Deracination

Walter A. Davis is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience and Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. He recently published the companion piece to the present volume: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima.

"The issues raised in this book strike at the heart of the crisis of contemporary political rationality and its philosophical, literary, and sociological understanding. In addition, it is an important critique of the dominance of scientific epistemology as the model for philosophical and political rationality. It re-establishes the basis for a real contact on the part of critical reflection with self, world, and others." — Garth Gillan, author of Rising from the Ruins: Reason, Being, and the Good After Auschwitz"Davis draws on an impressive number of scholarly traditions from across a number of disciplines. This is a supple and sophisticated mind at work. This book is exciting, even exhilarating at times in its intellectual energy and expansiveness." — Gary A. Olson, coeditor of Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial

• (Abridged) AcknowledgmentsPreface1. THE WAY TO HIROSHIMA I. Only Connect: Trauma in/and HistoryII. The Concept of Crisis and a Hermeneutics of EngagementIII. Only Connect: Why Hiroshima?IV. On Psychoanalytic Method: No "Return to Freud"V. Engaging the Audience: Agonistic IntersubjectivityVI. Only Connect: Immanence—The Existentializing Process 2. CUTTING BACK INTO LIFE I. History as Hermeneutic of EngagementII. Internalization and Bad Faith: The Disorder Called the EgoIII. Authentic Internalization: The Birth of PsycheIV. Internalization and HistoryV. Language, Discourse (-Communities), the Problem of StyleVI. Horror, as ExemplarVII. A Modest Proposal 3. THE SUBLIME AND THE KANTIAN RATIO, OR, HOW THE WHITE MAN THINKS THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AT ISSUE I. Affect and AttunementII. Deracination as Concrete Deconstruction READING AS INTERROGATIN-KANT'S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, SECTIONS 23-29 I. Beyond the Beautiful: From Pleasure to DesireII. Frameworks: OpposedIII. Purposiveness: And the ContrapurposeIV. Affect and Attunement in Depth: Inwardness versus the RatioV. From Ambivalence toward the Object to Intimations of the BombVI. The Psyche in/and HistoryVII. The Scientific Imagination: Kant as Romantic PoetVIII. Reason and the BombIX. The Imagination's Re-education: Reason as Sublime Self-ReferenceX. The Dynamic Sublime and the Inner WorldXI. Sublimity and Theology: The Superego... and the BombXII. Coda: Crypt 4. THE PSYCHE THAT DROPPED THE BOMB OVERTURE: THE EGO AND ITS PLEASURE THE EGO'S CRYPT: THE INNER STRUCTURE OF AN ANTI-DIALECTIC I. The Psyche's Founding ConditionII. The Manic Defense against DepressionIII. The Fractured Mirror and the Psychotic CoreIV. Soul-Murder Perfected: Death-Work as Self-ReferenceV. The Law of the SonVI. Intersubjectivity: "Concrete Relations with Others" as Mutual DeadeningVII. The Trauma Is the Real: The Postmodern Condition AttainedVIII. Epiphany: The Eroticization of Thanatos THANATOS AS SPIRIT IN AND FOR ITSELF I. Rethinking Freud: Concrete versus Abstract DialecticsII. Humanizing Thanatos: A Phenomenological DescriptionIII. Death-Work versus the Death-DriveIV. Experience and ExistenceV. A New Theory of the UnconciousVI. The Dialectic at the Core: The System UCS RedefinedVII. The Last Word: Thanatos in Reply 5. FROM ENTHUSIASM TO MELANCHOLIA AS SIGN OF HISTORY: OR, REFLECTION FROM KANT TO HAMLET THE HISTORICAL VALIDITY OF AESTHETIC CATEGORIES I. Poetic Thinking as Ontological RegressionII. Kant's Theory of History: Enthusiasm, Progress, and the Sensus Communis HISTORY AND "VIGOROUS MELANCHOLY" I. Aesthetic ReeducationII. The Tragic RegisterIII. The Aufhebung of AnxietyIV. The Aufhebung of ThinkingV. Melancholia and the Tragic Historian HAMLET, THE CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE I. First Soliloquy: Toward Subject as Who/WhyII. Second Soliloquy: The Life of Questioning—Reflection as Interrogation and Self-MediationIII. Third Soliloquy: Thinking as the Cutting Edge of PassionIV. Fourth Soliloquy: Thinking as the Movement from Mind to PsycheV. Fifth Solilquy: Melancholia versus Catharsis 6. THOSE IMAGES THAT YET FRESH IMAGES BEGET TOWARD A THEORY OF THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE I. Images as SctivityII. Image as AffectIII. Image as PerceptionIV. Image as PsycheV. Image as MemoryVI. Image as Creative RegressionVII. Image as Reality TOWARD THE CRYPT: THE IMAGE AND INWARDNESS I. Affect as AgonII. The Inner World of the Image: Reconstructing the Regressive-Progressive Method "WHAT HURTS" THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE IN HISTORY I. Art: Between Psychosis and Neurosis/Normalcy DIALECTIC OF THE CONCRETE—THE THANATOPTIC IMAGE AND THE CRYPT IMAGE I. At the Origin: Death-Work and the Existential UnconsciousII. The Origins as HistoricityIII. The Heart of the Image: The Psychotic Register Laid BareIV. Affect: Its Primacy and Its DialecticV. The Nuclear Unconscious: The Temporality of the Dialectical ImageVI. The Motive for Art APPENDIX A. Twelve Theses on the Philosophy of HistoryAPPENDIX B. Toward Concrete Dialectics: History, Psychology, Aesthetic Ontology NotesIndex