Cracking Up (Bollas)

Selfhood is known by a rhythm. Intensity then dissemination. Thought, feeling, event, then cracking up. The cracking up is a process of re-appropriation. This is our relationship to our own history: and when it's not, we inherit our own history as a traumatic loss and nothing else. To crack up our own history is to creative transform it, make it available for new uses, new pleasures and laughs. Cracking up can mean laughter, where laughter is the effect of a process which re-appropriates old, traumatic, disturbing material and represents it for experience, maybe no less damaging, but accompanied in any case by laughter which is a kind of pleasure, albeit sometimes a sick one.

Cracking up can be a relief or the start of something new, a new relationship to oneself, one's past, one's world. A momentary diversion or a break. when situated in this process of self-experience, the debate over the political uses of laughter btw Benjamin and Adorno is defused: not a polarity but a spectrum between, a distance between two poles in a range of self-experience, ways of being with oneself.

This imagination of self-experience also moves my sense of encounter closer to Bersani's Intimacies, where the sense of experience is closed intertwined with the role the other (person, object, image) plays in cracking oneself up: dissemination is a kind of impersonal intimacy. It is impersonal in Bersani's sense because in it, the process, I gets confused with the forces that crack up the I, the You or the It. Someone else's words or unconscious idiom interrupts us, gets in the way of where we were going, even though we didn't know we were going anywhere until we got waylaid. In persona intimacy, one would see this as an interruption; in impersonal intimacy, one would be encouraged to see it as an opportunity, a letting go, a way to shatter and take pleasure in the shattering, or learn from it anyway.