Last thoughts on Amanda Knox

Having written on the Knox case,  on my own blog,  for the past year,  and having run the whole gamut of perspectives  -  from Amanda as beautiful sociopath,  as depicted on the blog "Lies Our Mothers Told Us" under the authorship of one Miss Represented,  to Amanda as Innocent Abroad,  to Amanda as Enigma  -   I can say that after last night's verdict,  and the past week of seeing her plead in a long and poignant address delivered in perfect and fluent Italian to the Perugian court,  I think Knox may be truly a child of our times.  In this sense, she remains a question without an answer.  Daemonic,  both blessed and cursed.  

There is something in her Generation -  born after 1984  -  which is enigmatic and disturbing.  Not as idealistic as the Boomers,  more real than them,  and yet more dreamlike than the Generation X which preceded them,  this "Y"  Generation which precedes the Millennials, has something about it which is both "transcendentally ideal but empirically raw and lurid"  to transpose Kant.  

Its epistemic privilege lies within its fragmentation:  More real than the psyche,  more dreamlike than the empirical world of the political domain,  it inhabits a borderland which arises from the surreal hybrid of broken homes and affluence;  of privilege combined with an alienation.  Both Knox and Sollecito were children of divorce,  remarriage, and blended families.  Both were privileged with a relative affluence:  Sollecito is the son of a Roman urologist who bought the youth his own apartment;  Amanda went to an exclusive preparatory school,  played soccer, and traveled abroad.  Yet enough of them was submerged in alienation to dabble in drugs and deviant sex.  Did old hurts come to the surface, jagged and raw?  Was Magnini telling the lie which held a grain of truth?  I find myself wavering.  Why have the two wound up as they have ?  Is it truly an error?  

In any case,  whether truly the innocent wrongly condemned,  or just as tragic,  the product of a psychotic break in which ego was at last overwhelmed with messy buckets of id,  the loss and the pain have been enormous, and need redeeming.