Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Urban Arabesques examines philosophy as an event of the city and the city as an event of philosophy and how the intertwining of the two generates an urban imaginary. This critique-in-motion of creative figures and conceptual personae from (non) philosophy illuminates the emergence of sense in the city, shows how "transcendental empiricism" operates within it, and how the everyday life of the streets--the ordinariness of experience as well as the screen/projector of urban surfaces--uncovers new pathways for politics, experience, and relationalities. Using Hong Kong as the primary site of thinking yet recognizing that thinking incessantly moves beyond any particular location, the book opens up cities within the city. Traversing Hong Kong reveals how the corners, the money, the trees and the water are involved in philosophy. Combining the linguistic approach found in Heidegger and Derrida, with the more materialist analysis of Serres and Deleuze, the objective of this book is to retheorize the urban and its imaginary--its virtuality, irreality, phantasmicity--with an emphasis on signs, images and rhythms, resonating through philosophy, and beyond.

Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality

Urban Arabesques

In Narcissus Transformed, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren interprets Narcissus as thematizing the tragic situation of the postmodern subject. After showing the connections between Cartesian philosophy and narcissism, he proceeds to lay out the function of Narcissus as a poetic figure of discourse in the fields of psychoanalysis and modern fiction. He moves beyond the description of narcissism to an interpretation of the conditions necessary for Narcissus, the beautiful boy captivated by his own image, to become a different kind of subject. The topos of narcissism, which is first articulated by Ovid, always includes within itself a mirror, a gap, self-referential desire, and death--all of which culminate in Narcissus's inability to make space for an Other. Kochhar-Lindgren contends that this is the founding topos of modern philosophy, which is then incorporated into and transmuted by the disciplines of psychoanalysis and fiction. With the extensive work of Freud on narcissism, it becomes a central concept for psychoanalysis; and with Lacan's interpretation of the narcissist as phantom, statue, and automaton, narcissism moves into a specifically textual interpretation of subjectivity. Kochhar-Lindgren then provides close readings of fictional texts---The Waves by Virginia Woolf, The Ogre by Michel Tournier, and Daniel Martin by John Fowles--to show more explicitly the textual construction of the narcissistic subject and to suggest ways that Narcissus might be transformed into a subject not held in thrall to the "glassy-eyed stare of Thanatos." He concludes with an enactment, from a Lacanian and fictional perspective, of the beginnings of the undoing of the narcissistic topos of contemporary culture. Narcissus steps from the self-reflective mirror into a theater; he stops longing to be a purely self-reflexive work in order to become part of the play of a text.

The Textual Subject in Psychoanalysis and Literature

Narcissus Transformed

Bent Sorensen

Night Cafe is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Cafe brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others. "These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sorensen) "When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Cafe, after inspecting the menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concave receptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination, reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafes of Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills are desirable & free " (Robert Gibbons)

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

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