Freud, Zizek, eros and thanatos

[David Morris]

Of course all descriptions are metaphors.  That is not a weakness.  It
is the nature of thought.  So instead of saying how Freud/Lacan/Zizek
are "bonkers," you are really only complaining that life is more
complicated than the framework they use to describe their
observations.  Of course it is, but do you have an alternative?

David Morris

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No. Freud is clearly bonkers on this, and so is Zizek.
>
> Science that focuses it's gaze on beginnings and endings is driven, at
> its core, by religious postulations of creation and judgment.
> Evolution on Earth seems necessarily to have begun at some point, but
> that beginning is so very complex any of the attempts to describe it
> with our current level of knowledge of how things work is really
> nothing more than to postulate descriptive metaphors for what we
> experience as self-aware (very) complex organisms. To confute love
> (which leads to integration)--whether philos, agape, or eros--with
> evil (that which causes dis-integration) only confuses, it doesn't
> describe experience in a way that abets understanding. If we say that
> death comes after love, that makes a certain simplistic sense; but to
> aver that love therefore causes death is, well, a causal fallacy,
> which can be mildly humorous. e.g., the leading cause of death is
> life. The balance is implicit in the tension between eros and
> thanatos, the infinitely divisible middle that we call existence,
> time, evolution. If love and death cause one another, it is just in
> this way: they provide polar definitions of the continuum between
> them. It is a matter of metaphor, that is to say it is a sort of
> cognitive map of reality--it is not the territory.
>
> There are things Freud gets right, but I do not think this point is one of them.
>
> --
> "liber enim librum aperit."
>