1. Theory and practice. We have no intelligent model of the relation of theory and practice insofar as our currently available models are designed to foreclose any such relation. The problem is always to justify theory against practice: we must go “beyond the classroom” or have “street smarts”, “that may be true in theory …” – Yet what this expression overlooks is the fact that anything that may be “true in theory” but that does not reflect the existing state of affairs is a false theory. We lack an intelligent model for theory because our operative presumption is that theory is prior to practice: we learn “principles” and then seek their “application”, for example. But what every enemy of theory fails to notice is that theory is the result of practice. The relationship of theory to practice is understanding or, more precisely, understanding is nothing other than the unity of theory and practice. Theory without practice is not understood and conversely for practice without theory. The musician does not begin with an abstract “theoretical” knowledge of harmony and then proceed to compose; but the musician who attempts to compose without theory will either have to reinvent the scale with every tune or will simply be banal and poor in her work. There is, quite simply, a dialectic of theory and practice: each implies the other and the failure of this dialectic results either in extreme academism or extreme stupidity.
2. Blaming the victim. Yet despite the usual demand for practice we have seen a curious double criticism of OWS in that the movement offers neither theory nor practice. Occupiers, so the charge goes, neither understand what they are protesting nor offer any “real solutions”. Of course, this criticism is either itself guilty of the same fault—e.g., in itself doing nothing productive in offering the desired “solution”—or fails to understand the significance of the protest. On the one hand, the message is right on the surface: those who are tasked with finding solutions are themselves part of the problem and have effectively debarred other possibilities from entering the discussion. But, more fundamentally, the refusal to articulate a “party platform” has inverted the disastrous model of theory and practice that has currently paralyzed our federal government. The right’s ideological commitments (theory) unilaterally trump the necessities of action in the face of competing interests. OWS has given us the opposite: practice without theory for the purpose of asking us to think. OWS’ silence has forced upon us, through its refusal to think for us, the recognition that we have all failed to think—and that this failure has permitted the continuing devastation of livelihoods and households under the name of a supposedly free economy. OWS has asked us to wonder how it is possible and necessary for these protests to exist. The exhortation, then, for them to re-enter the economic system that ejected them in the first place misses the point in a particularly pernicious way, i.e., by refusing to recognize the manifest injustice of the status quo that has produced the victims who are now being asked to shoulder the blame.
3. The body of the soul. “Only philosophy can be an antidote for all the evil into which philosophical curiosity has plunged us,” Herder said. This idle curiosity is the decadent form of the theological “wonder” of the Theaetetus. The philosopher, Socrates says, is like the goddess who passes between heaven and earth and that philosophical questions are those that the soul considers “alone and through itself” (185e). Aristotle respects this call to philosophy when he too says that the knowledge of the wise is “most universal” which is “farthest from the senses” (Metaphysics 982a25) that aspires toward the starry heavens above. Such knowledge, Aristotle says, would make us free, yet the human condition is necessarily one of bondage. Our freedom consists, then, in understanding the necessity of that which compels us to wonder, such as the incommensurability of the diagonal, “for there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diagonal turned out to be commensurable”.
It is precisely this complicity that criticism refuses. Philosophy shall complete its task precisely when there is no further need for it. “Happy if philosophy showed him the path on which he teaches the people to act without thinking, to be virtuous without knowing it, to be citizens without pondering about the fundamental principles of the state …” (Herder) or, as Adorno would say to Horkheimer, “true thought is thought that has no wish to insist on being in the right”. Philosophy ends not in the satisfaction of wonder but the rejection of necessity and in the truth of the given, not in understanding but disbelief, and not in happiness but in the suffering of a body rebelling against the ascent of the soul.
26 November 2011
02 August 2011
For Iphigenia
In a strange note from 1870/1, Nietzsche wrote that “I see enormous conglomerates taking the place of individual capitalists. I see the stock exchange falling victim to the curse under which the casinos have fallen”. What is strange is not Nietzsche’s prescience but, rather, that he says this fate is cause for pity for the “rich or talented egoist” and that somehow such pity is the “solution of the social question”. The entire (brief) note opens with the invocation of tragedy as the most fitting “teacher” of the human.
