So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?
I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)
About Me
- the other woman
- "She did not know if she did it on purpose, but she lived as a fatality the necessity of destining her pleasure to the absent one, who moreover was not always the same, the other of the other always possibly being an other. This is naturally, and here I have to quote her, a 'surplus' of always available pleasure, and a 'fatal deprivation.' After a silence: the day that I love someone, man or woman, I am certain, or I believe that it will stop, in any event this is how I will recognize love. I have loved a lot, however, without ever abandoning myself to those I loved, presently I mean. And up to the present. Another silence (I had already asked for the bill) and without anything provocative or vulgar, with a kind of confidence which I still like to think of: I have the feeling that with you [vous] it would be different." (Derrida, Envois)
2 comments:
I totally think there's something 'Romantic' about the Matrix...but that would be because my dissertation is about Romanticism being all about dealing with the materiality of the human. Which isn't what most people think Romanticism is about.
You know, in a way, my Romanticism orals list, though ostensibly arranged around the ideas of sublimity and temporality, also keeps coming back to the materiality of the human, at least in terms of how one manages one's relations with actual human beings in order to be able to maintain one's love for mankind. (I may not, of course, be understanding materiality of the human in the way that you're using it, but this is more or less what was behind my initial post.)
Now, of course, all I can hear is Linus Van Pelt saying, "I love mankind, it's *people* I can't stand."
Post a Comment