scholarly journals The Freudian Thing and the Ethics of Speech

Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wilson

In his 1891 On Aphasia Freud defines the “thing” in the terms of J.S. Mill’s empiricist phenomenology as a set of sensory impressions that is linked both to language and to immediate sensory experience. These distinctions structure the Project for a Scientific Psychology and reappear in “The Unconscious,” where Freud writes that the unconscious is a scene of experience that is linked to, but continues to insist in excess of, language. While Lacan opposes das Ding to Freud’s definition, in “The Unconscious,” of the “unconscious Vorstellungen” as “the presentation of the thing alone,” this essay argues that Freud’s definition of the unconscious points to a scene of experience disorganized by language, that is censored by the passage through the mirror stage, and about which the Other knows nothing. The essay ends by looking at several texts by Tito Mukhopadhyay, who is autistic. Mukhopadhyay describes his autism in terms of a decision to not pass through the mirror stage, which left him exposed to a scene of experience disorganized by the desire carried on the Other’s voice. In his eventual decision to enter into language and write of his experience, Mukhopadhyay’s writings locate an ethics of speech that, rather than censor the unconscious presentation of the thing by linking it to a prohibited Oedipal object, makes a space within the discourse of the Other for a universal dimension of human experience.

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Paul Sturges

Campaigners against corruption advocate transparency as a fundamental condition for its prevention. Trans-parency in itself is not the most important thing: it is the accountability that it makes possible. Transparency itself is, in fact, a metaphor based on the ability of light to pass through a solid, but transparent, medium and reveal what is on the other side. In practice it allows the revelation of what otherwise might have been concealed, and it is applied in a social context to the revelation of human activity in which there is a valid public interest. It can be applied to all of those who hold power and responsibility, whether that is political or economic. More accurate definition of the term, including distinctions between open governance, procedural transparency, radical transparency, and systemic or total transparency is important. Various ways in which an observer can make use of transparency to scrutinise the activity of others, including freedom of information laws, accounting and audit systems, and the protection of public interest disclosure (whistleblowing) also need to be distinguished from each other.


Konturen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Danielle Bergeron

The borders between autism and psychosis are determined by the position that the subject takes with respect to the entry into language during the mirror stage. An ethical choice on the part of the subject of the unconscious seems, very early in life, to determine the passage or the refusal of passage into the field of the Other. As a result of their experiences, certain children choose to reside in the present instant and to build their own space by surrounding themselves with objects, while other children take the risk of language and enter the time of the Other through which their history will be structured. We will address this question through consideration of the autobiographies of autistics and the clinical testimonies of psychotic patients.


2014 ◽  
Vol 490-491 ◽  
pp. 1489-1492
Author(s):  
Meng Tao ◽  
Hong Li ◽  
Wen Kang Li ◽  
Ai Ai Huang ◽  
Zhi Cheng Xu

With the development of construction tissue engineered cornea by using biomaterials and seed cells,how to measurement transparence of tissue engineered cornea need to be solved. Purpose of the paper is bringing forward a new method to measurement transparence of tissue engineered cornea. According to the definition of corneal transparence, a beam of light is divided into equal two beams of light by spectroscope. In which a beam of light pass through cornea. Ratio of light energy flow that light passed cornea and the other one is calculated. The usual optical and measuring instruments were used, such as sensors for illumination and Data acquisition (DAQ) card. The real-time measuring device for corneal transparence is designed and implemented. The method and device are effective to real-time measurement of tissue engineered cornea transparence through the elements analysis and experiment.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Norman

