The Transvestive Signifier and the Antigone Complex

Ismene: Linguistic Duplicity vs. Linguistic Transvestism Following up the line of thought begun in recent attempts to sketch out the possibilities for a postoedipal Antigone Complex subjectivity [What is the “Antigone Complex”? Posthuman Tensored Agency, More on the Antigone Complex], it is good I think to put our attention to the other sister, if only as a [...]

More on the Antigone Complex

Ribbons of New Subjective Action Yesterday I began thinking about the potentials of an Antigone Complex - how I would love to do an online, philosophical reading group on that play in the spirit of Mikhail’s Braver reading group, there is so much philosophical groudwork there, the play has been so conceptually influential its not even funny – [...]

What is the “Antigone Complex”? Posthuman Tensored Agency

Psycho-dialysis I came across something of the notion when reading Judith Butler’s Antigone Claim  that their conceivably could have been something other than the Oedipus Complex in history (despite its firm historical nestwork). That there could have been an Antigone Complex, with the implicit suggestion that perhaps it is time for us to recognize one [...]

A Taxomomy of Evils and the Demoness Ontology of Powers in Vitalism

In my few past posts I have begun exploring the ideo-figural aspects of the mythological figure of Zuggtmoy, a reported Demoness Queen of Fungi (seemingly drawn from the common stock of the sexualized evil of the D&D world). First I sketched out a fictional Encyclopedia entryin the style of Borges to get a feel for the [...]

“Let him prepare the soul…”: Disagreement as Amputation

“Let him prepare the soul as a ready sacrifice to the Lord by earnest prayers…For it is not small presumption to dismember the image of God” – 17th century (?) surgeon’s handbook, on how to advise the patient on the coming amputation The above quotation is found in the book The Island at the Center [...]

The Power of Political Silence: Achilles, Antigone and Ignatius

The non-Being of Speech In researching and thinking on political/philosophical application of the ideal of Achilles (written about here) I’ve run into a provocative quotation from the early Christian Bishop Ignatius: It’s better to be silent and to be rather than speak and not to be. Teaching is a fine thing provided that he who speaks [...]

Aggregates, Groups and Trans-semiotics

The Antinomy of Objects Levi at Larval Subjects makes an very interesting post which seeks to point out the constitutive difference between “objects” (or “groups”) and assemblages, how a Unity can be seen to come into being out its “sub-assemblages”; and how this antinomy between an Object and its parts can be best described in [...]

Spinoza’s Tomb and Sign: sêma

In a curious and revealing conflation of meanings, in Greek sêma, the word from which we get our “semiology” and “semantics” was generally a “sign” or a “mark” of significance, but also archaically it meant a “tomb,” a “burial mound,” a “cairn”. In the video above we encounter the “sign” of Spinoza, his tomb at The Hague. Perhaps [...]

Dust…Beware Fantasies of Being

For tho’ he had vanished, tho’ entombed not, Thin, as if the awe of a fugative, was the dust. Lines 255 and 256 of the Antigone stand in the way of any purely immanent, plentitudnal reading of the world’s ontology. A thin layer of dust has made the body of Polynikes “disappear”. In order to understand [...]

Teiresias and Sophocles resolve Non-Being

  And I find it so curious, for those that follow Heidegger (and even those of a Phenomenological bent in general, descendents of Brentano’s intentionality thesis), how fully the optical metaphor of “appearance” is embraced, as if this were the only mode of doing, thinking, acting. While it is certain that we, as a species, [...]