circulation within my skull

“ It is thus clearly here that the analysis of the ego finds its ideal terminus: that in which the subject, having refound the origins of his ego in an imaginary regression, comes, by the progression of remembering, to its end in analysis-namely, the subjectification of his death.

“ Shouldn’t the true termination of an analysis - and by that I mean the kind that prepares you to become an analyst - in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition? It is precisely, that in connection with anxiety, Freud designated as the level at which its signal is produced, namely, Hilflosigkeit or distress, the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death…and can expect no help from no one.

“ A similar claim apropos subjectivity merits advancement: horrified revulsion is not without its subject. That is to say, if psychoanalysis is indeed correct to maintain that the subject ontogenetically emerges through and comes to constitute itself by a sort of radical, primordial gesture of negating rejection (whether as Freud’s primal/primary repression as original Verwerfung or Verneinung, Lacan’s cut of symbolic castration, or Julia Kristeva’s abjection), then feelings of revulsion toward the corporeal substratum of the mortal body essentially are indicative of the presence of a form of subjectivity resistant to being collapsed back into its material foundation.

“ …nobody can experience his own death (since it requires life in order to experience); he can only observe it in others. Whether death is painful cannot be judged from the rattling in the throat or the convulsions of the dying person, this seems to rather be a mechanical reaction of the vital power, and perhaps it is a gentle sensation of the gradual release from all suffering. The natural fear of death, entertained by even the most unhappy, or the most wise, therefore is not a fear of dying, but rather…a fear of having died (that is, of being dead). This is a thought the victim of death expects to entertain after dying, because he thinks of the corpse as himself, though it no longer is, and he thinks of it as lying in a dismal grave, or somewhere else. This deception cannot be removed because it is inherent in the nature of thinking as a way of speaking to oneself and of oneself. The thought, I am not, cannot exist at all; because if I am not, then it cannot occur to me that I am not. I may indeed say that I am not well, and so forth, and negate similar predicates of myself (as happens with all verba); but to negate the subject itself when speaking in the first person (thereby destroying itself) is a contradiction.