Interpreting this note turns on what we take Nietzsche to mean by “the social question”, about which we know nothing from his published work from this time (he was still working on The Birth of Tragedy). This is still the Nietzsche for whom, with Schopenhauer and Wagner, culture is only possible for the life of an organism “greater than the individual”; where the production of the (artistic) genius is the goal and purpose of nature itself such that, as Nietzsche would declare in an unpublished appendix to The Birth of Tragedy, “to supply the soil for a greater development of art, the vast majority, in the service of a minority, must be enslaved to the demands of life beyond their individual need”. Nietzsche criticizes both the liberals and the socialists and, in his praise of war, argues that the purpose of civil life is to sublimate the impulse to war into the production of art. With the socialists against the liberals, Nietzsche observes that the bourgeois state strives, as much as possible, toward the “perpetual peace” of a world in which “a condition for war is an impossibility … through the creation of large, evenly matched states and mutual guarantees between them” but, in doing so, “the truly international, homeless, money hermits … have learnt to misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange and both the state and society for their own enrichment”. The individual, Nietzsche says, is nothing other than the “representation of the primal One” or the appearance of the primal One to itself. But why should the One thus appear? This the great mystery, Nietzsche says: the appearance of a will to existence that Nietzsche describes in all but name as nothing other than signification (in the Lacanian sense): “what is meant by becoming conscious of a movement of the will? A symbolizing process that becomes clearer and clearer. Language, the word, nothing but symbols. Thinking, i.e., consciously imagining, is nothing but envisioning and linking linguistic symbols”, i.e., in the language of discourse as opposed to the mythic language of magic. Discourse signals the reaching of consciousness back toward an origin that thinking always is but can never be insofar as ‘I’ am nothing other than the continuous process of relating to my origin (else I would simply be causa sui). There is a sort of “pure past” that must exist as my origin (I am born into a family, a culture, a people) and thus I have a certain mediated access to this past through education yet I must also posit this origin as that which will have always been “my” past but which must always have been since this past must exist without the temporalizing passivity of my consciousness. The excesses born of this gap between the intelligibility of the “I” and the mystery of its origin—the suffering of non-coincidence—are masked by tragedy. The dual tendencies of the Apollonian and Dionysian express life as both reason (necessity) and the forgetting of reason—the momentary collapse of the ego in the recognition that life must consume the individual.
Thus Sloterdijk is quite right in this commentary on Nietzsche to observe that “the origins of justice lie in permission—that is, the acceptance of a great abundance—and not in prohibition, as a narrow-minded dialectics would have it, and also not in the proprietary appropriateness of a decisive establishment of values”. As Nietzsche would say in the third Untimely Meditation, “no one has a greater claim to our veneration than he who possesses the drive to and strength for justice [emphasis added]” and that such a person “desires truth, not as cold, ineffectual knowledge, but as a regulating and punishing judge”. The revelation of the “higher order”, the search for truth, and the virtues of goodness, love, and charity, Nietzsche writes in an earlier note, are “practical drives” to correct the world, “pure instincts” of those with the strength to live and to suffer without delusion and resentment (which, for the record, is exactly what Hobbes had said in his lament for the dearth of such noble characters). Nothing is easier, as we know from psychoanalysis, than withholding from ourselves the satisfaction of our desires. Hence the Greek conception of justice (dikaiosune) had nothing to do with the liberal ideal of regulation and redistribution and was intimately associated with what under a different lexicon would be considered the vast injustice of a world where weeds and flowers are indistinguishable. If there is such a thing as modern tragedy, it is not only that the impulse to justice must be fueled by rage (Achilles, Clytemnestra) but that it will consume the lives of those who pursue it.
