Cult J: To Be or to Please
Block 4
Mon, Wed, Fri, 9:00-10:20 am (NY)
(4:00-5:20 pm, Kyiv/St. P)
Epigraph: At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. George Orwell
For whom do you perform? Is the price of being yourself worth paying? In a world committed to rewarding mediocrity, the consequences of being singular are grave. To be oneself—insistently to recover one’s origin, from the Latin originem (beginning or source)—is an existential risk with little instrumental value, for one risks rejection by every form. This dilemma has haunted writers, artists, the “great genius rejected by mediocrities” for the sake of “the preferred narrative,” for centuries. Consider the event of the rejection of Walter Benjamin’s habilitation thesis—an instance of the academic institution rejecting theoretical praxis. Consider J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello whose emotional lecture is rejected by a room of scholars whose seeming interest is the “examined life.” Why is mediocrity rewarded? Living proof of the examined life is blasphemous to those who are afraid to live. The little-known word for this misalignment between being and performing is hypocrisy, from the Greek hupokrisis “acting of a theatrical part.” Considering these examples and others, we will ask a single, almost insidious question: will you be yourself or will you perform to please? Provisional meeting “themes”: (1) The Loneliness of Sincerity, (2) Hypocrisy, (3) The Price of Art, (4) Being and Appearing, and (5) Freedom (To be or not to be? Or to let be?). We will consider the writings of Samuel Beckett, André Gide, Franz Kafka, J.M. Coetzee, Martin Heidegger, and more.