Limen

Limen is a Latin word, it means ‘a threshold’.

‘Foucault’s objection to the inwardly directed gaze rests on the unstated assumption that self-observation is, by it’s very nature, violent. Because le regard is considered intrinsically malevolent, there is no possibility of a non-objectionable split between an observing and an observed part of the self and a form of benign self-exploration. There is no place in Foucault’s thinking for the distinction between the observing ego, motivated by epistemophilic curiosity – the necessary precondition for a psychoanalytic process – and the continuous scrutiny of a sadistic ego. Despite his rebellion against Sartre, Foucault adhere’s to the master’s ‘paranoid ontology of the gaze’. The loving sparkle in the mother’s – or the lover’s – eye has no place in Foucault’s thinking, only the panoptic gaze of the persecutory father’.

In ‘The Whitebook’ – Gutting, G. (1994).‘The Cambridge Companion to Foucault’. 2nd Ed, London: Cambridge University Press, p 320.


This was an intriguing and disturbing paragraph for me to meet in my readings for ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’, this week.

It’s intriguing to read as I walk into a career in the therapy field, and I read Foucault’s damning, violent rejection of bourgeois normality reified in the name of psychic health in psychiatry. His paragraphs speak mostly to me as a rage of anguish, a rage against a society that in no way provided him, himself, with a place to ‘be’, half-ape, half-angel. He dropped his shoulder and heaved at that culture, hard, he pushed it into a post-modernity that has since walked around on tippy-toes, it seems, flittering on the depth to which pluralistic neo-liberalism should meet with a unifying structuralism, something that nurtures. To read Foucault, I’m not left with an impression of an intellect that lightly engages with everything else to preserve itself for it’s one, specialist field of only interest. Oh no. This man, I think, would have burned holes into the back of my head, into the back of anyone’s head, and it’s not with bitterness, it’s a with a penetrating shove. Answer to this.

I need to think about the way that a dualism, an initial split, can possibly be characterised as something other than violent. Sure, a schism is absolutely the onomatopoeia of itself. It is how it sounds. Absolutely, does the sensitive part of my ear hear a whispered roar of damnation in a call to turn and face, to see the dark edges of the self in the mirror. The mirror can be placed by the therapist or by the own-ego - I'm someone with lifelong blurring of boundary-edges, and the question of who owns what and which parts has never been my question of most concern. The means and the method are not skin-bound, in the way that my mind has expressed itself, repeatedly, through time.

So in the same way, completely, do I know that my own introspection will never ever reveal a complete map of the contours of 'me', those that turn up in this world. Knowledge of the precondition of my socially constructed self seems to have become a birthright, in my less-than-elegant, but still Western and tertiary educated, mind. The groove has been laid in the DNA, maybe, while everyone was out getting high in the 70’s.

Personally, this week, this paragraph is a hard to read, hard-edged, hard to digest. I do not want to walk into the dark edges of myself, even via my revered Foucault, into the nasty sharp judgemental bitch that has her cramped cave-space, within. I do not want to think that the liberation-through-healing that I want to add my own life-weight to, through practicing psychotherapy, only has persecution at it’s heart, as it’s intent. I do not see that the dualism torn with the shoulder that breaks it in the first turn, is ever healed, really again, and that’s a cruelly lived experience, for me, now, today.

I do not get to sit, and let it all just ‘be’, either. There’s a place where the rage gets transmuted, where the whole negative, ugly, twilight chaotic buzz is interred, absorbed, and released. I’m on my way there, slowly, and it horrifies me that I’m taking casualities in retrospect, as I walk.

Not perfect and not beautiful, but not implausible, or uncharacteristic, at that.