George Orwell said that inconsistency can be a mark of vitality, and this seems doubly apt when the inconsistency lies within an ethos of preaching disgust and hatred at life. The issue is not bad faith, as if what the pessimist writes is false and he knows it. It’s that, whatever he thinks about it, the very fact of his writing suggests something left unsettled. Ironically, depressive realism- which regards itself as the most clear-headed, disillusioned, unclouded way of perceiving the world – doesn’t know how to explain itself[… ]By its nature, realism is a state of opposition – it only makes sense in contrast with what’s unreal: fantasy, illusion, myth, lies and so on[…] Admittedly, the terms ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are awfully simplistic, but they are extraordinarily hard to see beyond. Even very sophisticated theories about the inadequacy of sorting anything, and not just art, into clumsy categories of right and wrong (or true and false, real and fake) are bedevilled by the purity of the terms they try to oppose. It is fiendishly difficult to escape these first ways of thinking, inadequate as they may be. Ben Jeffery – Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 06:43:17 +0000
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