speculative non-fiction writer and post-graduate researcher with an interest in radical death studies, post-humanism, negative theology, theories of the sacred, surrealism and other uncanny aesthetics.
Sitegeist: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 2019
This paper considers Freudian drive theory through the prism(s) of Hegelian dialectics and Batail... more This paper considers Freudian drive theory through the prism(s) of Hegelian dialectics and Bataille’s anti-philosophy in order to conceptualize death as the third term of the psychic economy. Reading subjectivity through the perspective of a Third (Dritte), we are able to conceptualize a dialectic that is not constrained to two terms alone. Here the Third acts as witness, neither self/other or life/death but the moment in which two terms, mutilated beyond the possibility of recognition, give way to a heterogeneous continuity beyond the self as point of reference. Such a thinking – made possible by the emphasis on force, energetics, and economics rather than the integrity of individual components – presents death not as an abstract negativity that, as per Freud, has no place in the unconscious, but as an awareness or experience of non-differentiation: a psychic principle in excess of subjectivity that insists (as the death-drive) and through the impossibility of its re-uptake or stabilization maintains the unconscious economy in motion. But how to conceptualize such a state in a way that neither undermines death’s non-representability nor places it in binary opposition with life? Through a consideration of aquatic metaphors in both Freud and Bataille, I argue for the death drive at its most “oceanic,” where metapsychology and entropy roll over one another like waves. Aimed at a porousness of contact and communication beyond the limits of subjectivity as a function of the spoken or representable (and, as such, the motor for the doublings, re-doublings, and reversals that sustain the psychic economy), these liquid manifestations signal death not as the absence or destruction of life, but its teeming superfluidity.
Sitegeist: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 2019
This paper considers Freudian drive theory through the prism(s) of Hegelian dialectics and Batail... more This paper considers Freudian drive theory through the prism(s) of Hegelian dialectics and Bataille’s anti-philosophy in order to conceptualize death as the third term of the psychic economy. Reading subjectivity through the perspective of a Third (Dritte), we are able to conceptualize a dialectic that is not constrained to two terms alone. Here the Third acts as witness, neither self/other or life/death but the moment in which two terms, mutilated beyond the possibility of recognition, give way to a heterogeneous continuity beyond the self as point of reference. Such a thinking – made possible by the emphasis on force, energetics, and economics rather than the integrity of individual components – presents death not as an abstract negativity that, as per Freud, has no place in the unconscious, but as an awareness or experience of non-differentiation: a psychic principle in excess of subjectivity that insists (as the death-drive) and through the impossibility of its re-uptake or stabilization maintains the unconscious economy in motion. But how to conceptualize such a state in a way that neither undermines death’s non-representability nor places it in binary opposition with life? Through a consideration of aquatic metaphors in both Freud and Bataille, I argue for the death drive at its most “oceanic,” where metapsychology and entropy roll over one another like waves. Aimed at a porousness of contact and communication beyond the limits of subjectivity as a function of the spoken or representable (and, as such, the motor for the doublings, re-doublings, and reversals that sustain the psychic economy), these liquid manifestations signal death not as the absence or destruction of life, but its teeming superfluidity.
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Papers by rebecca reynolds