/lit/ - Literature

>>11248879
>>11250061
>>11250077
> the very things which give us individuality (a sense of self defined against others) make total understanding and lack of pain impossible. … The Human Instrumentality Project, then, represents this Thanatotic desire to overcome the pain of existence by returning to the imaginary stage before individuality existed. Indeed, Rei later describes the post-Instrumentality world to Shinji in blatantly Lacanian terms, describing it as “an ambiguous world where it is impossible to tell where you end and other people start” (“End”).

> The Human Instrumentality Project creates a state wherein interpersonal conflict and pain do not exist, but does so at the cost of individual existence; indeed, it negates the very conditions that make individuality possible. In this sense, NERV’s solution amounts to little more than “running away” into otaku isolationism, and the manner in which Evangelion proceeds to its conclusion attests to Anno’s agreement.

>Reframing the inevitability of pain as a type of freedom seems to bring him a great degree of existential comfort. Reflecting the Lacanian title of the episode, Shinji finds his identity cannot exist without the ability to compare his view of himself against the discrepant versions of himself existing in the minds of others: “I am nothing but I. I am I. I wish to be I.” In their way, other people are just as central to his personality as he himself.

>In the end, Shinji rejects the Human Instrumentality Project as false, and reaches the same conclusion as Anno: while co-existence brings pain, the only alternative is a grim one – the total dissolution of the self.

>In rejecting a painless loss of identity in favor of defining his own existence at the risk of pain, Shinji has risen above the short-sighted isolationism Anno earlier disparaged.

human instrumentality as the collective withdrawl from samsara, the pain of differentially determined, isolated individuals struggling to navigate and cope with a world that is the very basis of that individuality

absolute selfhood is absolute non-being: the subject is defined by the very core of objectivity that protrudes into it, the ex-timate core, an interiority that is simultaneously an exteriority: what I am the negative space I define, what I am is fundamentally what I am not, what has to exceed me to make me