In the event that there exists no other person in the world, or that we choose to seclude ourselves from the place we live in--we become alone in everything that we do--wouldn't many of the emotions we deal with everyday cease to manifest themselves? As observers and actors in this world, it is other people that dictate our course. Whether we feel agency is in our own hands, and largely it is, there is no recourse or retraction of ourselves from dealing with others. A vow of silence limits us in one small sense, as does cloistering ourselves, but the real apocalyptic notion is that part of our self dies when we remove other people. This is simultaneously comforting and disturbing, as our egos place us next to Ptolemy, yet is lifted and coerced by our daily interactions.
In the case of B, there were no other people, and no sense of time. It seemed that his apocalypse was the culmination and self-implosion of the past, present and future in some space-time combustion. Like Saussure assures us a word is a word based on its 'competing' word--what its not and what its similar too--we too exist in an interactive enviornment where our vailidity as human beings can be based on social interactions i.e. what we identify with and what we leave as something we do not want to be a part of.
The confusion of identity comes in when ideas are left to stew in a single person. There is no philosophy without a social sphere, whether the philosopher be in constant interaction or a spectator, and what causes these writings to appear is the death of a previous notion in the philosopher's head: the need to kill an existing concept in order to replace it with a new one; some kind of dissatisfaction with the existing order. This, I believe is the apocalypse of 'theory.' But like the picture shows one person and involves two, we are able to view theory in a multifaceted perspective--writer, reader, and luckily in a class setting--and thus converse and move with our text. Marx had Engels, and Freud his patients as 'utilities' for 'bouncing' ideas onto and off the page, and if we were truly alone the apocalypse would cease to exist. As it stands, our end is everything we cannot imagine, everything the word 'apocalypse' does not connote or denote.
This is a very helpful re-weaving of some of the threads we've been unraveling in class. I am especially intrigued by this idea: "The confusion of identity comes in when ideas are left to stew in a single person." It would seem, then, that part of our challenge in thinking critically-apocalyptically, if I may inaugurate a clunky phrase, is to always gauge the levels of social engagement—or inversely, removal and detachment—evoked by end-of-the-world (as we know it) narratives. I wonder: does the 'stew of the mind' somehow reflect a (perhaps unconscious) 'stew of the wild planet'?
ReplyDeleteThis is a really thoughtful post. The comment you made on humans identify themselves only in that they are similar/separate from other humans struck me in particular. It's certainly a notion that I have come across in other philosophical studies, but I can certainly attest to its validity. True, who would I be if there was not someone else to verify or juxtapose my qualities. Moreover, the quote Schaberg noted above relates to our Lacan reading on the mirror stage and the "ideal I," which is a purely subjective and personal development of the ego.
ReplyDeleteYes, but remember that for Lacan the "Ideal-I" has a weirdly objective quality, too—weird because it is thrust in an outward (if fictional) direction.
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