I recently read Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. I was particularly taken by her discussion of the mechanization of the body as more than repression. As she writes:
It also involved the development of new faculties in the individual that would appear as other with respect to the body itself, and become the agents of its transformation. The product of this alienation from the body, in other words, was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as 'otherness' from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it. The emergence of this alter ego, and the determination of a historic conflict between mind and body, represent the birth of the individual in capitalist society.
This leads me to think of the individual as a particular form of enclosure. Individual identity as it emerges with and through capitalism takes form via an enclosing. Feelings, sentiments, and experiences of connection with others (whether alive or dead, real or mythic) and with the world (whether natural or spiritual) are enclosed within the individual as belonging to her. Rather than the individual belonging to the world or her groups, those connections are pulled in to her, becoming properties of her experience. So as not to be alien to her, so as not to enslave her or determine her, they have to treated as objects of her choosing.
What overwhelms the individual will have to be repressed and will thus come to constitute the unconscious. Differently put, Freud--following LeBon--will treat the group or crowd to which we belong as unconscious.
This is an interesting point. What you are calling enclosure Hegel would say defines our freedom and autonomy.
Posted by: Alain | September 07, 2012 at 04:20 PM