What Then for My Soul? Subjectivity, Existential Enablement, and the Metaphorics of Psychic Life

Dissertation, Harvard University (2000)
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Abstract

What Then For My Soul? is a theoretical treatise that explores the contemporary Western subject's loss of spiritual bearings, and seeks to build a critical vocabulary with which to address this loss. While my study is rhetorically centered around the trope of the soul, it deals more generally with issues of psychic life, freedom, and agency. My argument is that the Western subject has lost its ability to meaningfully narrate its existence, to craft the kinds of mythologies of existential enablement that would empower it to construct an evocative metaphorics for its psychic life. My contention is, furthermore, that our existing critical understanding of identity does not adequately address those components of subjective experience that are most immediately connected to the individual's most cherished existential aspirations. Consequently, my discussion is primarily devoted to the examination of those aspects of our lives---love, desire, loss, sadness, suffering, and the unpredictable unfolding of fate and fortune---that most intimately impact our psychic and spiritual destinies. My hope is that an investigation of these fundamental sites of existential meaning will furnish us with a conceptual opening into the mysterious inner regions of the post-humanist soul. My project, at once psychoanalytic and philosophical, draws its inspiration from the central paradigms of contemporary critical thought, but also examines key texts of Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, particularly insofar as these texts scrutinize the connection between self-actualization and aesthetics

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