2018 (44c) : Derrida

A certain alterity—to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious—is definitively exempt from every process of presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, the unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence. It differs from, and defers, itself; which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver of proxies might “exist,” might be present, be “itself” somewhere… In this sense, contrary to the terms of an old debate full of the metaphysical investments that it has always assumed, the “unconscious” is no more a “thing” than it is any other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness. (Derrida)

“The friend” is the one who approves, acquiesces, affirms the ineffaceable necessity of psychoanalysis, that is, above all, of its future-to-come, but who is also interested in the problematic, sometimes artificial, artifactual, and therefore deconstructible and perfectible character of the relations between psychoanalysis and its right, as between its theory and its practice, between the necessity of knowledge and its institutional inscription, between the public space of psychoanalysis and the absolute originality of its “secret” place…
(Derrida)

This obscurity, which Freud does not insist upon, is due to the fact before the instituted mastery of the PP there is already a tendency to binding, a mastering or structuring impulse that foreshadows the PP without being confused with it. It collaborates with the PP without being confused with it. A median, differing or indifferent zone (and it is differing only by being indifferent to the oppositional or distinctive difference of the two borders), relates the primary process in its “purity” (a “myth” says the Traumdeutung) to the “pure” secondary process entirely subject to the PP. (TS, 351)(Derrida)

36to say, never a single, unified, self-present concept of repetition. The indecision of a tendency to bind prior to the pleasure principle figures the duplicity of the concept of repetition in general. On the one hand, there is the classical concept of repetition as that which “repeats something that precedes it, repetition comes after…repetition succeeds a first thing, an original, a primary, a prior, the repeated itself which in and of itself is supposed to be foreign to what is repetitive or repeating in repetition” (TS, 351). On this view, repetition entails a rigorous distinction between what is repeated—an original, a primary—and the process of repeating; and the process of repetition is, accordingly, conceived as “secondary and derivative” (TS, 351). And on the other hand, there is an altogether other “logic” of repetition:But sometimes, according to a logic that is other, and non-classical, repetition is “original,” and induces, through and unlimited propagation of itself, a general deconstruction: not only of the entire classical ontology of repetition, along with all the distinctions recalled a moment ago, but also of the entire psychic construction, of everything supporting the drives and their representatives, insuring the integrity of the organization or the corpus (be it psychic or otherwise) under the dominance of the PP…Sometimes, consequently, repetition collaborates with the PP’s mastery, and sometimes, older than the PP, and even permitting itself to be repeated by the PP, the repetition haunts the PP, undermining it, threatening it, persecuting it by seeking an unbound pleasure which resembles, as one vesicle resembles another, an unpleasure chosen for its very atrocity. (TS, 351–352) (Derrida)

f death is not opposable it is, already, life death. This Freud does not say, does not say it presently, here, nor even elsewhere in this form. It gives (itself to be) thought without ever being given or thought. (Derrida)

No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral). But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of life…. This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the pleasure principle are native and congenital to that which they transgress. When Freud writes in the Project that “facilitations serve the primary function,” he is forbidding us to be surprised by Beyond the Pleasure Principle.(Derrida)

There is something which is distinct from the pleasure principle and which tends to reduce all animate things to the inanimate—that is how Freud puts it. What does he mean by this? What obliges him to think that? Not the death of living beings. It’s human experience, human interchanges, intersubjectivity. Something of what he observes in man constrains him to step out of the limits of life. No doubt there is a principle which brings the libido back to death, but it doesn’t bring it back any old how. If it brought it back there by the shortest paths, the problem would be resolved. But it brings it back there only along the paths of life, so it happens… It cannot find death along any old road. In other words, the machine looks after itself, maps out a certain curve, a certain persistence. And it is along the very path of this subsistence that something else becomes manifest, sustained by this existence it finds there and which shows it its passage. (Lacan)

