Hidden Revelations
To Be or not To Be: Hamlet, Modern Suicidology, and Suicidal Ambivalence
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bill Geis
In the Western Literature tradition, few passages are more famous than Hamlet’s soliloquy wherein he wrestles with the decision to end his life. This paper examines William Shakespeare’s description of suicidal ambivalence in light of the contemporary study of suicidology. The fundamental problems of the discipline have been far from resolved (how can we assess and know which person might kill themselves versus those who remain in ambivalent pain? what treatments and interventions can work to prevent suicide? how do risk factors change across subgroups, cultures, and societies?), while other disciplines of prevention (reducing breast cancer and heart disease) have made progress. Suicidal ambivalence has drawn the attention of the central figures in psychiatric care over the last century. Most interventions for suicidal persons have the objective of enhancing reasons for living and/or reducing reasons for dying. Clinical interventions address this dangerous calculus, including identifying unnoted reasons for living, challenging irrational reasons for dying, expanding perspective beyond the crisis, and invoking and strengthening unrealized resilience in the face of adversity. In the end, it is speculated, that, despite the “technological” innovations in our lives over the past 400 years, the task of diffusing suicidal ambivalence remains a deeply personal and unassailed forest where artificial intelligence and other contemporary technologies have proven little value. This mental state of ambivalence still requires a compassionate human presence for admittance—and it is hoped that this human presence is armed with the right words to ease a human soul back from the brink of suicide.
In the Wake of Nebulous Migrations: Twisting Trajectories of Cognitive Humanities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bartosz Hamarowski
The cognitivization of contemporary science, frequently described as a 'revolution' or 'turn,' has ignited significant movements in recent decades to reassess the position, state, and autonomy of the humanities. The aftermath of these debates within the scientific community and beyond has seen numerous attempts to connect the theoretical and methodological perspectives of diverse cognitive sciences with individual disciplines within the humanities. Ranging from subtle conceptual shifts to intricate integration and consilience projects, these endeavors reflect a hyper-diverse research and ideological landscape. The observed paucity of metatheoretical reflection on the evolving trends of cognitivization in humanities research since the 1990s is addressed in this paper. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which alliances are being established between the sciences of cognition and various manifestations of humanistic thought and practice. Models for their integration are discussed, and insights are provided regarding the profiles of the relationship between the humanities and science implied by specific strategies of cognitivization.
Aeschylus’ Opsis, Symbolon, Graphê as They Inform Lacan’s Inception of the Imaginary; Instauration of the Symbolic; and Underpinning of the Real
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Degener
The Oresteia’s foundational relationship to the Symbolic order through the institution of secular Law is known. What has not been recognized is that the key concepts of the opsis, image; symbolon, ‘symbol’; and graphê, writing, are construed by Aeschylus to work together to disrupt the pagan order in a formation of seminal importance to Lacanian studies. In the first intimations of a conception of the imagination in history, underlying Lacan’s Imaginary, Helen’s opsis, acts independently, hypostasized. Menelaus’ imaginary experience is effaced as the opsis evades the vain grasping of the metaphorical hands within his mind, passing into the inward oblivion of trance; in the physical register, the opsis, engine of war, effaces the boundary of within and world without, transposed from the imagination through physical hands put to oars, passing outwardly through the palace gates (visible on stage) driving ships to war. This imagination of the opsis is perceptible only, however, once the spectators have been led to phigeneia’s sacrifice in their vicarious imaginary, enthralled, participation. By dint of an exquisite ambiguity, they are shaken loose from their trance in seeing that those who participated in the sacrifice had been blinded by Iphigeneia’s stigmatizing gaze. This moment is effected as an ambiguity on the word symbolon―in which Artemis’, the god’s, apparent sanction of the sacrifice is revealed rather as her abhorrence of it―disrupts the theocratic symbolon in the instauration of the secular Symbolic, prefiguring Lacan’s Symbolic. The ambiguity hinges on the material written graphê in the register of the Real.
