Chesterton on man as stranger on earth
anecdote · Chesterton, The Everlasting Man ·
retold in 3 talks
Chesterton's Everlasting Man imagines the 'monster' man must have appeared to naturally evolved animals, wrapped in artificial bandages (clothes), propped on artificial crutches (furniture), shaken with laughter, unique in averting his thought from his own bodily existence. Žižek uses this to frame human monstrosity as the death drive.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“Man has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin. He cannot trust his own instincts.”
“Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.”
“a soldier who fights, doesn't care if he dies. But at the same time it doesn't mean I want to be killed. He is very fearless not afraid to die but this doesn't mean you are an idiot who just runs into the guns.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Derek Hook1Donald Moss1Terblanche Delport1Julien Offray de La Mettrie1Philip Gosse1Erik Erikson1Huey P. Newton1Norman Finkelstein1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Chesterton's Everlasting Man imagines the 'monster' man must have appeared to naturally evolved animals, wrapped in artificial bandages (clothes), propped on artificial crutches (furniture), shaken with laughter, unique in averting his thought from his own bodily existence. Žižek uses this to frame human monstrosity as the death drive., illustrating human monstrosity,death drive,man as animal needing a master
Žižek quotes G.K. Chesterton's 'The Everlasting Man' at length: man is a stranger on the earth, shaken with laughter, unable to trust his instincts, wrapped in artificial bandages (clothes), propped on artificial crutches (furniture), illustrating the drive as constitutive dysfunction., illustrating human exceptionalism as dysfunction,Freudian drive,strangeness of humanity to nature
G.K. Chesterton's example of a soldier who fights without fearing death but is not therefore reckless, fearlessness is compatible with strategic cunning, illustrating subjective destitution as a sustained political stance., illustrating subjective destitution