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Lots of thoughts from our August meeting, and conversations below and elsewhere (cf recent relevant class conversations) that followed from it.  I'll try and synopsize some of what I've been thinking in our September meeting but a few ideas in anticipation of that ...

I'm very much intrigued by the movement from "against," in the sense of self versus other, to what seems to me an inquiry into the self and its potential againstnesses, as in family versus academic, religious/spiritual versus family versus academic, and so forth.  To put it differently, one can feel "torn" between alternatives both external and internal.  Importantly, the existence of internal and/or external differences does not by itself lead to the uncomfortable feeling of being "torn"; that requires as well an additional ingredient, a sense of a need to choose, to decide what to accept/reveal/embrace and hence what to deny/hide/destroy.

The parsing is important because my sense is that much of the discomfort over the idea of "againstness" itself derives from the presumption that it necessarily involves a choice between embracing and destroying.  An alternative is to treat differences, both internal and external, as generative opportunities, as the creative tensions from which emerge new possibilities.   One doesn't, in this case, choose between alternatives.  Instead one hybridizes them, generating new possibilities in the process, possibilities for which existing alternatives are the parents and so, in an importance sense, existing alternatives all live on in the progeny.  In these terms, "againstness" is not an invitation to destructive conflict but rather to .... an eros of creation?   Both internally and externally?

Several interesting things follow from this.  One is that inquiry should be directed simultaneously both internally and externally, and should treat difference as a virtue rather than a problem.  A second is that a reluctance to expose oneself to others may be as much a matter of mistrust of one's own internal againstnesses as it is of the potentially hostile responses of others.  And a third is that hostile responses (in oneself and others) may largely reflect, projected on others, one's discomfort with internal againstness.   To put it differently, "one-person liberation movements" may be an essential ingredient in any group liberation movement.    They can, of course, be either discouraged or encouraged by groups but, in the end, it is each person who has to decide how to deal with their own set of external and internal againstnesses, whether to value/share them or choose among/hide them.  There are all sorts of reasons to do the latter but my guess is that they are all arguments for limiting rather than expanding inquiry, for preserving one or another aspect of the status quo rather than evolving.

Perhaps an "eros of creation" requires an appreciation of "the lusciousness of other minds" and of our own as well?