Journal articles on the topic 'Freudian epistemology'

The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large.

In this article, I try to reconstitute the inchoative debate that took place between Ricœur and Grünbaum concerning the epistemology of Freudian psychoanalysis. The debate was more inchoative than effective because of its asymmetry (Grünbaum read and analyzed Ricœur, but the converse is far from certain). First, I will underline the originality of Ricœur’s theory of motivation (as a mix of reason and cause) and causality (teleological). Then, I will examine the rest of Grünbaum’s objections: the overvaluation of clinical relationship and language, the ontological specificity of psychical reality, the narrative originality of the psychoanalytical explanation and the status of symbol. I finally conclude by underlining the added value of the debate concerning the specificity o

Abstract This essay argues that reading involves a form of unconscious psychic work that has the potential to deeply affect and transform the reader. Recent discussions about the practice of reading shunned psychoanalysis because of its alleged reliance on a suspicious epistemology rooted in the Freudian-Lacanian framework. But object-relations theory offers an alternative paradigm, as Eve Sedgwick knew when she proposed the concept of “reparative reading.” This essay looks to post-Kleinian developments in psychoanalysis, in particular the work of Wilfred Bion and the contemporary Bionians, to describe reading as a creative, quasi-intersubjective process, constituted by the unique match of the psychic demands made by a text and a reader's ability to work with those demands.

AbstractPerhaps best known by us as an exceptionally astute and incisive apologist, C.S. Lewis also has much to say to serious Pentecostals about religious experience—a foundational value in Pentecostalism. Aware of and interacting with Freudian and Jungian religious psychology, Lewis agreed with Rudolf Otto that religious experience is essentially mysterious encounter with the Numinous, arguing that numinous encounter constitutes the seed of all real religious experience. At its core authentic religious experience is divine encounter characterized by ineffable awe in God’s presence. Lewis’ articulation of experience informs and enhances Pentecostal theology and spirituality appreciably in key areas of ontology, epistemology, and anthropology. Personal testimony affirms the reality and centrality for Pentecostals of encountering God’s presence in Spirit baptism, speaking in tongues, and other spiritual gifts or experiences, as well as in private prayer and public worship.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Freudian paradigm took its first steps towards becoming a modern amalgam of science and hermeneutics, history was considered the most established and instrumental discipline in man's quest to endow his thinking and action with meaning. The kinship between the disciplines, which could be traced back to the persona of Freud, took many shapes in the course of the twentieth century. Examined in perspective one could maintain that modern historiography and psychoanalysis have travelled the same distance in moving away from philosophical idealism, have shared some of the illusions of militant positivism and are accustomed to evoke the same criticism due to their claim to half-scientific, half-artistic epistemology. We start by considering the intellectual legacies and theoretical foundations that shaped the two disciplines' perspective of each other. We then proceed to juxtapose several historical moments in the evolution of psychoanalysis and history. Turning our attention to several key concepts and tropes, which form part of the contemporary objectivity-subjectivity discourse, we try to sketch an outline for a psychoanalytically-informed theory of history.

AbstractIn the first two decades of the twentieth century, the figure of the adolescent (Jugendlicher) was introduced into public discourse in the German-speaking world. The adolescent soon became an epistemic object for the still loosely defined field of psychology. Actors in the slowly differentiating scientific field of youth psychology were primarily interested in the normal development of adolescent subjects and sought out new materials and methods to research the inner life of young people. In order to access this inner life, they turned to the interpretation of diaries and other self-descriptions. This article takes up the questions of how diaries were used in the scientific context of psychology, and how diary writing was psychologically interpreted and theorized. The theoretical and methodological contexts of psychological knowledge production grouped around the subject of the diary will be examined in keeping with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of historical epistemology. This analysis is carried out by using the example of three central actors who were in conversation with each other during the 1920s and 1930s: the developmental psychologist Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974), the psychologist and founder of personalistic psychology William Stern (1871–1938), and the youth activist Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953), who was influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis.

The relational perspective of analysis is a way of looking at, practising, and understanding the whole of analysis—including psycho-analysis, group-analysis, and socio-analysis—rather than a specific school of psychoanalysis. Farhad Dalal’s excellent article describes the evolution of his thinking and practice, from a classical analytic stance to a relational conception of it. There are two ways of conceiving and practising psychoanalysis, which he calls ‘the analytic’ and ‘the relational’, derived from two contrasting conceptions of the world and of life. This generates a split between theory and practice in analysis. Some practitioners adhere to the classical view, but are actually relational in their practice; others have adopted relational theory, but maintain the detached scientific attitude of the classical Freudian analyst. Freud’s abandonment of the traumatic theory of neuroses had unconscious sources that determined the injunction for analysts not to be relational. Group analysis, on the other hand, has been relational from the beginning. S.H. Foulkes had a contradiction between his adherence to Freudian theory and the revolutionary aspects of his thinking and practice—what Dalal calls ‘radical Foulkes’. The hierarchical, detached, and emotionally closed off form of relating prescribed by classical analysis is anti-therapeutic. By contrast, the kind of therapeutic relation that Dalal strives to develop has connotations with engagement, reciprocity and mutuality, and may generate corrective emotional experiences. But human events are never fully explained or predictable, so that the corrective emotional experience is an occurrence, not a technique. The analyst works in a radical uncertainty and can only be guided by his intuition, which has then to be checked by rational critical analysis. This generates a dialectic tension between imagination and rigour, which must be kept and nursed, not solved. This corresponds to an analogical hermeneutic stance, which rejects both the dogmatic univocality of Modernism and the relativistic equivocality of Postmodernism. The analyst must respond with his whole being, and this being must be developed through a process of personality development, not training but formation (Bildung in German). This implies a particular epistemology, ontology, axiology, and ethics, a whole Weltanschauung and Lebensanschauung that includes the Golden Braid of thinking, feeling, and acting, on a basis of relating.

Freud’s momentous discovery that the largest part of mental life, both individual and collective is unknown to us and out of our control, brought about a major revolution in epistemology and our conception of the human being, but such evolution was stalled by Freud’s adherence to several assumptions that were an essential part of his Weltanschauung or ‘Conception of the World’. These were the individualistic paradigm and the misguided attempt to turn the discipline he had created into a positivistic science, framed in the model of the natural sciences. Orthodox psychoanalysis has since focused on the intrapsychic, leaving out the interpersonal and social dimensions. Group analysis, as introduced by Foulkes has been a bold attempt to transcend the limitations of psychoanalysis and integrate the dimensions it has ignored or denied. Nonetheless, the development of Foulkes’ revolutionary contributions was encumbered by his adherence to Freudian theory, just like the latter was by his creator’s subservience to positivistic natural science. Psychoanalysis and group analysis are two aspects of the wider field of analysis, but they are still impeded by a series of assumptions held by both science and common sense. These are: i) materialistic metaphysics, ii) the Cartesian subject, iii) deterministic positivism, iv) neutral objectivism, and v) rejection of teleology. Hence, the need to go beyond psychoanalysis and group analysis and formulate a new paradigm of the human being. This is a work in progress, being tackled by many people from different fields of human knowledge and practice, such as physical science, biology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, group analysis, sociology, political science, philosophy, theology, hermeneutics, and the Humanities, among many others. It is an interdisciplinary enterprise, to which analysis may and should contribute, but only through an open dialogue with its peers in the field of human thought.

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é demonstrar que a chave conceitual do diagnóstico freudiano do Mal-estar na cultura é incapaz de apreender a alteração do lugar e do funcionamento social da ciência na cultura. A razão disso é considerada residir em sua concepção de ciência, supostamente a única forma de discurso capaz de garantir uma relação não ilusória e infantilizada com as fraquezas humanas. Tal concepção de ciência é incapaz de apreender sua assimilação pela técnica, tal como Heidegger formula em seu texto Sobre a técnica. Como exemplo dessa assimilação, realizo uma análise da alteração recente da epistemologia psiquiátrica e de sua assimilação pelas técnicas do marketing, assim como seus efeitos subjetivos desses novos modos de nomeação do sofrimento. Na conclusão, discuto a impotência crítica da concepção freudiana de ciência diante dessa assimilação e os diferentes sentidos de verdade em jogo.

