Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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Oceanic

“In Freud's view, the oceanic feeling is at one and at the same time the basis of religious sentiments and the ground of a limitless narcissism, the infant's experience of a total lack of difference between itself ant its wold. It is this very lack of difference that, Freud also asserts, allows from primitive man to see nature as an extension of himself ant thus, in phallicizing the fire, to enter into aggressive, sexualized play with it. Civilization will deeroticize the fire, returning it to the reality of its naturalized, desymbolized difference from the human sphere. Civilization will strip the oceanic of this aggressive, undifferenciated lining, will repress it” — Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (1993)

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