Tag: World

Surrender upon demand | US experience part one

After about two weeks in the United States, there is to much too keep in. Writing seems the only sane response to the variety of experiences that cannot be but leave an impression.

After about two weeks in the United States, there is too much to keep in. Writing seems the only sane response to the variety of experiences that cannot be but leave an impression.
I could start with the initial wonder, those couple of days walking around in a haze, the filmset that was movie around me, that I didn’t want to touch anything so that it would not become too real. The steam coming out of put holes in the streets of New York. People walking like they have nowhere to be except right there, in that walk, walking the walk, as stand-ins, always ready for something to happen. The woman in the metrostation randomly starting to talk to me about her life. The people asking me if I have a problem with black men. The New York skyline from a rooftop in Astoria, and it not sparkling me as it should.
Continue reading “Surrender upon demand | US experience part one”

The Impossibility of an Original Self

There is always already the world with me in it (Heidegger). There is no me without the Other (Levinas). I am a product of my time. Everything I think and do is framed, already framed, in language. If there is a protolanguage, an original structure, this will always remain a mystery for me, as it is always me thinking it.
Nobyeni
Any existentialist conceptions of the Self, a being free of the Other, a being able to choose freely, is merely a product of our time. Existentialism is its own mauvaise foi. Even as a philosopher, how am I to know I am not merely satisfying my human longing, desire, for change, for freedom, existence?
As such all my thinking is fully grounded in today’s world: the illusion of being original. The search for a breaking of this structure, this world, is in vain. The idea of an Event (Badiou), a search for the impossible possible (Derrida), etc etc, is itself a product of our paradigm and as such it is impossible to use it as a starting point for the finding of a possibility for a rupture. And if we do find a break, a rupture, will it mean we have created it ourselves in order to satisfy our own needs? Breaking the world to reach for an original self is only one more perversion that merely re-establishes the present paradigm (Zizek).
But what does this mean? Does it tell us something about the limits of our present paradigm or does it say something about the most fundamental structure of truth and reality?
Or is it the impossibility of originality that makes it valuable above all? And are we to destroy the dichotomy of possible-impossible in order to become?