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Saji Ijiyemi

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“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.”

“Οι μεγάλες αφηγήσεις, οι εξιστορήσεις των μεγάλων στιγμών της ανθρωπότητας, των ριζοσπαστικών αλλαγών, των αλμάτων του πολιτικού και του πολιτιστικού προς τα εμπρός είναι εχθρικές προς τη σημερινή κατάσταση του κόσμου. Η αδιαφορία συναγωνίζεται την έλλειψη παιδείας· και τα δύο μαζί πιστοποιούν ότι η «ιστορία τελείωσε», όχι ως γεγονός αλλά ως συνειδητή απόφαση των κυρίαρχων του κόσμου μας.”

“History here is always a comedy, and not a tragedy: the tragic is before or after, and in any case outside of, temporal life; this life itself realizes a program fixed beforehand and therefore, taken in itself, has neither any meaning nor any value.”

“Did I completely lose my mind that night in the spring of 2017 when she commanded me to give her some cash so she could buy that first gram of cocaine—and I did it, without hesitation? (In my weak defense, she had looked me straight in the eyes and told me, “This is the exact amount of cocaine that will last me until I die, trust me. I’m just gonna need a tiny amount of coke each day, to keep me from falling asleep in my soup because of the opioids. Trust me, I know how to do this. It’s better if we only risk buying it once—that’s why we’re getting such a large amount.”) Or was I a total goner a few days later, when she told me to go to the ATM again and get more money so she could buy more cocaine (an eight ball this time), and I did it? Or was it the morning I walked down to a “harm reduction” agency in Chinatown and registered myself with the City of New York as an active intravenous drug user so I could get clean needles for Rayya—because I was determined to keep her safe and free from infection, even as she was dying of cancer and shooting cocaine and opioids into the veins of her feet, her hands, her neck? And also because I wanted her to see what a good girl I was, what a loving and accepting girl, what a generous girl? Or did I abandon myself completely the first time I suggested that perhaps she was becoming addicted to the cocaine, and she told me I was a “needy fucking crybaby” who needed to “back the fuck off from talking about shit you don’t even fucking understand,” and I stuck around after that for more abuse? Or was it when she and I (who had never once had an argument, in seventeen years of friendship and love) suddenly started fighting every day, as I begged her to look at me again like she used to, to touch me like she used to, to speak to me the way she used to? Was it when I started sobbing, ‘Where did you go, where did our love go?’” Was it when I started hiding in the bathroom at night, weeping on the floor (again with the crying on the bathroom floor!) while she hid in another bathroom, grinding down her cocaine into a finer and finer powder?”