A presente comunicação tem como objetivo apresentar aspectos da epistemologia funcionalista presentes na psicanálise freudiana. Para tanto, primeiramente, apresentamos a constituição do campo da filosofia da psicanálise, cuja inspiração constitutiva foi a filosofia da biologia, e cujo sentido foi a demarcação de um território teórico-metodológico singular. Em seguida, caracterizamos em linhas gerais o funcionalismo e sua relação com o positivismo no campo da psicologia, em seu esforço de estabelecer-se como ciência. Posteriormente, apontamos as características que identificamos em determinados conceitos e formulações na psicanálise freudiana, que a aproxima da matriz funcionalista. Por fim, buscamos responder à questão proposta por esta comunicação, que se trata de identificar na psicanálise freudiana aspectos do funcionalismo, os quais se apresentam em conceitos fundamentais, em momentos da obra freudiana, como o entendimento da estrutura psíquica e das pulsões.

A redescrição neopragmática da psicanálise contribui para desmascarar a transcendência do sujeito e do objeto, subsumida na epistemologia de cunho representacional, mas pode restringir demasiadamente o campo da escuta analítica. Heidegger nos afasta da via representacional e abre uma escuta para o não útil, o irrepresentável, o incomunicável, o absolutamente singular da experiência. Reencontramos então a lacuna do inconsciente freudiano.

Pierre Noaille, Un pensamiento, "reino del entre-dos". "Cuestión límite", a primera vista, para un psicoanálisis identificado en tanto que "ciencia de las profundidades" enteramente centrado sobre ese "núcleo" que es el inconsciente, el pensamiento puede, en efecto, encontrar su lugar en la periferia, tendremos por lo tanto que reconocer que el proyecto freudiano hace de ese "límite" su ideal, el punto de perspectiva a alcanzar implícitamente. Un límite - "la envoltura" - en lo que él implica de "síntesis", que el psicoanálisis parece no obstante temer en tanto que él apuesta sobre su intervención. Es que el psicoanálisis no sería otra cosa que un movimiento de pensamiento que tiene esa particularidad de problematizar su propio movimiento ? El lo sitúa, y haciéndose, sitúa "su" propio campo, precisamente en el "entre-dos" del par solidario "núcleo"-"envoltura". La "categoría de lo intermediario" - epistemología fundadora para el campo freudiano - se désigna así como el elemento conceptual verdaderamente apropiado a una problemática del proceso de pensamiento. Palabras-clave : Pensamiento, Psicoanálisis freudiano, Categoría de lo intermediario, Narcisismo.

Este artigo discute alguns dos questionamentos dirigidos à psicanálise por Paul B. Preciado em uma conferência realizada na Escola da Causa Freudiana em novembro de 2019, bem como alguns de seus desdobramentos. Nosso intuito é reconhecer e acolher as críticas apontadas por Preciado e, de modo mais geral, pelo olhar contemporâneo de outras disciplinas, considerando a possibilidade de construção de uma nova epistemologia que aposte na multiplicidade de corpos e sexualidades em contrapartida a certa leitura empreendida no campo psicanalítico acerca da diferença sexual. Para isso, analisamos criticamente a resposta de três psicanalistas à intervenção de Preciado e discutimos a problemática da epistemologia da diferença sexual, situando-a nos diálogos contemporâneos entre a psicanálise e os estudos queer. Por fim, sustentamos uma leitura da diferença sexual articulada ao conceito de dispositivo, proposto por Michel Foucault; isto é, como uma epistemologia política e como uma gramática das subjetividades historicamente situada, dentre outras possíveis.

En el presente artículo se reflexiona sobre el estatuto de la dimensión valorativa en psicoanálisis, desde los aportes de la historia de la psicología, en particular, de la historia crítica. Por un lado, se ubica brevemente la contribución de la epistemología feminista a la consideración de la relación entre valores y ciencia. Luego, se analiza el caso concreto de recepción de los Estudios de la mujer en la psicología y el psicoanálisis argentino y su proyecto de reflexión crítica sobre los sesgos ideológicos presentes en la empresa freudiana. Al final, se plasma la interrogación por las potencialidades y límites de dicho proyecto.

Este artigo trata-se de um ensaio que visa apresentar a epistemologia bachelardiana como construção análoga à psicanálise freudiana, no que se refere à evolução do que o autor denomina espírito científico. Essa elaboração, baseada em dados importados da história da ciência é aproximada pelo próprio filósofo ao contexto do ensino e aprendizagem. Neste sentido, pretendemos dialogar com os contextos científico e escolar, em especial, com a didática, por meio de elementos já há algum tempo são veiculados na literatura da área, como de tempo de aprendizagem, concepções espontâneas e aprendizagem das ciências. Os argumentos apresentados procuram responder à questão apresentada no título deste artigo, tendo como objetivo potencializar as intervenções didáticas em sala de aula.

O objetivo deste artigo é discorrer sobre pontos importantes da démarche de Freud na construção teórica da transferência. Busca-se, a partir do solo nativo de Freud, identificar a gênese do fenômeno da transferência, que, em seu horizonte clínico, tornou-se um de seus conceitos fundamentais. Para isso, recorreu-se à revisão bibliográfica para investigar a epistemologia do solo nativo de Freud, seus modelos bem como os referentes físico-químico-energéticos. Tais modelos e referentes compuseram as bases do fundamento metodológico de Freud na construção da metapsicologia, que, por sua vez, tornou-se uma das referências para o entendimento do fenômeno da transferência. Este artigo pode contribuir com as pesquisas que envolvem a temática da transferência, pois sua gênese, seus modelos e os referentes aqui colocados estão localizados no solo nativo de Freud, indispensáveis à sua teorização.

Gli Autori invitano tre capiscuola di modelli psicoterapici diversi - Calogero Lo Piccolo per la gruppoanalisi, Giovanni Lo Castro per lo psicodramma freudiano e Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, per la psicoterapia della Gestalt - a rispondere ad alcune domande cruciali per la terapia di gruppo nella clinica contemporanea. I temi affrontati trasversalmente dai tre approcci riguardano la definizione del setting gruppale, la dimensione del sentire corporeo, l'estetica dell'essere gruppo, le riflessioni sul concetto di autoregolazione e sull'antropologia sociale che animano l'intervento di gruppo, e infine valutazioni sul futuro della psicoterapia di gruppo in considerazione delle evoluzioni sociali e culturali degli ultimi anni. Un confronto tra epistemologie e prospettive di pensiero che forniscono un'opportunitŕ di riflessione e un'occasione per ampliare gli orizzonti di conoscenza sulla clinica dei gruppi.

A patologização da infância constitui um fenômeno que, embora contradiga as bases da epistemologia genética, tem sido pouco abordado nos trabalhos piagetianos con-temporâneos quando comparado com os psicanalíticos. Piaget manteve diálogo com a psicanálise freudiana desde o início da sua obra, em uma tentativa de articulação que continuou ativa em autores do âmbito da psicologia e da educação. O presente artigo revisita esse diálogo sob um novo prisma: a problematização da lógica indi-vidualizante do fracasso escolar e da patologização. Para isso, propõe três eixos de confluência teórica que envolvem ressonâncias clínicas e éticas. Conclui que a articu-lação entre ambas as teorias não só mantém sua vigência, mas também se mostra fecunda para discutir os atuais reducionismos do desenvolvimento infantil.

