbeing and thought (which are commonly held as being inextricably intertwined) asthe disappearance of thought will never be thought, but also that such a catastropheinhibits thought with a challenge beyond that of maintaining human life, posed inthe question ‘how could thought advance—through biological or technologicalinnovation—to a point where it can think the death of human life (and other forms

16Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, 1999.17https://thetragiccommunity.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/transcendental-clones-generic-humanity-ray-brassier-nina-power-and-returning-to-the-question-of-the-human/.18Brasier quoting Lyotard, Nihil Unbound, p. 223.

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of life) without being encumbered by the limitations of that organism. FrancoisLyotard provocatively states:

With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped – leaving that disappearanceabsolutely unthought of.19

Leaving aside other fruitful ideas Brassier’s catastrophe raises (absolute physicalextinction as the gradual objectification of thought/the externalization of theinternal, and the possibility for thought to characterize itself relatively independentfrom the horizons that have driven it hitherto) let us hover over this characterizationof thought as something that is driven but has already unbound itself from anyfuture horizon, a thought—like Freud and later Benjamin’s—that perpetuallyrepeats itself in order to buffer the very real (and metaphysical) trauma of its ownvertigo or misplacement between some ambiguous evolutionary impetus and theblind, random vagaries that ensue. It is not only us humans but also every atom,particle, molecule, organism, object etc. that exists within this framework ofextrapolation and misguided inference. If there is no teleology or absolute horizonthen does the world assimilate one anyway through the desire for continuity,uniformity, self-sustainability, the desire for reality itself? Wile E Coyote walks offthe edge of a cliff without noticing. For many moments after he is still carried by thecertainty/convention/custom of this action. It is only when he looks down to see theair beneath him (it is only when the invisible ‘equipment’ he has hitherto relied onappears now as a problem to be cognitively grasped) that the laws that suchcomprehension perceives ensues. For entities or processes that cannot reflect ontheir ‘being’ (that cannot make the switch between ‘ready-to-hand’ and‘present-to-hand’ existence) we could begin to see a humorous world of ‘things’trapped inside the ‘external’ uses/determinations of it as X, whether blindly oper-ating (like when an electronically powered walking toy meets an obstacle yetattempts to keep on walking) or like the majority of objects which remain stub-bornly inert until triggered/intervened with. Equally, if one allows an effect tosometimes be greater than its cause (thereby giving it some sense of agency) wecould also say that it is the objects themselves that maintain a standard (or ecstatic)operation regardless of its position in a network of use, value, signification; theclock remains ticking when we have finished reading it’s clock face, the basketballremains bouncing when we have tossed it aside in a fit of boredom, even the brainmaintains a minimal level of equilibrium and function regardless of any state ofdiversion, intention and difference that it encounters etc. In these cases I aminterested by those air-walking moments of Wile E Coyote, where human activity(and the objects we neurotically allocate) seem to be oriented by nothing but theslipstream of a previous task which is determining them, an intrinsic identity, or acustom for customs sake. Thanks to Graham Harman we also have a cogentgateway into what else such objects might be doing other than being caricatures ofhuman intention, and I wonder—if human interaction (theoretical and practical)

19Lyotard (1991).

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never completely exhausts an object (humans being objects too)—what procedureallows all available nuances of interaction to be subsumed under one (?) perspec-tive? Could this process aptly be called ‘neurotic’ (even simply in the generic senseof the neurotic procedure which subsumes all myriad thinking under onemaster-signifier or traumatic experience, or perhaps in the sense that the content andimpact of thoughts for the neurotic are in some ways determined by the attitudeof the neurotic himself, his disposition, his own experiences, and in this sense couldan objects relation to another object be retrieved in the object itself)?

