The principle of civilised passivity

The centrality of opposition might be seen as the defining category of selfhood.

take Esquirol’s insistence that selfhood only emerges with the ability to conceal,

Consciousness is not the ‘harmonious accompaniment’ but rather ‘the antagonist

and the violator of sensation’.  We might argue that the 'self' is

the unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics.

The notion of an imperial 'self' is complicitous with imperialism. The yoking together of self and mind is to twin different forms of oppression.

At our end do we abjectly cane in to a  conservative endings in which

we negotiate passionate self-fulfillment on terms which

preserve the social and moral conventions intact as they/we take positions within the social system that has oppressed us earlier.

 

 We must not celebrate the very ethos that has oppressed us.

 

I am always in  my desire for resolution I am constantly hopping from the resolution  fences of  conservatism and radicalism. My choices seem daunting and

I am left in this vacuum of dispiriting gulf between active self-fulfillment and social possibility."

 

I am perniciously individualistic and I am afraid that gets me in a whole lot of trouble at times. afterwards I feel like the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe.

Would I be well advised if I were to follow the principle of civilised passivity in the face of oppression?

 When I justify my actions to myself, "Well...that is me... I am like this or like that" this is to justify and disguise the  trope of my constant failings into a simile.

 Happiness hangs over me, like an enticing open door to a seraglio in its despotic and oppressive way, like some lucky horseshoe ever hanging on my door.

Heirarchy - must not talk to them, might lose my sense of authority.

in one's gender-authorized despotism fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next 

I have been egalitarian in the division of my monies, one might say communist Liberté!Egalité! Fraternité!"—

I would not, therefore, immediately charm the snake

Hume recounts an anecdote told of the Scythian women, who, tired of their subordination in marriage, and conspired to surprise the men "in drink, or asleep; bound them all fast in chains; and having called a solemn council of the whole sex, ... debated what expedient should be used to improve the present advantage, and prevent their falling again into slavery."

Despite their former enslavement, the women do not relish the idea of killing the men, and "it was, therefore, agreed to put out the eyes of the whole male sex, and thereby resign in all future time the vanity which they could draw from their beauty, in order to secure their authority.

We must no longer pretend to dress and show, said they; but then we shall be free from slavery. We shall hear no more tender sighs; but in return we shall hear no more imperious commands."

Like Achan I feel I am going to be stoned. the other haunts me

 

Edward Said’s ‘suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser,’ Bhabha asserts, without providing any explanation, the unity of the ‘colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised).’ I do not wish to rule out, a priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and natives can be reduced to the workings of a single ‘subject’; but such a unity, let alone its value, must be demonstrated, not assumed" (59–60).

By casting Desire as a state of craving vacancy, a reification of the traditional idea of feminine absence and passivity,

Love is so often presented fictionally and then re-presented as a fiction, which is to say first mystified and then clarified as an ideology

Begin by depicting a stable, seemingly ideal social world, then slowly build an atmosphere of injustice, suspicion and danger,

On men marauding in virgin territory

She had wished to deny separation, the founding condition of selfhood, and to return once more to the harmonious, passive, pre-conscious state of paradisiacal existence which for Ferrier (anticipating contemporary psychoanalysis)defined our original state of union before the emergence of the ‘rebellious I’ which marked our Fall.

 

65

Some try to create a false Eden; in ceasing to oppose the promptings of passions sand in dangers of becoming automatons.

What is Edenic is the thought of attaining inviolate selfhood. For this indivualist ideology, and a  sense of personal agency and power on a concept of selfhood which, lacking all unity, is merely the shifting relation of internal conflicts

Selfhood thus becomes, not an invincible bastion of sovereignty, the unshakeable bedrock of the imperialist project, but rather the interiorized defiant assertions of a self which threatens, imminently, to fragment and rupture

Re-entry into selfhood is marked not by articulation of the self, but rather by the  experience of the power to withhold. After refusing an you might hear  ‘I began once more to know myself’ The self is only conjured into existence by an act of refusal

Lines of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability’  Their relationship is founded on the power of the gaze; each treats the other as a text to be decoded. He seemed to read my face, with his piercing eyes, and ‘coruscating radiance of glance’ she finds herself falling ‘under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye’ 

All very Mills and Boon. 

Then the silent, mysterious man, belieing his apparent quiescence acquires dominion through his own indecipherability, using his eyes as instruments to search other people’s thoughts rather than reveal his own’

Sometimes we transplant the bourgeois ideology of self-improvement into an imperial exercise in control.

Following the conflictual theories of selfhood,the self is not a unified entity, but rathera site of internal struggle between competing energies; and self-consciousness arises only through the experience of oppositional control, and it is argued that a sense of unified harmony can never be attained

It espousesideologies of self-development and improvement, and economic ideas of energy flow, only to reveal their intrinsic opposition; the self is figured bothas a striving, integrated unit, and as the divided, unstable product of conflicting energies. The ideals of self-control are set, furthermore, against alternate models of female subordination to the forces of the body, and their social and psychological implications are explored and interrogated. A defiant assertions of selfhood in the text are cut across by fears of imminent dissolution, and an upsurge of energies which cannot be controlled.

 

Harmony and stasis suggest, to an individual defined by conflict, a form of self-annihilation