Yes, I respect Jung and his theory of archetypes, but it is not a religious canon and not an instruction for me. For me, it is rather one of the views and a possibility to systematize experience, not a canonical scheme.
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Have you read Alexei Losev’s Dialectics of Myth? In my view, he is one of the most important thinkers on myth, and he is greatly underestimated in the West.
No, but I will check him out now, to at least get the gist.
Marianna Gerasimova, an investigator with the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), an agency of secret police, was assigned to investigate Losev with the goal of proving that he was a leader of the secret religious splinter group called Onomatodoxy, based on the idea that the Name of God is God Himself, and that Losev was involved in planning violence against the Soviet government. Losev was indeed associated with Onomatodoxy but his role was theological, not practical.
Fascinating ! The name of God is God himself.
Found his book on Plato.
Losev is known as a representative of the religious movement called Imiaslavie — Name-Glorification — but for me this is not the important part, and I have not studied it deeply.
Dialectics of Myth is about something else: myth is not fiction, not a “fairy tale,” not a primitive explanation of nature, and not a psychological illusion.
Myth is a miraculous personal history given in words.
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That sounds good to me. You point out how “myth” tends to be neutralized, but in my view we “are” myth.
De Man’s point is that demystification always involves bringing a new myth against the old. So Jung’s psychology is just another myth, not the non-mythical “truth” about myth. There just is no “space beyond myth.” That would be a space beyond personality and subjectivity, an empty longing for annihilation. The “space beyond myth” or “myth-free discourse” is an anemic myth ( Derrida’s “white” mythology, a dominant myth AKA as scientism.)
Subjectivity is dynamic myth incarnate. And I agree that “miraculous” ( atypical, important ) personal history gets encoded in myth. People have to lie to tell the truth.
Unfortunately, I do not know de Man.
The Western concept of myth that I am familiar with is mostly built, for me, around Roland Barthes, where myth is part of deception or ideology.
For Losev, myth is something different: an ultimately concrete, natural form of thinking.
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Yes. I am with you on this. Lakoff writes of metaphors we live by. Douglas Hofstadter suggests that analogy is the core of cognition.
De Man is great but largely forgotten. He was a friend of Derrida but wrote in a different style, in an elusive but precise English.
In our time, even in a modern civilized society, one can find many places that structurally resemble myths and mythical thinking in a striking way.
For example, some narratives around Covid have the following structure: some evil “they” perform bodily rituals in order to change the essence of the human being. Who exactly “they” are is explained schematically. In ancient times they might have been called servants of evil forces, or shamans. In our time they are called pharmaceutical companies.
Or another example: a variation of the myth of the creation of man. Certain beings — aliens — descend from the sky, create human beings, and give them power and knowledge, but only partially. These beings are anthropomorphic and powerful. Structurally, this almost literally coincides with traditional gods.
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Exactly. That would fit in with the centrality of analogy. We previously discussed Finnegans Wake along these lines. The “same thing” happens again and again, but differently each time.
This is where I think we begin to diverge.
I am not very close to a picture in which the world is explained by simple — and chaotic — difference. For me, the world is always ordered in some way. The world needs gaze and power.
In essence, the world needs an observer, though not in a directly mystical sense. Rather, as the world separates itself from nothingness, it always acquires a definite structure. Structure implies repetition, and repetition is time.
Time is possible only in the balance between predictability and unpredictability. What is completely predictable becomes the past. Complete unpredictability, on the other hand, does not allow the moments of time themselves to be distinguished.
I would rather read Joyce in terms of the approximate repetition of ordering gazes. He bases his book on Vico’s cyclical theory of history.
I agree that the world needs an observer. I would even say that we as subjects can only talk nonsense when we talk of “the world from no perspective.”
I agree that temporal structure requires some kind of repetition, some kind of compressibility in the sequence ( Kolmogorov complexity, for instance.) I see Joyce as providing his own monomythic vision of the world, which is an expression of great personal “will” on his part.
I don’t consider myself a partisan pomo warrior of difference. In fact, I am more interested in the ideality that synthesizes difference. Difference is not prior to identity. Difference and identity are two sides of one coin. This is how I read Plato’s unwritten doctrine.
