Dehiscence: de·his·cence/ (de-his´ins) a splitting open; the separation of a surgical incision or rupture of a wound closure; a rupture or splitting open, as of a surgical wound, or of an organ or structure to discharge its contents; the spontaneous opening at maturity of a plant structure, such as a fruit, anther, or sporangium, to release its contents; to discharge contents by so splitting <seedpods dehiscing at maturity> Etymology: Latin. dehiscere, to gape
“idealist obscurantism” (that is, a reaction against mechanical materialism that insists upon the existence of a sharp dehiscence between the physical and the metaphysical) is repeatedly presented in diverse forms of packaging (5 review of Parallax Diacritics)
In the course of elaborating the foundational thesis of Žižekian dialectical material-ism stating that the materiality of a Not-all one gives rise to a series of conflicting, irreconcilable twos (as more-than-material dimensions and dynamics), The Parallax View runs through a dizzying array of distinctions, all of which are treated as parallax pairs (that is, as seemingly insurmountable oppositions between mutually exclusive poles/positions):
- being and thought,
- positivity and negativity,
- the temporal and the eternal,
- immanence and transcendence,
- particularity and universality,
- substance and subject,
- is and ought,
- ontological and the evental,
- essence and appearance,
- neuronal and the mental,
- finite and the infinite,
- Pre-Symbolic and the Symbolic.
with each of these pairs of terms, the question recurrently posed by Žižek is: How does the latter term emerge out of the former term? and the basic general model being constructed here stipulates that once a second plane is produced by a first plane — this amounts to the genesis of a transontological dualistic Two out of an ontological monistic One — the resulting split between these planes becomes an ineradicable gap, an ineliminable dehiscence permanently resistant to any and every gesture aimed at its dissolution (7 review of Parallax Diacritics).
“In man… this relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months.” (Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” pg. 78)
The dehiscence internal to drive involves two axes—an “axis of iteration” and an “axis of alteration.” The axis of iteration consists of the drive-source (the regularly repeated demand for satisfaction issued by the drive) and the drive-pressure (the displeasure or anxiety accompanying an unmet demand of the drive-source, namely, the negative affective avatar of the drive-source). By contrast, the axis of alteration consists of the drive-aim (the achievement of the satisfaction demanded by the drive source, or, put differently, the reduction of the tensions experienced as a result of the drive-pressure) and the drive-object (the “ideational repre-sentative” of the drive, the mnemic traces of privileged object-choices in-fluencing the various vicissitudes of the drive). Freud portrays the meet-ing place of these four constituents of Triebas a realm between soma and psyche. However, what does time/temporality have to do with all of this? At the broadest of levels, psychoanalysis contains within itself an un-resolved tension. (xxxii, Time driven: metapsychology and the splitting of the drive 2000)
The Hegelian twist lies in claiming that the dehiscence between quasi-somatic repetition and representational, ideational becoming isn’t a contradiction indicative of the inadequacy of psychoanalytic thought with respect to its external object of investigation. Rather, this conflict between temporal orders is nothing other than the reality of Trieb. xxxiii
The timeless “I” is always–already the lost “I,” paradoxically making determinate acts of consciousness possible while nonetheless remaining forever out of the reflective reach of this same activity. And, as Deleuze notes, this dehiscence between noumenal and phenomenal subjectivity is irreparable, it “never runs its course.” (86)
Despite the dehiscence of subjectivity resulting from the interference of temporal mediation in self-consciousness, all cognition (whether as reflection or apprehension) belongs to a single, “simple,” selfsame “I” (what will later become the transcendental unity of apperception). (89)
What is responsible for generating the unsurpassable gap, incapable of convenient erasure by phenomenology, within the very heart of subjectivity? Time itself is the “cause” of this dehiscence (this being the sole means of recuperating the Heideggerian emphasis on temporality in the interpretation of Kant). Because self-consciousness is forced to vainly at-tempt an apprehension of itself through the mediation of temporal inner sense, and because reason can only exceed intuition in a regulative and not a constitutive fashion, the noumenal “I” remains intrinsically out of reach. (106)
As both Kant and Žižek point out, the dehiscence at the heart of self-consciousness thwarts any potential substantification of the subject — any attempt to say what the subject, abstracted from its determinate predicates, “is” in and of itself. But, what constitutes this rift? Temporality — as the irreducible tension between timelessness (the atemporal subjectivity of unconscious enunciation) and time (the phenomenal subjectivity of diachronic utterances)—is the gap constitutive of the Kantian–Lacanian subject. (112)
Like Kantian self-consciousness, the drives, thus divided along lines similar to the noumenal–phenomenal dehiscence, are structurally condemned to failure. (150)
Furthermore, Lacan speaks of an exact parallel between the split subject ($) and objet a. The dehiscence between Lacan’s subject of enunciation (synchronic) and subject of the utterance (diachronic) represents a structuralist translation of the Kantian antagonism between the transcendental and phenomenal/empirical dimensions of subjectivity. Thus, temporality proves to be the wedge forcing a division in subjective structure. (187)
This bivalence of Trieb demands a theory that takes into account an internal split, a dehiscence between Real and Symbolic (369).