Introduction
Carl Jung made a prophetic observation that spoke not only of the catastrophic effects of World War I but also foreshadowed a future whose terrifying remainders linger tragically today. From the ruins of a shattered Europe, he instructs us with the urgency of originary knowledge. âTo really break with [a soul deadening] tradition,â Jung said, one has to be âwilling to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with [oneâs] own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that [oneâs life] is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginningâ (Jung, 1927/1970, para. 268). Even though peace and economic recovery appeared to be re-establishing itself in 1927 when Jung wrote this essay, the coming Great Depression of 1929 would soon unravel any sense of regained civility or stability in and beyond Western civilization. New and appalling levels of disregard for human life, including ethnic diversity would soon advance as economic instability would further give way to already rising extremist movements that would enable decades of uncritically held violence. It was from this moment in history that Jung was urgently speaking. The traditional ways of understanding and attending to the prevailing crisis of spirit were failing.1 Indeed, the crises at hand arose from a carelessness of thought in the first place and the withdrawal of thought from the body. Collective blindness to a ruin that none of us can escape, then and now contributed to the spread of what Bernard Stiegler refers to the âordinary, everyday apocalyptic feelingâthe feeling and the knowledge that something has come to an endâ (Stiegler, 2013, p. 10).2
Jung described the inauguration of the subject (self) and redemption of a savaged Europe as being dependent upon oneâs capacity to surrender to the neighborâs plight, or as he put itâto take the step that Nietzscheâs Zarathustra could not take, the step toward the âugliest man, who is the real manâ (1927/1970, paras. 268â271, my emphasis). The ârealâ as I am using it here is a term created by Jacques Lacan that is correlated with the effects of contingent traumatic events that shape human beings. That is, the self is contingent3 upon its encounters with the real whose very definition lies in its utter resistance to symbolization and is therefore incomprehensible, unintelligible, and inarticulatable. While experienced as an alien force that suddenly penetrates us from outside of ourselves, the real touches us from within (oneâs psychology). The sensorial effects of the present trauma, therefore, aggravates my psychical scar tissue that has accumulated over time and resonates with all of the other times I have constituently failed to understand (what Heidegger refers to as existential guilt) what was happening to meâor my world. Encounters with the real will radically disrupt our coherent sense of reality. Put another way, the real as a transcendental dimension of unintelligibility is experienced through unbearable bodily intensities such as shock, horror, dread, anxiety, and the violent whoosh of emptying out (oneâs bowels, mind, stomach, vitality, or life force) while violently breaking through banal existence. For Lacan, the neighbor is the real (Ĺ˝iĹžek & Daly, 2009). What breaks through banality holds the potential for a different kind of knowledge that Heidegger referred to (following Kant) as authentic or originary knowledge from which we may begin view ourselves, our neighbor and world from a more vivifying perspective.
Jung contended that the selfâs telos was furthered through the principle of enantiodromia when encountering the real of the neighbor. Enantiodromia is a psychological process that occurs when the emergence of an unconscious opposing quality is integrated into the personality. Zarathustra, as the Nietzschian âSuperman/Dionysianâ figure was analogous with the Jungian self and the ugliest man represented his shadow opposite. Elaborating on this idea further, Jung stated: âThe man that makes for growth is the ugliest man, the inferior man, the instinctive collective being, and that is exactly what he loathes the mostâ (Jung, 1998, p. 164). This step toward the real of the neighbor, Jung continued was generated within the individual from a âhigher plane of loveâ and compelled one to break out of heretofore unconscious deadening social and psychological ideological restraints, as St. Paul had done (1927/1970, para. 265).
Letâs take a deeper look into Jungâs engagement with Nietzscheâs text. Jung identified Zarathustraâs moment of truth as culminating through his violent sensorial repulsion upon taking in the real of his neighbor. Leading up to this moment, Zarathustra finds himself on a path in a barren wasteland depicted as a valley of death that is devoid of all animal life (Nietzsche, 2012, pp. 310â311). Nietzsche describes the impending face-off as one that slowly registers through the protagonistâs encroaching anxiety and darkening mood while pulling his awareness inward. âThen, however,â Nietzsche narrates, âwhen he [Zarathustra] opened his eyes, he saw something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came over Zarathustra a great shame, because he had gazed on such a thingâ (p. 311). Zarathustra encounters the real of the ugliest man, his neighbor.
If only Zarathustra could have tolerated the unbearable intensity of his own terrible shame when faced with the horror of the ugliest manâs ex-sistence4âŚa shame that momentarily evoked a deeply personal and ethical response to the impossibility of his neighborâs demand that is also, and this is a central point of this essayâŚcrucially linked to the fate of his own dawning humanity. However, this is not the step that Zarathustra could take because the shame in witnessing the rawness of being human overwhelmed him. Letâs follow the text with a sample of the ugliest manâs retort to Zarathustra upon his failure to bear the shame that is evoked under the neighborâs disemboweling gaze:
Thou thinkest thyself wise, thou proud Zarathustra! Read the riddle, thou hard nut-cracker,--the riddle that I am! Say then: who am_I_! âWhen however Zarathustra had heard these words, __ what think ye then took place in his soul? PITY OVERCAME HIM; and he sank down all at once, like an oak that hath long withstood many tree-fellersâŚ.heavily, suddenly, to the terror even of those who meant to fell it. But immediately he got up again from the ground, and his countenance became stern. (Nietzsche, 2012, pp. 311â312).
