The Evocative Object World

Bollas, Christopher

doi:10.4324/9780203889510

Cited by 70 publications

(51 citation statements)

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“…Objects, Christopher Bollas (1992Bollas ( , 2009) tells us, are evocative. As internal objects, representations of figures introjected from early experience are evocative in two ways: as things evoked solely in the mind and as states of mind evoked by objects in the external world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Where might I find you? Objects and internal space for the father

Lewis

2012

Psychoanal Cult Soc

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This article explores the relationship between objects and their role in the recovering of the (my) father. Its distinguishing features include use of lived experience gleaned from memory in combination with cultural and post-Kleinian theory in an exploration of the internal space constituted by oedipal dynamics and domestic space inscribed as 'multiracial'. Its mode is free associative, mirroring the act of remembering. It offers a distinctive contribution to the psychosocial, diaspora and memory literatures in its attempt to chart the simultaneous expansion of internal space and shrinking of 'racial' space that made room for a complicated, yet uncertain, psychic recognition of my father.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Where might I find you? Objects and internal space for the father

Lewis

2012

Psychoanal Cult Soc

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“…Within the psychoanalytic discourse, affect connotes "the subjective transposition of the quantity of instinctual energy" ( [11], p. 14). It is thus distinguished from emotions as "the raw material of our internal life," including "anxiety, rage, and euphoria, in their pure, essential form," whereas emotions constitute a more complex psychic experience, consisting of affects but also of "ideas, memories, unconscious perceptions, derivatives of somatic states, and other mental ingredients" ( [12], p. 26). In contrast to the psychoanalytic tradition, the materialist discourse has developed a "pre-individual" conception of affect: unconfined by the boundaries of a singular body, affect is taken to be always traversing and connecting different-and not only human-embodiments and corporealities [13,14].…”

Section: Affect and The Porous Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject

Zolkos

2016

Humanities

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This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation-of affect and of sentiment-and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational overlaps, but they are both kinds of critique of the liberal individualistic subject. Engaging the methodology of juxtaposition, I bring together the affective porous subject (drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan) with the modern sentiment idea of the sensible body, focusing in particular on the 17th-and 18th-century neurological discourses of sensibility in the work of Albrecht von Haller, Georg Ernst Stahl and others. I argue that the modern sentiment tradition forms part of the genealogy of affect in that its ideas of sensibility and sympathy foreground one of the tenets of affective subjectivity: namely, that the subject emerges through (rather than predates) ecological exposure, membranous permeability and nervous responsiveness. In this sense, both the sentimental and affective notions of the subject operate as forms of critique of the idea of Cartesian self and of the disavowal of relational and/or dialogical subject in Western philosophy.

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“…As we have seen, in popular discourse, the enthusiastic and creative use of the mobile phone is also often shadowed by discourses identifying addiction, relationship breakdown, illiteracy, solipsistic mobile privatism and related, emergent psychosocial problems. We propose that the mobile has become, culturally, a particular kind of "evocative object", following Christopher Bollas's (2009) phraseology, also echoed in the work of Sherry Turkle (2011b). As we discuss, the mobile has become uniquely evocative of the present conjuncture in such a way as to inflect elements in the public discourse, but also in the sense that, as Bollas puts it, it forces us "to think and think again" (Bollas, 2009: 85-6) about psychosocial experience.…”

Section: An Evocative Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%