Form of life

pp. 135-173

in: Spencer Golub, A philosophical autofiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

In this chapter, a lack of what Wittgenstein calls "objective certainty" enables further shifting of the subject position and a series of maskings and unmaskings, self-impersonations, and self-corrections. Golub tries on his Jewishness as an Ashke (non)normative ilk-boy in genre fictions and so manifests the anomaly of not/being who or what he is. Themes of comedic masking and assimilation (Lenny Bruce) and of betrayal and forgetting of friendship (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) advance the theme of the unsustainable "I." The "we"-ness of friendship joins the ranks of the other fictional varieties of "we"-ness—family, cancer, Jewishness, history, and origin.