Another perhaps more controversial aspect of neurosis is its affinity with ‘Love’.We might not go as far as Freud and state that the unsuccessful resolution ofcastration anxiety (boys) and penis envy (girls) leads to neurosis, but there is—especially in Lacan—and his interpretation of Freud’s ‘rat man’ scenario—theunsuccessful resolution of two requirements in life. Firstly, the subject has to claima place for himself in the sexual realm, accede to what Lacan calls the ‘virilefunction’ and mirror this status in the realm of work, his professional life. Secondly,he has to achieve an enjoyment one might characterize as tranquil and univocalof the sexual object, once it is chosen, granted to the subject’s life. However, twoproblems occur when he attempts this: in relation to the first requirement theobsessional generates a narcissistic relation with a character to whom he basicallyceded control of his life, a character to whom “he delegates the responsibility ofrepresenting him in the world and of living in himself”.20 In relation to the secondaim, achieving this “tranquil and univocal” enjoyment comes at the price of asplitting of the sexual partner. Lacan refers to this splitting as involving an “aura ofabrogation”—a kind of cancellation, annulation of the object—which then leads tothe appearance of another object.

Love seems to be the most obvious battleground for neurosis. Our need forsocial interaction, the impact the human face has on registering emotion, all mixedwith that great social imaginary backdrop of ‘Love’ depicted through ancient Greektragedy to contemporary romantic film (let alone the differing pledges of love thatSocrates, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Keats etc. spoke of). We can speak of it (especiallyin Shakespeare I believe) as the varying manifestation’s of myriadobsessions/neuroses. In the ‘intellectual’ world ‘Love’ was seen as non-dialectical;Spinoza stated that:

“no sorrow can exist with the accompanying idea of God’ or ‘Love to God cannot be turnedinto hatred. But some may object, that if we understand God to be the cause of all things,we do for that very reason consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply, that in so faras we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion, that is to say, it ceases to besorrow; and therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do werejoice’.21

20Lacan (1953).21Spinoza, Benedict Baruch, Part 2 of The Ethics, Human Blessedness and the Eternity of theMind.

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Equally we have the same inclination in Nietzsche:

Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to allwoe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, ifever you said, “You please me, happiness! Abide moment!” then you wanted all back. Allanew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored–oh then you loved the world. Eternalones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joywants–eternity.

Even in Socrates, ‘Love’ is a road to forms of knowledge and does not impede it—“eros is a desire whose highest expression is the desire for wisdom”.22

However, there is cause to argue for a ‘Love’ that manifests as more aptly apsychological conflict (internal and external), between resolving ‘ideal’ modes ofbeing-in-love, with a ‘lack’ (Lacan), alienation (Hegel/Marx) or problem associ-ating with a fundamentally dissociated world (Jung). The obsession of jealousy,ownership, the appropriation of non-appropriated forms (the need to turn lights offor check the washing machine etc.) discloses itself as a master-relation (or con-vention) in Love. However it is a neurosis not unlike or disassociated from everyother neurosis in the world (in-fact it would be more apt to say that ‘Love’ is ahuman master-relation of neurosis).

In the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy/literature there are at least twothinkers who represent this ‘neurosis’ and involve it so much in their work that itcould almost be seen as a case against the paradigm of ‘disinterestedness’ that is theprecursor for any real models of knowledge. Those thinkers—for different reasons—are Franz Kafka and Soren Kierkegaard.

Franz Kafka’s neurosis with Felice Bauer, documented mainly through letterswhich became posthumously entitled ‘Letters to Felice’,23 shows the extent towhich Kafka thought about his ‘lover’. Between the years 1912–1917 Kafka wrotea minimum of two letters to Felice every day and at times intermittently during theactual creation of such works as The Trial and The Metamorphosis, discussing theprogress of these books with her. In Kafka’s works there remains a truth specific toneurosis; there is, simultaneously, an extrapolation of the universality of love‘out-there’ and in his characters, yet also a complete solipsism of love where everyconceptual and physical act leads him back to Felice. At times he also claims to livevicariously through her; he claims to feel ill when he discovers that she is unwell,he constantly asks her—when she is healthy—whether she is in-fact ill, becauseKafka (the hypochondriac) is always suggesting himself ill.

In Kafka there is a both a ‘being—towards—neurosis’ (as if it were aHeidegerrean mode of Being) and also a ‘neurosis—towards—being’ (aconstant/neurotic sensitivity towards—and amalgamating in—the self).

Soren Kierkegaard’s neurosis with Regine Olsen was of a similarself-tormenting disposition. As Charles Baxter has mentioned:

22Belfiore (2012).23Kafka (1973).

