on the possibility of critique

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days.   Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness.

Against the sweet insouciance of Friends, there is something terrifying about this sitcom, which is marketed in Korea under the title: “I love Friends.” As if Friends, and the friend, had already become the object of a pathetic longing. As if, even in this, we must resign ourselves to an Ersatz-friends. With a macabre instinct, someone recognized that the great joke of Seinfeld, the fake cast, had suddenly been recast as a real sitcom.  As if there were a third repetition in history, beyond tragedy and farce.

But this third brings us back to the first: the husband, an architect like Mr. Brady, tells his children how he met their mother.  The purest form of the tyranny of mythopoesis.  As if the children could, or should care.  As if the very idea that they should care, that the mystery of their birth could be reduced to an endless sequence of tawdry vignettes, were not the most terrible offence against childhood. As if the novelty of birth could be seamlessly folded into the life of the parents.

What did Oedipus and Antigone talk about during their long years of wandering?

All myth, every beginning, is perverse.  This silliest of sitcoms brings us to the brink of tragic, Dionysian knowledge. The parents who entertain their child with the story of their prehistoric misadventures demand that the child replicate their own desire for life — without having lived.  They seek nothing less than the confirmation of their own desire for life in the lifeless desire of their children.  This is the prosaic, everyday form of mythic incest. And the tyranny of desire is always this: the desire for obsolete forms of desire.

We who watch are like the children who listen.  We do not live, but we desire to live.  And we late-born theorists (we theorists after theory…) are, in this, not so different than the couch potato. (Hence the critique of television is not the least bit irrelevant for proto philosophia) We do not think, but we desire to think.  We desire the form that thinking once took in its still fresh, but wholly mythic past.  We cannot imagine happiness but in a form that is no longer possible for us. True happiness for us is whatever happiness we cannot have.

The genius of Tristram Shandy suddenly dawns on me:  the sobriety of prose begins with the parody of the myth of our own drunken birth.

I was born then, in 1966, and before this: in Weimar, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Prague, in Jena, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, and Athens. And also in places far from the cities.  Why do I then feel so melancholy as I read this book by François Cusset:  am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth. Is there greatness only in beginnings?   But hasn’t philosophy, which has created so much from a single matter, always been the next best thing.