Using ideas from the Bible, Derrida turns his anecdote of his cat observing him in the nude to extrapolate some ambiguities about what it means to “follow” being, and contrasts that with ideas of authority. I think ultimately, Derrida uses this seemingly surface level encounter with his pet to show us how shame is something that inherently belongs to humans, it is entwined with our creation, and perhaps is what distinguishes us from other animals. 

Derrida makes a discursive argument about how being “seen seen” by an animal, or seeing it seeing you, kind of awakes us to ask well, what does this cat see when they see me naked (382)? Animals don’t necessarily look for anything when they look at us, so why do we feel shame? And then on top of that why do we feel shame at being ashamed, which is probably even more silly. The argument Derrida makes here is that, since the story of Adam and Eve, humans can never recover the primordial innocence that Adam and Eve supposedly had in Genesis. We can’t rewind the clock to the moment where we always were naked but also never were naked, because it meant nothing anyway. 

The idea of this primordial innocence is complicated, too, though, once Derrida starts extrapolating the different versions of the book of Genesis and explaining his ideas about following/follower. He says that in the first narrative, God commands man-woman to command the animals, but not yet to name them; in the second narrative, the naming of the animals is performed at the same time as the commanding of them, and it is done solely by Adam: “[God] lets man, man alone, Ish without Ishah, the woman, freely call out the names”(385). In this second version, the idea that Adam, who was created after the animals, who has  not yet realized good from evil because Eve does not exist yet, somehow under some basis has dominion granted to him over the animals. He follows the animals chronologically, but maybe not in terms of authority. 

Adam’s power to name the animals does not couple with the fact that he and the animal are the same in their bareness. Similarly, Derrida feels shame in being naked in front of his cat because that is his pet, implying authority, but is also ashamed at being ashamed since the cat is simply seeing, and this feeling of being “seen seen” reminds us of our oddly related–both temporally and hierarchically–connection to animals. 

Lacan’s mirror stage, discussion of pigeon gonads, and ideas about the fakeness of mirror images all direct us to the major point that, though we need self-identification in order to function in the world, we will never really reach the ideal-I that our mirror image projects. To be human is to be dehiscent, and this is physically obvious when looking at 8-16 month olds with the mismatch between their executive functioning and their erratic and miscalculated behavior, and how their identification with their mirror image represents a cohesive, neat ideal-I who looks way more put together than the baby himself. This sticks with us throughout our lives, and one way we can see it is from an emotional perspective. Navigating our emotions and thoughts can be just as erratic and incohesive a mess as the baby’s physical navigation, but our mirror image does not reflect any of this confusion. Nor does it reflect any illness we may have, a headache we feel, and it has no way of reflecting back the fight we had with someone earlier in the day–we just see a contained, put-together, ideal self. This is why the image that the child sees in the mirror the first time they look at themselves is not real. 

I’ve been reading a book recently titled Talking to Strangers by Malcolmn Gladwell, and Lacan’s essay reminded me about a point Gladwell makes that one reason we don’t really know how to talk to strangers is because we assume we can tell everything about them from their outward appearance. The book brings up the Amanda Knox case, where Knox was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. There was basically no hard evidence against her–no fingerprints, no DNA, and nothing to tie her to the scene itself, but what convinced everyone of her guilt was her odd demeanor about her friend’s death. The crime scene investigators said she did a twirl and said “ta-da” when she let them into the apartment where the murder had happened, and this wasn’t seen as an appropriate response. True, maybe it wasn’t, but the awkward personality mismatch between Knox’s outward appearance versus inward feelings is what sent her to jail rather than any concrete evidence. I think this is similar to the mirror stage that Lacan talks about, just maybe on a less theoretical level. We are so messy in so many ways, but want to be interpreted as a neat and cohesive package. And often because of mental heuristics in combination with high stakes situations, we often are taken as our mirror image when we shouldn’t be, which clearly can be really unfortunate (I guess we are our own undoing, which also reminds me of how the plot of Billy Budd and the idea of a “crucifiction” totally undoes itself in Johnson’s reading, but I won’t ramble on!)

For Foucault, there are two models of sovereignty that represent different modes of power. The first, which came earliest chronologically, is “discipline”, whose object is the individual, controlled through microphysical methods. One example of disciplinary power would be the ways surveillance manifests itself, especially, as Foucault says, in the sphere of labor. Overall, the point of disciplinary sovereignty is to “let live and make die”. In this way, the sovereign’s ultimate display of power is in the act of death. From this view, death almost had to be a spectacle because it was the visualization of “a transition from one power to another”. Death is the marked passing of our bodies from one sovereign who can let our bodies live or make them die, to another with the same power over our soul. The second, newer, form of power–the way I see it–is almost insidious in the way it seeps into every aspect of modern life without us really noticing it. This sovereign power is biopolitical. It is the focus of power over population through standardized means. Examples of this could include medicine–which I think serves as a good example of biopolitics’ sweeping nature as a power. Medicine basically started out as people learning hygiene, which led to institutions like hospitals, and ultimately we have grandiose schemes of life insurance, health insurance, medicare and medicaid. Not only this, but medicine and hygiene education itself can be forms of population control–the focus of biopolitical power. The premise of this new power of sovereignty is intervention: to make live and let die. Consequently, this differentiates the extent of the sovereign power especially when it comes to death. Death becomes something shameful under this new regime, because with all these means to prolong life, to improve life circumstances/chances/outcomes, we can’t escape death. On top of it all, death is something that becomes prolonged and ambiguous. It is not a spectacle from one sovereign to another, but a secret and confusing embarrassment, that lies outside of the power of the biopolitical sovereign. 

