Michael Funk Deckard

Paul Ricoeur’s presentation of “Consciousness and the Unconscious” at a colloquium in Bonneval from 1960 cannot make sense until afterwards, which is fundamental to Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit, often translated as aprèscoup or afterwardsness. This chapter is an uncovering of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit in Ricoeur’s own philosophical biography and writing. A reading of Freud’s text from 1914 (“Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through”) reveals how the work of mourning and the work of memory were already interlaced from Freedom and Nature to Living Up to Death. If Descartes is right about the cogito, then there cannot be a distinction between the two concepts of consciousness and an unconscious, and the apre`s-coup cannot exist. But Freud’s notion of working-through (perlaboration) finds a possible way out of this impasse. The little miracle of memory, the opposite of which is repetition toward compulsion (or hell), may resurrect the dead. The underworlds of Homer, Virgil, and Dante are taken up in 20th-century philosophy and psychoanalysis. At the core of this philosophical or psychological work is Ricoeur’s powerful claim: “consciousness is not given but a task.”

In 1665–1666, both Margaret Cavendish and Robert Hooke wrote about the beard of a wild oat. After looking through the microscope at the wild oat, Hooke describes the nature of what he is seeing in terms of a “small black or brown bristle” and believes that the microscope can improve the human senses. Cavendish responds to him regarding the seeing of the texture of a wild oat through the microscope and critiques his mechanistic explanation. This paper takes up the controversy between Cavendish and Hooke regarding the wild oat as two forms of a broadly Baconian enterprise. Challenging Lisa Walters and Eve Keller, who suppose that Cavendish was against the “Baconian enterprise as a whole,” the argument in this paper is that Cavendish is opposed to Hooke’s defense of instruments as recovering Edenic glory in the Micrographia, but not to the Baconian enterprise as a whole.