Todos los modelos teóricos de la comunicación basan sus supuestos en la teoría social general y en la teoría del conocimiento. Los paradigmas a los que corresponden ambas teorías son clasificados conforme a las relaciones entre sus funciones (operacional o probativa) y sus componentes (sujeto/objeto o abstracción/experiencia sensitiva). Se sugiere que en la filosofía moderna tanto el idealismo como el empirismo asigna una función probativa al componente sujeto/objeto, lo cual entraña una revolución epistemológica en la teoría social. Las interpretaciones marxistas "sin Marx", por ejemplo, leninismo, marxismo freudiano, existencialismo, marxismo estructuralista ? son sometidas a análisis, y se examina la epistemología de varios modelos teóricos de comunicación en referencia a los paradigmas de la filosofía del conocimiento y de las ciencias sociales.

El psicoanálisis surgió, hacia fines del siglo XIX, como una teoría científica que pretende explicar el aparato psíquico y como una forma de psicoterapia que es una aplicación de ella. Desde entonces, su metapsicología y sus técnicas de intervención han cambiado mucho, sobre todo como consecuencia del contraste permanente con la evidencia clínica. En muchos casos, sin embargo, su epistemología y su filosofía de la mente siguen siendo deudoras de los presupuestos teóricos con los que nació. Eso es doblemente negativo. Por una parte, porque esa epistemología decimonónica suele estar comprometida con formas de fisicalismo y reductivismo que son por lo menos discutibles y que tienen consecuencias respecto de su concepción de lo mental. De otro lado, porque no facilita su integración con la filosofía de la mente actual. En este texto me propongo reseñar y comentar algunas tesis del libro de Carlos Caorsi, con el objetivo de mostrar la necesidad de mayor diálogo entre psicoanálisis y filosofía de la mente, concentrándome sobre todo en la ontología de lo mental que pudo haber presupuesto Freud y en la tesis de Caorsi sobre los sistemas lógicos que subyacerían a los sistemas psíquicos de la primera tópica freudiana.

Apresenta-se primeiramente a concepção de Freud do que seria a Ciência e em que constituiria a atividade cientifica, utilizando-se textos freudianos nos quais ele trabalha esse tema. Considera-se as noções de Naturwissenchaft e Geistwissenchaft para contextualizar a discussão sobre a cientificidade da Psicanálise à época de Freud. Confronta-se então a Ciência, como entendida por Freud, com as concepções de Popper e Bachelard, oriundos da Epistemologia. Posteriormente, apresentamos diferentes posições de psicanalistas, como Lacan e Kernberg, quanto ao mesmo tema, para mostrar como a compreensão do que seja a Ciência determina os posicionamentos quanto à relação entre esta e a Psicanálise.

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão acerca da abordagem freudo-frankfurtiana e a estratégia de pesquisa que dela deriva, articulando a metodologia de pesquisa-ação à socioanálise de René Lourau. A abordagem freudo-frankfurtiana que apresentamos realiza uma reconstrução epistemológica, evidenciando a proximidade entre a epistemologia frankfurtiana e a epistemologia freudiana, para elaborar um suporte teórico-analítico que instrui essa metodologia. Argumentamos que tal abordagem e metodologia propiciariam uma conjunção entre teoria e práxis, uma vez que promovem uma profunda interação entre pesquisador e pesquisados, além de ter a emancipação como um dos valores que norteiam a investigação. Nosso objetivo é buscar um saber e uma construção de conhecimento para os estudos organizacionais orientados pelo interesse emancipatório que seja tecnicamente aplicável e guie a atividade prática/comunicativa. Com o propósito de apresentar esta proposta alternativa para os estudos organizacionais, neste artigo, primeiramente apresentamos e discutimos a abordagem freudo-frankfurtiana, realizando uma reconstrução epistemológica. Na segunda parte, sistematizamos um suporte teórico-analítico a partir do qual elaboramos a estratégia de pesquisa anteriormente mencionada. Em seguida, apresentamos nossas considerações finais, concluindo que apontamos saídas para a pesquisa organizacional que privilegiam a prática e a emancipação, pois recomendamos que as investigações tenham um objetivo de conhecimento, mas, também, um objetivo prático, de modo que o analista organizacional pactue com o grupo ou organização abordados, sem deixar de incentivar sua autonomia, indicando quais são as metas coletivas da investigação, qual é o plano de ação a ser implementado e, ainda, realizando uma avaliação coletiva dos resultados.

O presente artigo tem por objetivo identificar como determinados paradigmas se estabeleceram e originaram determinadas teorias psicológicas/filosóficas com repercussão na área da saúde emocional. Devido à complexidade do objetivo, aborda-se uma posição investigativa-crítica de que as ciências humanas se constituem através de práticas discursivas, o que automaticamente, envolve paradigmas de como a linguagem objetiva da ciência psicológica relaciona-se com a linguagem subjetiva do indivíduo. O método de revisão narrativa através da literatura científica busca englobar uma compreensão do reducionismo produzido pelo pensamento cartesiano ao longo dos séculos, e as diversas correntes de pensamentos: Psicanálise Freudiana, Psiquiatria Humanista, Fenomenologia, Testagem e Avaliação Psicológica. Após a discussão teórica sobre as dificuldades, facilitações e paradigmas qual cada teoria possui, através da familiaridade proporcionada com analogias de personagens de literatura fictícia, conclui-se necessário uma plataforma cultural-científica do profissional que envolva não apenas a compreensão abstrata da teoria, mas também, as possíveis representatividades fanáticas da profissão geradas pelo senso comum, o que envolve a finalidade daquela profissão.Palavras-chave: Epistemologia, Crítica, Psiquiatria Humanista

O machismo, expressão da misoginia, utiliza-se de diversas estratégias de aperfeiçoamento que visam assegurar a manutenção de toda uma ordem de privilégios sociais historicamente atrelados a uma identidade específica (homem branco-europeu-heterossexual), conjunto de disposições culturais conhecido como sistema patriarcal. Pretende-se discutir se a obra de Freud se encontra alheia a esses mecanismos ou encontra-se limitada pelos dispositivos do patriarcado. Como estratégia, será adotado um percurso específico que nos permitirá, inicialmente, compreender como o conceito de misoginia se estruturou no pensamento ocidental e seu entrelaçamento com a história e a cultura, visto que a nossa hipótese, a priori é de que este pensamento está intimamente associado aos dispositivos produzidos pelo patriarcado. Por fim, entraremos em discussão com o fundador da psicanálise, a partir da sua teoria do complexo de Édipo, tentando, assim, perceber em que medida o pensamento freudiano acerca da sexualidade está afetado pelas técnicas falaciosas de um pensamento oriundo da misoginia. Buscaremos adotar, como método de análise dessas construções teóricas psicanalíticas, a categoria que sugerimos chamar de epistemologia feminista.

RESUMO Este texto pretende repensar a disputa de epistemologias feministas no que tange às construções discursivas de gênero, tendo como contexto os pensamentos de Freud e Lacan. Trata-se da crítica de Butler às teorias feministas binárias relativamente à substancialização do corpo sexual: se o corpo sexual é construído pelo discurso, ele também se porta como um elemento subversor do discurso, já que não pode ser completamente determinado pelo binarismo cultural de gênero. Utilizamos parte do debate que Butler trava com a psicanálise freudiana e lacaniana como um “caso modelo” no qual tais questionamentos epistemológicos seriam analisados: de início, a psicanálise coloca-se como um dos principais alvos críticos da “segunda onda” feminista; em segundo lugar, a psicanálise também teria sido mobilizada a favor da causa feminista binária; contudo, para Butler, tais feministas não teriam criticado suficientemente a psicanálise, por não discutirem a raiz corporal essencializada que sustentaria a divisão binária entre sexos; finalmente, Butler ressalta a potencialidade crítica que a psicanálise comporta, dada a resistência subversiva e plástica do inconsciente, das pulsões, do desejo e do corpo, noções centrais para a epistemologia feminista não binária e remodelação do construtivismo discursivo.

