Gregory, here's my formulation:
"A cinema experience makes its content available to all areas of that experience
and to other experience as well, but by focusing on the cinema experience first,
I think some interesting ground can be covered with Freud. That ground is
content framing--the way cinema makes content available and the way it validates
that framing. What does this approach imply for a reading of Freud? It involves
not a study of the symbolic, but a study of juxtaposition."
Juxtaposition has the following sense:
"A dream requires a certain psychic state. A dream state may make its content
available to other psychic states--_The Interpretation of Dreams_ plays on this
division. For a dream to be interpreted validly, Freud implies that an
authentic psychic state is required."
Gregory says,
"The key to interpretation, in a rigorous Freudian sense, is this: one does not
really interpret a dream at all so much as one (say, an analyst) brings his/her
patient to see the dream itself as an interpretation of the unconscious. The
point is not to render a latent content from a manifest content but, rather, one
'investigates the relations between the manifest content and the latent
dream-thoughts' [cf. the begining of chapter VI]. As such, there is no simple
'opposition' between manifest and latent, but rather a process of distortion
that renders the dream a 'rubric or picture puzzle.' "
Gregory, are you posing at least another state to arbitrate between what was
originally manifest and whatever revealed itself as latent (on state, two
states, multiple states)? If you are, you're engaged in content framing.
Gregory says, "While the lure of the dream is precisely to reach a deeper
meaning, what Freud locates in the dream--in the most important part of the
dream--is precisely a 'navel' where meaning (symbolization, even censorship)
falters altogether. "
This statement sounds like bad Derrida (_Spurs_) more than it sounds like Freud.
Where does Freud say that he's interested in reaching an interpretive impasse?
Freud, of course, does not have to say it so much as imply it, but why should we
care about his latent program? This programmatical impasse is already present in
such Veil-of-Maya philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Truth is
seduction: "If truth is a woman . . . ," says Nietzsche in _Beyond Good and
Evil_, "by what name have we known her?"
For the impasse, Gregory gives the following--non-typical--example:
"See, for instance, Freud's own "dream of Irma's injection," where the analyst
dreams of examining one of his patients at a party. When Freud discusses the
dream, his narrativiztion runs aground at the
recollection of certain lesions on Irma's throat; he retreats into claiming
that, based on the patient's history, the dream reveals his own professional
anxieties--but what Freud has in fact brushed up against is the dream's navel,
the place where the signifier fails. The dream is important because it
interprets this jouissance (das Es), which usually eludes us ('Wo Es war, soll
Ich werden'). "
1) Gregory, does your Freud have a sympathetic (ph)allacy: "his narrativiztion
runs aground at the recollection of certain lesions on Irma's throat"?
2) Gregory, do Freudian (ph)allacies merely repeat themselves: "what Freud has
in fact brushed up against is the dream's navel, the place where the signifier
fails"? Your analysis seems to be no more than the cipher method--you've
translated one item into another. You begin your post by complaining about this
very act.
3) Gregory, would you give some context for the following statement, "what Freud
has in fact brushed up against is the dream's navel, the place where the
signifier fails."
Does Freud want to prick the veil of Maya? Is he out of position--trying to come
in through the out door (the
navel)? Does his prick (signifier) fail him?
4) Why do you translate "das Es," in standard English, "the It" (in standard
Latin, "Es" is "id), as "this jouissance"? Whom are you following here? Lacan
perhaps? . . . Are you simply making a supplemental reference " . . . this
jouissance (das Es)"?
5) How do you draw the following conclusion: "The dream is important because it
interprets this jouissance (das Es), which usually eludes us ('Wo Es war, soll
Ich werden')"?
"Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" reads "Where it was, I shall be." I don't follow
your meaning--could you explain?
Notice that "Ich," the term for "I" in standard English, is related to "das
Ich"--"the I." In standard Latin, "Ich" is "ego."
Do you have another translation in mind? Are you familiar with the saying of
Nietzsche, "become who you are"?
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Do you have a movie to which we might apply your analysis?
JMC
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