Fantasizing the Self

I am not

            Anna Karenina, Bartleby, Count Zero

            Dracula, Emma, Frankenstein

            G, Huckleberry Finn, Ivanhoe

I am not

            Jekyll and Hyde, Kim, Lolita

            Molloy, Nicholas Nickleby, Orlando

            Peter Pan, Quixote, Robinson Crusoe

I am not

            Sherlock, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses

            Voss, Winnie-the-Pooh, the X-Men

            Yorick, Zorro, Alice

I am not

            Amelie, Borat, Caligari

            Donnie Darko, E.T., Faust

            Gilda, Hulot, Ivan the Terrible

I am not

            Jules et Jim, King Kong, Lola Montes

            Mononoke, Nosferatu, Orfeu Negro

            Pinocchio, Quatermaine, Rocco and His Brothers

I am not

            Shane, Thelma and Louise, Umberto D

            Viridiana, Wall-E, X

            Yentl, Zhivago, Annie Hall

I am not

            antagonist, beginning, climax

            destiny, ending, fantasy

            ghost, history, identity

I am not

            jouissance, krisis, love,

            melodrama, narration, order,

            plot, quest, reversal

I am not

            story, turning point, uncanny

            voice, weather, XX

            yesterday, zeitgeist, author

I am not a

I am not i

I am not u

Fantasizing the Self
In narrative’s phantasmatic reversal, the self imagines itself the origin of desire, which is, in actuality, the progenitor of the self.		The doer is the master of his destiny, declares the plotting, plot-thickened self.
Fantasizing the self as the source of the desire it dramatizes, narrative fabulates free will.	My hero!, narrative flatters the self-regarding self.	Narrative Ltd, Ego-Builders Inc.
The self, wedded to narrative, begins and ends in desire.	Samsara—the self circling, encircled by story.	The tautology of story: story fabricates the self fabricates story…

drop the story

Narrative as inevitable as the sense of self, and as false. Like the self, narrative is always already telling stories. (Infants, however, have no selves, tell no stories—and neither do the dead.)	The self’s insatiable appetite for narrative, story after story feeding the self’s hunger for itself.	Narrative’s narrow orbit around the self, its dark son.
If narrative recounts multiplicity, it is only in order to reduce it to predictable identity.		The secret identity of every hero—the self, again the self.
The self is just another story.	To drop the story is to drop the self—suicidal.	Is there an alternative to narrative? (Is there an alternative to the self?)

drop the story