Laurence Arthur Rickels - Quotes

Nazi Germany was the first pop-psychological culture of all-out healing.
Rickels, Laurence Arthur.

But the Gulf War was America's most successful war in terms of mobilization of group psychology for psychological-warfare purposes. The Nazis were way better at it than we would ever be. Already in 1941, U.S. military-psychologists were racing to catch up with Nazi advances in psychological warfare. They reconstructed the Nazi reading lists, which included references to Freud. It's as though psychoanalysis was enlisted on the Allied side following a trend that the Nazis had set.
Rickels, Laurence Arthur.

More than anything else in society, mourning must be diluted and distilled; the corpse is beautiful and the 'hardened survivors' odor free. Alongside this disturbed relationship to the dead, mass media culture conducts that endless work of mourning Freud called melancholia. … The cult of the dead in any given culture is coextensive with the media extensions of the senses current in that culture. Psychoanalysis, our culture's institution of mourning, keeps open lines of communication with the deceased which are precisely lines of telecommunication. Freud's disinterment of the phantom voices of the superego, for example, coincides with the advent of phonographic or radio recording… just as photography and film project and animate those phantoms which, in Totem and Taboo, haunt those who are unable to grant the dead proper burial.
Rickels, Laurence Arthur.

California is where unending mourning achieves its society-wide manifestation (or massification) as sado-masochism, where the death wish yields to death drive (which takes a detour via suicide), and where the femininity of mourning constitutes the group's secret agenda, gender, and desire. The psychohistory that documents the intellectual migrations to the most modern of frontiers cannot but unfold or fold out a psychology of the ultimate idol of Freud's second system: the adolescent or Californian. But the two anchorpersons for this special report on California — Kafka and Thomas Mann — have been selected, according to the bicoastal logic of this case, from among Germanicity's teenagers at heart. In between: television covers the ins and outs of this psychoanalytic investigation of a global conspiracy — the Californian (and German) invention of adolescence.
Rickels, Laurence Arthur.

Nostalgia comes in waves, like nausea: the etymological sense of their wavelengths, on both sides of the simile (nostalgia meaning homesickness and nausea seasickness) contains and announces a certain surf’s up confrontation betweenpsychology and psychoanalysis.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

According to Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” the radio reception installed inside the ego ideal broadcasts within the home the uncanny or unhome. What tunes in – on station identification –ranges from ancient parental criticisms to public opinion to the background music Géza Róheim’s schizophrenic patient identificed as the sound in the back of one’s head as one eats and chews.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

On the outside uncanny doubling travels the route of return – as vomiting and haunting. Thus Hollywood horror films – from The Exorcist, for example, to The Fly –feature throwing up among the props of monstrous invasion and metamorphosis. Freud already analyzed this aberration in a dream that returned from the underworld it opened onto: Freud found himself naked on the stairs, which his old nurse had also ascended by returning from the forgotten past to reprimand him for spitting. Spucken (spitting), Freudnotes, calls up Spuken – haunting.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

By this Freud means, up close, that recollections involving women are easier to call up in analysis than those in which men were faced. Because the father always gets repressed, the feminine is the motior of repression.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

Thus a return of Freud (that would be truly peristaltic in its reversal of the nostalgic return to – into – his corpus) would reshift the Lacanian/feminist/filmtheoretical emphasis on desire or repression, narrative or point of view towards the reach (and retch) of more primal lines of defense.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

Melancholic identification is embodied or conveyed by mother who, dead, leaves it up to little one to produce the narcissistic object or objection; live, she transmits a dead child (or, put differently, the work of mourning she had been unable to perform) to the surviving child who carries the deposit or crypt and obeys its phantom’s telecommand.
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English).

On the group-psychological outside of this underworld one always faces the happy-faces and mirror images of nostalgia; but on the underside we encounter – how could we have overlooked it! – the encrypting identification Derrida recast (in “Fors”) as “internal vomiting.”
Rickels, Laurence. "Gag Me With A Tune." in: artUS. No Date. (English) Finitude is therefore not so much foreclosed or redeemed as given all the times in the world to pass on.
Rickels, Laurence. "Who’s Watching, Who’s Dying Now?" in: artUS. No. 27, 2009, p. 44-51. (English).

In sum, "all science fiction occurs in alternate ... universes." The basis of fantasy's appeal, at least according to Tolkien (in his 1938 essay "On Fairy-Stories"), is Christianity: the fantasy that is also true. The happy ending may be escapist in everyday life, but in the end (of life) it becomes the Great Escape, the overcoming of death that Christianity advertises.
Rickels, Laurence. "Who’s Watching, Who’s Dying Now?" in: artUS. No. 27, 2009, p. 44-51. (English).

From this mythic or psychotic origin onward, Dick speculated, he had inhabited a realm of undecidability specific to mourning over the other's death conceived as double loss: both parties to the death lose the other. Indeed, Dick claimed he could not decide who had died: he could be the memory crossing his surviving twin's mind. Dick's signal investment in alternate present worlds derives from this unique specialization within the work of mourning or unmourning.
Rickels, Laurence. "Who’s Watching, Who’s Dying Now?" in: artUS. No. 27, 2009, p. 44-51. (English).

