Thursday, September 02, 2010

grey eminences




The other day was a melancholy day for me. Whatever is inside us is complex, not just what we're conscious of. Jung, Freud, Klein, Lacan - all point to this complexity, this unknowable process at work in us, and they conceptualize it as event, timeless symbols or significations. Lacan goes the deepest of any I've read on this matter of the unconscious. He contends that our ego, that sense that I'm thinking my thoughts - and Klein's object relations construction of introjects is contained in what he calls the Imaginary: that is my own conception of an Ego is a product of my imagination. So the ego, that sense that we know what we know, is illusory - that is, it is more a sense that we imagine a sense in ourselves that knows. There is a gap in the cogito, a gap that where we would grasp our identity, we find that it slips further away. At least as long as we think that our goal is to strengthen our Ego - our sense of knowing what we know about who we are - as if our problem were simply one of being informed, and then we would live a life of stasis. Free from the demand of unmet desire.
Our desire is what keeps us going.
I was musing today how in the last few years I've read Merleau Ponty, Deleuze and Gutarri, and now Lacan (along with Freud) - and I feel absolutely liberated. I feel that I've thrown off mental shackles that hampered my artistic sense. I no longer think - What do others say I should read, believe; but What helps me? What frees me?
Free from the "poison gift of transcendence" as Deleuze would phrase it. Living now.