An Ontological Break
摘要
After establishing a Lacanian interpretation of Dick’s Exegesis, this final chapter places the textual madness within the Exegesis in respect of paranoid knowledge. In effect, it demonstrates how the psychosis weaving its way through the many pages of the Exegesis is simultaneously illustrative of Dick’s postmodern historical moment. I take up his discussion of time, or orthogonal time, to show how his seemingly mad, delusional and paranoid ravings about his altered state do, in fact, strike a chord with technological and epistemological/ontological developments in our global appreciation of temporal dynamics. The chapter concludes by arguing that just like the refracted, highly idiosyncratic knowledge detectable in Schreber’s mad cosmology, similar cultural, historical and philosophical themes can be detected in the ontological break Dick witnessed and committed to script at the close of the twentieth century. However, this interpretation is just one amongst many that can be deduced from the Exegesis due to the overdetermined nature of any psychoanalytic reading. Developing modes of interpretation that are open, porous or democratic, ones that are able to incorporate multiple, often contradictory lines of exposition is key to any ethical engagement by psychoanalysis in the realm of mad writing. An engagement that will provide a cornerstone to Lacan’s relevance to the broader critical psychiatry domain.