Sunday, February 17, 2008

Blah Blah Blah and the Modern World

(February 17/08)

February 29th or 30th I will be giving a paper on the Freudian Unconscious and Husserl’s Epoche at the upcoming student conference at the Dominican University-College cloistered away in a century-old monastery/church/rectory/ Dominican Priory in Chinatown.

I am planning to write my PhD dissertation in philosophy on the trisection of Samuel Beckett, Wilfrid Bion and phenomenology, principally Beckett’s writings from a Husserlian and psychoanalytic perspective. My MA thesis, which can be view online at the Modern World Brazen Head James Joyce site, was entitled ‘Joyce’s Ulysses, and Schopenhauerian and Freudian Reading’. I am interested not only in Beckett as a writer and dramatist, but also as a phenomenologist.
I am still up and in a state of cosseted animation, sort of like Joseph K after eating too much Special K, which of course he pilfered from his dear father before leaping off the bridge into the roiling water below, a bachelor no less.

I’ve been bandying about ideas and topics for a thesis and have come up with one I’d like to share with you. I have been stung, bitten and otherwise awakened by the phenomenological-bug, especially the whole notion of a transcendental-subjective-ego, which to me sounds suspiciously unconscious, be that Freudian or Lacanian. I can’t help but be pulled into the Freudian camp every time Husserl’s ego comes up, and the whole notion of a middle ground or stream of consciousness, or pure-experience. My reading of Husserl is one that sees this middle-ground or stream as the cheese between the realist and idealist bread, it’s where all the taste and substance is.

Now for my idea for a thesis topic, which I must say is still in swaddling cloth: A phenomenological look, or reading, if you like, of Beckett. There I said it, and with my mouth full of rocks, each one carefully pocketed and then re-pocket ad nausea; which would mean, I suppose, I’m lolling on lint and hard-candy. I think one could read Beckett in a phenomenological voice, looking at his onto-existential crisis and the manner in which his characters seem to be-in-the-world while being-outside the world (word) simultaneously.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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