The Geology of Repression, Part V

Maggot: “Eh Father Gilliam, I don’t believe I am wasting my time or your time… I want to continue this discussion about repression… I want to find out what it means to link psychic repression with social oppression, as you and Felix and Wilhelm Reich have done, and whether by understanding and thereby somehow relieving my repression and the repression of others I could somehow alleviate social oppression. I am nagged by the worry that in thinking about psychic repression, particularly the manifestations of it which I am observing in myself, I am at best engaging in an activity which can only be of private interest, and which at worst is an aggravation of those tendencies of solipsism, narcissism, and self-absorption already so evident in my way of ‘being in the world’.”

Father Gilliam: “ Yeah, well, I don’t think my concepts, which modify in very important ways the earlier concepts of subject, subjectivity, desire, mind and nature, have been successfully engaged by very many of the new crop of my interlocutors which is springing up.”

Maggot: “I’ve got to admit – I am very fortunate to be able to speak directly with you… How many years is it you’ve been dead? It’s now nearly a decade and a half, isn’t it?”

Father Gilliam : “ You are indeed outlandish, Maggot. We’ll entertain each other a bit longer. You are putting words in my mouth, and it never would, or never should, be an acceptable practice within academia, but perhaps here we are a bit more free… and there is much more room for carelessness, and indeed, for recklessness. Your punishment, you know, and it is already in effect, is that you are ignored.”

Maggot: “Anyway, sooner or later I hope that Dr. Spinoza and I will speak in much greater detail about the presuppositions of ‘repression’; certainly that is one of the most obvious ways to begin speaking responsibly about the desiring of one’s own repression… to examine the presuppositions, to know what they are, to know where they are questionable or weak, etc.”

(Upon hearing this, Father Gilliam looks bored… and I think that what Maggot has suggested here must be boring…. How else to explain that Dr. Spinoza and Maggot , who have twiddled around in this theme for such a long time have never gone very far in this direction? They are really only entertaining themselves in this twiddling… what is boring is not entertaining.)

Maggot: “I experience my repression and neuroses kind of in the same way that I experience the symptoms of a common head cold. There is a bit of discomfort, a nagging sense of the presence of sickness, but nothing really very disturbing or painful or frightening or worrying; nor is there any major impediment to performing my daily activities… I am aware that I am not at my best, that’s all. In other words, these are slight discomforts, unpleasant – but they don’t really matter much. I can very well live with my repression and neuroses… ”

Father Gilliam: “See here, Maggot. I can live with the outlandishness and the “flailing nature” of your posts – but what I see in this last comment of yours is the striking of a note of resignation. This I consider much much more unacceptable. When we resume this discussion, we must go further into what the affect of resignation does and what it connects with…”