A Brief Hystery of the Phantasm

Abstract

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche’s critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual’s growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, who represent the last nail in the imagination’s coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post‐structuralism that follow in Nietzsche’s wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze’s early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille’s emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno’s art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re‐enchanted cosmos.

The invisible other: Rituals and Egyptian perception of the unknowable

“…The invisible Other is used in this research to designate any unseen force (whether benevolent and malevolent) such as the soul, spirit, psyche, angel, ghost, phantasm, double, devil, jinn , and any other imperceptible animate or inanimate object, impacting humans. According to Georges Bataille, “the phantasm is the Other within the self” (Santiago, 2023, 198). Invisible Others are considered synonymous with “metapersons” (Sahlins, 2022) or supernatural beings, as such “scientific knowledge finds no place for them in its account of the natural world” (Strathern, 2019, 4).…”

Dream alliance: Art, anthropology, and consciousness

“…Bruno warned that ordinary language results in “a tremendous loss, first of memory, and then of divine science or magic” (2004, 115). Bruno's language of the gods (composed of images, symbols, signs, signals, figures, gestures, sounds, and other ceremonies (2004, 115)), a few centuries later becomes Rimbaud's derangement of all the senses (which opens to “a universal language” “of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors” (1966, 309)), or Artaud's theater of cruelty (“the theater, which is in no thing , but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness” (1958, 12)), all of which are methods for recovering a sacred synesthetic language that breaks through discourse to restore one's connection to the body, the earth, and the spirits (Santiago 2021, 2023). The difference is that, whereas Bruno was labeled a heretic, Rimbaud and Artaud were diagnosed as mad 3 .…”

“…Flora interacts with figures in a whirl of signifiers such as eyelashes and quotidian objects. Christopher Santiago is an anthropologist and self‐taught artist whose paintings deploy brut techniques to summon phantasms in defiance of western hystery, a concept he has developed in three articles (2019; 2021; 2023). Santiago aligns with outsiders to rival oppressive social ideals, dreaming of redemption.…”