Renouncing access to everything is the price of coherent thought

Evidence

Like all political positions which are ethically viable, the Marxist one also closes off certain possibilities and opens up certain others. In choosing such a position, one chooses the closures, certainly, but one also chooses the potentialities. Said’s warning – which is also a self-warning – that a choice for Marxism entails putting ‘oneself outside a great deal of things’ points towards a possible inventory of renunciations; it is a pity, though, that Said never takes stock of what Marxism might have made possible, nor of what one actually loses when one puts oneself inside too many things. Having access to a ‘great deal of things’ always gives one a sense of opulence, mastery, reach, choice, freedom, erudition, play. But resolution of the kind of ambivalences and self-cancelling procedures which beset Said’s thought requires that some positions be vacated, some choices be made, some of these ‘great deal of things’ be renounced. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 427

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘Having access to a great deal of things always gives one a sense of opulence, mastery, reach, choice, freedom, erudition, play. But resolution… requires that some positions be vacated’ — a durable truth about commitment and coherence worth returning to.
• XREF: Resonates with the chapter’s running theme of renunciation as the price of any committed position, mirroring the existing article on sacrifice as grief/love and stabilization. — connects to: Genuinely novel thought requires abandoning the networked horizontal plane of information. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 191