another example of tedious contrarianism

I’m sorry, but the following sort of thing annoys me very much. This comes from the Wikipedia article on Deleuze:

“Upon Deleuze’s death, his colleague Jean-François Lyotard sent a fax to Le Monde, in which he wrote of his friend: ‘He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It’s your sadness, idiot, he’d say.'”

It’s those last two sentences that annoy me, in their affectation and their emotional bullying.

Look, Deleuze was widely loved. He died with unexpected suddenness in a manner that shocked most of us. What’s wrong with being sad about his death for awhile? “It’s your sadness, idiot”? In other words– feel sad about the death of Deleuze and you are some sort of “reactive” figure filled with ressentiment.

I’m seeing more and more of this at funerals in recent years– someone’s always striking a pose that it’s no big deal, and always claiming to speak in the voice of the departed, saying “lighten up!”, or whatever.

Clever contrarianism of this sort bothers me in no matter what area of life it occurs. There is a tendency not to want to do justice to the obvious. And the obvious is– death is a painful, frightening, and mysterious thing. Let people deal with it for a few weeks if they need to, or even longer. Why this cruel and affected pose of telling them that the dead person would ridicule them for being sad? This general ethical posture in our time of being above all strong emotion is one that I cannot and do not respect very much.

The sensitive/temperamental personality, in other words, is another of the stock types that is undervalued in the current social arrangements. But these things tend to work in periodic cycles. One hundred years from now, today’s aloof, jaded cynics are likely to be as passé as speakeasys and the name “Myrtle.”