In a single moment, we can see how Zarathustraâs shame was rapidly converted to sternly masked pity, thus demoting my neighbor as fellow creature into less than.
This unconscious dynamic is played out ubiquitously in daily life such as when I mindlessly give my spare change to a nameless homeless creature in my neighborhood or other countless impersonal so called charitable gestures that momentarily absolve me from a more intimate or dangerous libidinal connection with the empty thing (das Ding or the enigmatic core of being/self). Our embeddedness within collectives is both a source of social belonging and deadening hegemonic control. We are (all of us) helplessly lulled in our human animal status that is lodged in a primal level of uncritically held immersion in our every day practices with others, what Jung referred to as âthe herd,â Heidegger described as âdas Manâ or Stiegler the âinhuman-being that we areâ (Heidegger, 1927, p. 164; Jung, 1998; Stiegler, 2013, p. 132).5 The collective hypnotic experience of das Man, however, is susceptible to sudden and meaningless eschatological disruptions that may compel us to decide a new way of beingâwhere what once had seemed impossible becomes possible. Contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou elaborates on this idea thus:
There is only a particular kind of animal, evoked by certain circumstances to become a subject â or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment, everything he is â his body, his abilities â is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path. This is when the human animal is convoked to be the immortal that he was not yet. (2001, p. 40)
In other words, something actually happens to us, a kind of radical contingency that violently pulls us down to our knees by revealing an inescapable and singular poignancy. If we can contain our unbearable libidinal intensities without going up in flames, possibilities that were here-to-fore unthinkable can reveal the obviousâŚthat it is time be serious.
What then are the conditions within my intersecting worlds of experience and my own psychology that allow me to respond meaningfully to my own singular moment of truth? How do I come to acknowledge the enigma of my neighbor as an obligation to make myself accountable to myself and to others for what I say and do (Butler, 2005)? In this essay, I argue for a notion of political action that can emerge when the realities of what concerns us in our everyday lives becomes radically penetrated by a destabilizing threat to what we deeply care about. Such a destabilizing threat has the potential to completely alter how we care, think, practice, and creates a possibility for starting over again in the face of powerlessness from conditions where there is no hope.
In the process of writing this paper, I realized that I needed to expand my research approach into an interdisciplinary design in order to respond to the questions I pose in the introduction and throughout. As such, I focus on the themes that the questions evoke and engage in a sustained dialogue with those themes from different ways of knowing within academia (theory) and outside of it (the applied action that can occurs through collective inquiry). The disciplines I thematically engage are philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. My aim is not to bridge theoretical divides into a unified whole but to critically hold what is thematically relevant. While this research framework includes aspects of a traditional compare and contrast approach in addition to a critique of different thinking systems, it predominantly attempts to reach outside of those systems by looking creatively into new ways of investigating questions that are beyond traditional frames of understanding with the aim of attempting to rethink what it means to be a human subject amidst collective blindness in our moment of history.6
The narrative journey that follows does not provide the reader with closure to the questions posed but will, I hope, provide an impetus for further discourse. To this end, I engage with Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžekâs political theory as it relates to political subjectivity along-side of Badiouâs characterization of the subject indelibly marked by an event of truth. I attempt to balance the theoretical and methodological rigor behind this notion of political action as it intersects the emotional, relational, and creative experiences of actual people engaging the real of the neighbor amidst a plague. Illustratively, I use a concrete example that arose from and in response to the catastrophic effects of the real of the AIDS pandemic in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s from an autoethnographic perspective.7 Autoethnography is a contemporary form of social research that attempts to understand the complexities of individuals among others and their unique struggles within the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and essentially how to make meaning of an existence that has suddenly lost its foundation in the midst of a crises (Adams, Jones & Ellis, 2015). As an analyst/psychotherapist member of this forming community, I use my own experiences in conjunction with the oral and written histories of my immediate colleagues and long-term survivors in the study of the conditions under which the emergence of a community-based clinic run for and by the people living and dying of AIDS occurred. I portray a revolution of egalitarian-based care that emerged from a social void that cracked open and illuminated the real of AIDS.
Lastly, I wrestle with early Heideggerâs secular reading of the Apostle Paul and the Christian revolution as means of engaging his formulations of authentic knowledge and its co-affectivity within group contexts. I incorporate distinct aspects of Badiou and Jungâs use of Pauline doctrine to augment the discussion. Heidegger was interested in understanding what he referred to as the âfactical life experienceâ or the here-and-now existence of Paul and the early Christian community he founded as it was shaped by their co-engagement with the event of conversion and eschatological rupture. I attempt to unthread certain intricacies of facticity to the extent that we might better understand how the Pauline subject of the Christian revolution might be relevant to contemporary emancipatory enterprises whose ontological ground (and transcendental agency) is rooted in authentic rupture.