Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

I have constructed this chapter using several sketches. These are accompanied by intermezzo schizzo and meditations from the post- and more-than-human multiplicity called the Nomadic Detective Agency (NDA, 2024). These brief accounts and reflections are based on my pedagogical transdisciplinary teaching experiences that I have created at the University of the Arts London (UAL), which I have been associated with in different guises for the last 44 years. As a multidisciplinary learner, artist, researcher and educator, I am often drawn to forms of experimental creative academic writing. They have become ways of showing how these educational events unfolded for students, colleagues in higher education institutions, and various collaborative communities such as museums, and art galleries. Each sketch and intermezzo schizzo has an element of transdisciplinarity within it or alludes to the transversal operations that are extremely useful, and inspiring, in art and design teaching and learning practices at UAL and beyond. I use the term ‘nomadic pedagogy’ to allude both to the way we can wander our world over the last 20 years with the advent of networked digital technologies, and to wonder about what other thinking we can use in our educational practices. Rachel Fendler (2013) describes learning with nomadic pedagogy ‘... as a process whereby learning is the change incurred when subjects enter into unfamiliar territory, in a process of discovery … [and] is inherently concerned with crossing boundaries; challenging established notions about what education, art, and research look like’ (pp. 786-793) ‘The chapter, Becoming a nomadic artisan: cosmos, streets and transdisciplinarity is strong; `nomadic pedagogy' adopts the same spirit of play promoted in the previous chapter. The detailed sketches provided in this chapter, with appropriately timed references to scholarly concepts, was particularly useful for getting a sense of how this nomadic strategy can actually be done and for readers to understand the methodology behind it.’

Adding to the growing field of posthuman or cyborg studies, TechnoLogics explores how our position in the technologized world reorders, in the most radical ways imaginable, our basic experience of the lines governing literary, philosophical, and cultural production. The ancient dream of immortality is now becoming realized through cloning, genetic research, and artificial intelligence, bringing with it the need for new forms of both reading and living in the everyday world. In this emerging cyborg culture, what is to come for us is not predictable but, instead, an open possibility to be shaped by the work of, among others, artists, computer designers, scientists, and writers. Through encounters with Plato, Melville, Marx, Jünger, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren identifies the causes, characteristics, and links between the most primordial of wishes—immortality—and the highest of high tech, and asks how, in our culture of technocapitalism, we can continue to listen to the faint call of ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche by Lucas FainGray Kochhar-LindgrenFain, Lucas. Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. 216pp.In Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche, Lucas Fain sets out to explicate the very possibility of philosophy, with its origins in wonder and its end in happiness. He moves toward these goals through a comprehensive reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Socratism” intercalated with Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic intervention focused on the universality of untranslatable “enigmatic messages” that shape the (un)conscious of each individual. Through this combination of trajectories, Fain hopes both to deconstruct philosophy’s metaphysical origins along the lines of thinkers from Descartes through Badiou, and also return this fundamental question back to the emergence of the wisdom of eudaimonia, the flourishing of happiness, as a libidinal object.When the teaching, historical periodization, and explication of philosophy takes Rousseau under its wing, it is usually as a political theorist, but, as Fain reminds us, Rousseau explicitly asserts that he is “neither a philosopher nor austere,” but instead a “man of paradox,” a “friend of virtue,” or a “friend of the truth” (qtd. in Fain 5). This is important for it is related to the claims that paradox is an irrevocable trait of thinking, that philosophy requires friends both within and outside its rather blurry boundaries, and that reason cannot, in the end, claim self-grounding knowledge of its own origins and ends. Fain, like Rousseau, writes as a friend of the love of wisdom and “[a]gainst all the odds, the combination of Rousseau with Laplanche amounts to something of a double-dog dare against the ruling conventions of academic philosophy” (ix). The wager has been laid on the table, but it will extend far beyond the contemporary academy.A certain image of Socrates is the central figure around which Fain’s reading of Rousseau is organized. This is Socrates as that oddball Athenian irritant who works to demonstrate, succinctly put, that “virtue is knowledge; happiness is knowledge of the good” (4). This Socrates—and [End Page 92] Socrates is always multiplying—knows the irony of the unknowing and the joy of the virtuously beautiful. Phronēsis will be more foundational than epistēmē and philosophy, in itself—however that “in itself” is construed—will not be sufficient to explain itself. It has a constitutive blind-spot that will need looking into from different perspectives. It will need Rousseau and Laplanche, for instance, as external supports in order to get it into gear, with Laplanche being the psychoanalyst who most systematically brings this “support” of Freud’s Anlehnung—often translated as “anaclitic”—as a relation between the Instinkt of biology and the Trieb of the psyche, into sharper critical relief.Plato, in Theaetetus, succinctly states the origin of philosophy is “wonder” at a point in the conversation focused on questions of becoming and definition, which have already made the Theaetetus “dizzy.” (We all know what that is like.) Socrates replies to this confession, noting that “It looks as though Theodorus’s sketch of your character was accurate my friend. I mean, this feeling—a sense of wonder—is perfectly proper to the philosopher: philosophy has no other foundation, in fact. Whoever said that Iris was the offspring of Thaumas was no mean genealogist” (155d, 37). The genealogist in question is Hesiod, who, in the Theogony (265–6), observed that Iris (the rainbow as a ‘shining wonder’) was the daughter of Thaumas (‘wonder’) and Electra (‘shining’). Let me limit my comments here to simply observing that Theaetetus’s character, not just his ratiocination, matters. The dizziness becomes an opening to the shining wonder “beneath which” there is no other foundation.Socrates, as he so often does, translates the poetic into the philosophical, but without losing sight of the former. The mythopoetic—for both Plato and Rousseau—is inseparable from logic’s explanatory force and cannot be extirpated by that force. This relationship is active throughout Primal Philosophy and binds together the philosophical, the artistic, and the psychoanalytic. Although genre distinctions are generally useful, Freud points out thedream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by...

