What is Soul?

'Soul' is often hijacked and commodified--bypassed--by dead objects and artifact, but "What Is Soul?" Wolfgang Giegerich— "third wave" post-Jungian theory helps us to consider soul deeper and closer to the core, redeeming its process once more from the clenches of the hyper-rationalism of the intellect. Quite a paradox!

From the Chapter The Corpse & the Perceiving Mind & the Soul as Sublated "Corpse":

"Although doubtlessly the sacred books of the great religions record soul experiences, the sacred books themselves are not an actual bodily presence of soul the same way that a living tree or tiger is a bodily presence of natural life. Those books as such are in themselves dead objects, soulless matter. They only become events of soul if there is an understanding mind and a feeling heart that reads and appreciates them, and only through such a mind and heart. This is to be taken deeply as an if-then-than-that axiom. The text cannot produce the feeling heart and understanding mind. The acoustic sounds of words and sentences are something physical. But they become a 'moment' of soul only if there is a mind that pushes off from the sounds and thereby in itself creates the corresponding meanings. Music is certainly an expression of soul, but not their scores. Music like soul exists only in the actual event of being. Soul as 'energia' does not appear at all in space, not in a thing-like manner, embodied, but 'only in time. It is essentially performative. The life of the soul, rather than being metastable and having a natural existence, is totally ephemeral. Even its very form of realization and actualization is incorporeal, unnatural, fundamentally sublated, distilled, vaporized: momentary act. It is only in the doing: in the act of process of awareness, feeling appreciation, contemplative comprehension. In the soul, the dance as logical negativity, has truly come home to itself. It is really just a dance with no dancers, nothing but a dance. It is and stays logically negative, exclusively negative, not even metastable.

"When the moment of understanding, of deep feeling, of poetic or musical appreciation is over, the soul is gone and only a dead thing, a music score, the dead letters of a printed book, a canvas full of paint, remains. What in the case of soul does get embodied is only its one sublated moment: the corpse, the produced work as a dead record, the words in the sense of "words, words, words," the letter, not the animated spirit. It only seems that all the works of culture that often appear in indestructible stone or bronze or in a poetic monumentum aere perennius ("a monument more lasting than bronze," Horace) are the objective manifestation of soul, because we a priori apperceive them. But they themselves are and stay only its corpse (latin, corpus) that, if soul is to come to life, needs to be awakened through the act of appreciations: extra corpus! It is an act that does not happen "in" them the way biological life happens in the body. The printed book stays printed. They are mere insinuating signs that need 'our' soul-making, that is, our negating them, our pushing off from them into the extra corpus sphere of shared meanings indicated by them, our inwardizing them into their absolute negativity. Only in the understanding, appreciating, feeling sense, and not in the cultural 'erga' themselves, can the soul be really born into the world as negative presences which question the spirit of things. Soul itself is fundamentally—and this means inescapably—temporary, fleeting."