The Road to Self-Destruction

I like to come home from lectures to write about what I think I might have learned. If I don't I tend to forget about it and my lecture notes are usually a bloody mess.

On a lecture on Bataille I was thinking about my own self-destructive qualities. I don't mean in the usual sense of self-destruction which is used about people who are going off the rails, or self-destructive teenagers, although this generic sense of the term must come from this more primordial notion of the destroying the self. When the self is destroyed, it is exploded and this explosion can come about in different moments... perhaps in eroticism, language, or suffering. I think that unconsciously, I've always had this little streak that has wanted to do away with this determinability of who I am. It's only now that I've had the faculty to give any sort of meaning to it.

I have dabbled, through my life, in many different things that might induce a loss of self. Drug abuse, meditation, paganism, shamanism, eroticism, removing myself quickly from situations where I am finally getting comfortable. Perhaps this is why I always leave a place after a period of time, I like the newness, the indeterminability of somewhere new. However, I have never fully destroyed my self and it seems to be a recurring theme in my life. At least now I know what is going on and perhaps I will achieve it.

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