10000-02

If following Plato, we take the logic of the transcendental from the Cartesian paradox of the “having,” as depicting the finite subject is limitless in extent and emptiness—then, to put it in yet another way, human subjectivity appears as a pointless mechanical thing, a “thing that can” only emerge and function within a minimal amount of freedom, subject to its creator (i.e., to the logic of the liberal arts, of democratic representation, etc.). The problem here is that it is impossible to pin down the level of the two compromising identities of man to one another: the level of what we see and what we would like to see in person is what keeps changing. What we are effectively told is that we are seeing a clever child, who is silly, who is ill. But what is truly cruel to a child is to inflict as much pain as possible, to take from it what it has not earned and put it to shame by its suffering. And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for the attempts to save children from drowning by the endless stream of their painful lessons. The more we learn, the more we resemble children, the more we resemble development! This is what Freud wants us to think. Unfortunately, the answer is simple: you are listening to the lecture of a madman who wants to teach us how to become civilized. This, perhaps, is the ultimate example of the logic of the “disappearance of process”: the idea is that, if we are to view the development of a person, we are to take it over’; if we are to view individual characteristics, we are to apply them to a goal. The problem with this first view is that it supplies no explanation of why the appearance of a “normal” face is so strongly accompanied by an “impossible” explosion of subjective features. Second, that the “normal” face is neither something in-itself nor something extraneous—the question is what we would like to see more of, and what we are willing to deprive a person of if we believe that he will be led to produce more achievements than he is capable of producing himself. . . . It is here that the “scientific materialist” observes with amazement the link between dialectical materialism and human enhancement: the explosion of subjective qualities (IQ) that, precisely insofar as they are not derived from objective factors, serve as the support of language and human enhancement programmes.