JOURNAL

Today, I read about Eros and Hauntology. I already wrote up a journal entry for this but it got deleted because Edge decided to stop responding :(

This article by the Phenomenological Society posits that the 21st century has 'killed Love' and turned it into something transactional and self-centred, to cater to our own ego and fragile idea of identity instead of accepting another person for whom they really are. Eros, this concept of primordial love, is said to stem from finding joy in the Otherness of this person, and accepting them for their unpredictability, their uniqueness, rather than expecting them to satisfy our expectations and satiate our need for perpetual comfort. They describe Love itself as a brief caress, a fleeting, exhilarating moment of intimacy shared between two distinct identities, a mindset that aims to experience your partner as they are instead of fitting them into your extremely intricate expectations. In the 21st century, we have cannibalized the Lover into ourselves, made them the center of our universe, instead of allowing them to inhabit their own personal universe, dance according to their unique energies. This makes sense to me on a certain level because our model of other people, our needs and demands are an accumulation of our personal neuroses, deprivations, traumas, personal quirks arising from our unique upbringings, and a constant focus on the Self will lead us to build these extremely intricate fantasies of people where they live within our mind, live circumscribed by our insecurities, our urges, our comfort zone, and when real people with their intricately unique permutations don't match up with this, it leads to tension. This is why relationships began to fall apart after the first few animal stages of romantic pursuit and sexual attraction - once these things fade, and all there is is the person standing before you, their alienness becomes apparent to you, their inherent Otherness, and this makes us uncomfortable, and we attempt to bridge it by trying to violently assimilate them into ourselves, cannibalize them into our inner world until there is no unpredictability, no threat to the ego, and none of their unique beauty remains, all the edges and humps having been ironed out.

This Otherness must be celebrated. This constant tension between Otherness and the Self is illustrated using the Greek tragedy of Adonis, where a boar 'lovingly' impales the lovely Adonis upon it's 'amorous teeth', or tusks - but it is this pain, this discomfort in difference, in which Eros is said to thrive. Of course, what about actual incompatibility? Is it not possible for two people to be elementally different? Where do we draw the line between actual incompatibility and plain narcissism? The ambiguity is very real, but I personally think it does not diminish this thesis in any way - there has definitely, on a sociocultural level, been a reorientation of energies towards the Self, towards a neurotic curation of identity, towards a building of identity and personal growth that is performative - fast fashion, virtue signalling, politics disintegrating into reactionary poles  - people genuinely cannot fathom the point of doing something anymore if it isn't immediately communicated to everyone in the most unambiguous way possible. Advertising built on Freudian psychology exploits the irrational desires of the Self, that craving for selfhood, and links it to external, unspeaking, static objects, and puts these advertisements on every possible surface, fills every moment of our time with it, which has lead to a vicious curation of identity, a constant performance of the Self.  It seems Love also has been subject to this cannibalization of the inner Self. But the beauty of being human is that some of our primal natures will ceaselessly resist external influence, and eternally exist in their pristine beauty. Eros will remain untainted and unchanged. 

Hauntology refers to the constant oneness of the past with the present - they are actively intertwined with each other at every moment, and cannot exist in the absence of one another. Instead of seeing past and present as two distinct identities, hauntology describes them as an inseparable chimera that operate in harmony. Of course, it is obvious that the past affects the present. If I set an alarm three hours ago to ring in three hours, and it rings, the past will have affected the present. Why must we use some fancy term to refer to this? I suppose the difference is that:

a) In the case of an alarm clock, we have scheduled it to happen - we have control over it. In the case of hauntology, we do not have control over it. As the article states, it is the act of being visited by a memory, rather than a memory visiting us. Think trauma, triggers - it is not us recollecting a memory, but rather, the memory forcing itself upon us. A ghost of the past coming to drop by, and the ghost becomes so real and vivid that the present pales in comparison to it.

b) The consequences of setting an alarm clock do not constantly persist in our reality, they do not constantly inform our decision-making and our thinking patterns - it happens, and then it recedes. 

The example used to illustrate this is the recurring ghost in Hamlet which ACTIVELY influences Hamlet's decisions and is a prominent agent of action. Hauntology was immediately understandable to me once I started thinking of the nature of trauma - once you have been traumatized, you will either subconsciously or consciously behave in such a way as to not inflame that trauma, it is a memory that dictates your behaviour, your decisions, and therefore, the structure and narrative of your life - it is a persistent, proactive agent (Derrida describes it as an always-already absent present), a past episode that coexists with your present, and is as vital as the factors in the present in dictating the future. It is a loop, a distant memory in which you are trapped, that fits your perception so that you see certain things in terms of it, and if the trauma is violent enough, see EVERYTHING in terms of it. Social trauma permanently alters th act of socializing for people, changing the very way they see social reality and read the social script, seeing the world in terms and in the language of the trauma which they were subjected to. Hence, trauma transforms life into a fractal echoing outwards, a loop that repeats over and over again. I hope in no way is this seen as a romanticization of it - it is a violent haunting. 

Of course, there are happy hauntings too. Sweet memories that sweep through you after smelling something or hearing a song. Those too, are a tinged with a certain melancholy, a yearning, a longing for a time forever gone, inaccessible to us forever. So I suppose, another factor that defines hauntology is:

c) Visited by something that is now permanently inaccessible to us. Something that we can never return to, because of a quantum leap in personality, or an irreversible change in circumstance. It is to be visited by an Absence.