TY - CHAP

T1 - Strangers to the Aesthetic

T2 - Psychoanalysis in the Work of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva

AU - Fabian Rauch, Malte

PY - 2023/1/1

Y1 - 2023/1/1

N2 - In contemporary theory, the notion of alterity has come to designate that which refuses comprehension, resists assimilation, escapes integration and evades possession. It names an irreducible difference within any economy of the same. Since the theorization of otherness always already occurs within an established system of signification, it appears to be self-defeating. This aporetic ambition can be characterized through the concept—coined by Georges Bataille—of a heterology: a science of what is wholly other. Arguably, psychoanalysis may also be understood as an aporetic knowledge of knowledge’s other, since the emergence of the discipline is characterizable as the acknowledgment of an alterity within the psyche that contradicts the supposed ideality of reason and undermines the notion of a self-present subjectivity. And yet, in Sigmund Freud’s work, this theorization takes, of course, the form of a “science of the unconscious,” an ambivalence that led Jacques Derrida to insist that Freud’s discourse borrows its concept from logocentrism but that its force is not exhausted by belonging to them (Derrida 2001a: 248)....

AB - In contemporary theory, the notion of alterity has come to designate that which refuses comprehension, resists assimilation, escapes integration and evades possession. It names an irreducible difference within any economy of the same. Since the theorization of otherness always already occurs within an established system of signification, it appears to be self-defeating. This aporetic ambition can be characterized through the concept—coined by Georges Bataille—of a heterology: a science of what is wholly other. Arguably, psychoanalysis may also be understood as an aporetic knowledge of knowledge’s other, since the emergence of the discipline is characterizable as the acknowledgment of an alterity within the psyche that contradicts the supposed ideality of reason and undermines the notion of a self-present subjectivity. And yet, in Sigmund Freud’s work, this theorization takes, of course, the form of a “science of the unconscious,” an ambivalence that led Jacques Derrida to insist that Freud’s discourse borrows its concept from logocentrism but that its force is not exhausted by belonging to them (Derrida 2001a: 248)....

KW - Cultural studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186644518&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/ddf504cd-d8cd-3826-9b48-48c7bb8a5920/

U2 - 10.5040/9781350184183.ch-023

DO - 10.5040/9781350184183.ch-023

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85186644518

SN - 9781350184152

SP - 309

EP - 321

BT - The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis

A2 - Tambling, Jeremy

PB - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

ER -