No Sex Please - We're Post-Human!

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Feb 13 11:44:06 PST 2001



>>> manders at midway.uchicago.edu 02/12/01 06:17PM >>>

Humans are not simply overwhelmed by the impact of the traumatic encounter (as Hegel put it, he/she is able to "tarry with the negative": to counteract its destabilizing impact by spinning out intricate symbolic cobwebs). This is the lesson of both psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition: The specific human vocation does not rely on the development of humanity's inherent potential (on the awakening of dormant spiritual forces or of some genetic program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other's desire in its impenetrability.
>In other words (and pace Steven Pinker), there is no inborn
>"language instinct." There are, of course, genetic conditions that
>have to be met for a living being to be able to speak; but one
>actually starts to speak and enters the symbolic universe only in
>reacting to a traumatic jolt. And the mode of this reacting - the
>fact that, in order to cope with a trauma, we symbolize - is not "in
>our genes."

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CB: My note next to this paragraph in the text is " Why not ? " ( quoting Louis whatshisname from the Steve Allen show). Why can't human capacity for symbolling, language and otherwise be instinctive ?

Symbolling and language are expressions of our unique sociality. It is our unique human genetic makeup ( part of that less than 90+ % that IS different than other species) to respond to most social contact ( "trauma") by symbolling, rather than by an inborn reflex.

Other species have instincts that only kick in in response to their "traumas" including social contacts with other species members.

Zizek's discussion seems a mystification of symbolling.

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So there is no cause for panic about the fate of human freedom in the digital universe. It is, on the contrary, precisely in the digital universe that we confront the abyss of freedom at its purest - not freedom as an inborn property of the human mind, but freedom as the capacity to ground our identity upon contingent encounters.

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CB: Some freedom from stereotypical instinctive responses, but the symbolling response does not free the individual to form an identity based independently of the socio-historical.



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