Philosophy Note 19,090 The bourgeois concept of the self, as it is manifested in the West, denotes many a feature about reasonableness and responsibility whilst at the same time disavowing any ethical relation outside the loop of the self. At all levels of so-called American culture, and now in Western Europe, this ideology of narcissistic disavowal, the (eyes) stare(s)/stairs up/at/of into the Nothingness: into the abyss of closed stores, rotting factories, etc. - on the one end - and designer tea shops and custom built cabinet stores for interior perfection: those wives of bankers who need pilates, Xanax and several diamond rings to get through the morning, much less the day - all of this is permeating the psycho-somatic development of the self. What Sartre calls the circuit of selfness is based on radical freedom, yes, but also the facticity of the language, the network(s) - for their are no more (or very few) friendships in this desert - of being that submerges the subject, the person, into the lacuna of the Nothingness; here the Nothingness crunching - which is something! - is deflating, finitude is disappearing as with the singularity obsession. When you cry, when you think of suicide, cancer and death, the atom bomb, I am standing with you - I am dwelling in the language of the death-drive, just as you are. And when the positive psychology people produce pretentious palliatives for this remedy, guess what? They are standing with us too; immersed in the same ontological nexus of racism, homophobia, capitalism, mass-slaughter of animals, genocide and ecocide - they are, per Heidegger dwelling in language. Here we have No Exit per Sartre. The exit is the realization that no exist exists, and here we have the beginning of Zen, specifically Soto Zen, which we must take up in the task of re-re-thinking the place we dwell. How we dwell? For Zen is not about being kind, it is about shaking and we must shake until the waters of the infinite sea of Nothingness begin to alter-again, alterity is the necessity for survival, for right now the stagnation is too much of not enough. What is Reality? An icicle forming in fire. -Dogen Zenji (1200 - 1253) Dedicated to Alex Verney-Elliott and Aaron Sanders with love.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 20:22:43 +0000
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