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In Friedrich Schelling's philosophy of nature, the attempt to think the unconditioned absolute of nature performs unconditioning, thereby transforming the present into a field of experimentation. Schelling's nature-philosophy produces a series of interventions into cultural fields of consistency, drawing on material operations to reconceptualize forms of collective organization. In Schelling's First Outline, beings have a specific signature: to be is to resist. In the Deities of Samothrace, philosophy performs a "magic singing" that gathers initiates together by continually exorcising—and preserving—the unruly obstinacy of pre-socialized drives. This conception of philosophy coheres with a gesture from his earlier lectures on the philosophy of art in which music forms the basis of inorganic communities, implicitly cultivating collective forms called upon to navigate the dangers of overly cohesive (harmonic) and overly transgressive (rhythmic) forms of life, while directing an unconditioning power to the conditions of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the works of Ludwig Tieck—specifically the fairy tales collected in Phantasus—and the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin operate according to an aesthetics of impotentiation. Impotentiation designates the coexistence of seemingly opposed operations: on the one hand, the generation of forms that can be developed further in unexpected directions; and on the other hand, impotence, a condition whereby processes of emergence are brought to a standstill. The works of Tieck and Hölderlin draw on these operations to imbue sites of deviant emergence with uncertainty, albeit directed toward different ends. Tieck dramatizes the shifting of states in which everyday forms of intelligibility are briefly suspended, thereby allowing individuals to explore alternative forms of being, some of which are transgressive, some of which are redemptive, if but for a short while; his tales gesture at impotent forms not capable of development, but nevertheless invested with a critical force over and against problematic reality. Hölderlin situates his poetic voice on the cusp of an emergent order that would entail a revolutionary suspension of cultural norms; poised between the possibility of renewal and the danger of annihilation, his poetry invests such inflection points with an increased sense of urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I promptly read their co-authored paper, Self Psychology and the Concept of the Nuclear Self: A Dynamic Systems Perspective (J. Trop & Trop, [5]). B Sarah: b Gabe, you were saying earlier that even though you're not a clinician or a therapist - Jeff, you will turn to Gabe to bounce ideas off about particular cases. At the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology conference in 2019, I attended a plenary, A Dynamic View of Self hood, Affect and Political Context. [Extracted from the article]

This paper argues that Schiller's theater develops a political semiosis organized around operations of indexicality, understood as the attempt to trace a figure back to its invisible conditions of genesis. This notion of indexicality linking visible form to invisible origin is developed in the Kallias-Briefe in reflections on technical form (technische Form) and acquires a distinctively political character in theatrical representation. A tension emerges in the manner in which Schiller's theater translates agonistic fields of invisibility (instinct and reason, cosmos and character, purposiveness and chaos, necessity and possibility) into visible signs. On the one hand, Schiller's theater exposes diffuse forms of power that cannot be traced back to a sovereign instance (as is the case with Elisabeth in Maria Stuart) and seeks to reactivate in spectators an indexical capacity that links political agency to its conditions of genesis in a character. On the other hand, Schillerian theater makes the character of the dramatic figure into a zone of inconsistency through which political possibilities are generated and foreclosed. In Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orelans and Wilhelm Tell, for example, the character of the hero disrupts the concentration of normativity in the body of the king or the collective democratic body respectively, thereby investing the dramatic figure with a power of deviation. This tension in the simultaneous repairing and disrupting of politically inflected forms of indexicality is woven through Schiller's theater and is generative of the radiant power of its dramatic figures. These figures can never be completely extracted from the exterior force of law or from the power of the norm—whence their restorative force. Nor do such figures harmonize perfectly with the instantiation of law and norm—whence their emancipatory force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political and ethical consequences of a specifically dynamic systems view of psychoanalysis and selfhood, arguing that a dynamic systems view entails an ethos, or a way of looking at the world. The article postulates the "thin" normativity, or the minimalist set of commitments involved in a dynamic systems account of selfhood. These minimal commitments provide a framework for exploring two ways in which politics and psychoanalysis intersect: first, how political context surfaces in psychoanalysis (as it is thematized concretely in treatment); and second, the politics of psychoanalysis (as a political or cultural force). The commitments can be summarized under the headings of an ethos of changeability; disruption; experimentation; particularization; and exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti-humanism of Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater — wherein the ideal of grace is supposed to make visible mechanical forces devoid of human self-consciousness — takes the form of a temptation. The text nevertheless has a poetological function inasmuch as temptation lies at the genesis of aesthetic experience for Kleist. The paper examines the potentialities of a form of agonistic reading in response to the challenges posed by Kleist's aesthetics of temptation, and concludes by considering Die Marquise von O.... as an elaborate ritualistic manipulation designed to integrate transgressive desire into the ethics of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article will be to review some self psychological concepts and describe their commonalities and differences with system theories that have emerged under the umbrella of a dynamic systems framework. There are several important elements of self psychological language and theory that cohere with a systems vantage point. There are also elements that are not consistent with a dynamic systems perspective, such as the nuclear self. The concept of the nuclear self has the potential to galvanize psychoanalysts to look for the buried essence of structural properties and a preprogrammed design. It is our view that the language and underlying theory of psychoanalysis should be consistent with the fluidity, variability, and soft assembled nature of a systems viewpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the concept of the absolute operative in Goethe'sFaustby taking its point of departure from Schelling'sNaturphilosophie, which supersedes and embeds tragic subjectivity in an ontological dynamic that both grounds and exceeds the subjective. The essential operations of such an absolute manifest themselves in the tensions and inconsistencies generated by dynamic forces—attraction and repulsion, contraction and expansion—that move through all appearances, whether material, psychic, or discursive. Because a chaotic reserve of disorder belongs intrinsically to the unfolding of the absolute ofNaturphilosophie, absolute signification in Faust manifests itself primarily in the shape of aberrant destinies. Moreover, the transcendental and textual dynamics of attraction and repulsion produce operations ofunconditioning(from the “conditionlessness” of the absolute,das Unbedingte) such that no singular phenomenon or individuated being can become a prioritized representative of the absolute. This article thus attempts to “uncondition” Faustian striving by drawing attention to alternative models of absolute signification in the text—for example, to Homunculus (the absolute as disindividuation), Euphorion (hyperindividuation), Gretchen (heteronomous-ethical individuation), or Mephistopheles (the negation of individuation)—each of whom are differentiated but nevertheless share the dynamic of forces of attraction and repulsion through which the movement of the absolute discloses itself. Finally, the paper seeks to “uncondition” the Eternal Feminine—itself an inconsistent, queer manifestation of the absolute (since it operates not just on male subjects, but on female subjects and angels that perturb sexual differentiation)—and open the path to anexteriorityto the narrative of redemption, one that calls into question the Eternal Feminine as a full, adequate representation of the textual cosmology ofFaust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the concept of static equilibrium around 1800. Topics discussed include, mechanically minded philosophers of the Renaissance, scientists of the Enlightenment, and the dominant interpretations of modernity. Also being discussed is the emergence of modernity in the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses of the 18th century.

This article examines the emergence of discourses in the eighteenth century in which disequilibrium appears not as an aberration-a perturbation later attenuated by some future well-ordered state-but as a source of affirmation in and of itself. The article focuses on specific paradigmatic snapshots that ascribe a certain value to disequilibrium: William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Schiller's Anmuth und Würde, Schelling's early philosophy of nature, and the Homunculus episode of Faust II. These texts frame affirmative disequilibrium in different modes: as a perceptual technology (aesthetic disequilibrium), as a way of being in the world (ethical disequilibrium), or as a basic structure of givenness (ontological disequilibrium). Each instance of affirmative disequilibrium makes possible a form of thought in which disruption, disjunction, or deviance constitutes the condition of possibility of the author's respective investments, whether in an aesthetics of stimulation (Hogarth), an ethics of sovereignty (Schiller), or an ontology of agonistic forces that frames systemic inconsistency as a source of affirmative potentiality (Schelling). An epilogue on the Homunculus episode of Goethe's Faust II shows how the text imaginatively engages with non-teleological, chaotic liquidity as a generative matrix of forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]