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Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher fell in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, andthen he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that hehimself was so complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement soas to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probablyinvolved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself,the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general.A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen tothe West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in theform of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety.He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actionstoward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.24

From single-celled amoeba’s to multi-cellular organisms, what part of the pro-cess of ‘extending’ and ‘attracting’ in relation to one’s environment has essentiallychanged? We have moved from something which is limited in its action/function(that is deemed a ‘determinate reflex’—the amoeba) to a level of ostensiblesophistication/culture which could still be seen to be built upon this principle ofextensions and attractions in relation to something analogous to Freud’s ‘pleasureprinciple’ (the instinct of both seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in order to satisfybiological and psychological needs). In the twenty-first century these extensionsand attractions have proliferated and appropriated every aspect of lived experience;“I am cold, I will put a jumper on”, “I’m walking this way so as to avoid the road”,“I am using a language to communicate/liberate my thoughts”, “I am walking to thecafé because I am hungry”, “I scratch my head because I have an itch”, “the jumperI am putting on is from my favourite shop”, “it’s my favourite colour” etc. We arehappy to allocate a principle of determinism to the hard sciences; we enjoy learningabout what plants, chemicals, our bodies do, without us telling it to do so, withoutus constantly monitoring, deciding for or being conscious of such processes, but inthe humanities and softer sciences we are of a completely different opinion. Thedetermination of various thoughts/reflexes and principles of pleasure/pain in thedomain of everyday life (which includes all disciplines—philosophy, politics,ethics etc.) is, however, of a similar principle of determinism, yet the ‘ground’which sets the criteria for such determinism (the ostensible ‘cause’) has a semioticand semantic nature to it which cannot be completely ‘naturalised’ (at least not withour present definitions of naturalism’25). Cultural constructions/conventions pro-duce habits of a second and perhaps third nature, whereby the stimulus for suchhabits (conceptual habits as well as physical) do not pertain in ‘matter’ or in anylogical, rational, evolutionary or positivistic manner. To be embarrassed aboutbeing by oneself in a cafe, muttering the latest pop song playing on the radio (butsinging quiet enough so no-one can hear), reaching for your mobile phone—whatfundamental or ontological principle can we equate this to? Because culture

24Baxter (2001).25For example Paul Kurtz seems to equate naturalism with a form of materialism. See Kurtz(1998).

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changes, can be manipulated, superimposed, and so forth, and because there is notone locus where this change occurs, a purely essentialist, biological (of innate genesetc.), physical or logical framework cannot be established. Assimilation is whatoccurs. Although biological/physiological factors of the pleasure principle obvi-ously come into play with how we respond to our environment, ‘pleasure’ and‘pain’ are never solely found in responses to the physical environment alone. A boyhas been invited to his first rock concert yet a few hours before the concert shouldstart it has been canceled due to health and safety reasons. Do we not find aprinciple of pleasure and pain here? A form of pleasure and pain constructedculturally, without legitimation by the biological or whatever ‘conditions’ you wishto allocate as defining the human species.

These newer, constructed arenas of pleasure and pain necessarily take the psy-chic subject as de facto, and forms of capture, acting, roleplaying, determination I.eassimilation occur. Yet we still hold a general consensus that the act of thinkingcomes from within us causa sui and intervenes with ‘the balance of nature’ (theoryof homeostasis26); that thinking constitutes ‘a role of the dice’ (Mallarme), ‘thecreation of new concepts’ (Deleuze), a commitment to a singularity/‘Event’(Badiou). Even us ‘Nietzscheans’ cannot deny that thinking (or the task to think foroneself) constitutes the individual/authentic self.

Not only do we see neurosis as the mechanism which attracts and repels us toboth our own and our collective world of pleasure and pain (from the sudden reflexof being burnt to our personal and collective ideological inclinations) It is alsoof the utmost importance that neurosis itself appears as the only anomaly to thepleasure principle—as Freud realised—posed in the question—why is it that wewish to repeat unpleasurable experiences? Neurosis escapes the dialectic ofpleasure/pain because it is neurosis itself which can designate what is ofpleasure/pain, significance/insignificance to its subject. It not only designates buttransgresses these poles in the name of neurosis. Examples of this can be found insado-masochism, obsession, ‘anoraks’, products of thinking ‘beyond good andevil’—powers of neurosis that cannot see the vague moral, biological, religious andsocial limitations and demarcations of pleasure/pain (its inclusion/exclusion and itsjudging to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’).This power is in-fact the secret fuel that givesbreadth to an epic scale of assimilations (in capitalism and outside of it in differentcivilizations).

