TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

dogmatic binding and over which to perform some ceremony of mourning after its
dissolution. At the same time, Pound and Benjamin register the dreamlike nature of the
narcissism that reifies such beliefs. Poundian de-personalization teaches us that
murdering Narcissus, freeing oneself from one's personality, comes at the expense of
knowing that we have only ever been captives within a community of dreaming slaves,
whose dreams of belonging extend the real duration of the self's exile in the provinces of
regret, litost, and impoverishment. "Time is the evil." Pound will say in Canto XXX,
referring to the production of just these sentiments after the romance of self-creation is
abused.
Cameron gives us an interesting example of the ambivalence implied by the
subject-predicating function of the impersonal she theorizes, by way of a thought
experiment in which she asks us to consider just what it is that suffers when our body is
attacked: personhood or personality. The implication of her experiment underlines the
nature of impersonality's undecidable wager between accepting the delirium of
personhood and the knowledge that that personhood is personality‘s derivative. Cameron
argues that it is impossible to believe that an attack is made on your personality if your
body has been attacked. Personality, that is, is inalienable: "In distinction, personality
stresses self-ownership, the of or possessive through which individuality is identified as
one's own" (viii). Simone Weil pursued a painful program of intense self-unmaking
through a practice of active attention and concentration upon the particulars in her
immediate environment that she called "de-creation" (this, the homeopathic habit she
used to overcome her bouts of depression coupled, as they were, with deep and painful
migraine headaches), Cameron similarly acknowledges the antinomial nature of
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