This book represents a thought experiment on the theme of uncertainty. It takes as its premise G. E. Mooreās notion of mutually incompatible statements in relation to life being held together by a shifting first-person subject that hypothesizes narrative as a single subject through-line. It recalls Wittgensteinās idea of āfamily resemblanceā as a genre rather than biological or genealogical classification. āFamily resemblanceā both centers and de-centers the idea of āfamilyā as a stable unit of common singularity. In the guise of memory and family history, I offer my imagining mindās āelective affinitiesā (to borrow from Goethe who borrowed from science) in which resemblances are observed but observations are in large part invented. I undo history and memory for the purpose of discovering the self via reconstruction, which engenders another language game of family resemblance in which a single self metastasizes from a family cell (or cells). The self becomes its own family of resemblances and non-resemblances as well. I do things with philosophy (and employ literature as philosophy) but embed philosophy in experience, in errors of naming and recall, as in family relations and family history and other indices of the so-called real. Dolorās Youth treats selected incidents as found objects and objects as life events drawn from my own and other charactersā lives. It is a work of hypothetical embodiment, a ālifeā not of record but of slippage. āLifeā lived as philosophical error. It tries not to tell you but to show you this and to perform the task of self-discovery without the benefit of an integrated self. To go where obsessive-compulsive self-overturning takes me and see how the individual self moves away from āIā and into the interspace this āIā inhabits.
Wittgenstein called G. E. Mooreās statement, āI went to the pictures last Tuesday but I donāt believe that I did,ā a āparadoxā but many others labeled it āabsurd.ā1 The problem rests in subject more than in il/logic, or to state it differently, in the apparency of the former rather than of the latter. Mooreās statements are so widely disputed because they are scanned as one might any other sentence, by looking for subjectāobject agreement and for where the thought begins and where it ends. The problem, insofar as it is a problem at all, is that a thought oscillates through the sentence that puts the subject at risk by doubling its appearance and rendering it unrecognizable both to the reader and to itself. A doubled and redoubled āIā is the present bookās semantically actual agent, its subject in search of a subject position, a position from which it can be framed as an integrated subject, opposed by the counter-agency of the subject itself. The subject of this book is at a loss to know who he is other than someone else and so employs fictions to create or re-create (his) character. These others tessellate, sometimes even under the sign of the same Hebrew name borne by three non-Jewish characters drawn from real life so as/as if to attest to the ambiguousness of the narratorās own ambiguous Jewish identity (not so much as Wittgenstein but of the same order). Changing family names and family members accrue generational loss that inexactly matches cause and effect. The multiple, alternative selves who (are) set forth in this book and clamor for its authorship, have ghost-written the statement, āp and I do not believe that p.ā2 It is a statement that is forthright in its embarrassed negotiation of lower-case and upper-case subjecthood (āpā and āIā).
The question broached by another Moore statement, āItās raining outside and I donāt believe itā is a contestation of outside and inside, and more commonly among philosophers, between knowing and believing. But it is furthermore a contestation between an āandā and the ābutā which is sometimes put in its place or else is overlaid upon the āandā in the readerās mind to spin it round to something that appears on the surface to be only slightly less illogical. I feel something not entirely dissimilar in thinking about the title of the celebrated cine-paradox that is simultaneously called Last Year at Marienbad and Last Year in Marienbad (LāannĆ©e derniĆØre Ć Marienbad). Many people use the titles interchangeably, and if you Google the latter you will get a complete pull-down menu under the title Last Year in Marienbad but/and when you click on any of the menu options you are taken to the site of Last Year at Marienbad.3 The title has been auto-corrected minus any evidence that the original title entry was incorrect. In fact, the number of entries that appear under the āincorrectā title leads the reader to believe that his misremembering of the film title is correct. Given the filmās non-agreement of protagonistic memory (predicated on the assumption that memory is the protagonist), the contestation of at and in here appears to be all the more subject-driven. You not/remembering transpires at/in the story of the narrative trying to recall itself, without necessarily taking or having taken place. There may be only semantic memory, which may only be memory in/of itself, its figuration, the sounds it makes when we speak it, the shapes it makes when we write it down as sentences, words, and letters. And as/in the stories of our life. I believe what I say in much the same way that the speaker in/of Mooreās paradox believes what he says or rather what āIā says, whoever āheā is, whatever āIā have made of āhim,ā or of whatever āIā am also made.
