On Discursivity and Neurosis: Conditions of Possibility for (West) Discourse with Others

Abstract

Introduction:  The alliance of discursivity with neurosis on the one hand, and an exploration of new conditions of discourse on the other, conditions now self consciously denoted as 'West', gives notice of a certain disillusionment I feel with my culturally received, monotheistic valourization of the power of 'word-ing' (rendered as discourse, reasoning, dialoguing, conversation, etc.), and my sense that the problem is not discourse per se, but the way my understanding of it is, or has been, too stuck within its own cultural self enclosure, within the compound of its own cultural grammar, one might say.  In taking up these issues within the context of a conference convened to consider "Fragmentation and the Desire for Order/Unity" play off each other relationally, or symbiotically (which they probably do) but how so inevitably and incidentally in the West that play-off has a neurotic tail-chasing character that is inspired precisely by Desire.  My remarks, therefore, about the possibilities of new conditions of discourse for the West, turn most profoundly on a problematizing of Desire itself.