Soul Partitions and The Siren Stage: Chapters 6-7

First point – Autistic Bubbles

438-442

Building on my point last week, these pages provide some insights into what an ethics of spherology might look like. The bottom of page 439 states that the With-companion operates as a kind of membrane, or sluice, through which the metabolic exchange between subject and world takes place. Sloterdijk presents two main risks, or failures of the companion’s membrane function, here: the first in which this opening is not sufficiently porous so that it closes the subject off from the world. The discussion of the Jennifer and June Gibbons case on p. 440 is a fascinating illustration of such autistic spheres, in which the companion-other becomes too real, obsessive, impermeable, and thus seals the subject off from communication with the outside so strongly that a hermetic inner life emerges. The second risk emerges from the premature loss or absence of the companion, in which the hermetic communion becomes a security measure that shields the subject from the shock of the outside.

The becoming-autistic of bubbles thus counts among the potential danger of the dyadic communion which may become less a linking than dividing. The understanding of the ‘non-autistic’, protective-permeable bubble that enables openness, transference and communicative competence reminded me of the ethics Deleuze sees in the philosophy of Simondon, which is oriented against modes of aestheticism, or acts that cut the individual off from the pre-individual reality in which it is immersed, and instead in terms of an affirmation of ontogenesis and an augmentation of capacities to enter into relations and becomings.

Second point - Therapy

461-465

These pages are interesting as attempts to subvert Lacanian ego and object-centric accounts of neuroses – with some interesting implications for thinking therapy and care of the self. S. foregrounds melancholia over mourning in Freud’s distinction, which he understands as the subject’s response to the premature amputation of the ‘genius’ or ‘intimate nobject’. Therapy, at the bottom of page 461, would thus consist of strengthening the isolated/autistic subject’s potential for a renewed faith, a restored belief, in the possibility of mental augmentation. So for S. melancholic depression isn’t just an individualised mental problem (as in traditional psychoanalytical approaches), but rather a media problem; a function of the personal relationship with the mediating operation of the With. S. identifies three means of recalibrating the mediation system of the subject on page 462: the analyst as substitute genius in traditional psychoanalytical transference relationships; the assertion of a higher god in pastoral-theological counselling; and finally autotherapeutic self-augmentation techniques (the return of Warhol’s tape-recorder). The language of self-care is particularly interesting here, and on p.465 he remarks on the possibility of the subject ‘training itself to lose the other in such a way that its disappearance would not be followed be ego loss’. Annoyingly S. leaves this undeveloped, perhaps because this itself is a form of nobject loss as it requires a clear demarcation of the subject and the possibility of the object being lost or abandoned. Beyond the need for ‘mythological thinking and practice’, Sloterdijk is also quite hesitant on the possibilities of an incorrect or ‘bad’ repair – those assumptions, discourses, ideologies, microfascisms that influence the practice of therapy and which might further imprison the subject within autistic and destructive spheres.