{"id":216,"date":"2020-06-02T19:53:46","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T19:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desorganisation.org\/frederic-neyrat-staying-unhuman-on-marvel-and-horror\/"},"modified":"2020-06-02T19:53:46","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T19:53:46","slug":"frederic-neyrat-staying-unhuman-on-marvel-and-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desorganisation.org\/en\/metheorzine\/frederic-neyrat-staying-unhuman-on-marvel-and-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"FR\u00c9D\u00c9RIC NEYRAT: STAYING UNHUMAN: ON MARVEL AND HORROR"},"content":{"rendered":"

STAYING UNHUMAN: ON MARVEL AND HORROR
<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

First, Arthur Rimbaud: je est un autre.<\/i><\/p>\n

Not \u201cI am another,\u201d but: I is<\/i> another.<\/p>\n

Every time I try to get who \u201cI am,\u201d I cannot but get another one than me.<\/p>\n

A double, a ghost, a mechanical replica.<\/p>\n

Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, we could say: le moi n\u2019est pas le je<\/i>,<\/p>\n

The ego is no the I.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet we keep confusing both, we keep imagining<\/i> who we are;<\/p>\n

but between the I and the ego, there is a gap, a Spaltung<\/i>, a split.<\/p>\n

This split is the mark of the unconscious -<\/p>\n

not the unconscious, but the effect of its genesis: something is lacking<\/p>\n

something is repressed,<\/p>\n

something fell down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Because of an encounter \u2013 <\/p>\n

a primal encounter with language, this virus (dixit William Burroughs);<\/p>\n

with death, the \u201cabsolute master\u201d (dixit G.W.F. Hegel);<\/p>\n

with sexuality, this polymorphous libido (dixit Sigmund Freud)<\/p>\n

with the origin and its promise of end,<\/p>\n

with something bigger than me, deeper than me, older than me<\/p>\n

- something ancestral, out of joint, radically other, deeply unhuman<\/p>\n

something that will always prevent the ego from being a monad,<\/p>\n

a self-sufficient entity<\/p>\n

- something that always should prevent human beings from taking themselves for themselves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As they exceed our symbolic, interpretative capacity, <\/p>\n

primal encounters are traumatic: <\/p>\n

They are like white holes, <\/p>\n

blank skins,<\/p>\n

surfaces deprived of inscriptions<\/p>\n

that are surrounded only by our imaginary, <\/p>\n

bordered by our attempt to deal with what Toni Morrison calls <\/p>\n

\u201cthe scariness of things with no names.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If black holes don\u2019t let light escape, <\/p>\n

white holes don\u2019t let in darkness, <\/p>\n

they don\u2019t tolerate the lines of inscriptions of meaning:<\/p>\n

facing white holes, every writing process fails;<\/p>\n

every narrative is torn apart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hence repetitions: the return of the repressed, <\/p>\n

that is to say the return of a psychological structure, be it individual or collective,<\/p>\n

 affected by a collapsed part.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What comes back is what never came, never appeared, that is: <\/p>\n

that which never happened in what happened,<\/p>\n

that which was unexperiencable in the experience.<\/p>\n

An excess, to refer to Bataille.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The excess is recalled as what overwhelmed me,<\/p>\n

a jouissance that I try to experience again, <\/p>\n

and again,<\/p>\n

and again,<\/p>\n

thanks to the dreamwork, failed acts, and art.<\/p>\n

But every time I recall, re-suscitate, a primary experience, <\/p>\n

I experience a lack of meaning.<\/p>\n

The repetition is therefore double sided: <\/p>\n

a recollection of the primal experience, <\/p>\n

and an experience of the immemorial.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That is to say marvel and horror.<\/p>\n

- Marvel of the excess, of what allows me to be more than myself, <\/p>\n

marvel of the existence of others, <\/p>\n

of a world that has not my face,<\/p>\n

a world alien enough to leave a place for love.<\/p>\n

- Horror of the trauma threatening to swallow me, <\/p>\n

to disintegrate the imaginary narrative that I conceived around the white hole.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who am I?<\/p>\n

\u201cI <\/i>am, Lacan says, \u201cin the place from which \u201cthe universe is a flaw in the purity of Non-Being\u201d is vociferated.\u201d<\/p>\n

A human being is an attempt to make this place, the place of jouissance, habitable.<\/p>\n

An attempt to give a form to the pre-human, <\/p>\n

unhuman forces that keep undoing any forms.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Being human means staying, as much as possible, unhuman.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Neyrat <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STAYING UNHUMAN: ON MARVEL AND HORROR     First, Arthur Rimbaud: je est un autre. Not \u201cI am another,\u201d but: I is another. Every time I try to get who \u201cI am,\u201d I cannot but get another one than me. A double, a ghost, a mechanical replica. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, we could say: le … FR\u00c9D\u00c9RIC NEYRAT: STAYING UNHUMAN: ON MARVEL AND HORROR<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metheorzine"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t