Superego I: Childish superego, takes on prohibitions of parent, you’re a worthless piece of …
Superego II: Humour This superego is potentially a friend, a tough friend, a friend that finds you ridiculous. This idea o
Whether the picture of Infinitely Demanding Ethics and Ethical Subject, infinite responsibility that divides me from myself leads to a form of self-hatred?
Sublimation not as tragic sublimation, but sumblimation as more assuaging form of sublimation, humour as self-mocking, I find myself laughably inauthentic, humour is a reminder of ones inauthenticity. The split is not masochistic self-flagellation, but a divided humourous self-relation.
One smiles at oneself and finds oneself ridiculous. Humour is the experience of the lack of self-coincidence. We do not coincide with ourselves. Humour is the eccentricity of ourself to ourselves.
Distinction between Being and Having: An experiential gap between being the one is, and relationship I HAVE to that BEING. Eccentricty, I’m eccentric with regards to myself, I’m not at ONE with MYSELF. I’m in a different orbit with regards to myself.
Humour is the enactment of that ECCENTRICITY. Human beings are NATURAL beings, we’re bodies, we’re animals. We have a self-relation to ourselves which is not one of coincidence. There is an uneasy disjunction between the body and the experience of THOUGHT. What is self-consciousness, the consciousness of self. But what is that, consciousness is already divided, I’m divided from myself as far as I reflect.
Black Sun of melancholia at centre of the comic human experience. Humour is anti-depressant
Conscience: is the internalization of the ethical demand that splits open the subject between itself and a demand that it cannot miss
Conscience is work of human being on itself, this work could be excessively demanding, Foucault has idea in late work, the idea of technology of self are forms of work upon the self. But Critchley is not with Foucault, there is this stoicism in Foucault a paganism, autonomy or idea of self-legislation. Foucault died and worked incredibly hard on vol 2 and 3 before he died. Monastic discipline in Christianity, what new form of discipline is Christianity with regards to the self.
With Christian subjectivity we get Abstention of sexual desire, and this leads to a deepening of the subject, a deepening of his subjective matrix. We see this most radically in Augustine who was a frat boy, a party animal until he converted to Christianity.
There were 2 wills raging within me will of the Flesh and will of the Spirit. From abstention of sexual practices we get a DEEPENING of subjectivity.
Critchley on Faith of the Faithless: Simone Weil, Song of Songs (Psalms)[??] Female mystics, what you find sublimation of discourse of carnal love into a discourse in relationship to the Divine. How the experience of love is described in these discourses. The links the experience of love has to absention of sexual practices and chastity.
Sexual practice takes on different character in female mystics. A key thinker here is Ann Carson’s DECREATION. How these women tell love. Love for Polette is an act of not a union, not a contract between 2 people, Love is the act of radical spiritual daring which annilates the self in order to give itself to another in love (God). This comes full circle to Lacan and psychoanalysis, because the ethics of psychoanalysis, for me, what does Lacan mean by jouissance and Feminine Jouissance, the difference between Phallic Jouissance and Feminine Jouissance. The former is male, the universal tendency to debasement in love. The phenomenon (freud) in my male patients is psychical impotence, physically capable but incapable with their wives, partners??? There is a split between IDEALIZATION and Debased object. in Phallic Jouissance the phallic jouissance is incapable of love, and desire is only in relation to debased object. Separation of LOVE and DESIRE.
What the hope is to put LOVE AND DESIRE IN THE SAME PLACE. THIS IS THE QUESTION.
What is Feminine Jouissance: Female mysticism: an experience of feminine jouissance connected to TRANSGRESSION, it is a different form of sublimation. Kierkegaard: Love as a radical act of self-impoverishment, of trying to give oneself over.
Here is Critchley article on Kierkegaard in the times on love
How does one reconcile oneself with one’s being towards death. No Critchley is on to a different question: Not how to live, which is about moratlity, but how to LOVE, which is about immortality.
There is something engaged there, eternal, immortal, what does being immortal mean? The discourse around the question of Love historically, continues to raise that question, Love as that experience that attempts to transgress that experience of finitute, and we can call it immortal.
Question about humour, when Jon Stewart uses it Freud and psychoanalysis is a deeply conservative project, and Lacan even more. Lacan, “I never spoke about freedom.” Reich, R.D. Laing revolted against this conservatism. Satire might just be that pressure value that regulates the social order, let them poke fun at those in power and nothing will be done. There is no inherent emancipatory potential in the comedic.