Kill (Giegerich)

The kill is Wolfgang Giegerich‘s technical term for the active-determinative act of killing without which — on his reading — the alchemical-psychological operation of dismemberment remains mere disintegration rather than genuine transformation. Against Hillman‘s archetypal imagistic tradition, which Giegerich accuses of cocooning itself in its own imaginings, the Giegerichian reading insists that the soul is made by acts of negation and killing, not merely by contemplation.

The kill is the linchpin of Giegerich’s critique of archetypal psychology (see archetypal-psychology-charter and souls-logical-life): “on principle” Hillman rejected killing as a primary mode of soul-making, and in Giegerich’s judgment that refusal is why archetypal psychology “does not really connect with reality” (Giegerich 2020). What the alchemical mortificatio enacted in chemical operation and the archaic rite of sparagmos enacted in cultic dismemberment — the active killing of the old form so that the new can be — must, Giegerich insists, be enacted thinkingly if the soul’s logical life is to proceed. The position is sharp, contested, and central to the internal polemics of post-Jungian thought. See souls-logical-life.

Relationships

• wolfgang-giegerich
• dismemberment
• mortificatio