…the compulsion to repeat, in as much as it is beyond the pleasure principle, beyond relations, rational motivations, beyond feelings, beyond anything to which we can accede. In the beginnings of psychoanalysis, this beyond is the unconscious, in so far as we cannot reach it, it’s the transference in so far as that is really what modulates feelings of love and hatred, which aren’t the transference—the transference is what makes it possible for us to interpret this language composed out of everything the subject can present us with…That is what the beyond of the pleasure principle is. It is the beyond of signification. The two are indistinguishable. (Lacan)

not a matter of simply and in total neutrality substituting an unveiled truth for what resists it, but rather of leading the patient to awareness [la prise de conscience] by actively and energetically using counter-resistances, other antagonistic forces, through an effective intervention in a field of forces…At this point, analysis of a resistance does not consist in a theoretical explanation of the origin and the elements of a defense symptom, but in an unbinding dissolution, an effective practical analysis of the resistance broken down in its force and displaced in its locus—resistance not only comprehended and communicated in its intelligibility, but transformed, transposed, transfigured. (Derrida)

These breaches and openings sometimes reorganize, at least virtually, the entire field of knowledge. It is necessary, as always, to be ready to give oneself over to them, and to be able to give them back their revolutionary force. An invincible force. Finally, whatever the inequalities of development, the “scientific” incompleteness, the philosophical presuppositions, this force always involves the reaffirmation of a reason “without alibi,” whether theological or metaphysical. This reaffirmation of reason can go against a certain state or a certain historical concept of reason…(Derrida)

s not what Freud was looking for, under the names “death drive” and “repetition compulsion,” that which, coming “before” the principle (of pleasure or reality), would remain forever heterogeneous to the principle of the principle?… is not the duality in question, this spiraled duality, what Freud tried to oppose to all monisms by speaking of a dual drive and of a death drive, of a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery? And, thus, to what is most alive in life…. (Derrida)

Unlike repression (Verdrangung), which remains unconscious in its operation and in its result, suppression (Unterdruckung) effects what Freud calls a ‘second censorship’—between the conscious and the preconscious—or rather affects the affect, which is to say, that which can never be repressed in the unconscious but only suppressed and displaced in another affect. (Derrida)

These moments, supposing we can isolate them, are terrifying moments because of the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them, no doubt, but just as much because they are in themselves, and in their very violence, uninterpretable or undecipherable. This is what I am calling the ‘mystical.’ As Benjamin presents it, this violence is certainly legible, even intelligible since it is not alien to law…But it is, in law, what suspends law. It interrupts the established law to found another. This moment of suspense, this epokhe, this founding or revolutionary moment of law is, in law, an instance of nonlaw. But it is also the whole history of law.(Derrida)

Iterability makes it so that the origin must repeat itself originarily, must alter itself to count as origin, that is to say, to preserve itself. Right away there is the police and the police legislates, not content to enforce a law that would have had no force before the police. This iterability inscribes preservation in the essential structure of foundation. (Derrida)

Even though Freud does not say it, certainly not in this way, this concept of the indirect seems to me to take into account, in the mediation of the detour, a radical discontinuity, a heterogeneity, a leap into the ethical (thus also into the juridical and the political) that no psychoanalytic knowledge as such could
175propel or authorize. On the subject of the polarity love/hatred…Freud says clearly in fact that, like the polarity preservation/cruel destruction, it must not be hastily submitted to ethical judgments evaluating “good and evil.” (Derrida)

At the very point at which he recalls that there is no ethical evaluation in the description of the polarities of the drives and no sense in wanting to rid oneself of the destructive drives, without which life itself would cease, Freud continues, and clearly this is important to him, to find in life, in organic life, in the self-protective economy of organic life, and thus in one of the poles of the polarity, the roots of the whole ethico-political rationality in whose name he proposes to subjugate or restrict the forces of the drives.(Derrida)

2018 (44b) : Derrida , Montessori , Prashna Upanishad , Montessori , Tao Te Ching , Montessori , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

If Eros and Philia are indeed movements, do we not have here an inverse
hierarchy and an inverse dissymmetry? Prime Mover or pure Act, God sets
in motion without Himself moving or being moved; He is the absolute
desirable or desired, analogically and formally in the position of the beloved,
therefore on the side of death, of that which can be inanimate without
ceasing to be loved or desired (apsukhon). Now in contrast to what takes
place in friendship, no one will contest that this absolute object of desire is
also found at the principle and at the summit of the natural hierarchy,
whereas He does not allow himself to move or be moved by any attraction.
(Derrida)