<p>O presente trabalho se concentra na exposição dos conjuntos estruturais das ideias e dos aspectos estudados dentro do desenvolvimento de uma iniciação científica inserida no projeto de pesquisa do Prof. Dr. Marcos Alexandre Gomes Nalli “ A Biopolítica como Biotécnica”, ofertada pelo programa instituicional de apoio à inclusão social pesquisa e extensão universitária, administrado pelo SEBEC e com a contemplação de bolsa pela Fundação Araucária. Resumidamente o subprojeto intitulado “A Perspectiva Dualista dentro do Pensamento Bachelardiano”, se propôs a estudar e a pesquisar sobre os pormenores destas duas facetas contidas nas teorias e nos textos do autor Gaston Bachelard, e também buscar entender o movimento de desdobramento no pensamento do autor que o levou a desviar seu centro de interesses e pretensões investigativas de pesquisa de um direcionamento primeiramente diurno à ciência, à epistemologia e à gnosiologia com embasamento na psicanálise freudiana, para o período posterior e sua ultima fase de produção intelectual voltada à estética, tratada como a faceta noturna, ou, poética de Bachelard. Sobre esta transformação de interesse e consequentemente de pesquisa e produção, queremos propor a continuação de duas vias que cruzaram ambas as facetas desta dualidade, sendo elas a fenomenologia e psicologia.</p>

Partiendo de un detallado estudio del seminario VII de Lacan, el presente trabajo se propone fundamentar la siguiente hipótesis: así como Kant y la tercera antinomia de la razón pura le permiten a Lacan fundamentar, desde las condiciones epistémicas, el concepto de das Ding, desde la clínica, es la “posición del sujeto en la paranoia” uno de sus argumentos principales. Los postulados que pretenden fundamentar esta lectura se desplegarán en una serie de movimientos sucesivos y lógicamente complementarios. En el primero ubicaremos el abrevar lacaniano en el “Proyecto de Psicología” a partir del cual se ubica uno de los primeros desarrollos freudianos de das Ding. En el segundo haremos mención de algunos puntos fundamentales del concepto kantiano de «cosa en sí» y exploraremos cómo utiliza Lacan la tercera antinomia de la razón pura a los fines de ubicar el impasse en la pregunta por la causa, temática relacionada con das Ding. En el tercero pretendemos señalar y explicitar el valor argumentativo de algunas de las referencias hechas por Lacan al concepto de “Cosa” en Heidegger. Por último, en el cuarto movimiento pondremos en relieve las diversas referencias que hace Lacan a la paranoia en este seminario para así poder destacar el valor que tiene la posición del sujeto en la paranoia en tanto postulado central en la fundamentación de das Ding como concepto.

Our object of study in this article, succinctly, shows the evolution of the concept of telepathy in the psychoanalytic field, as well as the concept of synchronicity in the Jungian field; For this we will verify concepts that are close to the latter, such as projective identification, transitional object, within the Kleinian and Winnicottian universe. Bion’s considerations on “Finite space and infinite space, such as Jung’s use of the concept of “participation mystique”. To accomplish this goal we intend to make a survey of the historical evolution of the concept of synchronicity. We will begin with the primary sources, and in a second moment we will make a bibliographic survey of the developments that occurred after the death of Jung until the present day, on these proposed themes, and the possible enrichment through interdisciplinarity with other sciences. We will try to identify at the end of our reflection, some epistemological consequences that may benefit the evolution of Freudian and Jungian metapsychology and its consequences for the epistemology of analytical practice. We intend to illuminate some objective and intersubjective aspects of therapeutics. What types of communication are possible? What kind of looks? What types of listening? What kinds of relationships can we establish between the forms we compare the forms of communication in transference, compared to telepathy and synchronicity?

El artículo recoge la elaboración de un estado del arte de 72 documentos que muestran el diálogo interdisciplinar entre la ciencia política y el psicoanálisis. En su elaboración se seleccionaron textos de orientaciones freudianas y lacanianas con tres lógicas de diálogo: investigaciones de lo político desde el psicoanálisis; investigaciones desde el análisis político con herramientas psicoanalíticas; y diálogos teóricos y metodológicos. Su contribución es pertinente ante la ausencia de revisiones de la literatura existente similares, además de propiciar un diálogo mutuamente enriquecedor entre la ciencia política y el psicoanálisis. Este último amplía el campo clínico al ofrecer herramientas que permiten comprender el espíritu de la época y romper con la epistemología homogenizadora de la ciencia clásica, al incluir la singularidad de los sujetos en los fenómenos políticos.

The theory of psychoanalysis came to Turkey in the early 1900s, but it was dismissed as being unmedical in a psychiatric context shaped by the Kraepelinian model. Still, it rapidly entered the intellectual discourses of the period, and in literature, it became a contact zone to discuss broader issues concerning the modernisation of the country. Novelists in particular undertook a critique of its epistemology to explore what they deemed the conflictual relationship between the native values and the westernising attitudes as broadly conceived at the time. Two early examples of such novelistic engagements with psychoanalysis are Peyami Safa’sMatmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğuand Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’sSaatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. This article focuses on the novelists’ engagement with psychoanalysis in their critique of the modernisation project adopted in Turkey through the theme of the ‘self-in-crisis’. Both texts contribute to the broader discussions of their milieu in a way that presents psychoanalysis as being representative of that which is modern and portray it critically to underline the dissonances between the old, traditional values and the new, imported ones.