Around ten years ago, I noticed that the vampires were changing. Whereas bloodsucking had been rou- tinely interpreted in the earlier era as a metaphor for genital sexuality (which I always felt missed the points of the encounter), the vampire fictions themselves now began to flesh or flush out the pre-Oedipal blood bond with the fully sexual bodies of our undead neighbors - for example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Blade (1998).
Rickels, Laurence. “By Mourning’s Light. Laurence A. Rickels on True Blood.” in: Artforum. October 2009. (English).

A death wish list of resistances, blocked transmissions, unexamined transferences happened on my way to this essay. In Fall 2000 I was contacted by a former student (beware of former students!) who offered that the firm for which she was working, Hyper Television, was interested in interviewing me as part of a web presentation of The Sixth Sense. One hit of good transference and I reversed my decision not to see the movie again, a piece of the resistance that rose up in me (when I saw the film the year before) against the doubling bind the film imposes on its audience to watch it one more time.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

Occult and technical media occupy interchangeable places within the genealogy of media that Freud's exploration of the work of mourning and his attendant work of analogy opened up. That is why every horror film is self-reflexively compatible with psychoanalysis: the horror film cannot touch on the relationship to the dead without touching its own media parts which, already contaminated by haunting partings, are also portraits of psychic functioning.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

What is popularly associated with resistable (or irresistible) psychoanalysis is sexological interpretation (in which representations of violence, for example, do double duty as symptoms of repression).
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

In contrast to the view of horror or monstrosity as symptomatic of sexual repression—and of the horror movie as a sex-therapeutic session and wedding-night initiation—which, with joking on the side, cannot but be accepted, it is the inside viewing of the horror film's overlap with the "underworld of psychoanalysis" ...
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

The perspective of someone undead or dead who doesn't know that he is dead is more compelling, now as surprise, now as fiction, than the outright deception involved in hiding the lies of both first-person narrators and of the seeing-I perspectives given in film.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

But even if the boundaries between the living and the dead seem thus blended beyond time's dominion, the media death cult itself could not have emerged any earlier: magnetic tape technology, which was first realized by German engineers during World War II, spread world-wide only after the total war was over and out. The new technology gave the movies a first fully functional and realistically realizable audio portion.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

If Freud always seems to turn with the force of inevitability to the relationship to the father in his interpretations, it is not because that relationship was a living standard, whether in society at large or in the biographies of his patients. The "patriarchal" interpretation of mourning for the father does not reflect whatever was out there but instead performs what it introduces. The father's death is the original transference neurosis.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

Psychoanalysis aims to lift resistance and raise unconscious thoughts to the power of conscious understanding. Uncovering the objectionable unconscious thought, for example, is therefore not the main focus of analysis: instead the aim is to remove the patient's resistance to the consciousness raising itself. The transference, which is always also resistance, is the force along for the resolution of the transference.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

Transference is where The Sixth Sense grabs us. Our resistance to the film's intervention in or reinvention of the eternally, internally transferred relationship draws from the same source as that which makes us the film's captive audience. Resistance in transference is repetition. The Sixth Sense raises repetition to consciousness as difference or delay in the acquisition of its sense. The second time around we see that our transferences are ghosts and we see that we are able to see that much because we identify with dead or Dad people and with the seeing-I of cinema ... That consigns the primal reach of the haunted sensorium to the recent past, always the most repressed passage, the one most pressing to return.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

What makes The Sixth Sense—like the Scream trilogy (1996, 1997, 2000), for another example—precisely post-Psycho rather than pre-Psycho is the self-conscious therapeutic momentum that builds (on) resolution. This fantasy or entertainment all about resolution need not stay under the skin for long. Just one more time around the blockage and the fantasy's recognition value (calculated according to the therapeutic standard) effects, already and finally, an enduring (because original) displacement.
Rickels, Laurence. “Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time.” in: Other Voices. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 2002. (English).

Children have never been around for very long. The child did not really begin to exist - and to exit with equal rights to commemoration - until literacy was established as unconditional requirement for socialization.
Rickels, Laurence. "Tot’s Tomb.” in: aRude. Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997. (English).

The pupil was focused first. But now, already in the beginning, with earliest infancy, in the zoning, the measure, of what language animates in the speaking and non-speaking alike, there was the I, old enough to live, to be called by first name, old enough to die, to be buried with the name call, the role that was now personalized, stationary, even or especially for the littlest corpse.
Rickels, Laurence. "Tot’s Tomb.” in: aRude. Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997. (English).

One child in the 1896 study had been "given a doll so lifelike that she feared it, believing it a dead baby" (147). Smallness makes itself more available to the pupil's range of vision. But it also intensifies the relationship.
Rickels, Laurence. "Tot’s Tomb.” in: aRude. Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997. (English).

But if toys r therapy that's because the savings that can be drawn from play's observance pile up alongside the same danger zone of loss retention and secret burial that holds the primal place of first contact with the small worlds and words of childhood. "One child had tried all her life to keep her doll from knowing she was not alive".
Rickels, Laurence. "Tot’s Tomb.” in: aRude. Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997. (English).