Interpreting this note turns on what we take Nietzsche to mean by “the social question”, about which we know nothing from his published work from this time (he was still working on The Birth of Tragedy). This is still the Nietzsche for whom, with Schopenhauer and Wagner, culture is only possible for the life of an organism “greater than the individual”; where the production of the (artistic) genius is the goal and purpose of nature itself such that, as Nietzsche would declare in an unpublished appendix to The Birth of Tragedy, “to supply the soil for a greater development of art, the vast majority, in the service of a minority, must be enslaved to the demands of life beyond their individual need”. Nietzsche criticizes both the liberals and the socialists and, in his praise of war, argues that the purpose of civil life is to sublimate the impulse to war into the production of art. With the socialists against the liberals, Nietzsche observes that the bourgeois state strives, as much as possible, toward the “perpetual peace” of a world in which “a condition for war is an impossibility … through the creation of large, evenly matched states and mutual guarantees between them” but, in doing so, “the truly international, homeless, money hermits … have learnt to misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange and both the state and society for their own enrichment”. The individual, Nietzsche says, is nothing other than the “representation of the primal One” or the appearance of the primal One to itself. But why should the One thus appear? This the great mystery, Nietzsche says: the appearance of a will to existence that Nietzsche describes in all but name as nothing other than signification (in the Lacanian sense): “what is meant by becoming conscious of a movement of the will? A symbolizing process that becomes clearer and clearer. Language, the word, nothing but symbols. Thinking, i.e., consciously imagining, is nothing but envisioning and linking linguistic symbols”, i.e., in the language of discourse as opposed to the mythic language of magic. Discourse signals the reaching of consciousness back toward an origin that thinking always is but can never be insofar as ‘I’ am nothing other than the continuous process of relating to my origin (else I would simply be causa sui). There is a sort of “pure past” that must exist as my origin (I am born into a family, a culture, a people) and thus I have a certain mediated access to this past through education yet I must also posit this origin as that which will have always been “my” past but which must always have been since this past must exist without the temporalizing passivity of my consciousness. The excesses born of this gap between the intelligibility of the “I” and the mystery of its origin—the suffering of non-coincidence—are masked by tragedy. The dual tendencies of the Apollonian and Dionysian express life as both reason (necessity) and the forgetting of reason—the momentary collapse of the ego in the recognition that life must consume the individual.
Thus Sloterdijk is quite right in this commentary on Nietzsche to observe that “the origins of justice lie in permission—that is, the acceptance of a great abundance—and not in prohibition, as a narrow-minded dialectics would have it, and also not in the proprietary appropriateness of a decisive establishment of values”. As Nietzsche would say in the third Untimely Meditation, “no one has a greater claim to our veneration than he who possesses the drive to and strength for justice [emphasis added]” and that such a person “desires truth, not as cold, ineffectual knowledge, but as a regulating and punishing judge”. The revelation of the “higher order”, the search for truth, and the virtues of goodness, love, and charity, Nietzsche writes in an earlier note, are “practical drives” to correct the world, “pure instincts” of those with the strength to live and to suffer without delusion and resentment (which, for the record, is exactly what Hobbes had said in his lament for the dearth of such noble characters). Nothing is easier, as we know from psychoanalysis, than withholding from ourselves the satisfaction of our desires. Hence the Greek conception of justice (dikaiosune) had nothing to do with the liberal ideal of regulation and redistribution and was intimately associated with what under a different lexicon would be considered the vast injustice of a world where weeds and flowers are indistinguishable. If there is such a thing as modern tragedy, it is not only that the impulse to justice must be fueled by rage (Achilles, Clytemnestra) but that it will consume the lives of those who pursue it.
22 July 2011
Some rescued texts
These are rough, old, and occasional fragments but something of them might still be rescued.
