Reflection/dissipation

 

Length: 0:50

 

The camera pans over one of Glen’s photographs, a black-and-white picture of a crowded city scene of cars and advertising lights, including large signs for Coke and BP. Jonathan speaks:

 

My own genealogical reflections here, prompted by the handing to me of a set of photographs, reveal to me the ways in which I have not created myself even as I have always been re-creating myself. Foucault says that “the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation” (“Nietzsche” 162). Indeed, what I am discovering in these photos are hardly my “roots.” My uncle’s life ended before any alternative “home” could be made for me—if such was even possible, and I’m hardly sure it was. Rather, what I see in my uncle and in his absence, and what I see in having followed in his footsteps by leaving, has been the necessity of dissipation and re-creation.