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Six: A Self of One’s Own?
- Fordham University Press
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s i x A Self of One’s Own? Only where man is essentially already subject does there exist the possibility of his slipping into the aberration of subjectivism in the sense of individualism. But also, only where man remains subject does the positive struggle against individualism and for the community as the sphere of those goals that govern all achievement and usefulness have any meaning. — m a r t i n h e i d e g g e r , ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’ He asked her one night which one of herselves was sleeping with him. And all she could reply was: this one.’’ — c a r r i e o l i v i a a d a m s , ‘‘Vermilion’’ in A Useless Window Our identity is always a case of mistaken identity. — m e l a n i e k l e i n , in A. S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess Consider the little games lovers play with each other. You know the kind: ‘‘Would you still love me if I was in a horrible accident and lost both my legs? Or if my face became paralyzed and I always spoke like this? Or if I lost my job and had to clean toilets? Or if I suddenly started wearing those jeans with the transparent pockets we saw yesterday in that shop window?’’ The perfectly reasonable assumption is that beneath this litany of horrors is a unique being worthy of being loved, a being immune from physical distortion or fashion disasters. But what is it exactly that we love about this being, if we cannot confidently locate a definable essence? Are we happy to just answer, ‘‘Their soul’’? Some kind of intangible kernel of being? If so, then how do we assimilate the trauma of the second love? How do we account for the insult of multiplicity, as discussed in the previous chapter? The ever reductionist Alain de Botton sums up the problem quite succinctly in his book Essays in Love: ‘‘Once we locate beauty in the eye of the beholder, what will happen when the observer looks elsewhere?’’ (1994, 129 130 Love and Other Technologies 101). Clearly, love is not simply the harmonious blending of two complementary contents—the contents of our unique individualities. We could not find a less appropriate symbol than the combination of yin and yang to represent the subtextual decodings of the lover’s discourse, since the complementarity is too Neoplatonic, too complicitious with the discourse itself. ‘‘There but for the grace of God go I,’’ states the folk wisdom, recognizing the invisible contingencies which separate us from our neighbors (an aphorism which shares a rhetorical kinship with the deceptively profound ‘‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another.’’ A lottery ticket, a different science teacher, an allergy to spaniels, an unassuming foreskin, and, indeed, the Grace of God itself may be the only things which we can point to as the bases of distinguishing Tom from Dick from Harriet.1 The crucial move, however, is to make this statement stand without relying on the naı̈ve onto-liberalism that would posit a shared substance, specifically ‘‘humanity,’’ which is only then, through life’s trials and tribulations , imprinted with ‘‘difference’’ (i.e., identity). The trick is not to advocate a Homo generica, or Home-Brand Humanity, which exists a priori to experiential grids such as ethnicity, class, and gender, only then to be shaped through time. Instead, we must give serious thought to a constitutive difference at the very origin (Stiegler would say ‘‘default’’) of being, which itself is the medium of transmission—to share the fact that we have nothing to share, not even our somatic structures, since these can be radically revised through birth, injury, surgery, or design.2 This is all to say that some very complicated maneuvers are being made whenever we utter the personal pronoun ‘‘I.’’ Indeed, the mysterious inconsistencies of deixis challenge the authority of Descartes’s ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’ by stalling any self-evident logic at the dictum’s very first word (the first letter, even!). To illustrate this a little further, it seems useful to turn to that different kind of default: literature. In his novel The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad invites the reader to an Italian restaurant in London, which we see through the eyes of the assistant commissioner of police: The patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of...