A series of vignette examples taken from psychological research on motivation, emotion, decision making, and attitudes illustrates how the influence of unconscious processes is often measured in a range of different behaviors. However, the selected studies share an apparent lack of explicit operational definition of what is meant by consciousness, and there seems to be substantial disagreement about the properties of conscious versus unconscious processing: Consciousness is sometimes equated with attention, sometimes with verbal report ability, and sometimes operationalized in terms of behavioral dissociations between different performance measures. Moreover, the examples all seem to share a dichotomous view of conscious and unconscious processes as being qualitatively different. It is suggested that cognitive research on consciousness can help resolve the apparent disagreement about how to define and measure unconscious processing, as is illustrated by a selection of operational definitions and empirical findings from modern cognitive psychology. These empirical findings also point to the existence of intermediate states of conscious awareness, not easily classifiable as either purely conscious or purely unconscious. Recent hypotheses from cognitive psychology, supplemented with models from social, developmental, and clinical psychology, are then presented all of which are compatible with the view of consciousness as a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. Such a view of consciousness would open up for explorations of intermediate states of awareness in addition to more purely conscious or purely unconscious states and thereby increase our understanding of the seemingly “unconscious” aspects of mental life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandi Silva Knuppel

Scholarship on Hindu traditions and practices proposes the practice of darshan as fundamental to Hindu traditions, particularly in temple worship, observing that devotees seek out images of deities primarily to see them and “receive” their darshan. These works typically gloss the definition of darshan with a sentence or two about seeing, exchanging glances, and/or receiving blessings. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which darshan is ideally imagined in conjunction with other bodily sensory practices through sources of authority, such as texts and senior devotees, to create a specific sensory experience and expectation in the transnational Gaudiya Vaishnava community. I then look to the lived realitiesof darshan in this tradition, specifically how devotees negotiate the structures created through sources of authority in their daily lives. Through this juxtaposition of idealized and lived darshan, I argue that we need a new approach towards theories of practice to take into account the complexities of darshanic moments in this and other religious practices.


Author(s):  
Walter Ott

Descartes’s treatment of perception in the Optics, though published before the Meditations, contains a distinct account of sensory experience. The end of the chapter suggests some reasons for this oddity, but that the two accounts are distinct is difficult to deny. Descartes in the present work topples the brain image from its throne. In its place, we have two mechanisms, one purely causal, the other inferential. Where the proper sensibles are concerned, the ordination of nature suffices to explain why a given sensation is triggered on the occasion of a given brain motion. The same is true with regard to the common sensibles. But on top of this purely causal story, Descartes re-introduces his doctrine of natural geometry.


Author(s):  
Juan de Lara ◽  
Esther Guerra

AbstractModelling is an essential activity in software engineering. It typically involves two meta-levels: one includes meta-models that describe modelling languages, and the other contains models built by instantiating those meta-models. Multi-level modelling generalizes this approach by allowing models to span an arbitrary number of meta-levels. A scenario that profits from multi-level modelling is the definition of language families that can be specialized (e.g., for different domains) by successive refinements at subsequent meta-levels, hence promoting language reuse. This enables an open set of variability options given by all possible specializations of the language family. However, multi-level modelling lacks the ability to express closed variability regarding the availability of language primitives or the possibility to opt between alternative primitive realizations. This limits the reuse opportunities of a language family. To improve this situation, we propose a novel combination of product lines with multi-level modelling to cover both open and closed variability. Our proposal is backed by a formal theory that guarantees correctness, enables top-down and bottom-up language variability design, and is implemented atop the MetaDepth multi-level modelling tool.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-428
Author(s):  
Miriam R. Lowi

Studies of identity and belonging in Gulf monarchies tend to privilege tribal or religious affiliation, if not the protective role of the ruler as paterfamilias. I focus instead on the ubiquitous foreigner and explore ways in which s/he contributes to the definition of national community in contemporary gcc states. Building upon and moving beyond the scholarly literature on imported labor in the Gulf, I suggest that the different ‘categories’ of foreigners impact identity and the consolidation of a community of privilege, in keeping with the national project of ruling families. Furthermore, I argue that the ‘European,’ the non-gcc Arab, and the predominantly Asian (and increasingly African) laborer play similar, but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: while they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the ‘nation’ and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and ‘the other(s).’


PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monroe Z. Hafter

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.


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