Interview with Richard Boothby on Blown Away
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- This interview addresses the theoretical revelations of Richard Boothby's memoir about confronting his son's suicide. The relationship between mourning and reconnecting with the other--rather than letting go--is the focus of this remarkable book. Boothby discusses here the insights that he gained through the horrific struggle to come to grips with what his son did and how their relationship could continue to exist after his death.
Wept through this. I am cyclothymic: each day, I think how my own self slaughter would harm those I love. This alone keeps me here. Not to cause further anguish. Not to leave an absence even in the life of my old dog. And yet going on seems impossible. (“I can’t go on. I’ll go on” - Beckett- The Unnameable)
11:20 - conceiving of death as letting go vs holding on to something that's not known, Hamlet's "Undiscovered Country" soliloquy
20:30 - Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" can be seen as a misstep/point of betrayal of psychoanalysis because its precisely about putting the dead to rest, which is the crucial thing about being alive, 22:12 - cutting off connections to deceased, re-inventorying memory
32:00 - Badiou's punctual, violent event; the mania for guns as a unique, revolutionary unconscious instrument; similar to guillotine, cut, absolute break
36:10 - Hegel's "All identity is identity and difference.", absolute knowing, relating to the Other
38:10 - Hegel's absoluten Zerrissenheit, Dr. Jamieson Webster's review: "I'm blown away by Blown away"🤣
very piercing and topic discussion as usual, thank you!
Great interview about a really beautiful book. I hope you guys do more stuff together in the future given how good your chemistry is!
Thank you. As a parent in similar conditions, it was a relief that the book explored the messiness of the situation and didn't attempt to simplify it with any over-arching neat theory. I loved its rawness and simple honesty. It is very helpful for those who want to take the same explorative, and ongoing, journey. Thank you.
This is fantastic, thank you so much for this.
Wanted to thank you guys for this very sober conversation about loss and grief, perhaps some of the most difficult experiences human beings have access to today. But this conversation has driven me to ask if part of that difficulty is somewhat particular to the west, in that we do not recognize that the task of grieving involves the maintenance of a relationship with what you never had that the person gave to you (as Todd mentioned in a reply to another comment above). It seems like this framing of the problem of death as a problem of letting go is a problem that has to do with our… for lack of a less clumsy term.. culture of individuality. It’s like about getting rid of the excess emotions, putting them in the ground as boothby had it, and getting on with it. It’s very isolating and sad to think about. It’s not a trivial matter to simply lift, say japan’s or the ancient Greek’s more ancestral tradition of dealing with death, as they simply would not work the same way, as long as our culture is geared towards individualism and that expediency of mourning. But nonetheless it’s worth thinking about how death and loss can inspire new ways we relate to each other here in the west. Wanted to thank you guys again for doing this talk!
It seems to me, that when he gives that moving story of his loss of his son and his friend, that the figure who is created in the fantasy, becomes a symbol of power. Death creates fantasmatic symbols, sages of wisdom, who tell us who we are.
I was very struck by how the lost loved one can reappear as a presence that seems somehow disentangled from the lived difficulties of history, and yet how those very difficulties could lead one to follow threads of unknowing into the heart of ones own identity, changing how we appear to ourselves. I find that duality really interesting. Does it relate to the ‘physiological’ nature of attachment that seems almost atemporal, and the (impossible) work of attunement unfolding over time that it ‘encumbers’ us with do you think?
That seems right to me.
I think Hegel and Freud would’ve liked people like Gabor Maté, a physician who is mainly interested in trauma and the relationship between addiction and childhood development. He also works on psychedelic therapy and has wrote many amazing books on these subjects.
I notice you have a copy of Vighi’s Unworkable on your bookshelf because I have started reading it myself (what a great front cover!) Whats your take on it?
I like his take on Marx and labor but am less sanguine about his pandemic conspiracy theorizing, to be completely honest.
@@toddmcgowan8233 yes, I saw a youtube video of him talking about that and I wasn’t sure about it at all. I thought he had some interesting ideas about how the pandemic might have been used in certain ways but he kept pushing away the term conspiracy almost as if he couldn’t quite get rid of term to his own satisfaction. Thanks for the heads up, am very interested to see what I make of the book.
Do you think that there is a potential misstep in thinking about death as a letting go vs holding on to the unknown of the other? Only insofar as it sets up this obstacle that stands in for the impossibility that constitutes the grieving process in the first place. I think the problem with death is that we can’t let go or hold on to something that we never had. A grieving person’s obsession about the details of the life of the deceased problem doesn’t seem to be knowledge. Whatever they learn is essentially just a stand-in for or way of enjoying what they dialectically can’t know about the other.
I think that that can happen, but what Rick is getting at in death is sustaining the relation to what one never had. So I think that he is thinking along the same lines as you here.
@@toddmcgowan8233 I guess the only problem I have with that formulation is that sustaining seems like a conscious action even though the relationship to what we never had in the first place resides in the Unconscious.
@@toddmcgowan8233 I know that this may sound a bit semantic but it seems like “accepting” that which we never had is closer to arriving at Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge than “sustaining”. Only to the extent that the former seems more parallel to a psychoanalytic understanding of love(accepting what the other doesn’t have in-spite of not asking for it). It’s almost like we are haunted by the unknown of the other, dialectically.
@@jeanlamontfilms5586 Yes, good point.
Just as an aside, anyone who has read Boothby’s Sex On The Couch and was struck by his comments on the necktie might find an encounter with Mimi Parent’s surrealist necktie of interest.
Hegel was a shaman sounds like.
That’s a pretty swift way of ridding yourself of any responsibility to actually engage with his work before taking a stance
@@punchgod project away, genius. it was a comment, not a 'stance' ... besides which it wasn't intended as derogatory or dismissive of his thought... nor of shamanic thought, for that matter. I happen to respect both and hear echoes. you are maybe a little colonial in your leanings? you do not want pure dialectics to be tainted?