I know I know I know... it's been a long time.

Two reasons: 1) My reluctance to move on blogwise from my Grandmother's death. There's something unsettling about the way time continues to pass after someone close to you dies. The idea of her memory being scrolled under by my everday happenings upsets me to a fair extent, but this is, after all, part of life. At any rate, I thought a hiatus was appropriate.

2) My life has been full to brimming. I'm starting to get into the meat and potatos of school work, and I am up to my neck. Not only for the things I have to do, but most especially for the things I want to do. So let's talk about school.

A rundown of my schedule in several parts:

Mondays I have an evening class on Malebranche's The Search After Truth. My professor, Dr. Breeur, is a modern French specialist who is able to connect Malebranche not only to Descartes and the moderns, but also to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, among many others. I really like this class because I now have the background in Descartes (thanks to Dr. Selcer's seminar last spring), Malebranche is interesting and even fun to read and Breeur explains him well. Among the issues that interest me is this idea Malebranche takes from Augustine (huge Augustinian revival at the time, including some theologians at Louvain, where I go to school!) that the original sin of the first man in the garden weakened our connection with God and strengthened our connection with our body, while at the same time lessening our control over it. This leads to the concupiscence which is of course how we can be lead into error as creations of an absolutely truthful nature (God), which was also one of Descartes' problems. Before the original sin, Adam's only object of love was God and his attention to material things was strictly for the preservation of his body so as to go on loving God as God intended. Inheriting the sin, human beings can now be diverted from the love of God via an uncontrollable desire (concupiscence) for material goods, which is of course our downfall. Epistemologically, this leads us to believe that the effects that material objects have on our senses correspond to attributes of material objects, but really, Malebranche says, these are only modifications of the soul which can lead us to a better care of the body and be a means to our loving God, or they can lead us into the miseries of error and eventual damnation. The philosophical elaborations of original sin have become something of a preoccupation of mine, since I am about to study in depth Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, not only for my thesis, but also so as to fill in a gap in the paper I "delivered" in New Brunswick. It's interesting stuff.

On Tuesdays I have my beloved Lacan class with Prof. Moyaert. I just love this class. As it turns out, I think we will probably only read the seminar on ethics, which precedes the seminar on transference, but I'm fine with that, it fits better with my thesis. Moyaert has been laying out the Freudian background to Lacan's discussion in terms of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and this burgeoning desire that emerges from their double intersection. Yeah, it's really that simple. The idea is basically that if the p.p. wasn't held in check, it would simply hallucinate the object of satisfaction, and this is bad for the subject. So the r.p. steps in and is able to mentalize, to interstice words essentially, between the drive of the p.p. and the object of satisfaction, postponing desire indefinately. Basically we can talk about things or sublimate our drive for the pleasure of inertia through a kind of substitution, words and ideas for objects. The upshot of this mutual intersection between the two principles is this desire that goes beyond both, and which Lacan identifies as the desire for "Object a" which has emerged as an indefinite lack that can never be fulfilled. Essentially, desire and the anticipation of satisfaction become an autonomous force of the subject, which in some sense constitutes our relationship with the world. Moyaert takes great pains to emphasize that the reality principle is not an advocate for reality, but maybe something more like our sense of a lack, which opposes the pleasure principle. Anyway, it's a great deal more complicated than that, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, I'm all kinds of into it.

I'll continue this later, but for right now here is a picture of the path from the front door of the lecture hall down the path that leads to Tiensestraat. Beautiful no?