“Otherworld”. What if life were not a dream? Cypher’s fantasy in The Matrix of then returning to sleep would have to be recognized precisely for what it is and we would have to take responsibility for our frivolity. Cypher makes his deal with the Agents indulging in pleasures he “knows aren’t real”, which he cannot but help enjoy. Such is the nature of all enjoyment having tasted of reality. What if life were not a dream? We would be freed of the burden to will ourselves to exist … but at what cost?
The recession has taught us to mortgage our enjoyment with apologies and excuses; but this has been no new lesson to those for whom enjoyment comes at the cost of blending in with a crowd that simultaneously constricts the opportunities for expression even as it adopts those models as its own. […] It is always possible to purchase a moment of anonymity and steal into the dream where everything is ok.
But what if existence were not enough—to be in the same world as music, tattoos, soccer, and ATVs—because the world rebels against justice, just as enjoyment is blind to suffering. Laughter and passion are antithetical (not that we have any trouble living in contradictions): the former requires oblivion while the latter forgets nothing even as it turns its back on existence for the brilliance of the future. Yet for us—we who would succumb to the temptation to exist—a future world does not need to be dreamt but demanded.
“Uncommon” [for J]: 1. The old cliché claims that there is a fine line between madness and genius. In fact, there is no such line. In both cases we are confronted with the one who by definition cannot be recognized by those to whom s/he must speak. Who are the paradigmatic cases of such madness? The one who preaches heliocentrism, who complains of dropsy and buries himself in manure, who advertises the virtues of tar-water, who gets locked in the attic, who dresses only in white, who collapses at the sight of a flogged horse, the ones who suffer aphasia and synaesthesia. These are the ones who shape our world precisely by being excluded from it, just as the acceptable forms of behavior and psychic life are defined by what is not permitted outside the sanitoriums and hospitals (what is not written in the DSM).
We cannot aspire either to madness or genius. Some, however, between madness and genius, are fortunate (or cursed) to be faced with a choice: whether to be seen or whether to remain invisible. Whereas solitude is a necessary consequence of either madness or genius, it can also precede either as their condition.
We might try, however, to distinguish madness from genius by recognition, i.e., objectively, since both are marked by the "inner conviction" that s/he is absolutely alone in the world or that s/he is the first to have arrived (this is, in other words, the ostensive difference between "greatness" and "delusion"). But this difference is only apparent, on the one hand, for to whom must one appear as a genius other than precisely to those who, if they really understood what was being said, would be no different than the one who is to stand apart? The one who stands apart is precisely the one who is not understood, else s/he would simply be saying everyone already knows.
On the other hand, the real mark of inner conviction is not (self-)certainty but a constant disbelief—the refusal to believe that things really are as they are, that what is obvious remains invisible or unspoken, that injustice is acceptable. Sometimes this manifests as the opposite of certainty: as doubt or the feeling that nothing is quite right, that a word is out of place or a line is too oblique, that "I really am different".
By definition the mad cannot be the one who names himself and is able to exclude madness from the method of radical doubt. Ironically it is the madman who cannot be accused of solipsism. But who, then, is the one who names the madman or the genius? Who are the ones who must "take notice"? […] Who are the ones who did not have ears to hear?
2. […] Identify, be counted, be viewed—the spectacle and the charlatan.
Or: Do. Laugh. Adjoin. What are the forces that you can release? Instead of wondering "to whom can I be seen?" the real question is: what are the possibilities that I can see? In this harmony, in this image, in this phrase, this spiral, this vertigo, in you? What is the life we can construct from the fragments we have been given—the fragments of this body, this identity, this world?
“Otherworld”. What if life were not a dream? Cypher’s fantasy in The Matrix of then returning to sleep would have to be recognized precisely for what it is and we would have to take responsibility for our frivolity. Cypher makes his deal with the Agents indulging in pleasures he “knows aren’t real”, which he cannot but help enjoy. Such is the nature of all enjoyment having tasted of reality. What if life were not a dream? We would be freed of the burden to will ourselves to exist … but at what cost?
