Elliott Smith is placed in the context of Heideggerian and Nietzschean existentialism, Foucauldia... more Elliott Smith is placed in the context of Heideggerian and Nietzschean existentialism, Foucauldian ethics, Christianity, psychoanalysis, the nonviolence of Judith Butler, and the writings of Thomas Bernhard in order to argue that what's primarily at stake in all of these cases and ultimately in philosophy in general is the question of authenticity. The premise of the essay is the ambiguity of the concept of "sociality", which means both inauthenticity and interdependency. On one hand we are social creatures, created by the society we happen to find ourselves in (such is inauthenticity), and on the other hand we're social animals--dependent on that society for both our subsistence and our possible flourishing. Ethics and morality are self-centered and other-centered ways of coping with this circumstance, respectively. In Elliott Smith, art is an ethical way of coping with this, the human condition; love is a moral way of doing so; and drug abuse is a destructive (unethical, immoral) way of attempting (and failing) to do so. Politics, the final term around which the essay is structured, is concerned with arranging the social world to make ethics and morality possible.
Elliott Smith is placed in the context of Heideggerian and Nietzschean existentialism, Foucauldia... more Elliott Smith is placed in the context of Heideggerian and Nietzschean existentialism, Foucauldian ethics, Christianity, psychoanalysis, the nonviolence of Judith Butler, and the writings of Thomas Bernhard in order to argue that what's primarily at stake in all of these cases and ultimately in philosophy in general is the question of authenticity. The premise of the essay is the ambiguity of the concept of "sociality", which means both inauthenticity and interdependency. On one hand we are social creatures, created by the society we happen to find ourselves in (such is inauthenticity), and on the other hand we're social animals--dependent on that society for both our subsistence and our possible flourishing. Ethics and morality are self-centered and other-centered ways of coping with this circumstance, respectively. In Elliott Smith, art is an ethical way of coping with this, the human condition; love is a moral way of doing so; and drug abuse is a destructive (unethical, immoral) way of attempting (and failing) to do so. Politics, the final term around which the essay is structured, is concerned with arranging the social world to make ethics and morality possible.
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