25TH LECTURE AT THE GRAMSCI MONUMENT, THE BRONX, NYC: 25TH JULY THE UNCANNY (HEIDEGGER) – THE REAL (LACAN) – THE OUTSIDE (BLANCHOT) MARCUS STEINWEG
THE UNCANNY (2 QUOTES)
"The human being is to deinotaton, the uncanniest of the uncanny" (M. Heidegger)
„On the one hand, deinon names the terrible, but it does not apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish, and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call something "terribly cute." The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it can keep its overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more harmless but only more terrible and distant. But on the other hand, deinon means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence – and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein. [...] Being as a whole, as the sway, is the overwhelming, deinon in the first sense. But humanity is deinon, first, inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being. However, humanity is also deinon because it is violence-doing in the sense we have indicated [It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into an openness.] Humanity is violence doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense, it is to deinontaton, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming.“ (M. Heidegger)
THE REAL (2 QUOTES)
“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.” (J. Lacan)
“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.” (J. Lacan)
THE OUTSIDE (1 QUOTE))
„The Outside is so infinitely exterior that it ‘tunnels to the other side’ and becomes infinitely interior (hence, its so-called rustling intimacy). Being exterior even to exteriority itself, the Outside is, in a sense, neutral with respect to in versus out, here versus beyond, and immanence versus transcendence. We may crudely say that the Outside is what is both outside and at the ‘heart’ of language, what is both within and without.“ (From the Net)