“To try to actualize an assumed fantastic origin, to want to give rights to what could have been, to transform it into what must be, is a violent psychic gesture” - Catherine Malabou, Ontology of The Accident, pp. 88
Part of the motivation for writing this here is the desire to just express what I wish I could say to a psychoanalyst. To say before the words become a thought and fix themselves in the order of things.
Which is to state that I am writing to confront the fact that academia is not for me. It is not as if I have not tried. It is not as if I have not attempted to give rights to this possibility. It is just, for whatever reason, I have been unable to manifest this reality.
The reasons I get are exhausting to list. They are exhausting to hear. The first time I applied to graduate schools and failed, the shock among the professors who I knew appeared to be genuine. When I managed to win an MA from a program at a well known university but is also known for being a cash cow (what MA is actually authentic?) the disappointment was obvious.
When the professors from this illustrious university expressed shock at my rejections, following my matriculation of their MA, part of me wondered in earnest if the shock was authentic. But was it? To have a professor whisper in my ear while piss drunk how “special” I must be to win over the departmental grump and “convert” him to my way of thinking. What could this mean?
Readers who are familiar with the emergent child sex abuse literature know this scene by heart. It is manipulation pure and simple; it is nothing more than a simple seduction. Case closed. I am not special, at least not in ways that will win me a PhD. I am special because I can turn a smile while delivering critique and giggle when someone makes a conceptual blunder so severe that all I can do is cite the pages where their argument falls apart. To push a man so far all he can do is jump on the table and scream at me because my citations invalidate years of alleged “research.” Is the intellect I posses the intellect I have been assigned or is it tied to something far more insidious?
Freud calls the line of questioning I am engaging in “reality testing.” The psychic process of confirming one’s internal reality with that which is. The issue is that all of the objective evidence I get to prove that, yes, I am worthy is tinged by the secret question: “am I truly what they say?” All of the “yeses” I get can be immediately converted back to a “no.” They say “yes” to confirm a different reality then the one I wish to see. How could they not? All of the proof points to the fact that I am not what I am made out to be and all that I see myself as is not who I am. To insist otherwise, at this point, is to deny the evidence.
I had a professor confess to me that when he reads my work he sees the darkest parts of philosophy. The parts of philosophical thought we wish to occult and deny against the evidence. The philosophical inquiry that will survive a trial by fact but not by my peers. In the web of information that I am flooded with, how should I make sense of that which is?
Academia may not be the place for me, so much is obvious at this point, but there has to be something else. I cannot give rights and insist on a delusion when all I get is confirmation that no matter what happens my thought, or perhaps my existence, is excluded from the very foundation of the academy. One cannot insist on recognition from the intuition that they wish to destroy.
So I turn here, to make sense of what comes after the collapse. The collapse of understanding that I have to find some other way of living. To find a way when the beehive of the academy, as Derrida might say, has spit me out and denied me presence.