On Becoming God

Really liked this passage (pages 35-36) out of Ben Morgan’s “On Becoming God: late medieval mysticism and the modern western self.”

The assumptions that inform the texts of Lacan, Irigaray, and [Amy] Hollywood as well as those Lyotard, Zizek, Derrida, and Adorno suggest a world in which changes is not possible because individuals are too marked by the structures they wish to escape. This is a habit of thought that in some circumstances may be useful. It encourages a form of humility, since it suggests that the individual is shaped by powers he or she does not fully control. It consoles too, since it absolves the individual of responsibility, saying that if changes does not happen this is because the structure does not permit it. But the same assumptions could also be an excuse for cynicism, or for a resignation that justifies its inactivity by appealing to powers the individual cannot possibly master, when it is conceivable that contingent, less-dramatic factors, such as the inability of a man in a particular generation to cry or to talk about disappointment, create the conviction that the whole world is out of joint and the subject is necessarily and permanently exiled from fulfillment. The assumptions shared by Lacan, Irigaray, Hollywood, Lyotard, Zizek, Derrida, and Adorno help to reconcile the individual with a particular sort of loneliness and emptiness.

My alternative approach, drawing on the phenomenological tradition, does not attempt to reconcile the individual with a necessary isolation but instead offers an account of the ways in which the human potential for communication and fulfillment has been lived to a greater or lesser degree in different historical contexts.

This is pretty rad.