We know what we know according to evidence but we are in a position to manipulate this evidence to suggest that there is proof of life where no life exists and to doubt this existence in the past as well as in the present. There is, in fact, no evidence, only further evidence, something based on presupposition. But on what is presupposition based? As to the self, we have not even the certainty that we do at a glance that something else, something other (a chair or a table) exists in the material world. Even in cases like this, we can lose sight of material reality between glances without anything other than the object itself to sustain us. It is all tied to perception, of course but as Roy Sorenson notes, parsing and paraphrasing Schopenhauer, ālike the eye, the āIā is the ācenter of all existenceā and yet is not present to consciousness or experience.ā4 We cannot see it. Reality itself might disappear in the blink of an āI.ā In a discussion of Mooreās Paradox, I misread the first part of āmercury exists in a solid state only at a temperature less than 38.86 degrees below zero Fahrenheitā as āmemory exists only in a solid state.ā5 Despite its uncertain provenance, this new statement is true insofar as I believe it. The solidity of memory being here extruded from an overriding state of mercuriality is all the āevidenceā āIā need to go on as to who I am and am not, who I was and was not. I am not stating facts. I am making an argument, offering a counterproposal that on its own terms cannot be refuted. What would your (or my) evidence for doing so be?
Dolorās Youth appears in the wake of my book The Baroque Night (2018), which concludes with the statement, āa manās got to believe in somethingāāa tough guy remark spoken in the voice of a neo-noir character run through my own voice modulator (or perhaps the reverse). I had a desperate need to be somebody, and since the character in question had just expired in my retelling, I stole his identity and ended the book before I got caught. I am risking apprehension by continuing my life as an identity thief even more directly in Dolorās Youth, wherein I become characters I might actually have been, some but not all of whom were raised in the Jewish faith. I use āfaithā here as something larger than and not always commensurate with myself, a character trait, as something with which to be identified as if āIā am a genre (I imagine) unto myself. Was I in this as with my āselfā persuaded by other peopleās arguments as I often am by a book, only to āchange my mindā after reading another book that convinces me of its case or of my having misread the first book? In On Certainty, Wittgenstein, himself relates this to the question of family, the bĆŖte noire of Dolorās Youth.6 Wittgenstein, whose family was as accomplished as it was fatally broken, wrote: āI believe that I had great-grandparents, that the people who gave themselves out as my parents really were my parents, etc. This belief may never have been expressed: even the thought that it was so, never thoughtā (OC Ā§159). Wittgenstein intends for this to support his idea that there are things we instinctively āknowā without proof, even without prior mental representation, before thought but not aforethought.7 This is a part of the a priori world that predates our subjective worlding, which informs the first statement of the Tractatus, āThe world is everything that is the case.ā8
In terms of the individual, doing precedes thinking and yet doing is not precisely experience because that again would necessarily fold in the accountability of proofs. By arguing that some things are not so much anti- as extra- or a -evidentiary, Wittgenstein pursues a creative mandate for philosophy that can be lost in the abundancy of his philosophyās somewhat tortured idea (after and sometimes anti-G. E. Moore) of ācommon sense.ā Wittgenstein believes that philosophers have been deleterious to philosophy by overthinking it and through it, the world. And so, I have taken Wittgenstein not so much at his word (because I not only support but indulge in and rely upon misreading) but as a thought-prompt, as I have done before in my book, Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior (2014). I have now taken up the challenge of what it has been like to live without proof (as do we all) and with an overly developed sense of my own self as being unprovable by the evidence of real life. This continues an argument I have made in The Baroque Night, which flips the positions of reality and unreality on the authenticity spectrum. But I am now going further by illustrating that the self is not one of those elemental things that simply is without us knowing it for a fact or even as an intuition. The self is something that exists only in the fictional world that we call unreal. To speak of true fiction makes sense to me personally. To speak of real fiction is simply a matter of genre classification. What would make fiction be not real fiction? āIā am a genre classification, which, then, is to say that not all of what I have to say here is true and all of it is meant to be real.
āāTrue fictionā is a contradiction in terms,ā writes Bruce Duffy at the start of his (nevertheless) persuasive literary adaptation of Wittgensteinās life, The World As I Found It. The title was Wittgensteinās although it was not meant to be autobiographical, but instead to speak to the slippage of the āI.ā Looking back on his work four years following its initial publication, Duffy sees in Wittgensteinās self-effacing passage, āa poetās song of origins and disappearances, of words and then word-covering silence.ā9 Duffy is here paraphrasing the concluding statement of the Tractatus (āWhat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.ā) to characterize its opening passage, returning to āoriginā and the āIā as structural devices working together to create a fictional reality. On this theme, Duffy cites Rimbaud (another of his literary biographical subjects), who wrote at age sixteen, āIt is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: People think me. I is someone else.ā10
I am by nature a non-pro...