The Intellectual Defense
It is likely the case that all my precious theories are just an elaborate and overly-intellectual defense against what would otherwise be unbearable feelings. Freud himself makes this caveat when, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the “far-reaching conclusions” of his radical speculation seems, well, just too far-out. “If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime’ Ανάγϰη [Necessity], than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped. It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created ‘to bear the burden of existence.’” I’m puzzled by this notion of ‘escape,’ what does that mean? Is that a religious escape? Anyways, here Freud’s 1920 post-war text approaches in mood the destroyed world of the poem The Waste Land, published two years later and in which the spring-time force of life is itself cruel.
I had only became aware of certain unbearable feelings after mushrooms, as if the medicine had permanently dissolved blocks, or barricades, that had hitherto precluded me from feeling what had probably been there this whole time. Since the epiphany, the very thought of those who are dearest to me is indistinguishable from intensities of loss, fear, grief, ambivalence. Those dear to me who died prior to the epiphany did so in a hazy blankness; a loss the likes of which I could not think—in a very literal sense—and so remained haunted. If before I was unconscious of death, now I am all too conscious, living in a world where loss shines like the sun, and that needs to be defended against and so I concoct a steady stream of crazy theories to loft against the blinding rays of radical precarity—it also helps to burn off the excess drive energy.
My school calls this the intellectual defense and were I to be uncharitable, I would say they do so as a spell to ward of having to think. They can tend to put too hard a line in between theory and affect. If I were to revise this idea I would call it instead intellectual resistance, for any theory worth the name must have some affective electricity in it, some direct power to shock the unconscious, other wise what’s the point?
Humphrey Bogart practices the art of the intellectual defense
The Weather Project, 2003, Olafur Eliasson