Maybe it is possible to interpret this change in in the concept of power, life and death from something disciplinary to something biopolitical as a shift in cultural expectations as well. In a world no longer totally reliant on teachings of religious institutions, there is no longer a real reason for life or death to be politically represented in ways reminiscent of religion. With biopolitical power, we all have this force urging us to live, but maybe more room for how to define death. I recognize that this gets super dicey when actually examining what real choices we have when it comes to death–the law says one thing and our society might say another, or we don’t have any real means to die the way we wish, or whatever other reason. Overall though, if we see forms of power as fluid and responsive to the values of society, since after all we “contracted” to the sovereign and they are (allegedly) supposed to serve us, it might be interesting to see how else power will change in the future as cultures and contracts change, too.

For Marx, ideology is a distorted production of ideas that reflect a relationship between men and their circumstances, and ultimately is what keeps us following the status quo. Ideology is like a “camera obscura” in this way, because it is a reflection of something that does exist in real life, but does not necessarily not exist. According to ideology, for instance, “consciousness is taken as the living individual” (Marx, 660). Religion is an example of an ideology following this pattern, where we arrive to “men in the flesh” after looking at what men “say, imagine, and conceive”. After we look at the fantastical power of the church and its teachings–like we discussed in class: “last shall be first and first shall be last”–we arrive to men in the flesh who accept awful working conditions and painful labor. Like in a camera obscura, it is true that men exist in the flesh and certainly they imagine and speak; however, the idea that life is determined by consciousness is the upside down, not-untrue-but-not-entirely-true interpretation. Marx suggests that  it is our responsibility to identify our position in this camera obscura, and change the lens to give a more accurate reflection, or potentially even break the box. Using the same example, he says that consciousness is determined by life, and we must start with real, living men rather than obscure concepts.

We know Marx uses this analogy mainly to push his communist agenda–which might be a form of changing the “camera obscura”.  In Capital, Marx talks more about commodities and how they fit into this schema of reality. Commodities are odd things because their actual value and the labor behind their existence that stamps them as a commodity actually are totally unrelated. We give commodities a life of their own, a result of a sort of “fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor” (Marx, 669). He gives an example of wood, and how a table remains a piece of wood simply refashioned until we give it this enigmatic force that decides its value. The relation between a human and his coffee table, for example, is a person-object relationship that our culture has given a person-person relationship to. One way we do this is by socializing the coffee table in a way that places a value on the “social character of the labor that produce[d]” it. Products of labor are really just util items that end up gaining a mystical social status through exchange and our interpretation of the work put into creating it. And so suddenly, there is this really weird hierarchy that arises where a sports car, for example, has more “value” as a commodity than, say, drinking water, because more socialized labor was put into the process that created the car than in some random independent hiker wandering in the woods and finding a fresh pond. However, when looking at the sports car, there is no necessary relationship between the person who buys the commodity (the car) and the group of people who make all the different parts. Nevertheless, by fetishizing or creating a relationship between the producer and the purchaser we seem to be protecting ourselves from alienation. Marx brings up alienation, especially when talking about how industrial capitalism is not only ruining any (existing or falsely existing) relationship between the producers and the products they are producing, but even alienating workers from their own lives. The distorted reality that we uphold in this camera obscura is that some aspect of the bourgeois society is somehow connected to some aspect of that of the proletariat, and they need each other in some fundamental way. Really there is no intrinsic connection here. We push the narrative that the production process is some fantastical power, but there is nothing inherently magical about it. Regardless, aside from the “capitalism is a disease” theme, fetishism of commodities seems to be a protective factor we’ve created to keep us from the different kinds of alienation created by our own system.

The Eiffel Tower is probably my favorite of the collection of myths from Roland Barthes, since it’s a deduction of our sign system against a “resistant” object, to prove its limits as a means of communication and its paradoxical nature. 

