In today's postmodern melange, one can never fail to ignore the power of the call. Indeed, it is the ethical matrix, it is thought, through which one can hold of viable ethical position while still rejecting now outdated pretensions to a quasi-Hegelian Kantian inspired vision of a priori ethical truths that give way like sand castles of ideology against the tidal wave of Derridain diffarence. "Call me maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen captures the essence of the postmodern ethical situation.The song , though appearing simple, in proper dialectical fashion, reveals fecund wisdom, in its profound frivolity;thus she portrays the profound interiority and gaiety of the postmodern condition. In this, one cannot help to recall echoes of Nietzsche, who speaks ad infinitum about the solitary play of the Overman. Call me maybe also offers us a florid account of the experience of alterity at the heart of the cosmopolitan Zeitgeist, to which we as thinkers (in the post Hegelian sense) are constantly addressing ourselves. Finally in the constant quest for desire, it's blockage, and our inability to signify the object petite, one sees how Jepsen gets at the heart of the poststructuralist psychoanalytic project, and in so doing uncovers the true problematics of the Big Other.
I shall now demonstrate this through a hermeneutical analysis of the first verse and chorus, as well as notable lines. "I threw a wish in a well\don't ask me I'll never tell\I look to you as it fell\and now you're in my way". What is this but a salient encapsulation of both Lacanian theory and the residual longing for a Hegelian dialectic of recognition. She throws her desire into a well, in order to conceal that enjoyment from others, but she cannot conceal it; for she looks to him as it falls. I think there is an element of performance for the Big Other. His gaze is entrancing; he represents both a literal erotic object and the power of the symbolic dimension: our desire to possess the phallus and have it possess us. The call is an ethical one as well: the solicitation of the other that she cannot ignore; for in that very difference, she is imbued with ontology. She recognizes alterity to be constructive, isolating & exhilarating. It is an imperative that is (super)natural, yet cannot be ignored
She continues: "I'd trade my soul for a wish\pennies and dimes for a kiss\I wasn't looking for this\but now you're in my way" what is this but of further articulation of the power of desire, and further the castrating power of the Other, as experienced through civil society. The experience of alterity he causes is so great that she is willing to engage in a Faustian deal, if only to have an authentic ethical/erotic encounter. He is in her way; she wasn't looking for this, but nevertheless this authentic encounter with Being happened. The unfolding of truth — a revelation of the true authenticity of being à la Heidegger. She has a true experience of holiness in the religious ex-essentialist sense: for in the other she sees the face of God. Through that Kierkegaardain encounter with ontologically constitutive agape, born of extreme alienation, she affects a Nietzscheain leap back,so that she may leap forward into the postmodern. But because this process is never complete, and thus can never be signified, as such, it always remains tentative.
"Hey I just met you\and this is crazy\but here's my number\so call me maybe". Camus famously said art is merely philosophy expressed in images. I can think of nothing that captures the postmodern condition with greater laconic joy, poignant brevity, and elegant perspicacity! For hers is an ethos of SOLICITATION qua solicitation. She does not demand; she merely asks. She recognizes the insanity of such an encounter, but in the face of such nihilism, such sheer contingency, she prospers. She makes no demand of others or her environment, she merely has the courage to pose a question, all the while willing to stake her being in the quest for recognition. She achieves self transcendence by reaching out for the other. In so doing, she destroys her fictive Imago, in the existentially fraught and truthful quest to reach her ego ideal and break through the bond of the symbolic order, as well as the hyper repressive power to enjoy by restraining from enjoyment, or still worse enjoy through narcissistic domination, either of the self or of the Other. "Before you came into my life\I missed you so bad." Does not this speak of the gap in the chain of signification; in other words does it not identify the heart of the poststructuralist's project — the inability to complete the semiotic chain and the ultimate anxiety over the collapse of language. The desire/encounter that is always with her but to which she will never be able to give up proper appellation. Disembodied subjectivity without a suitable circumscribing symbolic matrix. In line with Hannah Arendt, she does not have the audacity to ask what a human being is, since that would mean she would have to occupy a transcendental position; she merely asks who a human being is, and how we are constituted by our historical experience – how our ontology is shaped by multifarious appellations that reveal new horizons of beings within Being.
Is not a condition of modernity a "call" with a question-mark? Does not Carly Rae Jepson capture this truth with poetic grace and piercing perspicacity?
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