Editorial

In recent decades critiques of a dualist structure embedded in Western thought have increased in force. The targets of these critiques have included Plato's division of forms from substance, Descartes' separation of mind from matter, and, more recently, Sigmund Freud's ego-consciousness and the unconscious. While the obvious alternative to a dualist ontology is a monist conception of the world, such as we find in physicalism or in Spinoza's notion of Being, this issue of *Inscriptions*, prominently featuring several contributions to last summer's Ereignis *Beyond dualism* Conference, suggests the event, or the notion of *becoming*, as an alternative. Drawing on the ontological split between Heraclitus and Parmenides in Ancient Greek philosophy, the conference sought to investigate the extent to which we can still find traces of these two world-views: a Heraclitean world in flux and a Parmenidean static universe.

In a versatile and diverse essay Jørgen Veisland shows how quantum physics provide tools to bridge the gap between an ontological split between the physical and spiritual domains, which Aristotle thought to be manifest in the division of humans from animals. Drawing on ideas from Søren Kierkegaard, a series of literary readings, and a number of modern artworks, Veisland shows how the notion of entropy can bridge such dualist divisions.

Jeremy Fernando takes the split between self and other, writer and reader, as his starting point in a creative intervention that suggests the act of translation as an event that already opens up to the possibility of another. Together with acts of love, translation radically transform the self -- the text. As acts of translation and love can fundamentally alter the text, they may also prepare the ground for a fundamental betrayal: the translator, as much as

the lover, can in their efforts to bridge the gap between the source and target languages, the author and the reader, themselves and the other, commit a radical act of treason. However, as Fernando notes, who this act of betrayal is committed *against* remains an open question: is it the text, the writer, the other, their relation or something else that is betrayed? The possibilities are seemingly endless.

Whether psychoanalysis has perpetuated Descartes' split between mind and body has been a topic of some contention. One view holds that while there is some justification for claiming that the early Freud adhered to Descartes' view of the mind-body relationship, in his writings from about the turn of the century onward Freud advocated a more continuous, unified theory of mind-brain relations. However, as Lucy Huskinson shows in this issue, important dualisms persisted in Freud's thought, prominent among them the split between (ego-)consciousness and the unconscious, "each with their own ways of Being and rules of behaviour." While it is fair to acknowledge psychoanalysts' increasing orientation towards the physical world in their burgeoning materialist theory (spurring some commentators to find in Freud a reduction of mental phenomena to physical processes), the obverse of psychoanalysis' emphasis on interpersonal relationships was a certain blindness to the ways in which the material world shapes our psychological wellbeing. In her essay Huskinson examines the significance of built environments for the theories of Freud and Jung: while Jung approached such environments more defensively, Freud remained open, "probably more than he himself realized or was willing to accept," as Huskinson notes.

In his rumination on Bruno Latour's posthu-
manism David Antolínez asks whether a more
symmetrical framework can be used as a lever
to “purge” modern psychology of its perva-
sive dichotomies. After outlining the divisions
between classical epistemology and Latour’s
approach to science and philosophy, Antolínez
searches for ways to move beyond a psychol-
ogy rooted in such dichotomies, a project that
derives its importance not the least from the sig-
nificant role psychology plays in what Latour
called the “Modern Constitution.”

This issue of *Inscriptions* also features contri-
butions by Jeremey Spencer on the aesthetics

of living historically in the context of Godard's
film *Tout va Bien*, by Mikołaj Marks on pos-
sible worlds theory and Cormac McCarthy's
*Blood Meridian*, and by Jan Gresil Kahambing
on meta-curation and antifragile realism.

*Inscriptions* is an independent, peer-reviewed journal on philosophy, psycho-analysis and the arts. While our online edition is open and free, we also publish a pretty print-edition. To support us purchase a copy of it from our distributor. More information is available at https://backcopies.tankebanen.no/.

Copyright © 2024 *Inscriptions*.

**Correspondence:** *Inscriptions*, e: inscriptions@tankebanen.no.

**How to cite:** *Inscriptions*. Editorial. *Inscriptions* 7, no. 1 (January 2024): 7-8.
Creative criticism