The Curse of Narcissism, Part VIII | Clarissa's Blog

The Curse of Narcissism, Part VIII | Clarissa's Blog





"If that fails, that’s a different kind of failure from that of choosing to only ever eat blueberries, right?"



It may be!



Something I am thinking of lately has to do with what I see as being a tacit notion of class relations in tyhe writings of Georges Bataille.  But we would be speaking of spiritual class relations.  So the way I see it (and let us leave behind the really lower levels, which he tackles in 'the psychology of fascism') there a level of middle-class spirituality which is based on the presupposition of exchange relationships.  The middle class is very absorbed and obsessed by equivalencies.  We can see in this sense it is very logocentric, since a word will always have the same meaning for it, no matter what the context.  But a word is also a coin, that has a certain set value and one ought to be able to obtain a certain set measurement for that coin.  The idea they have is that people can be equivalent and situations are equivalent (perhaps always presumed to be so) and this furnishes the basis for competition, as one equivalency races off against another of its sort, proving, somehow that it is ultimately more than equivalent (the bourgeois miracle of miracles, that is always, somehow expected).  



But the spiritual upper crust have no need for equivalencies.   Everything is simply what it is, without ascribing any meaning to it that would facilitate exchange.  Things are not for sale.



And then the lower levels, those who are disowned by society as a whole, they are not equivalent either, but have a lot of the stored up energy for evil in them that society disavows about itself.  



But you can tell a middle-class person (in spirit) because they do not seek to understand anything deeply, but immediately invent equivalencies on the most fragile basis of reason.  They can't see deeply enough into things to realize that there are no equivalencies.