Vanish

Identity is the new contemporary religion and "being oneself" is its main commandment.

As Eudald Espluga

2021) says, the culture of personal authenticity is constantly promoted through networks, self-help speeches and the doctrine of

that companies address to "entrepreneurs of themselves" , that is, salaried workers.

Neither art nor writing survives it.

You only need to shop around the internet to find a multitude of blogs on how to “learn to write in a personal way” or how to “discover yourself through writing”.

In the midst of all this

of ourselves and our authentic personality, writing is sold to us as one more self-image.

In reality, all that

discourse about art, thought or writing as an expression of "the personal" is nothing more than the conversion of all these things into merchandise, images, consumable aesthetic objects, the umpteenth version of neoliberal solipsism and individualist mysticism.

And against today's cheap mystique, nothing better than a really good mystique.

Simone Weil is a strange and unclassifiable thinker.

A revolutionary trade unionist who was part of the French Resistance and the Durruti Column, a platonic in the 20th century, a radical political activist who defended the sacred.

Contrary to any mystification of the person and the personal, Weil defended humility —which implies an annihilation of the self— as a condition for knowledge or art.

"The sacred, far from being the person, is what is impersonal in a human being"

2014).

And it is that truth or beauty, far from having been created or invented by great personalities, "inhabit that domain of impersonal and anonymous things."

Sánchez Ferlosio said that "modesty is a characteristic of science", because the one who wants to know, by "remaining totally focused on interest in the object, tends to spontaneously sink into a greater or lesser self-forgetfulness" (

1987).

That dependence of the subject on the object, that subjecting ourselves to something other than ourselves, is, deep down, the way to achieve independence in artistic creation or in thought.

As Weil says, "it is precisely the artists and writers most inclined to regard their art as the fulfillment of their person who are in fact most subject to public taste."

Only bad thinkers and bad artists aspire to do only something personal and talk only about themselves.

Only the mediocre and the arrogant believe that their work comes only after them and somehow did not exist before.

The good ones, like Michelangelo, consider that the sculpture was already inside the stone and that their job has been to eliminate the excess marble.

We live more and more trapped in a narcissistic slavery.

And against that capitalism of the self, against that suffocating obligation to produce our own authenticity, against that mandate to sell ourselves in the market of self-reflections, Weil's message is anti-system.

Let us defend art and thought as something sacred and impersonal.

And let's defend the writing.

Let's defend it as a way not to find ourselves, but to lose ourselves.

If writing is subtracted in some sense from the logic of consumption and property, it is because writing has to do with the improper, because it is turning to "the other", going beyond the self, forgetting about oneself.

It is precisely about wanting that nothing belongs to us once we write it, but also that when we write we aspire to nothing belonging to us before writing it.

true ideas,

like beautiful works of art, they deserve to be written precisely because they are not ours, because they belong to themselves, because they have their own objectivity, because they are independent, because they do not owe us anything but we owe them.

If searching for truth or beauty liberates us from something, it is precisely from ourselves.

And that is why writing, if it is really writing, like thinking, if it is really thinking, is a wound to narcissism, a gap in the egocentric obsession of self-absorption, a crack in the individual.

Writing is liberating, in the midst of all this obligation to be ourselves, because it is spilling into something else, overturning, disintegrating, becoming invisible, destroying oneself.

Vanish.

because they are independent, because they do not owe us anything, but we owe them.

If searching for truth or beauty liberates us from something, it is precisely from ourselves.

And that is why writing, if it is really writing, like thinking, if it is really thinking, is a wound to narcissism, a gap in the egocentric obsession of self-absorption, a crack in the individual.

Writing is liberating, in the midst of all this obligation to be ourselves, because it is spilling into something else, overturning, disintegrating, becoming invisible, destroying oneself.

Vanish.

because they are independent, because they do not owe us anything, but we owe them.

If searching for truth or beauty liberates us from something, it is precisely from ourselves.

And that is why writing, if it is really writing, like thinking, if it is really thinking, is a wound to narcissism, a gap in the egocentric obsession of self-absorption, a crack in the individual.

Writing is liberating, in the midst of all this obligation to be ourselves, because it is spilling into something else, overturning, disintegrating, becoming invisible, destroying oneself.

Vanish.

a breach in the egocentric obsession of self-absorption, a slit in the individual.

Writing is liberating, in the midst of all this obligation to be ourselves, because it is spilling into something else, overturning, disintegrating, becoming invisible, destroying oneself.

Vanish.

a breach in the egocentric obsession of self-absorption, a slit in the individual.

Writing is liberating, in the midst of all this obligation to be ourselves, because it is spilling into something else, overturning, disintegrating, becoming invisible, destroying oneself.

Vanish.

Defending that disappearance is revolutionary.

Because it is revolutionary, in times when everything is a mirror, everything is an image, everything is for sale, everything has a price, defending that, in reality, not everything has it.

That the publicists of the regime, the

and the merchants are not right.

That freedom is not looking for ourselves to sell ourselves, but submitting ourselves, in an act of freedom, to things that have value in themselves.

That, as Weil says, "nothing less than these things is worthy of inspiration to men and women who accept death."

Clara Serra

is a philosopher and researcher at the University of Barcelona.

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