What do you think?
Rate this book
Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative
Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.
ebook
First published February 1, 2001
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 25, 2011
De racination-
1. I have never read a book that so says what I’ve been longing to say.
2. the book is undermined for me by its bizarrely sterile language, in the midst of claiming to express content through form.
To write a theory of history grounded in a tragic and existential theory of the psyche:
When that happens, thought and the thinker are existentialized utterly and
from within because inquiry turns on a probing of the deepest hiding places
of the psyche. The term existential thus refers to an engagement in which
dialectic is drama: thought develops out of an agon in which every structure
on which the psyche depends is put at issue because the subject has once
again become a being at issue to itself.
Each stage of the inquiry cancels
an entire way of living: an “identity,” a psychological economy, a relationship
that the subject can adopt toward its being. The inquiry then preserves the
product of that labor as an anguish that becomes determinate through its
projection into the larger complex of problems that have emerged as the
true fruit of the prior inquiry.
The correct way to regain
what is “living” in Hegel is to “negate the negation” and restore the tragic as
the category that concretizes and existentializes the “unhappy consciousness,”
as that engagement which underlies and measures all the attitudes
and philosophies we adopt toward the world.
dream—the nightmare from which the rest of the dream forms,
in a sense, the effort to awake.51 The connections that the Bomb enables us
to make are of a similar order: depth-psychological rather than rational or
empirical. Thereby the dead of Hiroshima never become what would be
truly horrible—an example used to illustrate a thesis. Their status, rather, is
that of a cause—that which drives the discourse and constitutes the heart of
its inwardness. If, as Benjamin argues, “the dead are in danger,” the only
adequate response is to give them a voice that fully unleashes their power to
vex the minds of the living.52
burning
coal at that moment when it is lit, when experience first breaks through the
shields and forces the astounded and terrified subject to engage the dynamics
of internalization.
W. R. D.
Fairbairn, who advances the striking idea that internalization begins with
the bad object, there being no motive for internalization other than the
necessity to rework that which has had a traumatic impact on us.4
To do that one must sustain it as an
experience—in its immediacy. Thus: when horror grips us an abyss opens;
something has been hollowed out inside us in an anxiety that announces
itself, even as we flee, as a fundamental determination of our being as
subjects. When horror seizes us, it is in the hollow that we have our being.
the irrelevance of the dead, the impertinence of the body count.
What Oppenheimer whispers to us in this his Heideggerian “Letter on
Humanism” is this: at the deepest register man is a being who wills death
and who finds in death the power that regulates the psyche from within.34
Death is that sublime power that resolves the inner disorders we refuse to
confront as well as the strange attractor that draws us to the one object that
proves irresistible. “Now I am become Death, shatterer of Worlds.”
In breaking with the protective, self-regulating
life of emotions, affect in image reveals the psyche acting from the register
of its “to be,” the register where one is at issue to oneself but only insofar as
one engages in agon the existential situation that the image defines. Affect
in image reveals the situatedness of the subject as the effort to mediate
experiences that are primary because in them the who/why of subject finds
its being in act and not in concept or cogito. Affect is overpowering not
because a bundle of pent-up frustrations and instincts crave discharge, but
because our relationship to the world is intersubjective from the beginning,
The image does not reproduce reality. It shatters the continuum in order to
reveal the Real—to lay bare the psychological conflicts that shape the quotidian.
Every image is a great gap in being, a rupture revealing the void at the
center of the ego and the connection of that void to the venom that primes
the self-lacerating heart whenever life presents some fortunate opportunity
to project one’s cruelty.
1. I have never read a book that so says what I’ve been longing to say.
2. the book is undermined for me by its bizarrely sterile language, in the midst of claiming to express content through form.
To write a theory of history grounded in a tragic and existential theory of the psyche:
When that happens, thought and the thinker are existentialized utterly and
from within because inquiry turns on a probing of the deepest hiding places
of the psyche. The term existential thus refers to an engagement in which
dialectic is drama: thought develops out of an agon in which every structure
on which the psyche depends is put at issue because the subject has once
again become a being at issue to itself.
Each stage of the inquiry cancels
an entire way of living: an “identity,” a psychological economy, a relationship
that the subject can adopt toward its being. The inquiry then preserves the
product of that labor as an anguish that becomes determinate through its
projection into the larger complex of problems that have emerged as the
true fruit of the prior inquiry.
The correct way to regain
what is “living” in Hegel is to “negate the negation” and restore the tragic as
the category that concretizes and existentializes the “unhappy consciousness,”
as that engagement which underlies and measures all the attitudes
and philosophies we adopt toward the world.
dream—the nightmare from which the rest of the dream forms,
in a sense, the effort to awake.51 The connections that the Bomb enables us
to make are of a similar order: depth-psychological rather than rational or
empirical. Thereby the dead of Hiroshima never become what would be
truly horrible—an example used to illustrate a thesis. Their status, rather, is
that of a cause—that which drives the discourse and constitutes the heart of
its inwardness. If, as Benjamin argues, “the dead are in danger,” the only
adequate response is to give them a voice that fully unleashes their power to
vex the minds of the living.52
burning
coal at that moment when it is lit, when experience first breaks through the
shields and forces the astounded and terrified subject to engage the dynamics
of internalization.
W. R. D.
Fairbairn, who advances the striking idea that internalization begins with
the bad object, there being no motive for internalization other than the
necessity to rework that which has had a traumatic impact on us.4
To do that one must sustain it as an
experience—in its immediacy. Thus: when horror grips us an abyss opens;
something has been hollowed out inside us in an anxiety that announces
itself, even as we flee, as a fundamental determination of our being as
subjects. When horror seizes us, it is in the hollow that we have our being.
the irrelevance of the dead, the impertinence of the body count.
What Oppenheimer whispers to us in this his Heideggerian “Letter on
Humanism” is this: at the deepest register man is a being who wills death
and who finds in death the power that regulates the psyche from within.34
Death is that sublime power that resolves the inner disorders we refuse to
confront as well as the strange attractor that draws us to the one object that
proves irresistible. “Now I am become Death, shatterer of Worlds.”
In breaking with the protective, self-regulating
life of emotions, affect in image reveals the psyche acting from the register
of its “to be,” the register where one is at issue to oneself but only insofar as
one engages in agon the existential situation that the image defines. Affect
in image reveals the situatedness of the subject as the effort to mediate
experiences that are primary because in them the who/why of subject finds
its being in act and not in concept or cogito. Affect is overpowering not
because a bundle of pent-up frustrations and instincts crave discharge, but
because our relationship to the world is intersubjective from the beginning,
The image does not reproduce reality. It shatters the continuum in order to
reveal the Real—to lay bare the psychological conflicts that shape the quotidian.
Every image is a great gap in being, a rupture revealing the void at the
center of the ego and the connection of that void to the venom that primes
the self-lacerating heart whenever life presents some fortunate opportunity
to project one’s cruelty.
December 21, 2012
Heavy psychology, history theory and philosophy on the behavior of man and nations that annihilates man and nations. I still haven't read ALL of it, but in due time.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews