If Marechera'as "pre-oedipal" self has any revolutionary significance, it is in the sense that he observes its machinations from a transcendental or detached perspective. Its machinations appear, in this light, contingent, subject to change, conditioned by arbitrariness and apparently in a state of flux.
By contrast, the opposite way of viewing things has become generally enshrined within contemporary culture. We tend to see through a lens of pre-oedipal differentiation of the world into opposites, wherein never the twain shall meet. We think we see fixed essences of identity -- male versus female, and good versus evil (classical splitting). We impose upon the transcendental quotient of life a sense of fixed definitions, which somehow strikes us as resonating with a quality of the eternal (which is so because we impose our own arbitrariness of vision on the world as transcendental definitions -- or eternal 'essences').
The pre-oedipal remains what it is -- a developmental stage that leaves its mark on adult modes of perception. Yet one can learn to see it through the lens that fixes it as arbitrary and contingent (looking down on "fixed" as identities which wrongly believe themselves to be eternal and immutable). One can adopt the perspective of an eternity detached from (and genuinely transcending) that which lies below it in the form of thinking processes that have their own vicissitudes, which form and deconstruct 'identities' as an ongoing process.
By contrast, the opposite way of viewing things has become generally enshrined within contemporary culture. We tend to see through a lens of pre-oedipal differentiation of the world into opposites, wherein never the twain shall meet. We think we see fixed essences of identity -- male versus female, and good versus evil (classical splitting). We impose upon the transcendental quotient of life a sense of fixed definitions, which somehow strikes us as resonating with a quality of the eternal (which is so because we impose our own arbitrariness of vision on the world as transcendental definitions -- or eternal 'essences').
The pre-oedipal remains what it is -- a developmental stage that leaves its mark on adult modes of perception. Yet one can learn to see it through the lens that fixes it as arbitrary and contingent (looking down on "fixed" as identities which wrongly believe themselves to be eternal and immutable). One can adopt the perspective of an eternity detached from (and genuinely transcending) that which lies below it in the form of thinking processes that have their own vicissitudes, which form and deconstruct 'identities' as an ongoing process.
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