/lit/ - Literature

>>12375449
another thing.

what postmodernity and deconstructive critique suggests to me today is nothing more than *confession* above all else; in its more cynical form, this is what manifests as rage. *you* have to do something, *society* has to do something...all this. why? because i lack something. what is it? it is what makes me special. and it's all quite horrible. with psychoanalysis, maybe what you are hearing is the confession of protestantism: that with us lies a schizophrenic god, completely committed to pleasure, pain, difference, confusion, bewilderment...and this is indeed what makes us human. Heidegger walks a fine line here: what you want is Being, and thinking in this sense doesn't mean *wanting,* it means *thanking.*

to speak publicly is always a kind of confession; this is maybe what we wind up learning through social media, the fundamental inability to speak without confessing, or being able to mask the desire for a confession. maybe this is why mass adulation is so attractive: what could be better? what could be better than being rewarded for feeling guilty in the right way? what could be more terrible?

but it's also related perhaps to why i find Sun Wukong such a fascinating figure these days. the Monkey King is the crown prince of all differences; he is incarnate rage, wrath, confusion, a truly schizophrenic hero. but he has nothing to confess, because he is at bottom not *evil.* Wukong is entirely monkey; he is essence-of-monkey. but his 'conversion' to Buddhism isn't synonymous with salvation. it is just the beginning of his road to enlightenment, which is a path along which he stumbles continually throughout the remainder of the work.

i don't know, i just think that there is an aspect of confession in utopianism, utopianism is a built-in feature within revolutionary socialism. the absence of anything beyond mere happiness is what makes neoliberalism unbearable, but the absence of anything beyond *confession* is what makes socialism unbearable also...no? isn't this exactly the problem with writing postmodern critique, this sense of being unable to meld in perfectly with a crowd, to remain on the Right Side of History, to really convince yourself that the scapegoat really must be destroyed in the name of some Greater Good?

i suspect that all of this sounds crazy. it probably is. my sense is that i would rather vent my own craziness than rationalize it, which is mostly part of why i post here. where else? the whirlwinds of weird thoughts that i think are obviously symptoms, but i think this symptom is in everyone, in some sense, and that the real issue is with the idea of normativity itself: that is, the myth of the Healthy Polis: either the one of the Present (neoliberalism), the Past (fascism) or the Future (communism). all of these are aspects of time that appeal to us because, we think, Someday I'll Be Okay - or maybe it is the world that will be okay...

(cont'd)