Reading Philip Pullman's _Northern Lights_, which I cannot recommend highly
enough. The sinister agency in this book is called the "General Oblation
Board" - the GOBblers - who steal children and sever their daemons - their
souls - from them in a process called "incision". Sacrifice - or, here,
oblation - is their term for exploitation, mutilation of others.
Self-exploitation, self-mutilation, is not necessarily less reprehensible.
Perhaps I have a certain right over myself that I do not have over others.
The scope of this right is problematic however: debates about abortion and
euthanasia can turn on just this point.
The act of charity that is onerous and involves suffering is not guaranteed
to be free of narcissism. Narcissism knows what to do with suffering. It
turns it into costume drama. Simone Weil doubted whether torturing Hitler
would do anything other than vindicate his sense of his own greatness, since
the great hero must be afflicted and perhaps even slain by his enemies.
Masochism is narcissism trying to get the better of its vicissitudes. As
this is what narcissism always does, masochism is ineluctable, worse luck.
At least it's somewhat resourceful, creative even. Still, I for one feel
cheated.
A self that needed the guarantee of its own existence would experience
self-giving, or self-emptying, as suffering: as anxiety, fear of death and
nothingness. That which one is in place of oneself, when one is besides
oneself, might be free - ecstatically so - of such angst. But this other
remains tied to the self, so that its freedom is always at the beck of
anxiety. One might imagine one's mirror image walking free, or one's shadow
abroad, leaving the dull original standing oddly bereft. "Virtual" selfhood
is sometimes imagined in this way. I return to the prosaic: my shadow will
be buried with me, it will go where all the shadows go.
Dom
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