Abstract
The subject occupies a difficult position – between a conscious engagement in a shared social reality and its alter, or inverse: a series of inconsistent and disruptive ‘effects’ that we have come to know as the unconscious. The precise relation of consciousness to the unconscious is difficult to describe, since the unconscious manifests itself as nothing more than traces, residues or inscriptions which betray the ubiquitous yet indeterminate presence of something foreign or unintended.
Understanding human subjectivity requires reformulating the conscious-unconscious relation according to the autonomous logic of a trace (what Freud originally called the Erinnerungsspur or memory trace). This logical bridge between the conscious and the unconscious always manifests itself as a trace, and that which it is a trace of must be located at the ontological ground of the subject itself.
In other words, this trace, through which we can investigate the subject of the unconscious, appears to follow an autonomous logic (which Freud began to demonstrate both through the retroactive logic of Nachträglichkeit and by the dream-joke distortions of displacement and condensation) whereby it strangely anticipates what is traced, and appears to be one of the conditions for subjectivity, which I will suggest is derived from the trace of something absolutely inconsistent to the quality of subjectivity itself.
Biography
Rafael is a Swedish-Francophone PhD student, interested in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche), philosophy (German Idealism, phenomenology, post-structuralism), and psychology (cognitive, developmental, and neuropsychology). His interests extend to literature, politics, and film, and he has recently published in natural and social philosophy and film theory journals, with psychoanalysis papers (and translations) in French, Swedish, and English currently in progress.
Image: Edouard Manet, The Funeral, 1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA
Rafael was attracted by Manet's unusual and paradoxical position vis-à-vis an emerging impressionism (of which he is often considered a central figure), in the distance he took to this movement by his own technique. Strangely, Manet's deviation from impressionism seemed to reflexively define impressionism itself. Rafael considers this 'definition-by-deviation' to be central to the function of the unconscious.
The painting itself shows the indeterminate gestalts of a funeral procession as a subjectively centralised scene in an obscurely indifferent city-country backdrop. The obscure figures subjectify the unstable trace of death, a transient trace which colours the entire scene as a frame for subjectivity.
Both of these themes will be central to Rafael's presentation
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