Malkina S.M. Overcoming of Metaphysics: Psychoanalytical Interpretation (the History of One Phobia)

Abstract: The question of metaphysics, its forms and actual meaning to modernity is one of the themes that are actively debated in almost all trends of philosophy. The attitude toward metaphysics is the key to understanding not only philosophical views of hermeneutics, analytical philosophy or deconstruction but also establishment of problematics of modernism and postmodernism in contemporary culture. The problem of overcoming of metaphysics, constantly renewable in the philosophy, is examined by Malkina from the point of view of the psychoanalytic approach to the study of various phobias that reveals the underlying foundation of the philosophical problem of fear towards metaphysics. The use of the psychoanalytic method of interpretation of philosophical problems is based on the choice of philosophers’ conceptual personae as the subjects of analysis that are in a certain relation to their own text and to their predecessors. The novelty of the study consists, firstly, in description of the united problem field of the various projects of overcoming of metaphysics in philosophy, secondly, in identification of the philosophical foundations of metaphysical phobias, and thirdly – in usage of psychoanalytic methodology for this purpose. The main conclusions of this paper are following: in terms of the Oedipus complex the overcoming of metaphysics is based on the anxiety of influence felt towards a predecessor; the active negation can be interpreted as an attempt to repress the metaphysical content of their own thinking; and a tendency to repeat the overcoming of metaphysics can be explained as the death drive. Psychoanalytic interpretation of overcoming of metaphysics does not mean that it is something that ought to be 'cured' but takes us “beyond” metaphysics to post-metaphysical thinking as the endless work on the senses in philosophy where the very process of such work brings release and satisfaction.

Keywords: