The Time of Repetition and the Time of Suspension for an Historical and Political Understanding of Boredom

Abstract

According to Otto Fenichel, boredom is the sign of a conflict between the Id and the Ego, between the push of the first to reach the goal of our drives and of the second to inhibit them—an unstable equilibrium between movement and calm, frenetic agitation and catatonic immobility. This thesis provides the interpretive key to two of the most important concepts on boredom of this last century: 1) the concept of “deep boredom” elaborated in 1930 by Martin Heidegger in the text of his lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitudes, and 2) the concept of boredom as “stiffened restlessness” elaborated in good part in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin in the section of Passagen Werk in “Boredom, the Eternal Return”. According to the Heideggerian analyses, once boredom becomes “deep” and embraces one’s being in its totality, it reveals itself as that sort of basic emotional situation capable of awakening us to our authentic temporality, finally freeing ourselves from that empty and repetitive rhythm, from that “boring” space that, not by chance, we are constantly seeking to chase away. From Benjamin’s perspective, on the one hand, boredom is the subjective reflection of that eternal return of the same which time had become after the revolutionary defeat; but, on the other hand, in so far as it is the expression of a conflict, it is also an innovative energy potential ready to rupture. If boredom on the one hand is the inhibition of the drive goals, it can also, on the other, halt the repetitivity of time and indirectly favor revolutionary change. What struck me above all was that I did not want to do simply anything, although I desired eagerly to do something (…) between these frenzied bouts of boredom… Alberto Moravia, Boredom

Keywords:

• anxiety Keyword: anxiety
• boredom Keyword: boredom
• Eternal Return Keyword: Eternal Return
• Inhibition Keyword: Inhibition
• Repetition Keyword: Repetition

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Rights: Incopyright