Man, you're right, on coming back to this, that the metacommentary tags alas is wearing do look rather like a biohazard suit. I was genuinely feeling so kind of excited that someone was willing to open up as you did on this topic. Because...my life is this kind of mix, and my own brain doesn't necessarily speak well across those boundaries, but when I approach doing so, I do feel like I gain insight from it. I don't post in the Temple, but art is vital to my life and, at the very least, I often find metaphor and imagery to more accurately describe experience than the kind of language that typically passes logical muster.
I also really didn't want your post to be greeted with a kind of "headshop silence"...I haven't had as much time for barbelithing these past few days and the next two weeks are likely to be almost nil. But, anyway, sorry about the tongs and rubber gloves effect...
I think it's exactly this point, It's an important part of what it has meant to be human for thousands of years at least, and is of relevance to the psychology of martyrs, including suicide bombers, saints and mystics, heroes and poets and our contemporary clash of the civilisations, that's part of what I am experiencing up there in my negative reaction to Zizek's arguably quite "respectful" comments, and possible to some degree in Lurid's. This sense that a) somehow we in the rational intellectual set actually do subject all our behaviors to rigidly rational scrutiny and are already thoroughly self-aware adults, and b) that doing so would be indisputably a good thing.
I'm not arguing against all rational argumentation (after all, by using "point a, point b" I'm at least involving the accoutrements of it--I'll let you decide if my explanation is proceding at all logically/rationally), but I do believe it has its limits. We are, as Woolf says [subliminal message: go read A Room of One's Own and post in Books], creatures of illusion. no matter how "rational" the person, we function on the basis of certain stories we tell ourselves. We are all creatures of "myth." This does not mean "throw out all attempts to be rational, then." It's an issue of awareness and acceptance that there is no human without a body, without blind spots; there is no position that does not create a frame work, and there's no framework that does not cut something out of the picture.
It's so deeply human to be so, that I am strongly skeptical of the impulse to define adulthood in the way that Zizek is, and most especially when the focus is on some irrational, childlike Other, as in Zizek's argument, which smacks of Orientalism, to me.
I quoted Judith Butler in the Policy thread on anger--because I think emotions are also part of this boundary making around the purportedly rational, and that some people's emotions are more visible, more likely to be marked as "irrational" than others.
These people then don't quite qualify as "adult man," and they can be examined and controlled by the rational men, who never have their emotions examined by the other in any way that needs to be taken seriously. We are the ones holding the interrogation light in their eyes, safe in our assumption that all our own myths have been safely explored....Which, as I say, echoes to me of all those old men of my youth asking me about the state of my soul, because the power dynamic and approach are the same: you, child, need to prove that you are in a state of grace on my terms. I'm under scrutiny; they hold the light. That power dynamic, which is implicit in many discussions of religion (cutting both ways), creates blind spots and silences and shapes the discussion.
[And I still haven't addressed the content of your argument, elene, really, in anyway that does it justice.] |
and I fear the thread's likely going to plunge right out of my depth, but I'm very pleased it's not dead.