Doppelgänger
A Link to a Talk: On Dostoevsky's The Double and the Problem of Modern Identity
Hémérocalle (Duodi), 2 Prairial, CCXXXIV
Inspired by a comic—though also quite serious—article I published here about a year ago, Mackenzie Taylor, on behalf of the Philosophy Club of the University of Western Australia in Perth, invited me to give a talk by Zoom on Dostoevsky’s The Double and on whatever reflections the novella had occasioned in me. I delivered the first part of the original piece before taking my talk in a direction of its own. Along the way, both in my address and in the exchanges that followed, we talked about Dostoevsky’s text, but also about Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Nabokov’s Despair, and some of my own travails in being haunted for many years by my own (online) Doppelgänger. We also discussed the age of AI, the question of artificial consciousness, Richard Dawkins’s touching romance with Claudia, our shared sense of personal identity in the virtual age, cultural fragmentation, political contentions, the nature and history of nihilism, Russian Orthodoxy, and even universal salvation. By the way, excuse a misstatement: Christ kisses Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor, not the reverse.
It was good of the club to convene on a Saturday morning (though it was still Friday night at my end) and I enjoyed the encounter immensely. I was saddened to see that my very dear friend Byron the Koala was not in attendance, but he lives on the other side of the country, near Sydney, and he warned me he probably would not be able to make it. C’est la vie.
I enjoyed this talk immensely! And yet when it came to the students asking questions, I also found myself remembering my own short time at university in literary studies, where every semester I was happy when there was actually a course given on the "classics" and even then I would sit there with a dozen of other students who hadn't read even the assigned text, let alone any other works of the author.
Most of the time was then spent by the Professor making some general autobiographical remarks and summing up the story of the given text, because he/she realised that it was impossible to engage in any meaningful conversation about the actual topic.
My personal highlight was when one Professor started a class on "Die Leiden des jungen Werther" with a "trigger warning" that Werther commits suicide at the end of the book - which resulted in one student leaving the classroom and another student wispering to his friend: "Why do Professors always spoil the ending?"
Anyway, thanks for the conversation. I will pick Up der Doppelgänger again now, since I remember not appreciating ist very much the first time, probably because I had the harsher criticism about the work in the back of my mind.
I’ve never met my doppelgänger, but somehow he has access to my credit card, drinks all my wine, and DoorDashes curly fries around 12am. To make matters worse, I think the bastard hit me in the head before he left because I woke up with a brutal headache this morning. Very suspicious, I hope they catch the cretin.