pOST cOITUM hISTORICUM

Post Partum Post

(Feb 04/06)
I have awakened--perhaps not. How would I know (one know) if I (if one) were not dead, breathing, wheezing, lapping grubs of disagreeably damp air? This disconcerts me, so terribly so. Perhaps, maybe, perhaps, I have always been dead, yet to awaken, to live a life living, not a death dead dying, a Heideggerian misstep, an ontological charley horse, an inaccuracy in logic, an existential trip-up. In 1968 the intellectual landscape in France changed, and with it the desire for a raison d’ ere, a philosophical rebuttal: student uprisings, resurgence in Marxist dialectics, an end to Hobbesianism and capital greed and gain. We needed less structure, so the Sartreans and Althusserians gave us (pre)Structuralism(post) and Postmodernism. We needed more structure, so the Foucaults and Lacans offered us Truth as Power and an Unconscious structured like language, lacunas, pedagogical onerism, philosophical missteps. Foucault died from Aids related complications, Sartre with a pipe in his mouth (sometimes a pipe isn't a pipe), Lacan left early, analysis interminable, and Althusser from an irresolvable depression brought on by matricide and shoddy reasoning. Post, like Kellogg and Battle Creek, is a breakfast cereal, not some post-pre-ideological unintentional stance. But then again, madness brings out the best in a man, does it no?