THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD » Fetish

other-than-me, more-than-me, other-than-mine

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:53:55 +0000

Of the found object’s various Winnicottian features, three are crucial for it to qualify as found. First, it must possess a modicum of vitality evidenced through warmth, movement, or texture for instance. Second, it has to be resilient enough to survive the loving and/or aggressive manipulations of the individual that finds it, with the proviso …

Situational Subjects

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:14:19 +0000

Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process …

Subjects

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:18:21 +0000

Keeping in mind the initial definition of process as production, recording, and consumption, a third synthesis is invariably at work, a synthesis of consumption that belongs to the “subject,” a “subject” that is produced by a recording and that defines itself in terms of the recording it consumes. How could a recording produce a subject? …

Fetish-2

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:58:51 +0000

The two syntheses of production are subject to fetishistic manipulation: reversal in the case of connection, and exclusivity in the case of disjunction. The fetish is specific to a social delirium (an “I think”) of an apparent movement of, for instance, the body without organs as cause of all production (the logic of “without me …

Disjunction

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:26:44 +0000

In the face of this “without me, you are nothing” and instead of the all too familiar reversed and hence equally fetishistic and resentful response by the other, Deleuze and Guattari not only insist on the infinitely open quality of the binary series of machines that precludes the fixity of pedigree, they also complicate the …

Fetish

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:36:14 +0000

It is in terms of this tension that Deleuze and Guattari will understand the fetish, not as an object, a commodity, or a body part; but as the movement, event, and relationship that reverse the connective synthesis and fix the machine as fatefully miraculated, as, in other words, owing its existence to some body without …

Repelling

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:57:01 +0000

“We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction” (8). Again, and of the parallel between desiring production and social production: “we intend such a parallel to be merely phenomenological: we are drawing here no conclusion as to …