introduction

Maybe best to begin with a bit of a phenomenologically oriented introduction, so that anyone who perhaps would read this will be aware of the limits of my perspective of what I might write in this blog.

I am a 27 year old graduate philosophy student at a school known for its embrace of continental philosophy in all of its programs. I live in Manhattan on the Upper East Side in a little brownstone on 82nd street, the same street that leads to the Met and the same street that the New York Psychoanalytic Institute is on. However, I have almost no time to visit either, between classes and the job that barely pays my bills (I make cappuccinos).

At the moment, my thesis (coming soon), will be a critique of the critique of the role of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in metaphysics. The critique of presence and the infinite series of "now points" as French deconstruction has articulated its position in reference to the work of Heidegger, Husserl, and Freud. The dangers of the presupposition of self-presence as an identical point, a Kantian "unity of apperception." Language, differance, repetition, and dreams. My concern at this point will be the presence-in-absence of the self, which was a Kantian problem in Critique of Pure Reason; we intuit the self and at the same time we cannot apprehend the content of identity, its unity in thought. For philosophy, and by extension, for psychoanalysis, the "self" is not a livable experience. Or rather, the self is an absence-in-presence.

Actually, I find a rediscovery of identity in Husserl and Freud, at the same time as they discover the absence-in-presence possibility of experience. Now, the question is: how "livable" are their descriptions? What will be the grounds of their elaboration of consciousness against undifferentiated backgrounds? What does it mean to live an identity?

Now, a moment. I find that most of my sentences above were either fragments or incomprehensible, so in the interest of explication and autobiography, I feel a need to point to my first encounter with phenomenology. Existentialism. Camus and Sartre. Camus' articulation of Sisyphus and the Stranger who embraces his own absurd existence. Sartre's affirmation of the "void" which will prescribe a rigid duality, Being and Nothingness. I was 18 when I discovered French existentialism and found it exhilaratingly angstful. It is interesting that existentialism suits a temperament and little else. Imagine the fun I had with the idea of Being-for-Itself and Being-in-Itself. Sartre's work was like a clever little painting of a cafe, for me, a philosophical Waffle House where the presence of "objects" (in the general sense) was divided literally between freedom and facticity. A vanishing point delimiting the domain in which all being was exposed as if on a canvas, a horizon.

But like the "Blue Period" or Dadaism or the sixties or angst, the mood passed. In what sense was the world so black and white? In what sense was "my" (autobiographically speaking) existence tied to my freedom? I could not help but exist. And further, I had to survive. I had to work, I had to become thing-like in order to continue "existing." And was my every emotional impulse an irrational succumbing to the in-itself? Was I only free when I rode the waves of angst? Angst was as cheap as drug inspired rebellion. It never seemed to grasp the full weight of existence as life; as Merleau-Ponty would criticize, the perspective on being from the vantage point of Nothingness, is a presupposed negation and thus can never fully account for itself as nothing; it becomes a being itself - in-itself.

A presupposed negation can never account for its own negation; it presupposes itself and veils itself as in-itself. This perspective on nothingness and presupposition was the point of departure for me, from existentialism, and from a certain relationship to angstful culture, to life lived.