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Degeneration/Queer

Few years back (up till 2012) I was very much into decrepitude. I'm sure there are posts about that in this blog - for instance, about my ontology of decrepitude where everything displays advanced ages in many forms. (My interest was connected with the Heraclitus of our anarcheology book: an philosopher aggiornatto who thought from his many millennia of age.) Later, I got a bit farther from these rather Empedoclean attitude by thinking that maybe somehow one should resist and not embrace aging. But degeneration has some interesting if Beckettesque dimensions to it. Apart from the gradual realm of forgetfulness (that should be an antidote itself for resentment) that downs on one, there is de-individuation - that comes together with de-genderisation as, to be sure, Marx's notion of non-human sex didn't involve individuals and therefore a sexual difference (in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right", translated by Annette Joli and Joseph O'Malley, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p: 88-90.) At least the effects of forgiveness (if not the intention or the gesture) become more easily attained. In general, it opens the way for freer singularities that can move around untamed by pestering individuals that chain them up regularly. On top of that, gradual lack of decisive sexual drive disconnect people from a plot that is somehow often pre-written, or at least pre-sketched (unless for fully queerized people, there are cis-plots and increasingly non-cis-plots). These plots are as if something ancestral, molecular, biological were playing with our movements - we who are in a biological age. In contrast, the aged is a natural-born queer.
The degenerate is in the open.

I can't help thinking that most of what is said about humans being unconstrained applies rather to these vaguely defined age group - those who are too old (for something). The age where the sadus give up everything and eventually become too old for the world. This oldness is crucial for the tonality Beckett is often looking for. Maybe much Beckett can be presented like this: what would humans be if unconstrained - that is, if no economic or biological chain were pressing. In other words: what is human life be like when hormones are gradually watered down? To be too old - to think of the world itself as a sadu: too old to be in the world but rather remaining. Like a left-over.


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