Technocratic determinism is our closest ally to the theory of neurosis and anenemy to the theory of the subjectification of thought aligned to the human andhis/her act of willing. The theory of technocratic determinism—in brief—is thesomewhat ideological belief that technology acts autonomously from humanexistence and ‘progresses’ (or changes) in a certain, inevitable way based on earliertechnological advances and events. However, as soon as we see technology in a

26A theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium, which is to saythat a small change in some particular parameter (the size of a particular population, for example)will be corrected by some ‘negative feedback’ that will bring the parameter back to its original“point of balance” with the rest of the system.

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more expansive way (such as the Greek term Techne which involved many forms ofcrafting/doing), we begin to observe all objects, ideas and environmental conditionsas never simply neutral but always already working in some way, always prefiguredand always inextricable from the concept we adequately or inadequately assign to it.The objects around us contain the ideas assigned to them as if material signatures ofa task, and likewise, if we denied ourselves the possibility to assign ideas intomatter and experience (which would itself be impossible) the ideas themselveswould disappear, never again to be thought unless resuscitated through material andcraft—Techne.

Determination, characterized in the above definition, should not be seen as someteleological determination set by one cause or process that will unwaveringly movein that same direction regardless of posterior or ulterior changes, but rather thatconcepts, phenomena and entities will determine themselves until something in thatrelation will become the main determination. This is why we cannot say that thesubject causes thoughts because the conditions that motivate a subject; political,financial, social, cultural (and just as importantly the conditions that assimilate asubjects personality such as their desire, judgment, methods of valuation, preju-dices, experiences etc.) all act as determining factors for the character of a thought.This character of thought can never solely come from a ‘sovereign’ subject.Equally, ideas themselves have a long history that embody, influence and contributeto new thoughts expressed by men (this I get from Hegel).

That ideas are not spontaneous, innate or essentialist, yet assimilate each other asthey move along relentlessly, pre-supposing themselves and commonly subordi-nating themselves for larger ideas/assimilation, is not as controversial as one mayfirst discern. One of the things that Kant and Hume shared was the insistence thatsome propositions are ‘discoverable by the mere operation of thought, withoutdependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe’.27 That thought operateswhether we like it or not—regardless of instantiating it as an act of subjectivity(Descartes) or appearing as a ‘form’ emanating from a more perfect realm (Plato)—is a horror disclosed with the advent of philosophy itself. That the operation ofthought might perhaps be constructing its own content and not acting as a gatewayto apprehend ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ is neurotic. Unfortunately Husserl’s phenomeno-logical method does not relieve us of this neurosis; at first glance we appearliberated from our solipsistic cogito (the affirmative truth of our existence guar-anteed by thought yet skeptical of anything outside this truth) but now we have athought always already relating and interacting in and to the world; a consciousnessdirected towards objects, a consciousness always conscious of and not simplyself-conscious, a consciousness with intentionality. However, with reluctance toreturn to our pre-phenomenological methods, we still have to ask with confidencewhether we really do think intentionally all the time, and if so, how encumbered,claustrophobic, obnoxious and neurotic such consciousness is! The irony of the

27Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772). Hackett Publ Co. 1993;Chapter on Cause and Effect.

