Against the Robots

Isn't becoming oneself always about becoming someone else? What can become of someone who doesn't journey toward who they truly are? We must constantly bridge the chasm between who we are and who we believe ourselves to be. What can someone embody who doesn't know who they are? A wreck, an eternal drift, a shipwreck? Such a person can sink into all forms of submission, especially the will to power; nothing can temper, soothe, or control them. The same rigor is required here as in writing: to bring style and subject together as closely as possible. To succeed in becoming one, to be one. To effect and accomplish the metamorphosis in order to transcend oneself, to be oneself. Contrary to what is often said or believed these days, the perpetual encounter with the other—also called métissage, créolité, or whatever the next trendy term will be—is merely a subterfuge, a hysterical channel surfing, a way of catching a glimpse of oneself, of glimpsing oneself, and of camouflaging this vision under an ungrateful, anemic, and amnesiac veneer. Here, agitprop continues to stir ( which, as is often the case, finds itself allied with the most insidious liberalism), anxious to create new needs and endlessly renew them in order to generate unprecedented and endless dissatisfaction and force us into the eternal and exhausting quest for the phantom of ourselves.