Aphanisis

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In

subject
.

Jones

According to the theories of

female sexuality.[3] Jones considered that the Oedipus complex confronted each sex with the threat of aphanisis, and the choice of giving up "either their sex or their incest".[4]

Jones originally proposed aphanisis as a condition of female subjects based on their physiological characteristics.[5] He stressed that women depend more, for physiological reasons, on men for their sexual satisfaction and that the loss of sexual desire is associated with abandonment.[6] Jones subsequently linked aphanisis to Freud's concept of the trauma of separation, a point taken up by John Bowlby in the context of his own theory of separation anxiety.[7]

Lacan

Lacan adapted Jones's term to a new meaning: "aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical way at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement of disappearance...the fading of the subject".[8] He diverged from Jones' theory by maintaining that this phenomenon does not have a purely physiological basis, arguing that it is in the plane of intersubjective desire based in the signifier.[5]

In Lacanian theory, aphanisis describes the process through which a subject is partially eclipsed behind any signifier used to conceive of him/her: "when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as 'fading', as disappearance...aphanisis".[9] The subject as such is, accordingly, barred and riven by the Other (of language), a subject has no choice but to conceive of themself vis-a-vis something other than their self, something 'outside' or radically separated from them.

Because the Other is the sole means through which a 'subject' can be rendered thinkable, aphanisis, the disappearance or the fading of the subject behind any signifier used to conceive of it, is an essential concept for understanding subjectivity and the peril of the subject's fundamental emptiness.

Žižek developed the concept of aphanisis in terms of the dialectic of presence and absence—the gap between the core of the personality and the symbolic narrative in which the individual lives.[10]

Literary examples

Montaigne has been seen as a classic example of the exploration of the aphanisis of the subject.[11][12]

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-19-860761-X
    .
  2. ISBN 0028659244
    .
  3. ^ J. Laplanche/J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (2012) p. 40
  4. ^ E. Schuker/N. A. Levinson, Female Psychology (1991) p. 400
  5. ^
    ISBN 9783039113545
    .
  6. ISBN 0946439141
    .
  7. ^ John Bowlby, Separation (2010) pp. 431–2
  8. ^ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) pp. 207–8
  9. ^ Lacan, p. 218
  10. ^ R/ Maule/J. Beaulieu, In the Dark Room (2009), p. 183
  11. ^ J. Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamnetaux de la psychanalyse (Le Séminaire, Livre XI, 1964), Texte établi par J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, coll. Points, 1990, p. 249.
  12. ^ W. Apollon/R. Feldstein, Lacan, Politics, Aestetics (1996) p. 136

Further reading

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