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development of philosophy is that it attempts to liberate itself from thosedichotomies found in figures such as Plato (Reality/Appearance), Descartes(Thinking/Extended substance) and Kant (Phenomena/Noumena) which createpsychological effects, whilst at the same time accidentally paving the way for ageneral theory of determinism; whether it be the constant intentionality of the mindon its object, the proliferation of noesis in relation to the nouema, or the culturalrelativism that denounces the ‘absolute’ and designates the human condition and itsstages of thought as determined by historical, social, technological and politicalepochs (whether it be the ‘projects’ that define us as human ‘dasein’ in-the-world,the invisible ‘equipment’ that we are embroiled within when undertaking anynon-reflective tasks, or whether it be the ‘language games’ that we “blindlyobey”28). Like Fichte’s critique of Kant’s Copernican Turn, these forms of con-stituting and embedding consciousness and its objects within the world also createsa form of claustrophobia (this term aptly related to neurosis/anxiety disorder) whereall speculation or fideism seems closed off. In Francis Wolff’s words:

Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to ‘beable to be conscious of it’, it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or inconsciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But inanother sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world’s window: forto be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speakabout something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not theidea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about thething. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves onlyinsofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or lan-guage as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out.29

If I may be so bold, it is only with Hegel that one learns to love this neurosis. Nota neurosis trapped and pressured in the human mind, nor a mind vulnerably open toa reality that thought keeps ‘intentionally’/neurotically leaping towards, but rather aneurosis informing our very own awareness of ideas, watching them take shapeconcretely and never without our involvement (yet sometimes without our ‘inten-tion’), chasing and self-determining their elaborate and vast constructions thatorient human activity. For Hegel we have a reality mediated by concepts (in thesame vein as Kant). Such a reality and its objects are not simply apprehended butare formed through conceptual instances of determination—comprehension. Also itis not an immutable comprehension of transparent knowing in the mind, nor onedetermined by some non-cognitive ‘objective’ qualities of the object, but an in-stance purportedly finite (the historical and social inter-dependent forms of thoughtconstruction) and infinite (the speeds and heights of such conceptual determinationswhich exceed and assimilate finite spatio-temporal reality). In other words, theinstance of comprehension is a movement irreducible to solely the mental conceptwe give something and/or the way our reality naturally shows itself to us as aproduct of its own dialectical ‘development’ (or assimilation). It is the mutual

28Wittgenstein (2007).29Wolff (1997).

xxviii Authors Introduction: The Neurotic Turn

implication of the two that gives us a reality in this last consummated instance (and—anyway—we cannot give something a mental concept unless it has been given tous simultaneously). It is the dialectic which connects the shapes of consciousnessearlier on in the Phenomenology of Spirit with the configurations of human sociallife which appear later. It is the relation between the conceptual content of water(that it turns to ice at 0 °C and turns to steam at 100 °C) and our practicalexpression of this knowledge. It is the assimilation of further concepts which haveinformed, appropriated, extricated, oriented (and at times excluded) this conceptualcontent expressed in human experience. It is not simply that X ‘is’ but also what theactivity expressing the concept X is, and how does this further or disseminate theconcept?

Neurosis seems obvious in this regard; the history of concepts that assimilate andproliferate neurotically (sometimes with little coherence), the act of instantiating aknowledge that we are always already within, the less mechanistic and more exoticneuroses of object’s, their relations and their interactions, the neurotic whirlpool ofa constructed ‘self’ pulling things into perception, situating and defining itselfwithin a domain of pleasure and pain (reaching from physical to philosophical).

So far we have revealed that the surface phenomena of psychological neurosiscan be applied to all areas of being (ontology) which gives it great philosophicalimportance. Now let us use this ambitious concept of neurosis and see if it can standup to those abstract philosophical/metaphysical concepts that orient our currenttrends of philosophical thought. Not only will we find alternatives to such flawedsystems of thought (free-will/determinism, teleology/mechanism, internal/external,subject/object, concept/object and more…) we might find that such systems areequally neurotic, or, contain neurosis already within them.

Bibliography

Badiou A (2011) Being and eventBaxter C (2001) Feast of loveBelfiore E (2012) s, Socrates’ daimonic art: love for wisdom in four platonicDarwin C (1872) The expression of the emotions in man and animalsFreud S (1922) Beyond the pleasure principleGuattari F, Deleuze G (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2004Hughes R (1991) The shock of the new: art and the century of changeKafka F (1973) Letters to FeliceKurtz P (1998) Darwin re-crucified: why are so many afraid of naturalism? Free Inquiry (Spring)Lacan J (1953) The neurotics individual mythLyotard F (1991) The inhuman, p 10Wittgenstein L (2007) Philosophical investigations, p 219Wolff F (1997) Dire le monde

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