Elephant Stuff - Is There an Elephant in This Room?

Reading Écrits is like riding a bike — not because you never forget how (on the contrary!) but because different essays in the volume often require different intellectual gears.

Some essays, like those featured in our concluding session on the drive, have to be read slowly, in the lowest conceptual gears we’ve got. While other essays, like those covered in this week’s podcast, allow for much quicker reading.

So it’s no surprise that our second often overlooked essay of the week, “Introduction to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud's ‘Verneinung’,” yielded another speedy podcast episode!

Like our last episode, this one begins with several familiar themes: resistance, empty speech, ego formations, and the absolute master of them all: death. But then come two twists. With being-toward-death comes future anteriority: Only when my life will have been can I determine how best to live it out in the meantime. And with the phenomenology of death comes negation, especially as it finds expression in the only place it can: discourse.

Along the way, we also encounter elephants doing elephant things in my office, O’s in oxygen doubling as 0’s in language (and closely approximating objet a), and the curious way that words simultaneously engender and destroy things.

And you can guess where we’re headed from here. “Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's ‘Verneinung’,” here we come! Get ready to shift back into low gear, y’all!

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