tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post8151833460773257901..comments2024-03-28T08:37:58.136+01:00Comments on Limited, Inc.: you know the routine...Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-44026512556785304382007-06-18T04:19:00.000+02:002007-06-18T04:19:00.000+02:00I didn't know that about Charcot, but I am not sur...I didn't know that about Charcot, but I am not surprised. Your comments point to something I just haven't dealt with very well so far, which is the role of the woman's body in all of this. I tried, a while back, to talk about the 17 century Epicureans who saw materialism specifically as a way of breaking the stranglehold of male privilege - insofar as it made up the qualification for sagehood. La Mettrie's model body in orgasm is, I assume, female. And of course Caillois' praying mantis is the female looming as the bad dream in Don Juan's black heart. <BR/><BR/>All of which is a way of saying that the Epicurean materialists seemed to be, on the one hand, objecting to patriarchy per se - with its way of making the female sage into a sage-woman, and then - by a depressingly familiar sequence - into a witch or a whore - but on the other hand, just as you think La Mettrie or Danton is going to make the liberating leap, they lapse back into the most stereotypical sexual language. And the lapse is always registered as a distinct lowering of intelligence. There's a certain click, there. You see it in Nietzsche too, of course. A sort of amnesia - a forgetting of irony, a forgetting of the negation of the negation, a return to the stupid - overcomes them.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-82257444583798906012007-06-18T03:15:00.000+02:002007-06-18T03:15:00.000+02:00LI, you probably know, there's a moment where the ...LI, you probably know, there's a moment where the good doctor Charcot refers to la Mettrie, in the context of hysteria -- oh where there is the sage and the buffoon in our happy happy modern times, the hysteric is always a fun fun limit-test! <BR/>Charcot is into artificially reproducing hysterical scenes with his 'patients' through hypnosis, about which he says: c'est vraiment , dans toute sa simplicité, l'homme machine rêvé par de la Mettrie, que nous avons sous les yeux.<BR/><BR/>There's a lot to go through there! There's Burroughs' "routines", but I also think of Büchner who you mentioned in this thread, a student and practicionner of the science of medicine but also of the theatre, who wrote of automatons, of Medusa's Head...<BR/><BR/>And according to an old tradition Hypnose has a twin -- Thanatos.<BR/><BR/>AmieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com