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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 28/10/12 07:07, Johannes Birringer
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:DF657B70CB20304DB745D84933F94B1E02560B01A5@v-exmb01.academic.windsor"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">empathy is vital, and moral.</pre>
</blockquote>
habitual and normal<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 27/10/12 17:29, Alan Sondheim wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:alpine.NEB.2.00.1210270004310.23628@panix3.panix.com"
type="cite">pain is different ... I can't communicate to you I'm
dead</blockquote>
<br>
&<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:alpine.NEB.2.00.1210270004310.23628@panix3.panix.com"
type="cite">My mother for example, a highly articulate woman,
could not saying anything coherent towards the end; pain devouted
her.
</blockquote>
<br>
Antonio Damasio (e.g. <i>Looking for Spinoza</i>) shows, to
simplify, the material neuronal causes of such feelings as empathy
in the brain. Catherine Malabou goes further. She invents in <i>The
New Wounded</i>, self-consciously, the philosophical concept of
"cerebrality" to provide an aetiology for psychic events. She cites
the argument of Bruno Bettelheim implying a shared causality of
psychological symptoms in autists and mussulmen - the 1000 yard
stare and - why I bring it in to this discussion - the indifference.<br>
<br>
From Malabou's preamble: "this book is a belated reaction to the
ordeal of depersonalisation to which my grandmother was subjected as
Alzheimer's disease operated upon her. I say "operated" because it
seemed to me that my grandmother, or, at least, the new and ultimate
version of her, was the work of the disease, its opus, its own
sculpture. Indeed, this was not a diminished person in front of me,
the same woman weaker than she used to be, lessened, spoiled. No,
this was a stranger who didn't recognise me, who didn't recognise
herself because she had undoubtedly never met her before."<br>
<br>
And: "I was perfectly aware - along with everyone who must endure
the same spectacle in their own lives - that this absence, this
disaffection, this strangeness to oneself were, without any possible
doubt, the paradoxical signs of profound pain. Later, I learned that
Alzheimer's disease is a cerebral pathology. Could it be that the
brain suffers? Could it be that this suffering manifests itself in
the form of indifference to suffering? In the form of the inability
to experience suffering as one's own? Could it be that there is a
type of suffering that creates a new identity, the unknown identity
of an unknown person who suffers? Could it be that cerebral
suffering is precisely such suffering?"<br>
<br>
(I'd also like respectfully to ask the opposite: if it could be that
an as yet for us unknown person, an identity in the process of
creation, can be equal to cerebral suffering, in the sense in which
Deleuze issues the Stoic challenge of being equal to the wound which
afflicts us? or in other words, acting?)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Simon Taylor<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.squarewhiteworld.com">www.squarewhiteworld.com</a><br>
<br>
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