The principle and idea today are too much directed
towards self- perfection, . If we understand
the real aim of movement this self-centralization cannot
exist ; it must expand into the immensity of space. We
must, in short, keep in mind what might be called the
4 philosophy of movement ‘. Movement is what distinguish-
es life from inanimate things. Life, however, does not
move in a haphazard fashion, it moves with a purpose
and according to laws. In order to realize this fact let
us just imagine what the world would be like if it were
quiet, without movement. Imagine what it would be like
if all the plants stopped living, if the movement within
the plant ceased. There would be no more fruits, nor
flowers. The percentage of poisonous gas in the air
would increase and cause disaster. If all movement
stopped, if the birds remained motionless on the trees, or
if insects fluttered to the ground and remained still, if the
wild beasts of prey did no longer move through the
jungles, or the fish stopped swimming in the oceans,
what a terrible world it would be ! (Montessori)

He who meditates on the three syllables A, U, M, as upon God, is joined to the light of the sun.

‘When rivers mingle with the sea they lose their names and shapes and people speak of the sea only

(Prashna Upanishad)

Immobilization is impossible, the world would become
a chaos if movement ceased or if living beings moved
without purpose. Nature gives a useful purpose to each
living being. Each individual has its own characteristic
movements with its own fixed purpose. The creation of
the world is a harmonious co-ordination of all these
activities with a set purpose. (Montessori)

That which has no substance

enters where there is no space.

This shows the value of non-action.

(Tao Te Ching)

If we have a vision of the cosmic plan in which
every form of life in the world is based on purposeful
movements, having their purpose not in themselves alone,
we shall be able to understand and to direct the children’s
work better. (Montessori)

When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don’t react to them; as they have come so will they go, by themselves. All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of oneself or rather, of one’s mind.

Yes, the person, which alone is objectively observable. The observer is beyond observation. What is observable is not the real self.

You can observe the observation, but not the observer. You know you are the ultimate observer by direct insight, not by a logical process based on observation. You are what you are, but you know what you are not. The self is known as being, the not-self is known as transient. But in reality all is in the mind. The observed, observation and observer are mental constructs. The self alone is.

To divide and particularise is in the mind’s very nature. There is no harm in dividing. But separation goes against fact. Things and people are different, but they are not separate. Nature is one, reality is one. There are opposites, but no opposition.

There is a difference between work and mere activity. All nature works. Work is nature, nature is work. On the other hand, activity is based on desire and fear, on longing to possess and enjoy, on fear of pain and annihilation. Work is by the whole for the whole, activity is by oneself for oneself.

(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2018 (44a) : Derrida , Montessori , Derrida , Montessori , John 8:42 , Sri Ramana Maharshi , Jung , Derrida , Montessori , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

the being-pressed, the being-with as being
strictly attached, bound, enchained, being-under-pressure, compressed,
impressed, repressed, pressed-against according to the stronger or
weaker stricture of what always remains pressing. In what sense of the
neighbor [prochain] (which is not necessarily that of a biblical or Greco Latin
tradition) should I say that I am close or near to the animal and
that I am (following) it, and in what type or order of pressure? Being with
it in the sense of being-close-to-it? Being-alongside-it? Being-after it?
Being-after-it in the sense of the hunt, training, or taming, or being after-it
in the sense of a succession or inheritance? In all cases, if I am
(following)after it, the animal therefore comes before me, earlier than me
(fruher is Kant’s word regarding the animal, and Kant will later be called
as a witness). The animal is there before me, there close to me, there in
front of me-I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is
before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of
this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt,
but also-something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this
calculated forgetting itself-it can look at me. It has its point of view
regarding me. (Derrida)

It is not in man to do the same standardized thing
as in animals of the same species. Even if the same
thing is done by some, it is done in a different manner.
We all write, but each has his own handwriting. Each
has his own path always. (Montessori)

What stakes are raised by these questions? One doesn’t need to be an
expert to foresee that they involve thinking about what is meant by living,
speaking, dying, being and world as in being-in-the-world or being towards
the world, or being-with, being-before, being-behind, being-after,
being and following, being followed or being following, there where Iam,
in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they call the animal.
It is too late to deny it, it will have been there before me who is (following)
after it. After and near what they call the animal and with it-whether we
want it or not and whatever we do about it. (Derrida)

