The “discourse” of boredom is the management of boredom (Adorno on “free time”, normalization, and ideology). Discursive practices conceal boredom, even while boredom is experienced.
There is also a discourse on boredom—how useless! What is this discourse? Is it not assimilated into the discourse of boredom (who would participate in a discourse on boredom)? Either: the discourse of boredom suppresses or marginalizes the discourse on boredom; or: the discourse of boredom preempts the discourse on boredom (what happens to the discourse on boredom when in the vice of the discourse of boredom?) or, in other words, the discourse on boredom fails to become a discursive practice—the discourse on boredom cannot simply be an “understanding” or “reflection” on boredom.
Or: perhaps boredom is not a condition on which we can reflect or a problem to be solved (optimism). Boredom is also a possibility (pessimism).
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Benjamin too says that boredom is the egg from which experience hatches. But if boredom is an existential phenomenon, must we not also be compelled to speak of an existential laughter? There is, we are told, always trauma at the heart of consciousness—repressed in various levels of inauthenticity; why is there not also the possibility of laughter (one which is neither ironic nor even humorous)? Why, Nietzsche asks, in the face of our abyssal freedom, can we not laugh?
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