#david kishik

[funeral]

Philosophy likes to present itself as a public practice, though the thinker is usually found at home, either symbolically or actually. Philosophers are private intellectuals long before a few of them vie for public attention, sometimes to disastrous effect. Philosophy is actually a kind of interior design put on public display—a house tour, as it were. I can enter some philosophers' space by engaging with their work, but I must remember that this is their mental space. I can pay a visit, but I can't move in for good.

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[theblackestofsuns]

The Manhattan Project by David Kishik

Stanford University Press

2015

[funeral]

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[funeral]

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[funeral]

“Life, without feeling alive” is how Laing describes the schizoid position, which only now...I am coming to recognize as my own: “This shut-up self, being isolated, is unable to be enriched by outer experience, and so the whole inner world comes to be more and more impoverished, until the individual may come to feel he is merely a vacuum.” First the schizoid distances himself from an external life he deems desolate, especially when compared to the rich life he cultivates within. But after a while he “longs to get inside life again, and get life inside himself, so dreadful is his inner deadness.” [...] The schizoid ideal is a “will to nothingness, an aversion to life,” to quote Nietzsche’s not unrelated genealogy of the ascetic ideal. . . Schizoid life is but a life sentence, served daily in the ordinary world. It is a life lost, and I’m it.

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[funeral]

A secure existence means that a person has both feet firmly planted on the ground, confident of themselves and of the world. By contrast, many schizophrenics lack this “indisputable protection of existence from falling, sinking, breaking through into its abyss,” which results in a being that is no longer quite there in the world, a naked life stripped of its previous form. Existing feels like flailing while falling. Winnicott describes a milder unstable situation as the fear of falling forever and going to pieces. Laing further defines a similar critical condition as ontological insecurity. But is anyone’s existence truly secure? Mustn’t we all hold each other lest we fall? This is the case not only when it comes to helpless babies but also to fully-functioning adults. Thicker ice is not yet terra firma. So why do I continue to let many relationships melt away and just keep to myself?

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[funeral]

The problem, however, is that schizoids find love hard to metabolize. Their resulting social malnutrition, or self-starvation, makes it difficult to further digest meaningful relations, which are often substituted by shallow connections that give instant gratification but little nourishment . . . Even inanimate objects, consumed or hoarded, can pretend to replace the demands of human intimacy and hence act like temporary barriers protecting the individual from such vital demands. While anger and aggression lead one to first feel guilty and then depressed, schizoid withdrawal leads one to feel nothing. If hate becomes destructive it is still possible to love someone else. But if love seems destructive, if love is renounced, then there is no exit strategy. True hell is the life of a person who cannot shake off this conviction that hell is other people.

David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition

[launien]