Unreliable: …anti-Thomist and anti-teleological: B expresses abhorrence for the figures of the recent past, “those who immediately precede us in this land,” and stresses that there are those of his generation who spend all their time trying to erase this lineage. The erasure amounts to a negation of the notion of human nature and human progress, because it reveals the figures of the past for what they are: horrific, absent, monstrous others. If we believe in human nature, we have to suppose the eternal existence of certain qualities and thus we must admit that we are like them, our predecessors. But, if the sight of them is monstrous, if it troubles us, then we have to admit there is no human nature. B describes the moi, which can be translated as the self or the ego, as an abstract, irreducible concept, claiming that we can only understand it in an “intelligible universe” through metaphor. Metaphor, however, is a transposition, and therefore is removed from experience. The presence of moi in the universe is a shocking aberration, and, reverting to a metaphor to explain, B claims that it is as shocking as “a fly on an orator’s nose.” Thus, the moi is both insignificant and ridiculous, and yet still disruptive.
Mirror, Mirror 