08 November 2004
on the post-Christian idiocy of wanting to help others
'All love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges' - Lacan, Seminar XX.
Lately I have been trying to configure the impossible relationship between love-friendship-responsibility. I have come to the following entirely useless conclusions:
1. The single worst thing you can ever 'confess' to anyone is that they correspond, or ever corresponded, to some conceptual/emotional pre-existing whole belonging to you, pieced together via the sum total of your reading, fantasies and experiences: This only leads back (of course) to peculiarly adolescent disappointment and the endless, if sweet, shores of self-hatred. Here it is not a question of opposing the 'reality' of 'really existing' men/women to ideals - on the contrary, without these ideals there would be no possibility of ever appreciating the sheer excess of the more ideal than ideal, i.e. the really existing, perpetually surprising 'friend' (and how vacuous is this word). (Umm...I sound like a cross Derrida.) Instead, there are no types, and never have been.
Against the narcissism of one's relation to archetypes: 'I can only think of women as Madonnas or whores, it's my failing as a man', lies instead the revelation that this couldn't be more untrue - this desperate scrabbling to pledge allegiance to ready-made handy-one-size-fits-all crap psychological categories hides the fear that there actually aren't enough categories up to the task: 'you look so innocent but I know you're really a slut....you talk like a man but you blush like a girl...in the end you're just a rational monster, you're a traitor to your sex...'. All unraveled in drunken aggression to the single question: 'just what is it that you want...WHAT DO YOU WANT?!' I am increasingly convinced that we should dispense with all conversation predicated on believing that there are such things as 'persons', agency, men, women, etc. It might be unhappily amorphous, but it couldn't be any worse than the kind of discussions that currently persist.
In a related manner, what happened to Hitchcock's ambiguous modern subjects? The women you can't quite place sexually or economically....can we destroy this contemporary economy of clarity? Could it be any more obvious that the 'lock-down' mode of conceptualising people and relationships is just too easily suited to the current economic order. Why buy into the Ally McBeal schtick of the 'one', the person-product who will fulfill your every (fake) need?; refuse too the model of the direct-debit gas-bill paying couple, faithful to each other not out of love but out of laziness. There's nothing more disgusting than the disapproval of the self-appointed bourgeois sexual watchdogs. 'Well, we would never cheat on each other...'. It doesn't necessarily demonstrate your love for someone else, you know, just your selfishness. Don't peg your desire to the other like Cuba to the dollar (and you know Castro just banned it!).
2. Attempting to 'help people' is predicated on a vast black hole of libidinal confusion. There is no escaping this. If I help one person, I do so because of something specific about them (they are in some sense 'worth it'), and it necessarily takes my time away from others who need me 'less' - my investment may take on a sheen of universality, but this is really the ultimate in self-delusion: what is more self-reinforcing than the belief that you are helping someone else? Helping one man is not helping 'men', instead, all you end up with is the endless creation of 'allies' and 'enemies'. All assistance is predicated on antagonism, even, or especially, towards the person you are 'helping'. If I retract my help or refuse to enter into this economy in the name of some higher friendship (i.e. refusing to sleep with someone in the name of the 'true purity' of our relationship), and my friend recoils in anger, or they turn to someone else, the corrupt universality of my pledge is revealed in its true horror...I would have done it, you say, if I had known what you would do instead, but if I had, we would no longer be in a position to identify our actions as those of 'pure friendship'. I suggest all relationships be henceforth conducted in the open light of their mutual antagonisms and all investments made explicit.
Forthcoming: why Badiou should have chosen 'hate' and not 'love' as a truth condition.
Lately I have been trying to configure the impossible relationship between love-friendship-responsibility. I have come to the following entirely useless conclusions:
1. The single worst thing you can ever 'confess' to anyone is that they correspond, or ever corresponded, to some conceptual/emotional pre-existing whole belonging to you, pieced together via the sum total of your reading, fantasies and experiences: This only leads back (of course) to peculiarly adolescent disappointment and the endless, if sweet, shores of self-hatred. Here it is not a question of opposing the 'reality' of 'really existing' men/women to ideals - on the contrary, without these ideals there would be no possibility of ever appreciating the sheer excess of the more ideal than ideal, i.e. the really existing, perpetually surprising 'friend' (and how vacuous is this word). (Umm...I sound like a cross Derrida.) Instead, there are no types, and never have been.
Against the narcissism of one's relation to archetypes: 'I can only think of women as Madonnas or whores, it's my failing as a man', lies instead the revelation that this couldn't be more untrue - this desperate scrabbling to pledge allegiance to ready-made handy-one-size-fits-all crap psychological categories hides the fear that there actually aren't enough categories up to the task: 'you look so innocent but I know you're really a slut....you talk like a man but you blush like a girl...in the end you're just a rational monster, you're a traitor to your sex...'. All unraveled in drunken aggression to the single question: 'just what is it that you want...WHAT DO YOU WANT?!' I am increasingly convinced that we should dispense with all conversation predicated on believing that there are such things as 'persons', agency, men, women, etc. It might be unhappily amorphous, but it couldn't be any worse than the kind of discussions that currently persist.
In a related manner, what happened to Hitchcock's ambiguous modern subjects? The women you can't quite place sexually or economically....can we destroy this contemporary economy of clarity? Could it be any more obvious that the 'lock-down' mode of conceptualising people and relationships is just too easily suited to the current economic order. Why buy into the Ally McBeal schtick of the 'one', the person-product who will fulfill your every (fake) need?; refuse too the model of the direct-debit gas-bill paying couple, faithful to each other not out of love but out of laziness. There's nothing more disgusting than the disapproval of the self-appointed bourgeois sexual watchdogs. 'Well, we would never cheat on each other...'. It doesn't necessarily demonstrate your love for someone else, you know, just your selfishness. Don't peg your desire to the other like Cuba to the dollar (and you know Castro just banned it!).
2. Attempting to 'help people' is predicated on a vast black hole of libidinal confusion. There is no escaping this. If I help one person, I do so because of something specific about them (they are in some sense 'worth it'), and it necessarily takes my time away from others who need me 'less' - my investment may take on a sheen of universality, but this is really the ultimate in self-delusion: what is more self-reinforcing than the belief that you are helping someone else? Helping one man is not helping 'men', instead, all you end up with is the endless creation of 'allies' and 'enemies'. All assistance is predicated on antagonism, even, or especially, towards the person you are 'helping'. If I retract my help or refuse to enter into this economy in the name of some higher friendship (i.e. refusing to sleep with someone in the name of the 'true purity' of our relationship), and my friend recoils in anger, or they turn to someone else, the corrupt universality of my pledge is revealed in its true horror...I would have done it, you say, if I had known what you would do instead, but if I had, we would no longer be in a position to identify our actions as those of 'pure friendship'. I suggest all relationships be henceforth conducted in the open light of their mutual antagonisms and all investments made explicit.
Forthcoming: why Badiou should have chosen 'hate' and not 'love' as a truth condition.
