Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness*

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe author investigates a notion of self as political possibility from a multi-displinary perspective that engages the psychoanalytic and philosophical thought of Jung, Žižek, Badiou and Heidegger. The political subject is one who has encountered the real of a particular societal void through the neighbor's unbidden appeal and is thus violently wrenched out of the indifference of banal **existence into a possibility of political action in a world gone mad. To illuminate her theoretical arguments, the author includes her own auto-ethnographic study into the conditions from which an egalitarian-based clinic of care emerged amidst the horror of the AIDS plague when there was no societal support in place. Lastly, the author engages Heidegger's (secondarily Jung and Badiou's) secular reading of the apostle Paul's Christian revolution as a means of elaborating on the transcendental dimension of thought and the conditions for its collective and co-experienced political possibility in today's moment in hi...