We see in movement as it is developed the work of
the individual, and the work of the individual is express-
ing his psychic life ; it is the psychic life itself. It has
at its disposal a great treasure of movements, so move-
ment is developed in service of the central part, i.e. of the
psychic life. If man does not develop all his muscles,
even of those he does develop some are only for
rough work. So man’s psychic life is limited in as much
as his muscles only develop for rough action, not for
refined action. It is limited also by the type of work
that is accessible or chosen. The psychic life of those
who do no work is in great danger. We might say that
though all muscles cannot be put in motion, it is danger-
ous for the psychic life to go below a certain number. If
the number of muscles in use is not sufficient, then there
is a weakness of the whole life. That is why gymnastics,
games, etc., were introduced in education ; too many
muscles were being left aside. (Montessori)

I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me.
(John 8:42)

This reality of pure consciousness is eternal by its nature and therefore subsists equally during what you call waking, dreaming and sleep. To him who is one with that reality there is neither the mind nor its three states and, therefore, neither introversion nor extroversion.

His is the ever-waking state, because he is awake to the eternal Self; his is the ever-dreaming state, because to him the world is no better than a repeatedly presented dream phenomenon; his is the ever-sleeping state, because he is at all times without the ‘body-am-I’ consciousness. (Sri Ramana Maharshi)

Inasmuch as the I is only the center of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely a complex among other complexes. Hence I discriminate between the I and the Self, since the I is only the subject of my consciousness, while the Self is the subject of my totality: hence it also includes the unconscious psyche. In this sense the self would be an (ideal) greatness which embraces and includes the I.
(Jung)

I have just attributed passivity to nudity. We could nickname this
denuded passivity with a term that will come back more than once, from
different places and in different registers, namely, the passion of the animal,
my passion of the animal, my passion of the animal other: seeing oneself
seen naked under a gaze that is vacant to the extent of being bottomless,
at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive,
good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal
and secret. Wholly other, like the (every) other that is (every bit) other
found in such intolerable proximity that I do not as yet feel I am justified
or qualified to call it my fellow, even less my brother. For we shall have to
ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when
an animal enters the scene. Or, conversely, what happens to the animal
when one brother comes after the other, when Abel is after Cain who is
after Abel. Or when a son is after his father. What happens to animals,
surrogate or not, to the ass and ram on Mount Moriah? (Derrida)

The psychic life must use more muscles or else we
also shall have to follow the double path of ordinary
education alternating physical and mental activities. The
purpose in using these muscles is not to learn certain
things. Some forms of * modern * education develop
movement just because there is a desire to serve a cer-
tain direct purpose in social life ; e.g. one child must
write well because he is going to be a teacher and
another is going to be coalheaver so he must shovel well.
This narrow and direct training does not serve the
purpose or aim of movement. Our purpose must be that
man develop the co-ordination of movements necessary
for his psychic life ; to enrich the practical and executive
side of psychic life. Otherwise the brain develops apart
from realization through movement and cannot fulfil its
directive function regarding movement and that brings only
revolution and disaster in the world. Movement then
works by itself, undirected by the psyche, and so brings
destruction. As movement is so necessary to the human
life of relations with the environment and other men, it
is on this level that movement must be developed, in
service of the whole. It is not work to be first in
one’s art or profession. (Montessori)

Nothing is done by me, everything just happens I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.

The three states rotate as usual — there is waking and sleeping and waking again, but they do not happen to me. They just happen. To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rocklike, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.

There is peace — deep, immense, unshakeable. Events are registered in memory, but are of no importance.

(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2018 (43a) : Derrida , Montessori , Derrida , Genesis 40:8 , Derrida . Montessori , John 14 , Derrida , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The reality principle imposes no definitive inhibition, no renunciation of pleasure, only a detour in order to defer enjoyment, the way station of a differance.Because the pleasure principle — right from this preliminary moment when Freud grants it an uncontested mastery — enters into a contract only with itself, reckons and speculates only with itself or with its own metastasis, because it sends itself everything it wants, and in sum encounters no opposition, it unleashes in itself the absolute other.(Derrida)

