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Dismemberment (as logic, not event)

Dismemberment

For Giegerich, Dionysian dismemberment is neither an image to be amplified nor an emotional experience a subject may undergo. It is “not a particular event” and “not a style of consciousness, but a ‘logic’” (Giegerich 2020, p. 265). The dismemberment is the dissolution of the imaginal mode itself — the logical operation by which the image is carried through its own negation into the Notion.

The analysis is grounded in the Actaeon myth. What is dismembered is not only the hunter: “It is ‘shape’ as such, the notion of shape. The whole mode of ‘imagining things’ is decomposed. The end of the myth is a radical attack on the image, or better: the imaginal mode” (Giegerich 2020, p. 260). The myth ends with the instruction to de-imagine its own figures — the hunter, the bathing nudes, the transformation, even the dismemberment — in order to acquire “a ‘sublimated,’ ‘fermented,’ sublated understanding of it as conceptual thought, as our thinking, as the Notion” (Giegerich 2020, p. 260).

The kill is the linchpin. Without the active determination to kill, the dismemberment would be “just a positive fact, perhaps an ordinary butchering” (Giegerich 2020, p. 273). Hillman, Giegerich observes, “on principle rejected the idea of killing as a primary mode of soul-making” — citing Hillman’s “Once More into the Fray: A Response to Wolfgang Giegerich’s ‘Killings’” (Spring 56, 1994). The absence of the kill from archetypal-psychology-charter‘s theory is, for Giegerich, why that psychology “does not really connect with reality. Its approach cocoons it into its own imaginings” (Giegerich 2020, p. 273).

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