in praise of the pete

Revelation, I have reached the maturity demanded by Kant!!!!!! (I wouldn’t quite call it enlightenment however)

It all happened at the most banal of moments. Whilst typing my Deleuze essay (interspersed with a skype conversation with my mum), a meagre tapping on my bedroom door was calling my attention.

For an inexplicable reason, perhaps that was the beauty of, my o’ so wise and honourable housemate, Pete, was in want of…….well I have no idea. I presumed that it was something such as needing to pay a gas bill, or some other trivial reason. I pondered, what were the conditions of possibility for which I was to incur the privilege for this rare visitation (as if from another world)……..

what resulted during a few minutes of dialogue was a greatly appreciate tutorial on Foucault, freedom and the notion of the self. The subject of Foucault, being the man in my life at the moment, arose out of Pete’s preceding to tell me about the Chomsky Foucault conversation that he had just been reading.

It was only through our conversation, that led on to Foucault (sorry chomksy old boy), and to my questioning Pete on how Foucault manages to bring in freedom, that I came to understand what everybody had been going on about. My wrongly placed position, of which there was patently no solution, had previously been pointed out me via a previous housemate, mr Dogmat innit. He had struggled and toiled for many an hour to make clear to me the error of ways, and at times it appeared that he had succeeded. However, a few weeks later it would be apparent that my entrenched views on my freedom determinism dilemma were convictions so strong and entrenched that I couldn’t quite see past, despite the yearning to do so. Poor guy.

However, and I’m sure the dogmat episodes were a necessary condition of my present revelation, of which Pete was the sufficient contributing factor.
I think I am ready to grow-up………

turrets

the precariousness of our subjectivity, with all the paraphonalia that comes with it (freedom, responibilty ect), becomes apprant if we take the case of “victims” of brain damage or head injury (I use the word “victim” without the connotations of being partonising. I used the word lightly.) in these cases, the “victim”( im going to use the word “subject”actaully, despite that being the very fragile “thing” we are trying to analyis and possibily deconstrunt) may become “subject to” (not in control of, in the grips of something other) the tendancies usually supressed/repressed by those who have not be in their circumstances. It is often noted that people with severe brain trauma may have drasctically augmented behaviour to that of their “previous” selves (so much so that I can use the word previous self in the sense that “are they the same person?”, but I shant get into the problem of the self right now, I wouldn’t even know how!).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1009486.stm
now obviously if it is serious the chances are that you cant speak, let along be able to yell out sexual explivatives.
But my concern here is with the not so severe cases, but where the changes in personality are generally not appreciated, and perhaps not authentically recongined for what they are.
There is much too much to go into with regard to the actions, responsibilty and reaction by society to the novell and “inappropriae” actions or words that are the result of the brain damage, however I would like to pose the question that brain injusry has the possibility to allow for such thoughts to be expressed that otherwise would be repressed and so actualised through more destructuve means (perhaps in non-brain damaged people. But arent we all brain damaged, shell shocked, traumatised in one way or another?). It is interesting to consider a society of brain damaged mutants, yet with such “freedom” and lack of predictability!