You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How can we think the movement of life within any culturally specific symbolic framework? First, thought emerges from and follows experience, in the après-coup instituted by potential temporality; moreover, any representational reflection is conditional on the categorical givens proffered by language. These prerequisites of necessity apply to psychoanalytic conceptualizations if, when all is said and done, the psychoanalyst is a sentient and speaking being, and hence subjected to the symbolic order.
The French philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien interrogates the assumption of naturalness of the Western categorical binaries - Being and non-Being, life and death, good and evil, subject and object, and similar chains of opposites - from a position outside the philosophical Western tradition. From his perspective of scholar of the Chinese language, classical and modern poetry, philosophy and military strategy, he observes that, unlike the Chinese language, whose structure accommodates transformations and renders them thinkable, since Plato Western thought has not developed the conceptualizations apt to capture
transitions. Hence, when Western subjects become aware of their white hair, it is as though suddenly the reality of old age strikes them irrefutably. Similarly, being in love and having fallen out of love are often experienced as diverse and discontinuous states.
Jullien’s work - I argue - seems an apposite reference while reading Goldman’s Introduction to A Beholder’s Share, where he explicates the circumstances of his encounter with Winnicott when he was tasked with the translation into Hebrew of the phrase “going on being” during his stint in Israel as young man. “I did not know that English” - he concluded, but it may be more accurate to deduce that he did not comprehend that Hebrew, which has no word for “being”, except the etymological root of the word God. It transpires that reading Winnicott from the location of cultural otherness constituted a piv