For me, the only genuine form of identity is a deeply personal dialogue with God, the Absolute, Nothingness, and my own finitude.
Gender, race, language, desires, tastes, and biography may all be parts of human life. But when they are turned into the final formula of my identity, I experience this as a hostile machine of Moloch.
I can relate to all of that. I likewise reject all attempts at final reductive formulas. Class, race, sex, age, and whatever the next generation comes up with. Flights from the singularity of existence. Flights into cartoons for paper heroes to perform.
Did you ever read Marx on Stirner in The German Ideology ? He’s hilariously furious at Stirner. How dare someone insist on something unique and singular in their existence ! How dare they question the latest and so fashionable existence-denying idol ! Here I mean “existence” in the strong sense of an unrepeatable event, the exact hand that I have to play, facing my death alone, and facing the poetic quest necessarily alone.
No question that Marx asserts his superior sophistication, but there’s a confession in his fury. Stupid honest Stirner put his hand in the fire.
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The ideality which synthesizes difference is of course very Husserlian. But I don’t see a conflict between this and the idea that difference precedes identity. After all, idealities are never fulfilled completely. Repetition never achieves the pure self-identity of duplication.
Pomo writers like Deleuze who insist that difference precedes identity also see differences as productive of synthetic idealities, but they reject the notion of an synthesizing subject.
It looks like Deleuze is going to have a problem explaining knowledge. He could say knower and known are two sides of the same coin, and we separate them through the process of analysis, but that leaves someone who’s doing the analysis.
I think all we can say is that we recognize a sequence of events, unity gives way to duality, which comes back together as unity again. Each part is as “real” as the others.
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I don’t think our positions are far apart here. For me the ideality of identity goes back to Heraclitus and Plato. The river as enduring intersubjective entity is “ideal.” But this ideality is not an essence inside subjects understood as containers. I think we agree at least on rejecting the subject as container.
I made my comment within a particular dialogue. I thought maybe @VerticalOntology was mistaking me as a mere inverter of everything patriarchal. Identity is phallic, and difference is feminine and subversive, etc.
I’m sure many would class me as “pomo” for my outright denial that “truth” makes sense as a deep property of this or that statement. But “pomo” is also a style. I think Ayer’s LTL is a better book than Deleuze’s D&R. There are good passages in D&R, but it is frustratingly soggy on the whole.
Yes, but do you understand it? What are he and his partner in crime, Foucault, up to? What is he doing with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return?
I understand and agree with certain passages of D&R.
I’m open to finding more in it. I was reading it earlier and finding it sprinkled with nice moments but soggy and gaseous overall.
Let’s consider a secondary source:
In Chapters 1 and 2, to find a differential genetic principle, Deleuze works through the history of philosophy to isolate the concepts of “difference in itself” and “repetition for itself” that the assumptions of previous philosophies had prevented from being formulated. “Difference in itself” is difference that is freed from identities seen as metaphysically primary. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation between two terms which each has a prior identity of its own (“x is different from y”). Deleuze inverts this priority: identity persists, but is now a something produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x). Difference is no longer an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity (for example, it is the difference of electrical potential between cloud and ground that constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon of lightning).
In Chapter 2, the concept of “repetition for itself” is produced as repetition that is freed from being repetition of an original self-identical thing so that it can be the repetition of difference. Following the formula of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return, repetition is the return of the differential genetic condition of real experience each time there is an individuation of a concrete entity. Ultimately, then, Difference and Repetition will show that the individuation of entities is produced by the actualization, integration, or resolution (the terms are synonymous for Deleuze) of a differentiated virtual field of Ideas or “multiplicities” that are themselves changed, via “counter-effectuation,” in each individuating event.
I can hypothesize more definite interpretations that make these claims feasible, but why should I have to ? I suspect that plausible paraphrases will drastically reduce the novelty that is promised to us by the style.
What sort of difference is he talking about?
I am not very fond of using gendered or bodily terms and analogies in this context. I think sex is ontological: human sex manifests from the world, rather than the world being projected from human sex.
A more neutral language is closer to Jung, with his anima and animus: masculine and feminine archetypes that can be used to describe the world in the same way as fire, water, air, and earth — not literally, and not as fixed identities, but as principles that are present in people in different proportions.