In this dissertation I explore the textuality of the self through the myth of Narcissus. The goal of my research is to examine how the self is "written" in psychoanalysis and fiction, and to see whether the self might be transformed by re-writing itself in the context of otherness. ;In the introductory chapter, I discuss narcissistic thinking in myth, psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy, and show why these modes of discourse are active in the construction of a narcissistic culture. I also situate my writing in the space of poetry. ;Chapter Two is an explication of Sigmund Freud's work on the narcissistic subject. I focus on his essay, "On Narcissism," in which he attempts to understand the psychopathology as well as the "normal" course of the development of an object-choice for the cathexis of the libido. ;The third chapter interprets Jacques Lacan's understanding of the construction of subjectivity and its relationship to both writing and narcissism. As one aspect of this interpretation, I elaborate upon Lacan's images of the narcissist as phantom, statue, and automaton. ;In Chapter Four, I shift from psychoanalysis to the novel, and analyze the issue of personal identity and nothingness in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Bernard, who wants to narrate his life as a story, serves as the interpretive pivot. But since he is constituted by language, his effort is bound to fail. ;Michel Tournier's The Ogre is the second novel that I analyze for the insight it affords into the narcissism. Abel Tiffauges, the protagonist, pathologically aggrandizes his individual experience and is therefore destroyed by the apocalyptic semiotic in which he becomes engulfed. ;In Chapter Six, I discuss John Fowles's Daniel Martin, in which the protagonist writes his own "authentic" history as a novel. As Daniel Martin constructs his new identity out of the ruins of his old, I suggest that art is narcissism that overcomes itself and opens up new structural possibilities. ;In the conclusion, I rehearse my previous arguments and return to the problem of Cartesianism. Finally, I contend that if he is to change, Narcissus must accept the otherness of a "third term" that links the subject and the object in an active generation of meaning

In _Narcissus Transformed_, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren interprets Narcissus as thematizing the tragic situation of the postmodern subject. After showing the connections between Cartesian philosophy and narcissism, he proceeds to lay out the function of Narcissus as a poetic figure of discourse in the fields of psychoanalysis and modern fiction. He moves beyond the description of narcissism to an interpretation of the conditions necessary for Narcissus, the beautiful boy captivated by his own image, to become a different kind of subject. The topos of narcissism, which is first articulated by Ovid, always includes within itself a mirror, a gap, self-referential desire, and death—all of which culminate in Narcissus's inability to make space for an Other. Kochhar-Lindgren contends that this is the founding topos of modern philosophy, which is then incorporated into and transmuted by the disciplines of psychoanalysis and fiction. With the extensive work of Freud on narcissism, it becomes a central concept for psychoanalysis; and with Lacan's interpretation of the narcissist as phantom, statue, and automaton, narcissism moves into a specifically textual interpretation of subjectivity. Kochhar-Lindgren then provides close readings of fictional texts-—_The Waves_ by Virginia Woolf, _The Ogre _by Michel Tournier, and _Daniel Martin_ by John Fowles—to show more explicitly the textual construction of the narcissistic subject and to suggest ways that Narcissus might be transformed into a subject not held in thrall to the "glassy-eyed stare of Thanatos." He concludes with an enactment, from a Lacanian and fictional perspective, of the beginnings of the undoing of the narcissistic topos of contemporary culture. Narcissus steps from the self-reflective mirror into a theater; he stops longing to be a purely self-reflexive work in order to become part of the play of a text