The recession has taught us to mortgage our enjoyment with apologies and excuses; but this has been no new lesson to those for whom enjoyment comes at the cost of blending in with a crowd that simultaneously constricts the opportunities for expression even as it adopts those models as its own. […] It is always possible to purchase a moment of anonymity and steal into the dream where everything is ok.
But what if existence were not enough—to be in the same world as music, tattoos, soccer, and ATVs—because the world rebels against justice, just as enjoyment is blind to suffering. Laughter and passion are antithetical (not that we have any trouble living in contradictions): the former requires oblivion while the latter forgets nothing even as it turns its back on existence for the brilliance of the future. Yet for us—we who would succumb to the temptation to exist—a future world does not need to be dreamt but demanded.
“Uncommon” [for J]: 1. The old cliché claims that there is a fine line between madness and genius. In fact, there is no such line. In both cases we are confronted with the one who by definition cannot be recognized by those to whom s/he must speak. Who are the paradigmatic cases of such madness? The one who preaches heliocentrism, who complains of dropsy and buries himself in manure, who advertises the virtues of tar-water, who gets locked in the attic, who dresses only in white, who collapses at the sight of a flogged horse, the ones who suffer aphasia and synaesthesia. These are the ones who shape our world precisely by being excluded from it, just as the acceptable forms of behavior and psychic life are defined by what is not permitted outside the sanitoriums and hospitals (what is not written in the DSM).
We cannot aspire either to madness or genius. Some, however, between madness and genius, are fortunate (or cursed) to be faced with a choice: whether to be seen or whether to remain invisible. Whereas solitude is a necessary consequence of either madness or genius, it can also precede either as their condition.
We might try, however, to distinguish madness from genius by recognition, i.e., objectively, since both are marked by the "inner conviction" that s/he is absolutely alone in the world or that s/he is the first to have arrived (this is, in other words, the ostensive difference between "greatness" and "delusion"). But this difference is only apparent, on the one hand, for to whom must one appear as a genius other than precisely to those who, if they really understood what was being said, would be no different than the one who is to stand apart? The one who stands apart is precisely the one who is not understood, else s/he would simply be saying everyone already knows.
On the other hand, the real mark of inner conviction is not (self-)certainty but a constant disbelief—the refusal to believe that things really are as they are, that what is obvious remains invisible or unspoken, that injustice is acceptable. Sometimes this manifests as the opposite of certainty: as doubt or the feeling that nothing is quite right, that a word is out of place or a line is too oblique, that "I really am different".
By definition the mad cannot be the one who names himself and is able to exclude madness from the method of radical doubt. Ironically it is the madman who cannot be accused of solipsism. But who, then, is the one who names the madman or the genius? Who are the ones who must "take notice"? […] Who are the ones who did not have ears to hear?
2. […] Identify, be counted, be viewed—the spectacle and the charlatan.
Or: Do. Laugh. Adjoin. What are the forces that you can release? Instead of wondering "to whom can I be seen?" the real question is: what are the possibilities that I can see? In this harmony, in this image, in this phrase, this spiral, this vertigo, in you? What is the life we can construct from the fragments we have been given—the fragments of this body, this identity, this world?
13 July 2011
Appeals and incriminations
1. The primrose path. The split between philosophy and science has rendered philosophy vulnerable to two equivalent and damning accusations disguised as genuine questions: “what are the facts of the matter?” or “what is your ontology?” When, for example, cognitive and neuropsychology are busy re-creating the Kantian picture of cognition (including the opacity of the transcendental ego) or when sociology agrees with Aristotle’s insight into what we now call “crowdsourcing”, it seems that science has given philosophy empirical verification. Against the consequent threat of redundancy, philosophy (particularly in its idealist and crypto-idealist varieties) has generally responded with some doctrine of method: “philosophy provides an account of what a fact is in the first place”. Of course, we should be wary of any such tendency toward absolute idealism ever since witnessing the misfortunes of a system that attempts to deduce being from the idea. But an ethical idealism is equally problematic that insists on the role of philosophy in arbitrating between facts and values (which are, by definition, outside the domain of ontology): such a solution simply reduces philosophy to literature and makes it possible to speak of “my” and “your” philosophy since, after all, if values are not facts there is no other court of appeal than my “yes”.
