Abstract

This dissertation takes as problematic the modern totalization of mediation and the mediator, with modern man's greatest danger instantiated by the emptying out of that receptacle into which the once-privileged "subject" has been transformed. Meaning is a matter of the public, psycho-dynamics the colonization of the individual, and American psychology has turned man into a messenger but never a message. And the emptying of the "private" into the "public" is the essence of fascism, which is why this dissertation is actually about politics and oppression. ;We engage the potential reactivity of the totalization of the public, the trace, and the text within post-structural critique, this emptying of the subject within textuality taken as problematic. Proceeding with tools bequeathed us by Freud and Lacan--who as two of the greatest architects of subjugation have revealed for us most clearly the articulations of subjection--we begin an exploration of that Freudian corpus enframing much of the thought emergent in this century and enter upon an inquiry into the place within that corpus of an enigmatic "mystic" named du Prel. Our analysis leads us to an engagement of the historical crystallization of this discourse: specifically, the relationship between Kant and his doppleganger, Swedenborg, and between Descartes and Giordano Bruno. ;Enframing the theoretical articulations of modernity, we find a repression of immediacy as that danger which the subject poses to the socius: immediacy knows no laws, truth-values, or property-rights. We pursue the trail left by this irritant in a generative mapping from Descartes to the present. Finally, operating in loose affinity with a language of the immediate productivity of desire generated by Deleuze and Guattari, we examine two powerful proponents of non-alienation, Nietzsche and Artaud. ;We do not herein speak from immediacy or in its name, but merely invoke the emptying which has occurred--its linkages--and seek to establish the legitimacy of seeking for lines of escape and engagement. To raise the question of the legitimation of immediacy, within which questions of "verification", consensus, and compromise cease to significate except as the articulations of threat, is enough for now