Uncanny Freud

            On Tuesday morning my left ankle was aching quite badly, especially during yoga. It subsided afterward. 

            I listened to “Le régiment des mal-aimés” (The Regiment of Broken Hearts) by Boris Vian as sung by Serge Reggiani a couple of times and then started the process of memorizing the song. It’ll probably take a few weeks. 

            I finished memorizing “L’ethylique” (Ethanolaholic) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords online but no one has posted them. I worked them out for the first verse and part of the refrain. I might have the whole song finished on Wednesday. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast. I had time to eat a few grapes and drink a glass of orange juice before leaving for class. It was another cold day but it didn't feel as bad as on Monday. 

            Apala wanted to know if she could unmask to lecture. She said she was told that she could have lectured maskless throughout the whole term as long as she was distanced. I said, “Does that mean we can take our masks off as well?” Someone else said, “You might be opening a can of worms” and so she decided to keep her mask on. 

            In Season of Migration to the North, space is used as a metaphor. For example, the banks of the river express interiority, and at the end of the story, the self is externalized and eternalized in the river. Think of natural entities outside nature. Get out of the binary of human and nature and think of it more as elemental. 

            She used a lot of terms I had to look up later. 

            New materialism is “a theoretical field that has emerged mainly from the front lines of feminism, philosophy, science studies, and cultural theory, yet it cuts across and is cross-fertilized by both the human and natural sciences. The polycentric inquiries consolidating the heterogeneous scholarly body of new materialism pivot on the primacy of matter as an underexplored question. Matter is seen to be an active force that is not only sculpted by but also co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life, and experience. New materialism assumes a theoretical position that deems the polarized positions of postmodernist constructivism and positivist scientific materialism as untenable. Instead, it endeavors to account for the co-constitutive “intra-actions” between meaning and matter, which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact.” 

            Poststructuralist theory. Environmental criticism. Interrelationality. Outside of the binary of human versus nature. Not imposing definitions on the not human. Giving nature its own agency leads to the materialization of self. We think of the planet in terms of the solar system. 

            In Season of Migration to the North understand the narrator’s relationship with the land and what is at stake. 

            The Epistemological project or the Knowledge project versus the Ontological project or Being project. 

            Modernists did not doubt Being and were more about how we know it. Not doubting the ontology of a horse they were more in the Knowledge Project. Knowledge is mapping. Knowing as gaining control. Modernists were implicit in knowledge. 

            Post-modernists rejected this. For them, ontology has to be a figural aspect of everything. The figure of a horse means many things. To understand the climate crisis we must also understand what a tornado means. How to narrativize and understand it. There is no way to factually understand an object.   

            Otherity is otherness. The state of being other. Otherity is a philosophical idea. I couldn't find this word online at all. 

            Ontology is the study of being. That there is no human being outside the social is an ontosocial idea. To understand a tornado we can reckon religiously or many other ways. 

            Spivak says "To be human is to be intended toward the other." This reminded me of Emmanuel Levinas’s “Face to Face.” 

            Planetary wholeness without the trap of ideas of the globe. 

            Globe versus World versus Planet.

            In planetarity the world is almost unknowable and whole.

            The Globe involves mapping and reducing but that’s how it’s broadly understood. We can't get out of wholeness but we can get out of totality. Mapping shaped the globe. Globe is constricting.

            The World is usually a mental and theological representation of the planet. Worlding emerges out of engagement with the planet. The process is not escapable. We constantly do it. Combined and uneven development.

            Worlding is "a blending of the material and the semiotic that removes the boundaries between subject and environment, or perhaps between persona and topos (topic). Worlding affords the opportunity for the cessation of habitual temporalities and modes of being." The poetry aspect of Season of Migration to the North is worlding. 

            A quote from Season of Migration to the North: “We have no need for poetry.” Apala says that's part of postcolonial society. But I've seen the dismissal of the importance of poetry is probably as ancient as poetry. Plato famously said that poets have no place in an ideal state. 

            Thereness. "The quality of having location, situation, or existence with respect to some specified point or place." It can't be reduced further. Dasein is being there. 

            Spivak is Kantian and Heideggerian. 

            The uncanny as a concept is also something I had to look up: “The uncanny is the subject of aesthetics because it has to do with a certain kind of feeling or sensation, with emotional impulses. The uncanny is something fearful and frightening, but Modernism marks a turn in aesthetics in general toward a fascination with the ugly, the grotesque: a kind of "negative" aesthetics. Freud examines the aesthetics of the "fearful," the aesthetics of anxiety.” Rejection of horseness and gender specifics."  