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.Amissah, Edith Kohrs. Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers. Nairobi: Africa Resource Center, 1999.Andolina, Robert, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Fashion Theory 10.3 (2006): 1–24.Basu, Amrita (ed.). Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2010.Bulbeck, Chilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Connell, Raewyn. “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.” Feminist Theory 16.1 (2015): 49–66.———. “Rethinking Gender from the South.” Feminist Studies 40.3 (2014): 518-539.Daniel, Eniola. “I Work toward the Liberation of Women, But I’m Not Feminist, Says Buchi Emecheta.” The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2017. <https://guardian.ng/art/i-work-toward-the-liberation-of-women-but-im-not-feminist-says-buchi-emecheta/>.Devi, Mahasveta. "Draupadi." Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist. 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Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. 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If Continental social theory emerges from a climate of intensely cold winters and short mild summers, how does Australia (or any nation defined by its large masses of aridity) function as an environment in which to produce critical theory and new knowledge? Climate and weather are intrinsic to ambience, but what impact might they have on the conditions of producing academic work? How is ambience relevant to thinking and writing and research? Is there an ambient epistemology? This paper argues that the ambient is an unacknowledged factor in the production of critical thinking, and draws on examples of academics locating their writing conditions as part of their thinking. This means paying attention to the embodied work of thinking, and so I locate myself in order to explore what it might mean to acknowledge the conditions of intellectual work. Consequently I dwell on the impact of heat and light as qualities specific to where I work, but (following Bolt) I also argue that they are terms that are historically associated with new knowledge. Language, then, is already a factor in shaping the way we can think through such conditions, and the narratives available to write about them. Working these conditions into critical narratives may involve mobilising fictional tropes, and may not always be ambient, but they are potent in the academic imaginary and impact the ways in which we can think through location. Present Tense As I sit in Perth right now in a balmy 27 degrees Celsius with the local afternoon sea-breeze (fondly known as the Fremantle Doctor) clearing the stuffiness and humidity of the day, environmental conditions are near perfect for the end of summer. I barely notice them. Not long ago though, it was over 40 degrees for three days in a row. These were the three days I had set aside to complete an academic paper, the last days available before the university opened and normal work would resume. I’d arranged to have the place to myself, but I hadn’t arranged for cooling technologies. As I immersed myself in photocopies and textbooks the intellectual challenges and excitement were my preoccupation. It was hot, but I was almost unreceptive to recognising the discomforts of the weather until sweat began to drip onto pages and keyboards. A break in the afternoon for a swim at the local beach was an opportunity to clarify and see the bigger picture, and as the temperature began to slide into the evening cool it was easier to stay up late working and then sleep in late. I began to work around the weather. What impact does this have on thinking and writing? I remember it as a haze. The paper though, still seems clear and reasoned. My regimen might be read as working despite the weather, but I wonder if the intensity of the heat extends thinking in different directions—to go places where I wouldn’t have imagined in an ambiently cooled office (if I had one). The conditions of the production of knowledge are often assumed to be static, stable and uninteresting. Even if your work is located in exciting Other places, the ‘writing up’ is expected to happen ‘back home’, after the extra-ordinary places of fieldwork. It can be written in the present tense, for a more immediate reading experience, but the writing cannot always happen at the same time as the events being described, so readers accept the use of present tense as a figment of grammar that cannot accommodate the act of writing. When a writer becomes aware of their surroundings and articulates those conditions into their narrative, the reader is lifted out of the narrative into a metaframe; out of the body of writing and into the extra-diegetic. In her essay “Me and My Shadow” (1987), Jane Tompkins writes as if ‘we’ the reader are in the present with her as she makes connections between books, experiences, memories, feelings, and she also provides us with a writing scene in which to imagine her in the continuous present: It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window – a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) (128)This is a strategy, part of the aesthetics and politics of Tompkins’s paper which argues for the way the personal functions in intellectual thinking and writing even when we don’t recognise or acknowledge it. A little earlier she characterises herself as vulnerable because of the personal/professional nexus: I don’t know how to enter the debate [over epistemology] without leaving everything else behind – the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. (126)The deferral of autumn and going to the bathroom is linked through the final phrase, “not going yet”. This is a kind of refrain that draws attention to the aesthetic architecture of locating the self, and yet the reference to an impending toilet trip raised many eyebrows. Nancy Millar comments that “these passages invoke that moment in writing when everything comes together in a fraction of poise; that fragile moment the writing in turn attempts to capture; and that going to the bathroom precisely, will end” (6). It spoils the moment. The aesthetic green scene with one red leaf is ruptured by the impending toilet scene. Or perhaps it is the intimacy of bodily function that disrupts the ambient. And yet the moment is fictional anyway. There must surely always be some fiction involved when writing about the scene of writing, as writing usually takes more than one take. Gina Mercer takes advantage of this fictional function in a review of a collection of women’s poetry. Noting the striking discursive differences between the editor’s introduction and the poetry collected in the volume, she suggestively accounts for this by imagining the conditions under which the editor might have been working: I suddenly begin to imagine that she wrote the introduction sitting at her desk in twin-set and pearls, her feet constricted by court shoes – but that the selection took place at home with her lying on a large beautifully-linened bed bestrewn by a cat and the poems… (4)These imaginary conditions, Mercer implies, impact on the ways we do our intellectual work, or perhaps different kinds of work require different conditions. Mercer not only imagines the editor at work, but also suggests her own preferred workspace when she mentions that “the other issue I’ve been pondering as I lay on my bed in a sarong (yes it’s hot here already) reading this anthology, has been the question of who reads love poetry these days?” (4). Placing herself as reader (of an anthology of love poetry) on the bed in a sarong in a hot climate partially accounts for the production of the thinking around this review, but probably doesn’t include the writing process. Mercer’s review is written in epistolary form, signaling an engagement with ‘the personal’, and yet that awareness of form and setting performs a doubling function in which scenes are set and imagination is engaged and yet their veracity doesn’t seem important, and may even be part of the fiction of form. It’s the idea of working leisurely that gains traction in this review. Despite the capacity for fiction, I want to believe that Jane Tompkins was writing in her study in North Carolina next to a full-length window looking out onto a tree. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and imagine her writing in this place and time. Scenes of Writing Physical conditions are often part of mythologising a writer. Sylvia Plath wrote the extraordinary collection of poems that became Ariel during the 1962/63 London winter, reputed to have been the coldest for over a hundred years (Gifford 15). The cold weather is given a significant narrative role in the intensity of her writing and her emotional desperation during that period. Sigmund Freud’s writing desk was populated with figurines from his collection of antiquities looking down on his writing, a scene carefully replicated in the Freud Museum in London and reproduced in postcards as a potent staging of association between mythology, writing and psychoanalysis (see Burke 2006). Writer’s retreats at the former residences of writers (like Varuna at the former home of Eleanor Dark in the Blue Mountains, and the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in the hills outside of Perth) memorialise the material conditions in which writers wrote. So too do pilgrimages to the homes of famous writers and the tourism they produce in which we may gaze in wonder at the ordinary places of such extraordinary writing. The ambience of location is one facet of the conditions of writing. When I was a doctoral student reading Continental feminist philosophy, I used anything at hand to transport myself into their world. I wrote my dissertation mostly in Townsville in tropical Queensland (and partly in Cairns, even more tropical), where winter is blue skies and mid-twenties in temperature but summers are subject to frequent build-ups in pressure systems, high humidity, no breeze and some cyclones. There was no doubt that studying habits were affected by the weather for a student, if not for all the academics who live there. Workplaces were icily air-conditioned (is this ambient?) but outside was redolent with steamy tropical evenings, hot humid days, torrential downpours. When the weather breaks there is release in blood pressure accompanying barometer pressure. I was reading contemporary Australian literature alongside French feminist theories of subjectivity and their relation through écriture féminine. The European philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition and its exquisitely radical anti-logical writing of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva seemed alien to my tropical environs but perversely seductive. In order to get ‘inside’ the theoretical arguments, my strategy was to interpolate myself into their imagined world of writing, to emulate their imagined conditions. Whenever my friend went on a trip, I caretook her 1940s unit that sat on a bluff and looked out over the Coral Sea, all whitewashed and thick stone, and transformed it into a French salon for my intellectual productivity. I played Edith Piaf and Grace Jones, went to the grocer at the bottom of the hill every day for fresh food and the French patisserie for baguettes and croissants. I’d have coffee brewing frequently, and ate copious amounts of camembert and chocolate. The Townsville flat was a Parisian salon with French philosophers conversing in my head and between the piles of book lying on the table. These binges of writing were extraordinarily productive. It may have been because of the imagined Francophile habitus (as Bourdieu understands it); or it may have been because I prepared for the anticipated period of time writing in a privileged space. There was something about adopting the fictional romance of Parisian culture though that appealed to the juxtaposition of doing French theory in Townsville. It intensified the difference but interpolated me into an intellectual imaginary. Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, promises to shed light on Freud’s conditions of writing, and yet it is concerned moreover with the metaphoric or rather intellectual ‘scene’ of Freudian ideas that form the groundwork of Derrida’s own corpus. Scenic, or staged, like Tompkins’s framed window of leaves, it looks upon the past as a ‘moment’ of intellectual ferment in language. Peggy Kamuf suggests that the translation of this piece of Derrida’s writing works to cover over the corporeal banishment from the scene of writing, in a move that privileges the written trace. In commenting, Kamuf translates Derrida herself: ‘to put outside and below [metre dehors et en bas] the body of the written trace [le corps de la trace écrite].’ Notice also the latter phrase, which says not the trace of the body but the body of the trace. The trace, what Derrida but before him also Freud has called trace or Spur, is or has a body. (23)This body, however, is excised, removed from the philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginary Kamuf argues. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz contends that the body is “understood in terms that attempt to minimize or ignore altogether its formative role in the production of philosophical values – truth, knowledge, justice” (Volatile 4): Philosophy has always considered itself a discipline concerned primarily or exclusively with ideas, concepts, reason, judgment – that is, with terms clearly framed by the concept of mind, terms which marginalize or exclude considerations of the body. As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure. (Volatile 4)In the production of knowledge then, the corporeal knowing writing body can be expected to interact with place, with the ambience or otherwise in which we work. “Writing is a physical effort,” notes Cixous, and “this is not said often enough” (40). The Tense Present Conditions have changed here in Perth since the last draft. A late summer high pressure system is sitting in the Great Australian Bite pushing hot air across the desert and an equally insistent ridge of low pressure sits off the Indian Ocean, so the two systems are working against each other, keeping the weather hot, still, tense, taut against the competing forces. It has been nudging forty degrees for a week. The air conditioning at work has overloaded and has been set to priority cooling; offices are the lowest priority. A fan blasts its way across to me, thrumming as it waves its head from one side to the other as if tut-tutting. I’m not consumed with intellectual curiosity the way I was in the previous heatwave; I’m feeling tired, and wondering if I should just give up on this paper. It will wait for another time and journal. There’s a tension with chronology here, with what’s happening in the present, but then Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the act of placing ideas into language inevitably produces that tension: Chronology is time depicted as travelling (more or less) in a (more or less) forward direction. Yet one can hardly write a single sentence straight; it all rebounds. Even its most innocent first words – A, The, I, She, It – teem with heteroglossias. (16)“Sentences structure” DuPlessis points out, and grammar necessitates development, chronological linearity, which affects the possibilities for narrative. “Cause and effect affect” DuPlessis notes (16), as do Cixous and Irigaray before her. Nevertheless we must press on. And so I leave work and go for a swim, bring my core body temperature down, and order a pot of tea from the beach café while I read Barbara Bolt in the bright afternoon light. Bolt is a landscape painter who has spent some time in Kalgoorlie, a mining town 800km east of Perth, and notes the ways light is used as a metaphor for visual illumination, for enlightening, and yet in Kalgoorlie light is a glare which, far from illuminating, blinds. In Kalgoorlie the light is dangerous to the body, causing cancers and cataracts but also making it difficult to see because of its sheer intensity. Bolt makes an argument for the Australian light rupturing European thinking about light: Visual practice may be inconceivable without a consideration of light, but, I will argue, it is equally ‘inconceivable’ to practice under European notions of light in the ‘glare’ of the Australian sun. Too much light on matter sheds no light on the matter. (204)Bolt frequently equates the European notions of visual art practice that, she claims, Australians still operate under, with concomitant concepts of European philosophy, aesthetics and, I want to add, epistemology. She is particularly adept at noting the material impact of Australian conditions on the body, arguing that, the ‘glare’ takes apart the Enlightenment triangulation of light, knowledge, and form. In fact, light becomes implicated bodily, in the facts of the matter. My pterygiums and sun-beaten skin, my mother and father’s melanomas, and the incidence of glaucoma implicate the sun in a very different set of processes. From my optic, light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects while itself remaining unbent and unimplicated … (206).If new understandings of light are generated in Australian conditions of working, surely heat is capable of refiguring dominant European notions as well. Heat is commonly associated with emotions and erotics, even through ideas: heated debate, hot topics and burning issues imply the very latest and most provocative discussions, sizzling and mercurial. Heat has a material affect on corporeality also: dehydrating, disorienting, dizzying and burning. Fuzzy logic and bent horizons may emerge. Studies show that students learn best in ambient temperatures (Pilman; Graetz), but I want to argue that thought and writing can bend in other dimensions with heat. Tensions build in blood pressure alongside isometric bars. Emotional and intellectual intensities merge. Embodiment meets epistemology. This is not a new idea; feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway have been emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge and partial perspective for decades as a methodology that challenges universalism and creates a more ethical form of objectivity. In 1987 Haraway was arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex contradictory structuring and structured body versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 588)Working in intellectual conditions when the specificities of ambience is ignored, is also, I suggest, to work in a privileged space, in which there are no distractions like the weather. It is also to work ‘from nowhere, from simplicity’ in Haraway’s words. It is to write from within the pure imaginary space of the intellect. But to write in, and from, weather conditions no matter what they might be is to acknowledge the affect of being-in-the-world, to recognise an ontological debt that is embodied and through which we think. I want to make a claim for the radical conditions under which writing can occur outside of the ambient, as I sit here sweating over theory again. Drawing attention to the corporeal conditions of the scene of writing is a way of situating knowledge and partial perspective: if I were in Hobart where snow still lies on Mount Wellington I may well have a different perspective, but the metaphors of ice and cold also need transforming into productive and generative conditions of particularised knowledge. To acknowledge the location of knowledge production suggests more of the forces at work in particular thinking, as a bibliography indicates the shelf of books that have inflected the written product. This becomes a relation of immanence rather than transcendence between the subject and thought, whereby thinking can be understood as an act, an activity, or even activism of an agent. This is proposed by Elizabeth Grosz in her later work where she yokes together the “jagged edges” (Time 165) of Deleuze and Irigaray’s work in order to reconsider the “future of thought”. She calls for a revision of meaning, as Bolt does, but this time in regard to thought itself—and the task of philosophy—asking whether it is possible to develop an understanding of thought that refuses to see thought as passivity, reflection, contemplation, or representation, and instead stresses its activity, how and what it performs […] can we deromanticize the construction of knowledges and discourses to see them as labor, production, doing? (Time 158)If writing is to be understood as a form of activism it seems fitting to conclude here with one final image: of Gloria Anzaldua’s computer, at which she invites us to imagine her writing her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a radical Chicana vision for postcolonial theory. Like Grosz, Anzaldua is intent on undoing the mind/body split and the language through which the labour of thinking can be articulated. This is where she writes her manifesto: I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. (75) References Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bolt, Barbara. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 202-216. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. [1980 Les Edition de Minuit] Burke, Janine. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2006. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 1997. [1994 Photos de Racine]. Derrida, Jacques, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2006. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Graetz, Ken A. “The Psychology of Learning Environments.” Educause Review 41.6 (2006): 60-75. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. Kamuf, Peggy. “Outside in Analysis.” Mosaic 42.4 (2009): 19-34. Mercer, Gina. “The Days of Love Are Lettered.” Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss. LiNQ 22.1 (1995): 135-40. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pilman, Mary S. “The Effects of Air Temperature Variance on Memory Ability.” Loyola University Clearinghouse, 2001. ‹http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/306.php›. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19.1 (1987): 169-78.

