The opening lines of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic specifies the term ‘normal’ as what obtains “for man, at least,” and this at a certain level (in the sense of Lacan’s discussion of everything in terms of ‘levels’), picking up what is meant by ‘normal’ in those cases as that which addresses regions of the soul, after Aristotle. This is the context in which is couched ‘our normal faculty of representation’ that makes use of ‘sensation and real objects of sense.’ To locate the kind of discourse we are dealing with as specific to certain levels of functioning among certain kinds of men eliminates much obfuscation in the way that Bergson’s wet fish analogy cleared the field of unnecessary clutter. So now it might be said that only at a certain level of mind, only among certain men functioning collectively at some level, their mind characterizable by this region of soul they inhabit, is a real object of sense thought of as the underlying substance requisite to intuition and to knowing, to coherence, survival, to understanding which, even though this is possible only through representation, there persists the notion of the representation of a body as having those attributes belonging to a sensation and to a really existing body. At a certain level but not at all levels the representation that confronts you reflects your own need for certitude in comprehending what it is that you apprehend. At another level the representation appears as it does if you insist on material demonstrability, then it becomes a question of what is available and what is not. At another level the representation is what you “deserve” in a moral ethical sense. At another level the representation is the opposite of what you’d want owing to an overinvestment in what you already had and lost. All of which is to say it is not God or a superior intellect or our ancestors who require a real object of sense in order to function, i.e., who require an encounter with the real, with the tuche, with suffering, in order to know. Where it is made obvious that representations relying on a material body have a greater force for collective dissemination, often this is merely having to do with inertial laws, such that any so-called ‘social momentum building’ proceeding from it is not the same as real motion arising from contemplative activity and the correct weighing of reasons in terms of their ability to stand on their own, i.e., not reasons made kosher in recognition of the faults of man including his being dependently originated. Kant wrote in his Transcendental Critique that his was a critique and not a doctrine because it aimed not at enlargement but at the correction and guidance of knowledge in order to serve as “the touchstone of the worth or worthlessness of all knowledge a priori.” A survey of the worth or worthlessness of man-made knowledge that antecedes you – is it ideology, mythology, or empirically valid? – entertains claims on the side of critical discourse which would expose self-evident truths as in fact constructed. If such claims were sincere, then it would be evident that in the construction of conditions for possibility you’d have to desire such that possibility is not in actuality impossibility, fate, ‘destiny,’ inevitability to be otherwise. To say now, for example, that the promise of salvation all along symbolized the duration necessary for the Other to be rebuilt is suspect as soon as you recall the reality that any incremental increase arising from this duration has always been appropriated for the strengthened credibility of the Other to maintain existing property relations and not lines laid down in preparation for real renewal, renewal that is not merely re-instantiation of previous authority. While the symbol of law and order can’t be “renewed” with violence, obviously, it can fall short of giving expression to aspects of the real that run in excess of it. But death has always run in excess of the Other’s power to represent it fully, sensically. It’s when the Other no longer suffices in any reasonable capacity to console or compensate for tremendous loss and in fact authorizes repeated tremendous loss in order to re-instantiate itself that it is called into question.Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2018 Shumi Ferguson