            Freud’s concept of the Heimlich. We react to a severed body part and it gives a deep sense of unfamiliarity. Reality in terms of the uncanny. I had to look this up as well: The term “heimlich embodies the dialectic of "privacy" and "intimacy" that is inherent in bourgeois ideology. Therefore Freud can associate it with the "private parts," the parts of the body that are the most "intimate" and that are simultaneously those parts subject to the most concealment (see p. 200). However, in Freud's understanding the "heimlich" will also be something that is concealed from the self.” 

            Modernist inquiry of knowledge led to epistemological experiments. Experiments with knowing but not challenging the ontology. But postmodernists say we can't know. Nothing holds. They experimented in the ontological realm. 

            Apala says she’s still a modernist. Not rejecting wholeness but totality. 

            Modernism sits on the fence with knowledge to experiment with it. What's new in a horse that looks like a horse? Represent the whole horse, back and front, a cubist horse. But it is still mapping. But postmodernists such as abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock used no concept of a horse. For them, knowledge is an act of violence. It’s presumptuous to think we can know something. Postmodernism was from the 1960s to the 1980s and then branched into other forms. It didn't help thinking. 

            We are post queer studies, post environmental studies, and post nature studies. Culture as a binary is outdated. 

            Untouchable is a modernist novel. Its project of representation has no dead ends, unlike Salih’s novel. Postcolonial art could have modernist or postmodernist frames. 

            Planetarity’s contribution to world literature studies. World literature in terms of planetarity.

            The novel Pterodactyl. Indigenous modes of understanding the world are not historical. 

            Spivak was notoriously inscrutable. The concept of the Figure comes from Derrida. Reduceable to artistic abstraction. Point about factality. Unwillingness to sit with abstraction. Spivak says we need the figural because it is important for poetic thinking. The undecidable figure has no absolute line between what is represented. Spivak loves to use paradoxical phrases. Non final. 

            Every process of reading has to be unfinished. 

            We have to understand the globe as a differentiated political space. We need a mode of inquiry and that's planetarity. 

           Sabian did his presentation on Gikandi’s essay on Picasso. He mentions the black artist who Picasso ignored and just wanted him to pose for him. 

           When Sabian was finished Apala made no comment about his presentation other than to tell him not to use the N-word. Since Sabian had only quoted the word “Negro” I’d thought that Apala had misheard him. But she said “Negro” is the N-Word. That took me by surprise because in my 14 years as a student at U of T I’ve never heard anyone say that there is another N-word besides the much more extreme one. In my surprise, I argued with her and she walked off seeming upset. Obviously one does not refer to people as "Negroes" but I'd always understood that since the word was not created to be derogatory like the more extreme N-Word that it was appropriate to use it in a quote. I had thought that, as poet Laurie Sheck says, "there “is a distinction to be made between a racial slur wielded against someone and a quote used for pedagogical purposes”. 

            After class, I went to the Lost and Found office only to find they are closed between 12:00 and 13:30. I’ll have to wait until Thursday when class is over at 11:00. 

            When I got home I emailed the Antiracism office at U of T to find out what their policy is on the use of the word “Negro” when it appears in academic quotations. 

            I also sent an apology to my instructor, saying I was sorry if I’d upset her but I was taken by surprise by the introduction of a new and additional N-word. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. I had the usual avocado, tomato, and scallion salad. 

            I started editing my lecture notes.

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:45. 

            I continued editing my lecture notes. I had the usual avocado, tomato, cucumber, and scallion salad with lemon juice for dinner while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story, Astro Boy and his friends Specs and Dimmy are exploring the bottom of the ocean when they come across a colony of large oysters. Beautiful music coming from inside the shells puts Specs and Dimmy to sleep. A humanoid creature with antennae comes out of a shell, sees Astro Boy, and sounds the alarm so that all the shells close. Astro Boy takes one of the shells back to Dr. Elefun. They can’t get it open and the music puts Elefun to sleep. Finally, a creature comes out and talks to Astro Boy. He or she says they are from another solar system and that they have been on Earth for 500 years, but soon they will be leaving when their star gets closer to Earth. They need more time to rest but humans are building a dam under the ocean to control the tides and it will destroy their home. Astro Boy says he will help but when they go back one of the creatures attacks Astro Boy with what looks like an electrical blast from his antennae. Astro Boy is knocked unconscious. Then the humans begin bombing to clear the way for the dam. All the creatures take shelter but one baby is left outside. Astro Boy wakes up in time to save the baby but loses all his energy. The creatures recharge him and then he gets rid of all the bombs before they can explode. The creatures go back to their planet. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes and posted my Discussion Board comment after dinner.