I have often read letters from people, polite folks, who felt that my time was so precious that their persistence in writing to me betrayed their inherent "selfishness." As if being "selfish" disqualified them from reaching out or from participating in a complicated world.
Most of us seem to have learned to carry that civilizational burden as capably as my textual friends have. These days, as with eons before, it would seem, the self is the obstacle to get rid of. The pernicious thing. The poison. Everyone hopes to move from that diseased prefix "ego-" to the more innocent "eco-". It would explain the ongoing romanticization of the "communal" and the proliferation of "communities". I confess that I too have probably contributed to a countercultural milieu that curses at the Anthropocene and its characteristic anthropocentrality, one that is not very practiced at moving through the nuances of such a critique.
But to my meandering point: I cannot reject selfishness. I used to do that. Trained in my teenage years by revivalist American frontier theologies from the 19th century, I learned to equate selfishness with 'sin' ('hamartia': the Greek word in the Bible that means "missing the mark"). I imagined selfishness to be the opposite of love. The ego had to go if God had to be got. But I cannot reject the ego either. And all attempts to reduce it to some patho-ontology seem only to reinstate its performed centrality. Perhaps then, what we name as selfishness is an a-communal tension within the communal that distresses its claims to wholeness and completion.
Perhaps the ego is how the eco researches itself. Perhaps separation is how entanglement comes to understand itself. Perhaps there are tensions within fidelity; perhaps there are weird minor gestures in purity. Perhaps the ants need the zombie ant to selfishly chart its cordyceps-fungal cartography away from the community. Perhaps the posthumanist needs the humanist to think well about the world.
The 'problem' here doesn't seem to be with 'selfishness' or the 'ego' but with 'where' it is located. The Procrustean surgical operation that transplants an entire biopolitical, agonistic, zoetic field of multispecies matterings into the isolated individuality of the citizen-subject compels us to perform our lives as if we were behind the wheels. As if we were the ones living our lives. As if 'our' lives are not already threaded through with other lives and deaths.
But we are not selves any more than the wave is the entire ocean. The self cannot be held by an individual. The self is not human, not exclusively so. The self is a mangled, sweltering, rampaging, murmuring, whispering trace of tensions in their entrainments and becoming-with-the-world. Selfishness is not disqualifying. Selfishness is not 'sin', or instead it is only sin in the sense that everything else is - because everything misses the mark, and that - my friends, textual and otherwise, is a beautiful thing indeed.
Báyò Akómoláfé
