Pages

Friday, November 2, 2012

Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 9

Alice Kuzniar, “An Unnatural Ecology of the Self: German Romanticism’s Schizoid Symptomology.”
She is an amateur herbalist, she reveals. Homeopathy. German Romanticism: 1796 is the origin of homeopathy. Connection to philosophy and thought of the time. This talk is part of that larger project. 
Idea of vital organic unifying life force. 
Life power that subtends health. 
Irritability? Or sensibility? (Muscles or nerves?) 
Materia Medica Pura: anamorphosis and illness coming to the fore. Not just despite their belief in vital force, but precisely because of it. 
Samuel Hahnemann as "the genius of self-poisoning" (Sloterdijk)
Homeopathy believes in life force. 
Ritter: beauty and the inorganic; spirit within the mineral and plant world; use of analogy
Bizarre self testing, exposing one to toxicity
Hahnemann: a minute process that produces strange bodily effects
law of similars (1796)
He writes on opium: at first you go up, then you go down
Huge lists of adjectives
To determine via close observation himself and other testers what symptoms drugs produced
Recorded and cataloged these indicators to determine how they could be used to cancel the symptoms in the sick 
Not attacking disease but one symptom overcoming the next
Odd imprinting of homeopathic medicine on the body; anamorphosis
vital force in the most miniscule: like the bindus
Ritter had no concept of the body's equilibrium
Infinite referral system of somatic markers; like a body without organs, without any identifying systems
Schizoid practices, like Novalis
undermining organic wholeness idea

No comments:

Post a Comment