unconscious

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God. Henry David Thoreau

is made neither of desires or representations, it is 'always empty' -consisting solely in the structural laws that it imposes on representations and desires.

Levi-Strauss is right to say that the unconscious is made neither of desires nor of representations, that it is 'always empty,' consisting solely in the structural laws that it imposes on representations and on desires.30' (Deleuze 'desert islands' structuralism: 181)

is 'nothing unconscious' at all, rather, it is affect, which the language of mere repression is unable to capture.

For Henry, then, affect is less a 'psychic' state than a transcendental concept: it is because of affect that the unconscious is 'nothing unconscious'' at all, but the elusive escape for the language of mere repression. As a transcendental concept, affect manifests itself as a mode of self-appearance or self-immanence, a moment of feelign onself ('se-sentir) in feeling, a process of 'auto-affection' in which the self experiences the self. Henry's affect is pure immanence, absolute subjectivity beyond representation, beyond reduplication.

is (often suggested by scholars to be) synonymous with the thing-in-itself, a world that passes beyond our phenomenal and rational experience to which we, as finite beings, cannot have access.

The distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal is what supports Kantian metaphysics, a distinction, I want to suggest, which underwrites Freud's own claims in The Interpretation of Dreams that 'the unconscious is the true psychical reality,'[4] the knowledge of which, however, is 'inadmissible to consciousness.'[5] (net)

is (though melville doesn't use the word) that mysterious thing in the soul which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, and in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocence self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts. Herman Melville

is a desire to be interpreted. It wants to be interpreted. It has a desire to make sense.

Yet, the unconscious also wants to be interpreted. It offers itself for interpretation. If the unconscious did not want to be interpreted, if the unconscious desire of the dream was not, in its deepest phase, a desire to be interpreted Lacan says it a desire to make sense, there would be no analyst. (Miller J-A. 1996 : pdf.)

One can imagine the similar importance that a psychoanalysis would have if it were to share the dimension of an ethnology, not by the establishment of a 'cultural psychology', not by the sociological explanation of phenomena manifested at the level of individuals, but by the discovery that the unconscious also possesses, or rather that it is in itself, a certain formal structure. (Foucault 'order' : 379)

unconscious, n.Definitions

unconscious