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REFERENCE ONLY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THESIS Degree f*Vvo Year Name of Author A £ C O P Y R IG H T This is a thesis accepted for a Higher Degree of the University of London. It is an unpublished typescript and the copyright is held by the author. All persons consulting the thesis must read and abide by the Copyright Declaration below. COPYRIGHT DECLARATION I recognise that the copyright of the above-described thesis rests with the author and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. LOANS Theses may not be lent to individuals, but the Senate House Library may lend a copy to approved libraries within the United Kingdom, for consultation solely on the premises of those libraries. Application should be made to: Inter-Library Loans, Senate House Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. 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C:\Documents and Settings\lproctor\Local SettingsYTemporary Internet Files\OLK8\Copyright - thesis (2).doc PSYCHOANALYSTS AND THE NON-CONCEPTUAL: THE APORIA OF THE PRE-SYMBOLIC Stefan Polatinsky Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College London 2005 UMI Number: U593116 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U593116 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis attempts to extend the scope of consideration of the pre-oedipal or pre- symbolic mother-infant relationship by focusing on a ‘third’ space that exists between them, and the remains of this space in the infant’s unconscious. Through the theoretical explication of two non-concepts, the “third aesthetic” and the “O- Function”, the thesis endeavours to develop a framework, from a psychoanalytic perspective, which considers how the inauguration of a trace is established so that the infant may seek out or create meaning at a later stage of life following maturation or individuation. The thesis has not however insisted on defining the construct of meaning per se, which is invariably a subjective and existential endeavour or idiom, but is rather concerned with what may provide a possibility for subsequent meaning- making endeavours. The notion of a third space, which alludes to a meeting point of two subjectivities which in turn proliferates a third arena o f negotiation, considers other (liminal) spatial and temporal possibilities that exist (or rather ex-sist) between the mother and the infant. This third time-space (the “third aesthetic”), which takes its cue from “chora/khdra ” (as explored by Plato, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida) and the “potential space” (as identified by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott), is developed through a consideration of thirdness (or more specifically thirdness under erasure, and the refusal to enclose it within a triad), the aesthetic, metaphor and metonymy, and rhythm. What remains of this third energetic body in the infant’s unconscious (the “O-Function”) is considered through the tropes of the trace, the gift and cinders, as well as through the ineluctably uncanny rhythms of desistance (of the future-to-come). The thesis focuses critically on what tropological or metaphoric forums may be provided in service of explicating these two ‘non-concept’ concepts given the problematics of representation. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this thesis was aided.by the direction and guidance of a number of individuals. Firstly, my grateful thanks to my supervisors, Mary Target and Rosine Perelberg, for their valuable comments, assistance, facilitation, and for providing me with the scope and latitude for exploration. Thank you also Mary for managing on my t behalf the monolith of a rather magisterial academic bureaucracy - micro-politics, the Nom/Non-du-Pere et al, and for your encouragement and support of my future vocational endeavours. My sincere thanks to Peter Fonagy for his distinctive contribution of much needed humour and irreverence, and most importantly for his unstinting interest in this research project particularly in light of (in the face of) the implacable empiricists and logical positivists holding court (and fort!) at UCL. I benefited tremendously from the astute and meticulous comments offered by Merle Williams and Liz Allison. Thank you for the considerable time and energy that you invested in reviewing my thesis. I would like to particularly extend my special gratitude to Merle Williams for her boundless generosity and concern, and for remaining such a critical and formative influence. I would also like to express profound appreciation to my uncle and aunt, Colin and Gail Lawrence, who not only provided a safe haven in the early years for me to find my feet in London, but who also continue to be a constant and unwavering source of care and support. And to my parents, I cannot thank you enough for offering me such immense love and freedom to pursue what I find meaningful and creative, and for providing me with enriching opportunities that have made possible the otherwise impossible. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE - The Future Anterior of the Past Impossibility: The Frame of Non-Simple Presence 5 CHAPTER TWO - The Impossibility of Delimitation: The Refusal of Copcept 36 CHAPTER THREE - The Third Aesthetic 86 CHAPTER FOUR - The O-Function 134 CHAPTER FIVE - Permutations of Love: Towards An Ethics of Recognition 156 CHAPTER SIX - The Rustle of Language: The Scene of Writing Otherwise 176 REFERENCE LIST 203 4 1. THE FUTURE ANTERIOR OF THE PAST IMPOSSIBILITY: THE FRAME OF NON-SIMPLE PRESENCE Instead of being light opposed to darkness, or knowledge opposed to ignorance, truth is light which does not give up mystery, light which illuminates without revealing; never total, never authoritarian or dogmatic. Luce Irigaray (2000:110) This work, in its discontinuity, proceeds by means of two movements: the straight line (advance, increase, insistence of an idea, a position, a preference, an image) and the zigzag (reversal, contradiction, reactive energy, denial, contrariety, the movement of a Z, the letter of deviance). Roland Barthes (1977:90-91) In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might be revealed and that it can in some way be told, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless. Hermann Hesse (1972: 62) The realist unmakes the coherent multiple world into a collection of random objects. He thinks of reality as that which has an objective existence, but understands no more about objective existence than that which he can touch and feel, sell and buy. A lover of objects and objectivity, he is in fact caught in a world of symbols and symbolism, where he is unable to see the thing in itself, as it really is, he sees it only in relation to his own story of the world... Reality is continuous, multiple, simultaneous, complex, abundant and partly invisible. Jeanette Winterson(1996:143; 151) Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honour of the name. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard (1984: 82) For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. Jacques Derrida (1976: 5) Disseminating Prefacing: The Foreplay of the Outwork Hors-Texte( ........ Hors D*oeuvre) In her rather monumental preface to the translation of Jacques Derrida’s O f Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak (1976: ix) writes: “If you have been reading Derrida, you will know that a plausible gesture would be to begin with a consideration of ‘the question of the preface’”. So let me at least attempt to begin with this quasi injunction, as if it were/is/will be at all possible to begin from the beginning. I would like to stress in this section the problems of introducing, of constructing a pre-face, particularly in the case of this thesis where the introduction was conceived after the body of the thesis had been written up. Derrida’s questioning of all that pre-faces highlights the fundamental impasse of attempting to gather up material into a coherent, reduced body and introduce or present it. 5 This (therefore) will not have been a thesis1 a thesis whose itinerary could be recognised, whose continuity and underlying laws could be pointed out, whose overall concept or meaning could be squarely set forth.