We don't know what we're talking about
When I ask the question "What is 'I'", the answer I hope for is not of course: it is a first-person pronoun that refers to the subject who is speaking. What I want is something deeper, something more obscure, something that drives us all our lives to find and eventually slips out of our hands. The logic of this self can be said to be like this, let all things that are not me turn into nothingness, and the remaining thing is what I am. But is there really anything left in the emptiness? Could the core of "yes" just become a kind of "no"?
For Shinji Ikari, "I" is the EVA pilot who directly belongs to Misato Katsuragi, the son of Commander Ikari, and the classmate and friend of Asuka and Ling Bori. Obviously, he has found so many positions in the field of others, obviously he has so many seemingly complete and multi-faceted expressions about his self-image, and he has also been recognized and affirmed by so many people, why?" I'm still not satisfied with this? What exactly does "I" desire? What kind of elaboration of myself does "I" want to be satisfied with? If it is a simple definition, I can also give an answer. What "I" desires is the residual that remains after being extracted from all social relations, all symbolic orders, and all symbolic positions, the infinite approach Pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic beings of impossible mythological character. Each of us is more or less mentally clean in the process of pursuing ourselves, and it is difficult for people with mental cleanliness to survive in the crowd, because of the existence of other people inside and outside the subject and disgusting, because of the existence of language symbols. Nausea. In other words, it is to remove "Shinji Ikari as the EVA pilot", "Shinji Ikari as the son of Commander Ikari", "Shinji Ikari as a classmate and friend of Asuka and Rinpo Rei", etc., from the self identified now. , to carry out a series of endless negation and subtraction of the present social subject existing in the field of the other, and the residue left in the end is the self that "I" seeks. (Is the result of the subtraction zero? Or is it less than zero?)
However, how is this search possible? The symbolic law has been inscribed into the unconscious field of the subject from the moment of birth. The fundamental attribute of the impossible "thing" that keeps slipping away is impossible. Not present but present. What's more, our protagonist takes the proper name of the EVA driver to stitch the meaning and value contained in this signifier to the lack of subjectivity, so as to find and confirm a subject position for himself in the symbolic world, hoping to use The symbolic identification with this self-ideal reaches the fullness of the self-configuration, but there is always something that falls off in the stitching of meaning. Desires and pursuits over and over again will eventually lead to repeated setbacks - the pursuit of the so-called "self" is doomed to end in failure. This is the tragedy of human "prematurity". The common destiny of mankind. The subject sees his own incomplete nature in the face of that lack of originality and thus retrospectively condenses an imaginary human pre-Oedipal stage in the operation of the chain of signification: wholeness, unity, beautiful harmony mother-child community. Similar to the path that Nietzsche pointed out to us in his first monograph, "The Completion of Humanity" also intends to return to the One, to the wholeness, and to the mother of all mothers, Lilith, through the elimination of the individual. Atonement for mankind, complete religious salvation and collective evolution. Since the pursuit of self is an impossibility, what should we do with ourselves? A drive leads us to the end of self-destruction, where we face the infinite questioning and torture of others: Who are you? what do you want? And under the torture again and again, we dissolve the wall of the heart that we have built, and dissolve the difference with others, so as to achieve the effect of return. This is a kind of return, the road I have traveled in the future (even on a psychological level) I have already traveled in the past, time is a closed loop, so is fate, always going around in circles, in the process All its mysterious and unknowable parts are revealed to the "I", and the "I" then lives in a light and cheerful atmosphere of a completely different psychological reality, a whole new kind of possibility, imaginary and real. The distinction is no longer important, the ultimate subjective idealism. Here, all happiness and pain are transferred from "us" to "us"; here all differences are confiscated and silently eliminated; here there is no need for a thinking unconscious subject; here everything tends to to transparency. What a joyous scene of bliss, everyone is cheering and applauding for your growth, along with the impossible "thing", but there is always a hint of mockery in that voice.
But the me behind this "I" always feels that something is wrong, obviously wrong: the price of searching for the self and freeing it from the other is the disappearance of the self, what an ironic and paradoxical human ending. Perhaps it can be said that the most terrifying thing is not from the questioning and torture of others, but from oneself. A person with the same face, the same voice, and even the same thoughts as himself will face you face to face and then use its cold, nonchalant Emotional voices ask you: Who are you? If in front of others we are afraid because we feel powerless and yearn for recognition, then here we are simply afraid because of the weakness, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement of the self in front of us, which is somewhat similar to when people look in a mirror The fear that appeared, the person in front of her was so similar to herself but so unfamiliar, and if it was me, then what was I, this may be the anxiety that Ling Bo Li has encountered. Under such a seemingly complete and harmonious ending of Return 1, there is an ego that screams silently, howls with silence, and signifies existence with absence. It makes us feel indescribably strange and disgusting, and it is also the last thing that makes Shinji feel. A smile was dyed a strange color.
When I think about everything again, I feel a strong nausea: the never-ending Oedipus phase, the absence of the father's name, the farce of hysteria and paranoia, the metaphor of Philles, the desire of a partial object. Everything points to a primordial taboo, a patriarchal law that has been transgressed by humans (which makes the metaphors and characters in the play blasphemous). "Like mother/father", the terrifying affection and superego are divided between the subjects, yet man has achieved an impossible victory with his own hands - although it is also a failure - not only did man fail to pass The intervention of the name of the father transcended the original imaginary self-identification, but instead took a step back and entered the long-lost pre-Oedipus stage that never happened but is always there. Can human beings achieve such a stage in order to reach the original music? ? But even though the path of self-discovery has been cut off halfway, the question remains, how is pleasure possible, how is happiness possible. The person who is enjoying is both me and the other, and the stitching of the meanings brought by the other makes the impossible exclusivity of the psychic cleanliness suffer the most painful defeat, the establishment of a gestalt with countless individual subjects. Lost: no one looks at me anymore, I don't look at anyone anymore, staring and watching are murdered here, and there is only a community that can be called the human spirit left to act as "seeing" and "being seen" character of. And everyone can only draw the original joy from the same imaginary mother in this community. Although she is infinitely broad and tolerant, isn't this sad? "Humans" without ethics and subjectivity, although they can think and are different from animals, are no different from machines, aren't they?
It is not so much as a game of forced repetition of neurotic desires in fantasy structures, pleasure in delusion, pleasure in self-destruction, pleasure in defilement, pleasure in depravity, pleasure in crucifixion. Pleasure is sought in the structural moments of constant return to castration, pleasure in death. Then die.
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