Verschlagwortet: consciousness
Let’s delve into the spirituality of Fight Club. Tyler Durden, the protagonist of the film, is an unobtrusive representative of an average citizen in the capitalism during the turn of the millennium. He is dedicated to security of civilization and financial self-esteem. As an insurance commissioner for a large car group, he has to assess whether recalls of faulty and therefore potentially deadly cars are likely to be profitable for the company. Their policy is that they are only to be implemented if the expected subsequent costs of a legal dispute are higher than the cost of the recall action....
In the film Contact (1997) the protagonist Ellie Arroway makes contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence as a part of the SETI project. She gets plans for a construction that makes it possible to travel to their planets. The vehicle is being built and Arroway is allowed to try it out. What she experiences matches in an astounding number of points with anecdotal reports of the effect of n,n-dimethyltriptamine (DMT) on the human mind. DMT is presumed to be contained in all living beings, which means it is an endogenic substance, and it is structurally simpler than serotonin (quasi not much...
As so often, Slavoj Žižek is right when he says that the real issue of Fight Club is not resistance, but the fact that one has to suffer in order to reach consciousness and freedom. Freedom in late capitalism means first of all taking what is in the way of freedom (“Only after we have lost everything, we have the freedom to do everything”). One must be able to dispense with ideological accumulation and not to define itself over material possessions. Possession was the self of the protagonist, so he had to blast it up in order to reform his...
