On Exception and the Unconscious: Present/Absent, and the Otherness of Childhood

ABSTRACT

This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge. In this article, I turn to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception, those times and places where the law and the norm are suspended, such as we have seen most recently in the context of the COVID pandemic, but is always the case sometimes, in some places, most often regarding particular groups of people. I examine, as examples, two particular exception categories, a status in the Israeli legal code called present/absent, and our modern concept of childhood. I use the notions of present/absent and of childhood to think about what we call in psychoanalysis “the unconscious,” the unconscious as a subjective/collective terrain where what is socially excepted and forbidden becomes that which is psychologically dissociated and disavowed. And I reflect on how a social-theory driven perspective on subjectivity can both complicate and deepen our ability to address the intricacies of human experience.