Flat People

Following our last session I came away with an interesting set f connections concerning the contemporary subject. i.e. you can trace through the idea of the 'Clone' in Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' who seems to have a diminished relationship with life and passions, and then see a connection with the quotes from Maupassant and Flaubert used by Julian Barnes (below) in his LRB review, then add to that, not only Dennis Potter's 'Karaoke' character -for whom identity has become something already made (we just sing a little line of difference on top) but also, going all the way back to our VERY FIRST quote from Charles Taylor's 'Sources Of The Self' which I will quote again here as a way of taking the Blog and the course full circle, from beginning to end.

" It has frequently been remarked by psychoanalysts that the period in which hysterics and patients with phobias and fixations formed the bulk of their clientele, starting in the classical period with Freud, has recently given way to a time when the main complaints centre around “ego loss”, or a sense of emptiness, flatness, futility, lack of purpose, or loss of self-esteem." (Taylor, Charles. 1989 Sources of the Self p.19)

I suppose this line of thoughts might be best used to answer the question on the 'enduring possibility of the Subject' or the one about the Subject in the age of 'Yahoo, facebook etc. (read 'consumerism and technology').

Oh!, and here's yet one more connection, just noticed in Nicolas Bourriaud's Altermodern catalogue essay:

"In the view of Bernard Stiegler [...] capitalism functions through the channeling of desires; yet, he adds, 'desire underwent a downward tendency', forcing the system to 'exploit instinctive impulses', all real passions having disappeared among alienated individuals who had lost control of their own lives."