Against religion and therapy: Theses on art and the novel

The kind of person whom people will hate or try to change (convert or save, cure or offer advice to…) is a paradigmatically novelistic subject (character, author, reader).

Our world needs the novel because it is not novelistic. It is not novelistic because it is far too much organized around fear of crime. It produces disaffected people who are set up for punishment, salvation, or cure.

This is why there are more and more artists.

Morality stifles curiosity.

To make, or experience, an artwork is to call into question a form of life.

To call into question a form of life is to call into question both the subject (person with experiences) and the world he or she is part of. Thus, if there are clinical complexes of thought, feeling, and behavior, as in psychoanalytic thought, they are at once individual and societal, psychological and sociological, and never the former without the latter.

Which is why no one who considers their own experience can ever be saved or cured to fit the needs of the society.

Therapy, however pursued (medications, psychotherapy, spirituality or self-help), is meant to make your life work better, without, and instead of, calling anything into question.

The world the novelistic subject finds himself in is as irremediable in its miseries as its joys.

What is irredeemably bad may well be funny.

The novelistic subject’s experience is revealed as beyond good and evil. Where there seemed to be a fault, an enigma must be found.

Hence, writing is neither complaint nor confession. It is an exploration, an inquiry.

It is better to try to understand things (including oneself and others) than to try to change them to get what you want.

Life is either a problem to be solved, which is an idea of resentment, or a set of enigmas to be understood.

The enemy of art is abnormal psychology and all the spiritual religiosities that concern themselves mainly with it.

Thinking has less to do with solving problems than with inventing problems in order to understand situations.

Situations will be transformed, into new situations, and solutions to problems will generate new ones. This change, which may be for the better, will happen in spite of who is involved and what they want.

What is interesting may not be useful, but usually stands a better chance of being happy.