Can the Madman Speak
[save specific terminology--the critic, the worker, the self-negating shadow, the child, the romantic, the Unnameable--for third section.
also discuss: self cutting as an undeadening rite, an anti suicide, in Millard; the death of the author compared to the strange multiplicity and space within multiplicity out of which cutting comes; the problem of representation and re-presentation in Spivak
[the creation of a kind of being, a manifesto, a performance, an act of resistance]
to the paradoxes of self-enemyship and …, let me ad one more: the madman may not be able to speak, but that does not negate the speaking [eh…]
the uses of cutting and politics
-self-negating, self-transformational subjectivity. radical vulnerability in part because there are even deeper violences and violations to keep secret. leading to growth, friendship, experimentation upon the body and mind
-the development of a metaphysics of intrapersonal politics. [i.e. the critic, the shadow, etc.]
-intrapersonal politics are never merely intrapersonal; the way my internal critic relates to a friend differs from my inward child
-whats more, these relationships are themselves key, not the personas. the critic only exists in relationship to something to criticize, usually the “worker”, and I experience myself as a worker insofar as I feel myself judging and being judged, etc. I am reminded of Du Bois ideas of the veil, though for me it is less that there is a state in which I can “stand above” the veil, so much as the veil is the truest/most total expression of my experience.
the relationship, then, is both source and true expression of self, and likewise, I feel myself to be a subtly different self/ves when relating to one or another friend, co-worker, boss, etc. i am friend and enemy. in so far as I am that prepositional object to which both friend and enemy imply, the clearest is the enemy-of-itself. in the Schmittian sense of the term, I am politics, and also the breakdown of politics.
-at the time perhaps I could have qualified for a DID, though i never pursued it with my therapists or psychiatrists. x book suggests this is not particularly uncommon, differing more in degree then kind. since the improvement of my mental health which began around Febuary of 2020, though several crises, including proabably the second worst of my life encompassing two periods of homelessness in the summer of 2020...have I returned to a default feeling of singularity, or perhaps zero-ness, a self transparency not unlike what I think Spivak ciritques
only since early april has this become really entrenched, and I am painfully aware of how easily it could slip away.
-the truths of multiplicity of intrapersonal violence and intrapersonal politics more generally remain availiable to me, though strangely--as if separated by a veil of their own. much of my notes written, especially those written in fuge states but also run of the mill journal entries remain slightly incoherent--probably because through them i am looking for an author in me who has since died a second death, without even the memory of what it felt like to write them fully accessible.