There is a lot to unpack with the contradictory qualities of the “utterly useless monument”, which we actually learn is pretty useful (Barthes, 5). The point that stands out to me this most is that, physically, the tower is an uncontainable object that we try to domesticate. One way we do this is through “the installation of a restaurant […and other] means of leisure” (Barthes, 16). The fact that the tower is an open construction makes us uncomfortable when we are used to typical tourist hotspots (like the Louvre) being enclosed for us to feel like we entered, experienced, and “owned” some of it. The tower doesn’t do that for us. So we have to create a mini world surrounding the tower in order to make it feel normal. I never thought about that. It’s so weird for us in our conception of the order of the world (much like our syntax!) to have a monument that’s simultaneously a representation of the inside and outside. It’s too far outside of the social contract for the tower to be both sides of anything that usually presents itself as binary, and so we try to reduce the tower. But also, I think it’s interesting to see how maybe the tower makes us so uncomfortable because it’s become oddly more powerful than us. The tower can be a spectacle and an object, useless and useful, inside and outside. We cannot be those things. If we are looking at the tower, we can’t be in it. None of our relations to the tower can come together at the same time. We are perceiving it as one of its opposite meanings at a time, and we have to kind of deal with the impossibility of bringing together two things that are true and simultaneous but also cannot cooccur. I think one way we do this is by glossing over it all and pretending it can occur at the same time– a comforting thought facilitated by the constructed surrounding environment.

However, by doing this, what simultaneously happens is that the tower becomes a signifier of basically an infinite sight of projection. It is reduced to a symbol of Paris, of travel, of industrialism, of some kind of focal point in France. The tower being a signifier for everything really just makes it nothing. And when we come face-to-face with this (structural and symbolic) emptiness, we rush to find ways to create more perceived “somethingness”(we add restaurants, shops, carts of food, and other community experiences all around the tower) to fit into our schemas and orders. 

But we see that our efforts to reduce the Eiffel Tower from everything to just one thing also fail. The argument here would be similar to Nietzsche’s line of thought: the tower is immune to falling apart in this way because it is art. Much like Nietzsche’s argument that art is truth that allows you to live in a personal abstraction and intuition, the tower being art means it surpasses our rationalization, deconstruction, and assimilation of it into variations of speech/language or other binary schemas. It exists to emphasize its inability to be known by us and to serve mythical purposes–like the ones the Ancient Greeks lived by.

In his piece, On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche is very concerned with the epistemological consequences of our perceptions of truth as humans. Through various analogies and metaphors, Nietzsche reaches the claim that “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions”, and as a result, if humans should be valued for anything it should be for our architectural genius in creating a cohesive reality based on pure abstraction, but not for our genius in general, for we do not truly understand the essence of anything in world–we only interpret it based on our place in it (756). Ultimately, the perpetrator of our illusion is in language for taking the incommensurable, the individual, the unique, and assimilating it into sameness. The problem with this is what we lose through this process. When we use language we go through processes of metaphors that increasingly alienate us from the essence of something itself, and as time goes on all that remains is deception and lies. 

This is such a massive claim to make, and at first it seems that it can’t possibly apply to all our foundations and institutions. Surely, I thought, science is exempt from this judgment that “not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in itself’” actually is true? Science is supposed to have an objective methodology, a question we want to answer empirically, right? However, even science is so deeply rooted in an anthropocentric cause, where all of our answers are measured against ourselves, and subsequently categorized in our manufactured hierarchy. So, ironically, science is where we really see the process of how humans strive for an understanding of the world through assimilation, just as Nietzsche said we do with leaves, animals, and all other observable things (755). Even in science, we set parameters for what counts as truth–such as deciding what values of data results are/are not statistically significant–and again, we are in control of “truth” and perpetrating deception, even in the honest hearted pursuit of knowledge. 

Though I think Nietzsche does point out the importance of remaining humble since we really don’t know anything about anything, I also would like to make the argument that his philosophy, though insightful, does not serve much of a practical or tangible purpose. Nietzche is very focused on the structure of humankind, but only makes analogies at an individual level. At the end of his piece, he gives examples of two kinds of men, their values, beliefs, and life outcomes: the man of intuition and the man of reason. The man of intuition–though perhaps more aligned with Nietzsche’s love for the Ancient Greeks, rejection of a bland life, and seeks vitality and freedom from illusion–suffers unreasonably and painfully (761). On the other hand, the man of reason, who is guided by these illusions, is better apt to prevent himself from “falling into the very same trap time after time”, learns from his conception of experience, and is able to “ward off misfortune” (761). What would it be like to live in a world full of reasonable men? Or intuitive men? On a holistic level, I think it is much more efficient to have a community of people who at least agree on these self-imposed illusions and use of language, creating a framework through which we can move through our tasks and responsibilities without serious, larger roadblocks. Our disconnect from seeing a leaf as a leaf seems much smaller of an issue than a dysfunctional government and suffering citizens (whatever that term might mean) as a result of “falling into the same traps”. Nietszche’s point about language stripping us from the essence of things is really profound and seems to be true, but if we were to create a society where everyone pursues their own intuition, it seems that it would be an extremely fragmented and difficult place to live. Perhaps this illusion of reason is necessary for societies to function on larger scales.