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art communication book frontispiece engraving leviathan esposito communitas freud father son murder violence death sacrifice

✖ Via Wikimedia Commons: book frontispiece by Abraham Bosse for Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). It was created with input from Hobbes. [click for hi-res]

Learn more about the frontispiece on wikipedia.

Here’s another way to interpret this illustration:

The incorporation of the father on the part of the sons corresponds to the incorporation of the sons of the part of which, upon the death of the father, substitutes for him. What else does the celebrated image of the Leviathan represent, composed as it is of many small human forms wedged in together one against the other in the shape of a scale of impenetrable armor, if not the inclusion again of the murderous sons on the part of the “second” father in one’s own body? (Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community by Roberto Esposito, trans. by Thimothy Campbell, Standford: Stanford University Press, [1998]2010, p. 40)

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One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.

✖ Via Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud, tr. Abraham Arden Brill, New York, Moffat, Yard and company, [1913]1919.

Previously on Skandalon: Freud

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The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 207-208

Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?

Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

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We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

✖ Via The New Yorker: “Iphigenia in Forest Hill” by Janet Malcolm, May 3rd, 2010, p. 38

An excerpt taken from the fascinating (really) account of Mazoltuv Borukhova’s Trial. The way Malcolm’s puts it could be used, I think, to illustrate the existential implication of “cognitive dissonance”.

Janet Malcolm :

“(born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).” (wikipedia)

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In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. Thus, Bush was wrong. What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

✖ Via “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib” by Slavoj Zizek, May 21st, 2004

First heard of this text via Errol Morris Twitter account. Errol Morris is still thinking about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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art book author freud psychoanalysis reblog

✖ Via Dark Roasted Blend: “The Extraordinary Work of Ex-Libris Art” Nov. 20th, 2009

The “nude figure” is Oedipus. But the Greek inscription is much more relevant here ―on the ex-libris of the father of psychoanalysis― than the fact that a Oedipus is naked. The Greek inscription reads: “oV ta klein ainigmata hdei, kai kratistoV hn anhr”. It’s taken from Sophocles’ Oedipus King (vv. 1525) and it means:

The one who understood that celebrated riddle. He was the most powerful of men.

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A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer message from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an “awarness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,” transposition necessarily takes the place of translation.

✖ Via Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, Stanford University Press, [1985]1992, p. 265 [Amazon]

“Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.” (wikipedia)

Derrida offers a similar analysis in his essay “Freud and the scene of writing” (1966)

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art junk food freud psychoanalysis recycling hack

✖ Via Vik Muniz: “Sigmund” from the Pictures of Chocolate series, 1997.

“Vik Muniz (born 1961) is a Brazilian born, New York based artist who experiments with media. […] In his picture of Sigmund Freud, he uses chocolate to render the image. For his Sugar Children series, Muniz went to a sugar plantation in St. Kitts to photograph children of laborers who work there. After he returned to New York, he bought some black paper and several kinds of sugar, and copied the snapshots of the children by layering the different types of sugar on the paper and photographing it. He made the images from the sugar at the plantation.” (Wikipedia)

Watch a TEDTalk video by Vik Muniz

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derrida brain code communication difference dreams grammar movie philosophy poster psychoanalysis translation identity representation

✖ Via Internet Movie Poster Awards: Paprika by Satoshi Kon, 2006

“The dreamer invents his own grammar. No meaningful material or prior text exists which he might simply use, even if he never deprives himself of them. Such is, despite their interest, the limitation of the Chiffriermethode and the Traumbuch. As much as of the generality and the rigidity of the code, that limitation is a function of an excessive preoccupation with contents, an insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences (…)”

Quoted from “Freud and the scene of writing” by Jacques Derrida ([1966]1972), tr. by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no 48, p. 89 (PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).

Previously on Skandalon : Freud

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✖ Via Mark Ryden : “The Angel of Meat” (Angelica Carnis), oil on Panel, 1998, 38” x 33”, from The Meat Show

About Mark Ryden :

“Mark Ryden came to preeminence in the 1990’s during a time when many artists, critics and collectors were quietly championing a return to the art of painting. With his masterful technique and disquieting content, Ryden quickly became one of the leaders of this movement on the West Coast.

Upon first glance Ryden’s work seems to mirror the Surrealists’ fascination with the subconscious and collective memories. However, Ryden transcends the initial Surrealists’ strategies by consciously choosing subject matter loaded with cultural connotation. His dewy vixens, cuddly plush pets, alchemical symbols, religious emblems, primordial landscapes and slabs of meat challenge his audience not necessarily with their own oddity but with the introduction of their soothing cultural familiarity into unsettling circumstances. (more)

Artist Statement - “The Meat Show” - October 1998 :

“I believe to get ideas you have to nourish the spirit. I stuff myself full of the things I like: pictures of bugs, paintings by Bouguereau and David, books about Pheneous T. Barnum, films by Ray Harryhausen, old photographs of strange people, children’s books about space and science, medical illustrations, music by Frank Sinatra and Debussy, magazines, T.V., Jung and Freud, Ren and Stimpy, Joseph Campbell and Nostradamus, Ken and Barbie, Alchemy, Freemasonary, Buddhism. At night my head is so full of ideas I can’t sleep. I mix it all together and create my own doctrine of life and the universe.” (more)

Previously on Skandalon: meat

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