We're deep in the spot marked by the disjunction Freud first lodged, as plaint, inside his essay "Mourning and Melancholia" between mourning and the aberrant forms of mourning, which, however, do not put in their ghost appearance in the same essay, but always in some other place. It's in Totem and Taboo that Freud runs through the program of unmourning with station stops -- stations identification -- at haunting, vampirism, technology, and projection, all of them the stations of a double crossing between our get-well and our death wishes.
Rickels, Laurence. "Mine." in: Victoria Vesna. Terminals. 1.0. 1996. UCSB Web Project. (English).

But Freud als borrows these two sets of analogy from his patients, whose delusional formations and formulations double, always only along these two lines, as endopsychic perceptions, inside views of the dysfunctioning psychic apparatus which anticipate or reproduce Freud's theories of the psychic apparatus. The atmosphere that attends Freud's closing reflections on Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is therefore, at this point of crisis around the endopsychic nature of the paranoid's delusional projections, one of vertiginous indecision whether the psychoanaltyic theory of paranoia is not at the same time the paranoid view of psychoanalysis.
Rickels, Laurence. "Mine." in: Victoria Vesna. Terminals. 1.0. 1996. UCSB Web Project. (English).

In the original record of the Ratman case, Freud attributes to the one who cannot mourn belief in the "omnipotence of thoughts" (a phrase Freud borrowed from Ratman). The early belief that your thought or wish is at the same time a command always finds first application as a death wish.
Rickels, Laurence. "Mine." in: Victoria Vesna. Terminals. 1.0. 1996. UCSB Web Project. (English).

To know Larry Johnson's work is to attend to the silence of over-reading.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

America's reader digestion of "cute" needed the appetizing other and the New York critic to balance the couple act whereby I can have my mass culture and hate it too. It's the standard of exchange between modernism versus postmodernism.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

In Germany the language could only render "cute" as "sweet," which, as Freud reminds us in his case study of Wolfman, brings us back down to the cannibalistic stage of development and belongs, therefore, in this context, to the uniquely German idealization or death cult of childhood. But that belongs to what in cute culture passes as "history."
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

(The blending of gender gets injection-driven into this melting plot of commodification almost, however, as side effect. Simply put up there, every body on display is, in the first place, one mother of a body. Thus the accessible cuteness of young men in the Klein world after all are maternally curved cure-alls for all our oral needs.)
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Cute is the adhesive of our mass media cultures of adolescence. It's so basic to the (libidinal) functioning of everyday life in groups and yet, at the same time, it is our most repressed constant point of contact with our others, our selves. Cute is the password (with the adhesive side out) that improves our circulation, that lets us pass as instantly available for easy libidinization, assimilation, replacement.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Cute takes on a surcharge, embodies an access or excess of assimilation that becomes the one who's "similar," image, double, "like." If you're cute, you like to be different -- like everyone you like -- to be like. Our relations with cuteness always pass through this relay and delay of likeability -- all the way to a same difference that's only as close as it is so far away. The cute are up there with missing persons and all the other unmournable stars of young death.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

In Kantian terms: the cute one is free -- to die.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

The cute refusal of the other keeps what's cute always at the adhesive border of identification's half-life (life with other).
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Gadgets are always cute. Walter Benjamin sees gadget grow out of any old machine function once it has been updated to come complete with the trigger, the click, or the switch on and off that personalizes it for your own use while removing it from the assembly line of a machinic-industrial complex. It marks the spot of internalization we are in when it comes to technology. Internalization, like identification, always begins with trauma.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Cuteness belongs to a transferential-therapy-proof genre of resistance. It's live, not dead or alive. But if the cute one or the one who saw you as cute appear so hard to mourn, then the association that follows also spills over onto transference prospects for future work: mothers and children are at the front of the line of the unmournable body.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

The great lesson of the cave paintings of Lascaux is that art is an intuitive, autonomous, and timeless activity and works independently of the development of society.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Larry Johnson's Madonna piece of prophecy or projection is scrawled across the "Pop cycle" that continues to complete itself in his work. When Warhol opts for the machine's existence or Johnson embraces the likeability axis of mutual internalization and technologization, the point is not to double the isolationism that the more therapeutic brands of analytic theory promote through all-out interventionism.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Warhol wanted to be a machine, and I believe him.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).

Completely technologized work isn't haunted. But in work like Johnson's there's an allegorical tension between the low tech and the high tech that demarcates the damned spot we're in and that won't come out with melancholia. The relentless and makeshift application of the hands-on labors that once went into film titles and cels, and which double thus as replay of the concise history of their progressive innovations, always lead up then to that exquisite endpoint of developments, where the photogenetic transparency slams shut, with a certain cute perfection, right over the work, now contained, after the fact, a fact of life, like Snow White in her coffin.
Rickels, Laurence. "Silence." in: Scott Watson (Editor). Larry Johnson. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, 1996. p. 25-32. (English).