Symptom

“A condemnation of life by one who is alive is, in the end, just a symptom of a particular kind of life…” Nietzsche, twilight of the idols,  

 All I have ever aspired to be was a symptom. The illness itself is beyond my understanding, and it is much larger and more important than I am. If one cannot condemn life, that is to say judge life or assert its equivalence to certain valuations,  because one is a part of the living, then certainly one cannot diagnose an illness when one partakes in the disease process. We cannot exchange our identity for any sort of valuation––the same logic applies. We merely strengthen our identity by augmenting its symptoms. Even when we judge ourselves as a nobody, mimicking Ulysses trick at the birth of Western identity, we become only more deeply cemented in who we are. Perhaps all of this illustrates the radical hegemony of language over our lives. Even when we are silent, even when we refuse to speak, that silent refusal is a term of language. It is tempting to assert, against this hegemony, that aphasia offers true escape––not the willful refusal of language, but the actual and unalterable loss of language. But the aphasic does not appear to have escaped his identity nor to have found freedom from language, for aphasia is fundamentally persecutory in nature. The aphasic suffers. The aphasic is haunted acutely by what he or she wishes to speak. Perhaps this is only the memory trace of what language was, perhaps it is the sense of having become a ghost. The dilemma of the ghost is this––he or she is still turned toward the social, still wishes to be enveloped by identity, and love, and purpose, but the possibility of these things is lost, the world itself is lost, the Heideggerian sense of embeddedness in a world is lost. The world itself has withdrawn, disappeared mysteriously, leaving only the naked instrument of the human soul, as in a chilling vacuum, stripped of the ability to speak.