And Now For Something Completely Different

The immensely clever title is borrowed without reservation from the ground-breaking television series that really doesn’t appear anymore except on public broadcasting and in DVD collections: Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I don’t think that what I write or think is, compared to God knows what, something completely different. I am simply fond of the phrase, and even more so the show and the comedy troupe that made it popular.

My name’s Joe. I live in Portland, Oregon. I’m into (long-distance) bicycling, power-outages, Irish literature and music, decent syrah, good coffee, better Whiskey and chewy Stout, role-play gaming, the Buddha’s Middle Way and other aspects of the Dharma, texts and textuality, critical (psychoanalytic/Marxist/literary) theory, rhetoric and rhetoricality, American Jazz from 1945-1960, cutting through dualistic-thinking left and right, reading blogs, Public Reason and generally having a good time. I’m getting my BA in Liberal Studies (would be in English with a minor in Anthropology were it not for administrative bullshit), and am going to take a year off while I prepare for graduate school applications (again).

My aim (in graduate school) is to study, think and practice a new intersection between (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, Buddhist philosophy and practice, Continental philosophy and literary theory/criticism. More to the point, I want to read the Dharma closely and follow other texts like I follow my breath in zazen. Like Harold Bloom talks of a Shakespearian reading of Freud being much more interesting than a Freudian reading of Shakespeare, I’m interested to closely read both literary texts and social circumstances, to say nothing of stupidly everyday life, from the Canon of my breath. Lacan said that analysis is like reading a text, which I take to mean that if we return and tend to our experience close enough we will be at first frustrated, then excited, and then finally unimpressed, but just the same empowered and literally blown away by what we find.

Western philosophy of the last 2500 years has been dominated by duality. Before Plato, there was still debate over permanence and change, and a sense of the necessary dominance by one principle remained strong. Plato changed the conversation by making the permanence of the Forms and the impermanence of appearance part of the same life we must live, which Christianity maintained for more than two millennia, but with the added erotic tension of the absolute other-worldly perfection of God and the absolute this-worldly imperfection of, well, this world. Only with Descartes was this this tension reversed, but it produced an equally Unhappy Consciousness: skepticism. While skepticism internalized the impossible beyond to all worldly knowledge as mind, it maintained the same problematic dualism: some thing that doesn’t change amidst everything that does change. It maintains what Richard Rorty called a foundationalist view of the world, which Hegel would teach us to abandon. What these teachers all have in common, I think, is their return to this life rather than attempting to escape it.

Returning to this life, these men and women of Genius, as Emerson would put it, leave the impossible something out of the picture which foundationalists strive so hard to put into it. In their own way, these teachers harken something 13th century Japanese zen master Dōgen Kigen said in his Genjo Koan, the introduction to his opus, Shōbōgenzō: “When Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient; when Dharma fills your whole body and mind, you understand - something’s missing.” To this end, I’m moved by the teachings of the Buddhist tradition on emptiness, but specifically with the way that emptiness is not nothingness. With emptiness we’re not simply talking about the opposite of being (non-being), or something other than being, but the radical lack of any condition for the basis of being and/or non-being, our conventional way of talking. What’s more is that this is a radical lack that we must experience for ourselves, not in order to grasp or master it, but as Lacan would put it, in order to “traverse the fantasy” that such apprehension is the point to our lives so filled with this lack or emptiness. In other words, when we return to the text, the the analysand’s speech, to the breath or, at any rate, to this moment we are letting go of(as opposed to prohibiting) something that we don’t find in the first place.

Obviously, psychoanalysis has also made a stupendous impact on my thought in the last couple years. This interest technically started with Carl Jung when I was in high school, but since it was mostly for his typology and theory of personality, I wouldn’t say it had much to do with psychoanalysis. I rediscovered Freud at about the time I discovered Lacan, which all coincides with when I discovered Zizek over a year ago. The basic insight I derived from Lacan in particular was, like I mentioned, his “return to Freud,” but not so much for anything it illuminated about Freud. I take this return as the first phase of a basic lesson—for Freud was the first psychoanalyst to stumble upon this, unless you want to consider, as I have written about, Hegel’s “return to rhetoricality”—in which Lacan foregrounds his more critical return to the speech and desire of the analysand in all of its radical ambiguity. For my part, I am trying to return to at various times my breath, the texts I read, the conversations I have with real people, and in the end just this moment.

My blog email address is derived from the back-translation from Chinese my friend, Jon, gave me. You see, every now and again I suspect that some Chinese students get a topic to research that they plug into google that takes them to my blog. Not being able to read my non-Chinese English, they translate it with something like Alta Vista’s Babel Fish, the link to which is provided in my blog-stats when they happen. The title of the blog translates as, literally, “And Now For, Completely Not Same.” So, here you go: completelynotsame-at-gmail-dot-com.