Desire for Amnesia

From childhood to early youth, I develop a fantasy of amnesia which was most likely inspired by a particular movie that I saw on video. Many years later, I learned that it is actually a TV movie adapted from Robert Ludlum’s bestseller: “The Bourne Identity”. As a dreamer youngster growing up with the vivid images from the simplified versions of Western literature and tales from Arabian Nights as well, I was fancying to find myself in one day, like Alice, in the midst of an astonishing story that I am the protagonist. “The Bourne Identity” provided me an outlet to break the chain of the dull reality: only amnesia could offer a GENIUNE ground for self-exploration and discovery of the hero within me.

In 2002, I rushed to the movie theatre to regenerate my fantasies with the Hollywood version of the story featuring Matt Damon. But my excitement ended up with frustration by the reason of its hastiness to transform a fascinating mystery into a loutish thriller. In its TV series version, the audience was not introduced with more information about the real identity of Bourne than the clues gained by Bourne among the plot. Is he really Carlos the Jackal? But Hollywood version immediately adopts third person narrative and we are admitted to CIA headquarters.

There is fallacy coined by the immanent critique by Hollywood on the excessive deeds of US imperialism conducted by the perverted individuals from officially armed organizations. This so-called critique extracts the lame limb from the well-functioning organism: The well intentioned organization of CIA that provides useful information to ensure free-market democracy and its philanthropist assassination program to liberate third world from despotism is now went off the rails and became dangerous, thus there comes a renegade without a memory (completely ignorant to how the game is played) and somehow equipped with a native morality that prevent him taking other’s money. But in the real life, like in stud poker, most of the cards dealt face-up. For instance, CIA does not function independent from the social organism, from the regulations of international market, approval of the Congress, etc. Assassination and torture could become instruments of the official foreign policy, like once torture was a spectacle in Roman Empire. But in the psyche of our idiotic protagonist, the spy on the run, negative quantity of information turns into a plus quantity of moralism like Marx once identified in the ideas of Heinzen.

Social perversion has been confronted with the individualistic moralism without any insight that criterion of this moralism is the product of the whole organism. This is the point where Karl Marx classified moralism as “ideological rubbish”. Ideology is the conformist hallucinogen that prevents one to evaluate the real value of truth, political truths of market and inequality, to establish an accurate concept in connection with the given object. Spiritual and memorial awakening of a discarded CIA agent is ideological as long as it doesn’t provoke him to confront the whole organism. But, he recites particular truisms continuously. Once, a woman that I loved accused me of parroting about the honesty of my love again and again: I have realized now that my discourse on love was purely ideological.

The truth process in Badiouian terminology begins with an Event that disrupts sequence of traditional relations and legitimate ideas. This event introduces its own value of measurement, its objective morality at the end. It rips off the conformist morality from the Ideology. The genuine morality presents in the potentiality of a revolutionary event which has the accurate measurement to judge our past and present. But immanent critique invokes the ideological morality that stems from traditional relations of our past and present to foreclose our future.

As years go by, my desire for amnesia has reversed with the ordinary disappointments and regrets of reaching the period of middle age. Now I am fancying that I will awake some day with an empty memory and start to investigate what kind of an incredible conspiracy, a multifaceted plot or a chivalrous tale that I am the protagonist. But just to figure out whom really I was, a perfect personification of the Beatles song “Nowhere Man”: I had nothing worth to remember, had no friend worth to be concerned about, no love worth to all of those heartbreaks, no taste of a tongue that worth to be remained in my mouth… I was the man who buys four cans of Miller and two packs of Winston in almost every single evening from the same shopping mall. I was the man whose most exciting moments are limited with qualifying to the final table of the $10 buy-in holdem tourneys in PokerStars. That is all. And I will realize suddenly that, the amnesia itself is the most fascinating thing that ever happened to me. End of the illusions of the moralism of my old habits. Now, it is the perfect time to discover the potential hero within me.

With the most famous phrase of the history of human thinking Karl Marx designated to the revolutionary form of the amnesia: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”.