In introducing narcissism and its productivisation as it were in recent years Boris Groys presents the fact that what makes desire truly human, as opposed to animalistic desire which destroys its object is the fact that in a relationship to another, we desire not only the body but the desire of the other. In other words, anthropogenic desire is not merely for other objects, but for being desired. This as it were would appear to be a social bond in narcissism.
In pursuit of this we may be led to present ourselves as an object to society, yet more importantly - the desire for desire produces self-consciousness, and even the self as such: an insight which Groys attributes to Kojeve. He, that is the author Groys does recognize a degree of alienation that may be inherent in the effort for the desire of the other. In this sense, it sacrifices natural needs for an abstract idea of recognition.
Paradoxically, we are pointed out to the fact that our present-day Narcissus is, because of the aforementioned social dimension in desire - is interested in the survival and well-being of society.
A belief in God meant that the subject wanted to be loved, or at least recognized by God. The relationship between a subject to society was ethical in this mediated sense in which one's acts of worship were directed at God, even if done in society.
You may imagine the sense of loss then, when the death of God dawned, as the divine gaze for which the soul had been edified for centuries - was no more. The ethical bond which may have once characterized our commitments was replaced by an erotic one. Subjectivity became a question of design, manifested as it were in the clothes people wore and in the spaces they inhabited. The last theological question that remained was whether any encounter with the real was still possible amidst the omnipresent fabrication of surfaces.
Death, in the absence of god - becomes the temporal horizon that haunts society as it pines for its love of the other that sustains it.
The post-human condition as it were, in the absence of God does not mark the advent of self-design, with churches and palaces possibly preceding design and art museums as exhibits or public monuments to recent trends of the soul if you please.
Yet here, we may truly gain more from private practices which have often developed elaborate disciplines that have pre-figured the posthuman.
Choice of articles, tastes, etc. our general use of things constitute semblants of what this may mean, and this consumption is of course tied to its own productions which are most noticeably representative of the self being refashioned - artwork, photos, narratives, and books whose circulation has opened windows for the mind in our contemporary moment, as they are dispersed globally.
These new bodies which emerge as it were - are fragmented in their act of dispersal, retaining perhaps only a virtual unity, inaccessible to the human gaze, and whose traces may only be gathered by search programs such as Google. A semblance is hence recognized by a semblance. The author quotes Lyotard on the internet: 'mankind's persistence in a state of explosion.'
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