Thursday, April 06, 2006
(9:50 AM) | Matt Christie:
Names Left Wanting?
In The Time That Remains, Agamben remarks in an aside, and in typically perceptive and enigmatic fashion:There are still people today–although really only a small group, who seem to have almost become respectable these days–who are convinced that one can reduce ethics and religion to acting as if God, the kingdom, truth and so on existed. At the same time, the as if has become a highly popular nosological figure verging on a common condition. All of the people whose cases cannot be clearly ascribed to psychoses or neuroses are called as if personalities, or borderline personalities, because their "problem" consists in the fact that they have no problem, so to speak. They live as if they were normal, as if the reign of normality existed, as if there were "no problem" (this is the idiotic formula that they learn to repeat on every occasion), and this alone constitutes the origin of their discomfort, their particular sensation of emptiness. (34-35)
Agamben wants to recast and so reclaim the question "of the as if", as "infinitely more serious" than Hans Vaihinger would have it. But one wonders to whom else this aside might be addressed.
