The Quilting Point: post-structuralist ethics Grant Gillett

Structuralism The divisions are arbitrary. The signifiers slide over one another. The link to reference – the actual world is tenuous and undefined except in discourse.

The ambiguity of discourse Lacan: the sliding of the signifier over the signified. Abner and Jehoiada A plot, a soldier, a queen, and a priest. “the fear of God” “connects or hooks the discourse into a clear line of thought that disambiguates what is being said and produces a moment of insight in the participants whereby they see what the other is thinking” … “This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate I shall call a quilting point”(The psychoses, 267)

Meaning and the human life-world The human life - world a place of memory and adaptation “read through” or “seen in” the mirror of language. Language - an artefact for the communication and construction of the imaginary collectively and individually The imaginary - a shifting relationship to the actual or situated experience of a human being therefore room for slippage. Crossing cultures - potential & actual slippage we cannot always adjust our thinking to the ways of meaning we encounter we lose sight of how they are making sense of the engagement.

Planes of signification and the actual Planes of universal signification, ? the natural sciences. aim to track objects that are independent of our thoughts about them. Tracking, articulating, making meaning is always “interested” “Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest.” (Wittgenstein, PI, #569). We convey and refine thoughts through argument, The phenomena of culture - not universal in the way that natural science aspires to be.

Methodology and the quilting point Triangulation co-cultural thinkers and a situation subjectivities from diverse cultures & a third thing. (Kant). Immersion in “meaning as use”(Wittgenstein) “The common behaviour of mankind” (PI, #206). A critical clarification and engagement with culturally specific representations to seek an (?uneasy) reflective equilibrium. Intuitions, conjectures, interpretations, and instinctive responses examined with alertness for covert assumptions and modes of thinking that will hamper

Methodologising AHA! Quilting point - an “Aha!” moment that unambiguously and strikingly connects us with another in a context. Connection in human meaning that disambiguates but not just information. Vertical connections – tentative alignments of cultural connections between ways of understanding and structures of knowledge.

The importance of quilting points The schema of the quilting point is essential in human experience.”(Lacan, 268) It radiates into the discourses which it fixes, as lines arise around an upholstery button, It is irreducibly human … recognising the other as “like me but over there” in a very deep sense. Shared being - not just biological Agamben: voices. Heidegger: Dasein-mitsein. Out of the world we cannot fall (Freud) [even for the objectifying purposes of the academy.] Levinas – the “face” time that glimpses the enigma

Clinical Applications Psychiatry as in Lacan’s initial insight. Psychotic speech. Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms. Cross cultural clinical communication. End of life care and “telling the truth” e.g. !brain haemorrhage! Abandon Hope all ye who enter here! Cancer treatment. “We want you to do the treatment; just don’t tell him it is cancer.”