Genealogical Inadequacy

Reading Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971) in order to make sense of my use of the term, "genealogy" in my new title, I am threatened and inspired by the genealogist's first sense: to revitalize "the buffoonery of history" (94). By doing so, "we adopt an identity whose unreality surpasses that of God, who started the charade."

How to convert the depression, the constant feeling of helplessness and inadequacy into such buffoonery? It must not be turned into the disinterested onlooker, the detached critic seeking truth. Rather, one must perform and relish in the buffoonery only through which one escapes the rusted manacles of inadequacy. To regard those very feelings of inadequacy as age-old and worn-out, as weapons and whips that either shackle or perpetually lash a soul tormented with its own pursuit of a singular identity that can surpass such haunting, imprisoning inadequacies. "To possess in oneself not an immortal soul but many mortal ones" -- that is the dissociative identity of the genealogist. Is the genealogist tormented by inadequacy? Never: he is constantly aware of the futility of the project. Inadequacy is his weapon that he no longer uses against himself, but a weapon with which he targets traditional history. Painting his face, he redirects the barrel of the gun from himself to the historians who are themselves deflecting their own feelings of inadequacy with universal theories and truths.

Madness is one way to escape inadequacy. The more my dad fits the pieces together, the more he reconstitutes the hatred he carried towards himself, the feelings of both guilt and inadequacy that face off in an Eternal duel where they keep shooting each other down, dusting each other off, and starting all over again. His only moments of bliss, so it seems, were those of total fragmentation of thought: when he could carry on conversations who weren't even there.

The methods of the genealogist is another way to break the shackles of inadequacy. The genealogist is not mad, though his parodying might make him appear to be so. To take control of the inadequacy by pointing its barrel at traditional history, and to implement inadequacy into his own process of "acquiring" knowledge ("the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will of knowledge")--inadequacy is not altered: it continues to be a weapon of self-sabotage. But it is embraced by the genealogist, the one for whom the self is always already sabotaged, reveling in the noise of the sabots.

Much easier to write about than to convince oneself of the charade that starts with God and "oneself."

The other direction on easy way out

Tonight it's Adorno's Dialectics of Enlightenment; Tuesday morning it was Heidegger's Origin of the Artwork; and in class today we read a short essay by Lukacs on "The Sociology of the Drama" and a segment from Piscator's book, The Political Theater. And I have to finish an article that might be published in an anthology by Friday.
There are lots of ways to do things. I am often inspired by Cat Stevens when he sings about being on the road to Findout. But I just heard the chorus of a song by Elliot Smith that went like this: "It's all about taking the easy way out for you, I suppose."
I wish I could bring myself to taking a taxi more often.

Loss, at Long Last

"Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility still lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure" (Phillips). If perfectionism is ultimately humiliating and the best source for (self)punishment, then: no more ideals! Suffer because one must, suffer without the hope of getting it right. The question is how to sustain any sense of optimism in this condition. The answer is easier to write than to practice while writing, so to speak. Darwin: "I have as much difficulty as ever expressing myself clearly and concisely, and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time." But this loss of time is also necessary to get a better sentence, a more thorough reasoning. No one better to see this than Phillips: "The obstacle proves to be an instrument, the loss a calling." What is required is to accept the necessity of this loss. It's reveling in loss, being optimistic about loss as instrumental, that is most difficult, especially when the loss lasts so long.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.

Some humans disable themselves, while some disabled are more than human. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have one leg and be happy: to get up at 4am every morning to hobble down 2 flights of stairs, take 3 different buses in a wheelchair to get to the corner of Michigan and Randolf and sell Streetwise by 6am, during rush, when people are using 2 good legs to speedily get to work and deftly avoid your wheelchair while holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone to their ear with the other.
It is never enough to be reminded that one has two legs.

Stars and Teaspoons

“How, if with paper and with pencil I went out into the starry night to inventorize the heavens? Who shall tell stars as teaspoons?” (Melville, Pierre)

A Blog Darkly

Does my diary reflect me clearly or darkly? I hope more clearly than I see myself, because otherwise I'm cursed.
I've been told I that I am comfortable in my own skin, and that I can be read easily. This means that people might see me more clearly than I see myself, which leads me to believe in the clarity that they see in me. It's a relief from the darkness that I can't see through in myself.
Am I an enigma only to myself? If so, that is a bad sign. I put my hope in this: that I cannot lie; if I do, I cannot forget that I did. It is extremely difficult for me to pose as someone I am not, or to pretend to know something I have not fully understood. If it is so difficult to lie to others, it should be the case that I cannot lie to myself, and that I am being honest with myself at all times.
How come then I do not know what I want? If I am being honest with myself--which I do not entirely trust--then with honesty comes ambivalence.