This in-between [between nature and culture] is the \u201crepressed\u201d of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel\u2019s \u201cgrand narrative\u201d of the world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives.<\/p>\n
According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the \u201cinfinite lack of being\u201d (unendliche Mangel an Sein<\/em>), the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself. This insight also forms the core of Hegel\u2019s notion of madness: when Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world<\/strong>, the closing of the soul onto itself, its \u201ccontraction,\u201d he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a \u201cregression\u201d to the level of the \u201canimal soul\u201d still embedded in its natural environment and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.).<\/p>\n But does not this withdrawal, on the contrary, amount to a severing of links with the Umwelt<\/em>, the end of the subject\u2019s immersion in its immediate natural environment, and is it not, as such, the founding gesture of \u201chumanization\u201d? Was not this withdrawal-into-the-self accomplished by Descartes with his universal doubt<\/strong> and reduction to the cogito<\/em>, which, as Derrida pointed out, also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?<\/span>\u00a0 339<\/p>\n Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant was aiming at was not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from outside, through a cultural authority; rather, Kant\u2019s true aim is to point out how the very need for an external master is a deceptive lure<\/em>: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility.<\/span><\/p>\n In this precise sense, a truly enlightened \u201cmature\u201d human being is a subject who no longer needs a master<\/em>, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: \u201cEvery act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.\u201d 340<\/p>\n Perhaps this Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the figure of the zombie<\/strong>, slowly dragging itself around in a catatonic mode but persisting forever<\/strong>: are zombies not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (language, consciousness, and thinking)?\u00a0This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone we knew before, when he was still normally alive \u2014 the shock for a character in a zombie movie comes when they recognize the formerly friendly neighbor in the creeping figure relentlessly stalking them.\u00a0What Hegel says about habits thus has to be applied to zombies:<\/p>\n at the most elementary level of human identity, we are all zombies<\/em>; our \u201chigher\u201d and \u201cfree\u201d human activities are dependent on the reliable functioning of our zombie-habits\u2015in this sense, being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, humanity\u2019s inhuman or mechanical core.<\/span><\/p>\n The shock of meeting a zombie is thus not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own humanity.<\/span>\u00a0 341<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This in-between [between nature and culture] is the \u201crepressed\u201d of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel\u2019s \u201cgrand narrative\u201d of the world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives. According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as … Continue reading “madness 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,142,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-nightworld","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9522"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9549,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9522\/revisions\/9549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}