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg's poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII "Beat Generation" writers. "Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature," laments Nancy M. Grace, "doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project" (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—"Ginsberg's most highly praised and his least typical poem" (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theories of interpretation—or "hermeneutics"—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or "restorative" mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a "suspicious" approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski's pioneering work in relating Ricoeur's concept of "suspicious reading" to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing? In "Kaddish," Ginsberg tells the story of his mother Naomi Ginsberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who died in a mental hospital in 1956. It is a lengthy prose poem and spans a remarkable 19 pages in Ginsberg's Collected Poems (1984). In the words of Maeera Y. Shreiber, "Kaddish" "is a massive achievement, comprised of five numbered parts, and an interpellated 'Hymmnn' between parts two and three" (84). I focus on the second narrative part, which forms the bulk of the poem, where the speaker—I shall refer to him henceforth as "Allen" in order to differentiate between Ginsberg's poetic self-representation and Ginsberg-the-author—recounts the nervous breakdowns and hospital movements of his mother, whom he calls by her first name, Naomi. I begin by illustrating the ways in which Allen focalises Naomi in the text, and suggest that his attempts to "read" her suspicious mind alternate between restorative and suspicious impulses. I then take up the issue of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. Acknowledging Ricoeur's assertion that psychoanalysis is an unequivocal "school of suspicion" (32), I consider James Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish," in particular, his reading of what is easily the most contentious passage in the poem: the scene where Naomi solicits Allen for sex. I regard this passage as a microcosm of the issues that beset a suspicious reading of "Kaddish"—such as the problem posed by the self-exposing poem and poet—and I find that Breslin's response to it raises interesting questions on the politics of psychoanalysis and the nature of suspicious interpretation. Finally, I identify an unpublished thesis on Ginsberg's poetry by Sarah Macfarlane and classify her interpretation of "Kaddish" as unambiguously suspicious. My purpose is not to advance my own suspicious reading of "Kaddish" but to highlight the difficulties of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. I argue that while it is difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously, to do so offers a fruitful counterbalance to the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. There are as yet unexplored hermeneutical territories in and around this poem, indeed in and around Ginsberg's work in general, which have radical implications for the future direction of Beat studies. Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought's old worn vagina— (Ginsberg, "Kaddish" 218)Ginsberg constructs Naomi's suspicion in "Kaddish" via Allen's communication of her visions and descriptions of her behaviour. Allen relates, for example, that Naomi once suspected that Hitler was "in her room" and that "she saw his mustache in the sink" ("Kaddish" 220). Subsequently, Allen depicts Naomi "listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill," and, in an attempt to "read" her suspicious mind, suggests that she envisages "an old man creep[ing] with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat" ("Kaddish" 220). Allen's gaze thus filters Naomi's; he watches her as she watches for spies, and he animates her visions. He recalls as a child "watching over" Naomi in order to anticipate her "next move" ("Kaddish" 212). On one fateful day, Naomi "stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner"; Allen interprets that she "spied a mystical assassin from Newark" ("Kaddish" 212). He likewise observes and interprets Naomi's body language and facial expressions. When she "covered [her] nose with [a] motheaten fur collar" and "shuddered at [the] face" of a bus driver, he deduces that, for Naomi, the collar must have been a "gas mask against poison" and the driver "a member of the gang" ("Kaddish" 212). On the one hand, Allen's impetus to recover "the lost Naomi" ("Kaddish" 216)—first lost to mental illness and then to death—may be likened to Ricoeur's concept of a restorative hermeneutic, "which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation" (Felski 216). As if Naomi's mind constitutes a text, Allen strives to reveal it in order to make it intelligible. What drives him is the cathartic impulse to revivify his mother's memory, to rebuild her story, and to exalt her as "magnificent" and "mourned no more" ("Kaddish" 212), so that he may mourn no more. Like a restorative reader "driven by a sense of reverence" (Felski 216), he lauds Naomi as the "glorious muse that bore [him] from the womb [...] from whose pained head [he] first took Vision" ("Kaddish" 223). Critics of "Kaddish" also observe the poem's restorative impulse. In "Strange Prophecies Anew," Tony Trigilio reads the recovery of Naomi as "the recovery of a female principle of divinity" (773). Diverging from Ginsberg's earlier poem "Howl" (1956), which "represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship," "Kaddish" "constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains prophetic language. In 'Kaddish', Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in 'Howl'" (776). Shreiber also acknowledges Ginsberg's redemption of "the feminine, figured specifically as the lost mother," but for her it "is central to both of the long poems that make his reputation," namely "Kaddish" and "Howl" (81). She cites Ginsberg's retrospective confession that "Howl" was actually about Naomi to argue that, "it is in the course of writing 'Howl' that Ginsberg discovers his obligation to the elided (Jewish) mother—whose restoration is the central project of 'Kaddish'" (81). On the other hand, Allen's compulsion to "cut through" to Naomi, to talk to her as he "didn't when [she] had a mouth" ("Kaddish" 211), suggests the brutality of a suspicious hermeneutic where meanings "must be wrestled rather than gleaned from the page, derived not from what the text says, but in spite of what it says" (Felski 223). When Naomi was alive and "had a mouth," Allen aggressively "pushed her against the door and shouted 'DON'T KICK ELANOR!'" in spite of her message: "Elanor is the worst spy! She's taking orders!" ("Kaddish" 221). As a suspicious reader wrestles with a resistant text, Allen wrestles with Naomi, "yelling at her" in exasperation, and even "banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the whole gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe" ("Kaddish" 221).Allen may be also seen as approaching Naomi with a suspicious reader's "adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings" (Felski 216). This is most visible in his facetiously professed "good idea to try [to] know the Monster of the Beginning Womb"—to penetrate Naomi's body in order to access her mind "that way" ("Kaddish" 219). Accordingly, in his psychoanalytic reading of "Kaddish," James Breslin understands Allen's "incestuous desires as expressing [his] wish to get inside his mother and see things as she does" (424). Breslin's interpretation invokes the Freudian concept of "epistemophilia," which Bran Nicol defines as the "desire to know" (48).Freud is one of "three masters" of suspicion according to Ricoeur (32). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx "present the most radically contrary stance to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning" (Ricoeur 35). They "begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricoeur 34). Freud deciphers the language of the conscious mind in order to access the "unconscious"—that "part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions" (Barry 96). Like their therapeutic counterparts, psychoanalytic critics distinguish "between the conscious and the unconscious mind," associating a text's "'overt' content with the former" and "'covert' content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about" (Barry 105). In seeking to expose a text's unconscious, they subscribe to a hermeneutic of suspicion's "conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings" (Felski 216). To force texts to relinquish their meanings suspicious readers bear "distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact" (Felski 222).For the most part, these qualities fail to characterise Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" and "Howl." Far from aggressive or superior, Breslin is a highly sympathetic reader of Ginsberg. "Many readers," he complains, are "still not sympathetic to the kind [sic] of form found in these poems" (403). His words echo Trigilio's endorsement of Marjorie Perloff's opinion that critics are too often "unwilling to engage the experimental scope of Ginsberg's poems" (Trigilio 774). Sympathetic reading, however, clashes with suspicious reading, which "involves a sense of vigilant preparedness for attack" (Shand in Felski 220). Breslin is sympathetic not only to the experimental forms of "Kaddish" and "Howl," but also to their attestation to "deep, long-standing private conflicts in Ginsberg—conflicts that ultimately stem from his ambivalent attachment to his mother" (403). In "Kaddish," Allen's ambivalent feelings toward his mother are conspicuous in his revolted and revolting reaction to her exposed body, combined with his blasé deliberation on whether to respond to her apparent sexual provocation: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. ("Kaddish" 219)In "Confessing the Body," Elizabeth Gregory observes that "Naomi's ordinary body becomes monstrous in this description—not only in its details but in the undiscriminating desire her son attributes to it ('Would she care?')" (47). In exposing Naomi thus, Allen also exposes himself and his own indiscriminate sexual responsiveness. Such textual exposés pose challenges for those who would practice a hermeneutic of suspicion by "reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings" (Felski 215). It appears that there is little that is hidden or repressed in "Kaddish" for a suspicious reader to expose. As Perloff notes, "the Ginsberg of 'Kaddish' is writing somewhat against the grain" (213). In writing against the grain, Ginsberg inhibits reading against the grain. A hermeneutic of suspicion holds "that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths" (Felski 216). "Kaddish," however, parades its unpalatable truths. Although Ginsberg as a Beat poet is not technically included among the group of poets known as the "confessionals," "Kaddish" is typical of a "confessional poem" in that it "dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intra-familial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one's body" (Gregory 34). There is a sense in which "we do not need to be suspicious" of such subversive texts because they are "already doing the work of suspicion for us" (Felski 217). It is also difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously because it presents itself as an autobiographical history of Ginsberg's relationship with his mother. "Kaddish" once again accords with Gregory's definition of "confessional poetry" as that which "draws on the poet's autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet's own feelings and circumstances" (34). These defining features of "Kaddish" make it not particularly conducive to a "suspicious hermeneutic [that] often professes a lack of interest in the category of authorship as a means of explaining the ideological workings of texts" (Felski 222). It requires considerable effort to distinguish Allen, speaker and character in "Kaddish," from Ginsberg, celebrity Beat poet and author of "Kaddish," and to suspend knowledge of Ginsberg's public-private life in order to pry ideologies from the text. This difficulty of resisting biographical interpretation of "Kaddish" translates to a difficulty of reading the poem suspiciously. In his psychoanalytic reading, Breslin's lack of suspicion for the poem's confession of autobiography dilutes his practice of an inherently suspicious mode of interpretation—that of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalysis of Ginsberg shows that he trusts "Kaddish" to confess its author's intimate feelings—"'It's my fault,' he must have felt, 'if I had loved my mother more, this wouldn't have happened to her—and to me'" (Breslin 422)—whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion "adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts" (Felski 216). That said, Breslin's differentiation between the conscious and unconscious, or surface and underlying levels of meaning in "Kaddish" is more clearly characteristic of a hermeneutic of suspicion's theory that texts withhold "meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers" (Felski 216). Hence, Breslin speculates that, "on an unconscious level the writing of the poem may have been an act of private communication between the poet" and his mother (430). His response to the previously quoted passage of the poem suggests that while a cursory glance will restore its conscious meaning, a more attentive or suspicious gaze will uncover its unconscious: At first glance this passage seems a daring revelation of an incest wish and a shockingly realistic description of the mother's body. But what we really see here is how one post-Freudian writer, pretending to be open and at ease about incestuous desire, affects sophisticated awareness as a defense [sic] against intense longings and anxieties. The lines are charged with feelings that the poet, far from "confessing out," appears eager to deny. (Breslin 422; my emphasis)Breslin's temporary suspicious gaze in an otherwise trusting and sympathetic reading accuses the poet of revealing incestuous desire paradoxically in order to conceal incestuous desire. It exposes the exposé as an ironic guise, an attempt at subterfuge that the poet fails to conceal from the suspicious reader, evoking a hermeneutic of suspicion's conviction that in spite of itself "the text is not fully in control of its own discourse" (Felski 223). Breslin's view of Ginsberg's denial through the veil of his confession illuminates two possible ways of sustaining a suspicious reading of "Kaddish." One is to distrust its claim to confess Ginsberg, to recognise that "confession's reality claim is an extremely artful manipulation of the materials of poetry, not a departure from them" (Gregory 34). It is worth mentioning that in response to his interviewer's perception of the "absolute honesty" in his poem "Ego Confession," Ginsberg commented: "they're all poems, ultimately" (Spontaneous 404–05). Another way is to resist the double seduction operative in the text: Naomi's attempted seduction of Allen, and, in narrating it, Allen's attempted seduction of the psychoanalytic critic.Sarah Macfarlane's effort to unmask the gender politics that psychoanalytic critics arguably protect characterises her "socio-cultural analysis" (5) of "Kaddish" as unmistakably suspicious. While psychoanalytic critics "identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context" (Barry 105), Macfarlane in her thesis "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg" locates Allen's "perception of Naomi as the 'Monster of the Beginning Womb'" in the social and historical context of the 1950s "concept of the overbearing, dominating wife and mother who, although confined to the domestic space, looms large and threatening within that space" (48). In so doing, she draws attention to the Cold War discourse of "momism," which "envisioned American society as a matriarchy in which dominant mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle-class nuclear family" (Macfarlane 33). In other words, momism engaged Freudian explanations of male homosexuality as arising from a son's failure to resolve unconscious sexual desire for his mother, and blamed mothers for this failure and its socio-political ramifications, which, via the Cold War cultural association of homosexuality with communism, included "the weakening of masculine resolve against Communism" (Edelman 567). Since psychoanalysis effectively colludes with momism, psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" is unable to expose its perpetuation in the poem. Macfarlane's suspicious reading of "Kaddish" as perpetuating momism radically departs from the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. Trigilio, for example, argues that "Kaddish" revises the Cold War "discourse of containment—'momism'—in which the exposure of communists was equated to the exposure of homosexuals" (781). "Kaddish," he claims, (which exposes both Allen's homosexuality and Naomi's communism), "does not portray internal collapse—as nationalist equations of homosexual and communist 'threats' would predict—but instead produces […] a 'Blessed' poet who 'builds Heaven in Darkness'" (782). Nonetheless, this blessed poet wails, "I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless" ("Kaddish" 212), and confesses his homosexuality as an overwhelming burden: "a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head"("Kaddish" 214). In "Confessing the Body," Gregory asks whether confessional poetry "disclose[s] secrets in order to repent of them, thus reinforcing the initial negative judgement that kept them secret," or "to decathect that judgement" (35). While Allen's confession of homosexuality exudes exhilaration and depression, not guilt—Ginsberg critic Anne Hartman is surely right that "in the context of [the 1950s] public rituals of confession and repentance engendered by McCarthyism, […] poetic confession would carry a very different set of implications for a gay poet" (47)—it is pertinent to question his confession of Naomi. Does he expose Naomi in order to applaud or condemn her maternal transgressions? According to the logic of the Cold War "urge to unveil, [which] produces greater containment" (Trigilio 794), Allen's unveiling of Naomi veils his desire to contain her, unable as she is "to be contained within the 1950's [sic] domestic ideal of womanhood" (Macfarlane 44). "Ginsberg has become such a public issue that it's difficult now to read him naturally; you ask yourself after every line, am I for him or against him. And by and large that's the criticism he has gotten—votes on a public issue. (I see this has been one of those reviews.)" (Shapiro 90). Harvey Shapiro's review of Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) in which "Kaddish" first appeared illuminates the polarising effect of Ginsberg's celebrity on interpretations of his poetry. While sympathetic readings and romantic portrayals are themselves reactions to the "hostility to Ginsberg" that prevails (Perloff 223), often they do not sprout the intellectual vigour and fresh perspectives that a hermeneutic of suspicion has the capacity to sow. Yet it is difficult to read confessional texts such as "Kaddish" suspiciously; they appear to expose themselves without need of a suspicious reader. Readers of "Kaddish" such as Breslin are seduced into sympathetic biographical-psychoanalytical interpretations due to the poem's purported confession of Ginsberg's autobiography. As John Osborne argues, "the canon of Beat literature has been falsely founded on biographical rather than literary criteria" (4). The result is that "we are for the immediate future obliged to adopt adversarial reading strategies if we are to avoid entrenching an already stale orthodoxy" (Osborne 4). Macfarlane obliges in her thesis; she succeeds in reading "Kaddish" suspiciously by resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen's exposés. While Allen's confession of his homosexuality suggests that "Kaddish" subverts a heterosexist model of masculinity, a suspicious reading of his exposure of Naomi's maternal transgressions suggests that the poem contributes to momism and perpetuates a sexist model of femininity. Even so, a suspicious reading of a text such as "Kaddish" "contains a tacit tribute to its object, an admission that it contains more than meets the eye" (Felski 230). Ginsberg's own prophetic words bespeak as much:The worst I fear, considering the shallowness of opinion, is that some of the poetry and prose may be taken too familiarly, […] and be given the same shallow treatment, this time sympathetic, as, until recently, they were given shallow unsympathy. That would be the very we of fame. (Ginsberg, Deliberate 252)ReferencesBarry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Breslin, James. "The Origins of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish.'" On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 401–33.Edelman, Lee. "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 553–74.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. 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Shreiber, Maeera Y. "'You Still Haven't Finished with Your Mother': The Gendered Poetics of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg." Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 46–97.Trigilio, Tony. "'Strange Prophecies Anew': Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's Kaddish." American Literature 71.4 (1999): 773–95.