He must work
and create by will, and repeat the exercises for co-
ordination sub-consciously as to their purpose, but volun-
tarily as to his initiative. So he can conquer all. As
a matter of fact, however, no individual conquers all his
muscles, but all are there. Man is like very wealthy
people, he is so wealthy that he can only use part of his
wealth ; he chooses which part. If a man is a professional
gymnast, it is not that special muscular ability was given
to him ; nor is a dancer born with certain refined muscles
for dancing ; he or she develops them by will. Anyone,
no matter what he wants to do, is endowed by nature
with such a wealth of muscles that he can find among
them what he needs, and his psyche can direct and
create any development. Nothing is established, but
everything is possible, provided proper direction is given
by the individual psyche. (Montessori)

it leaves the trace of an affirmation … it speaks! to all, to the other … the ambiguous force. and it speaks of what provokes it. (Derrida)

Do not interpretations belong to God? (Genesis 40:8)

this sense of the continual fertility of the mother-site (an androgynous mixture of stars and sky). (Derrida)

It is not in man to do the same standardized thing
as in animals of the same species. Even if the same
thing is done by some, it is done in a different manner.
We all write, but each has his own handwriting. Each
has his own path always.(Montessori)

You know the way to the place where I am going. (John 14)

I have become increasingly interested in the philosophical border between man and animal, which also becomes an examination of the traditional boundary between culture and nature. (Derrida)

If you just try to keep quiet, all will come — the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? Don’t be anxious about your future — be quiet now and all will fall in place. The unexpected is bound to happen, while the anticipated may never come. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2018 (42a) : Derrida, Montessori, Derrida, Montessori, Bhagavad Gita 5:9, Isaiah 9:6, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Derrida

Let us take the chance, then, after so many glosses, of an ingenuous reading. Let us try to see what happens. But is this not right away impossible? … The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open. one’s eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible.
(Derrida)

Once the importance of something has been dis-
covered, everybody at once sets to work. Humanity is
generous, but ignorant, so when they learn of some-
thing they precipitate themselves, usually with too
much enthusiasm, and so also in this instance. Philoso-
phers, psychologists, sociologists and others have centred
their interest on the child of 1 J to 2 years of age. This
is an epoch of development in which special care must be
taken not to destroy the tendencies of life. If nature has
given us such clear indications that this is the period of
maximum effort we must support this effort. This is a
general statement, but those who observe become more
exact in the details they give. (Montessori)

This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me. I am not the only one to be interested by this economic power. I try to understand its laws but also to mark in what regard the formalization of these laws can never be closed or completed. (Derrida)

We wanted a perfect humanity and thought humanity was to be perfect
by imitating us, but we were imperfect ; what a con-
fusion ! Nature has not reasoned like we, she has reasoned
another way ; she does not bother about perfection
in adults. What is important is that in order to
imitate, the child has to be prepared to do so. It is
this preparation that matters and it depends on the efforts
of the individual child. The example offers a motive to
imitation, it is not the aim. It is the effort of imitation
which develops, not the attainment of the examples given.
In fact the child once launched on the part of this effort
often surpasses in perfection and exactitude the example,
which served as an incentive. (Montessori)

Those steadfast in this karm yog, always think, “I am not the doer,” even while engaged in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, moving, sleeping, breathing, speaking, excreting, and grasping. With the light of divine knowledge, they see that it is only the material senses that are moving amongst their objects.(Bhagavad Gita 5:9)

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given
(Isaiah 9:6)

There are so many things you are doing without knowing how to do it. You digest, you circulate your blood and lymph, you move your muscles — all without knowing how. In the same way, you perceive, you feel, you think without knowing the why and how of it. Similarly you are yourself without knowing it. There is nothing wrong with you as the Self. It is what it is to perfection. It is the mirror that is not clear and true and, therefore, gives you false images. You need not correct yourself — only set right your idea of yourself. Learn to separate yourself from the image and the mirror, keep on remembering: I am neither the mind nor its ideas: do it patiently and with convictions and you will surely come to the direct vision of yourself as the source of being — knowing — loving, eternal, all-embracing all-pervading. You are the infinite focussed in a body. Now you see the body only. Try earnestly and you will come to see the infinite only. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

So as to prepare us to see this invisibility, to see without seeing, thus to think the body without body of this invisible visibility-the ghost is already taking shape. (Derrida)