1a. The discourse bubble. Values, of course, are discursive (as Nietzsche insisted against the metaphysicians). “We must reflect and discuss our values.” But to whom do we speak? Confronted with the towering black obelisk of technology, for example, philosophy quarantines itself in a mode of discourse that appeals to Aristotle and Heidegger instead of Lanier. The objection to such discursive naïveté (at best and bad faith at worst) is not that of simply lacking reference to a “real” world outside discourse but, rather, that a discourse that intends only itself is self-defeating.
2. Whither the moral world? Is it possible to be moral in an immoral world? We face here an inverted image of the doctrine of original sin. Bourgeois ideology refuses, for example, to decide between the “right” of a chemist to create a better non-smearing lipstick and the creation of HIV medication. The democratic paradox is that we must at once affirm the separation of ethical injunctions from political right while at the same time recognizing that it is this very distinction that creates the very immoral world from which we must impose on ourselves the choice to be moral.
2a. Discourse and praxis. Philosophy faces a similar paradox. Faced with the separation of philosophy and politics (which Marx famously wanted to overcome), philosophy both recognizes and refuses its task in the face of injustice. Philosophy has its responsibility and capacity to incite us to the recognition of injustice—including the fact that its current existence in academic institutions is predicated on unjust socioeconomic practices—but it will not be by researching what passages of Hobbes Leibniz was reading in what years (although, in fairness, such research is arguably not philosophy at all but its decadent imposter).
1a. The discourse bubble. Values, of course, are discursive (as Nietzsche insisted against the metaphysicians). “We must reflect and discuss our values.” But to whom do we speak? Confronted with the towering black obelisk of technology, for example, philosophy quarantines itself in a mode of discourse that appeals to Aristotle and Heidegger instead of Lanier. The objection to such discursive naïveté (at best and bad faith at worst) is not that of simply lacking reference to a “real” world outside discourse but, rather, that a discourse that intends only itself is self-defeating.
2. Whither the moral world? Is it possible to be moral in an immoral world? We face here an inverted image of the doctrine of original sin. Bourgeois ideology refuses, for example, to decide between the “right” of a chemist to create a better non-smearing lipstick and the creation of HIV medication. The democratic paradox is that we must at once affirm the separation of ethical injunctions from political right while at the same time recognizing that it is this very distinction that creates the very immoral world from which we must impose on ourselves the choice to be moral.
2a. Discourse and praxis. Philosophy faces a similar paradox. Faced with the separation of philosophy and politics (which Marx famously wanted to overcome), philosophy both recognizes and refuses its task in the face of injustice. Philosophy has its responsibility and capacity to incite us to the recognition of injustice—including the fact that its current existence in academic institutions is predicated on unjust socioeconomic practices—but it will not be by researching what passages of Hobbes Leibniz was reading in what years (although, in fairness, such research is arguably not philosophy at all but its decadent imposter).
29 June 2011
The fundamental decision of metaphysics
Ancient philosophy enforced a decision between speech and silence. When modern philosophy accused its predecessor of therefore confusing being and nothingness (since to say what “is not” cannot be said does not preclude the identity of the being of what is not), we were asked to choose between the unity or the difference of being and thought. Hence, for example, Badiou’s characterization of the constructivist position in metaphysics declares that what is unnameable simply “is not”, such that metaphysics finds itself in a position of absolute immanence that “maintains the entire dialectic of the event and intervention outside thought”. Such a position, of course, simply begs the question as this is precisely the point for someone like Deleuze (see the plane of immanence as the image of thought). Rather, between the constructivist (Deleuzian) and generic (Badiousian) orientations of thought, beyond the difference between excess and subtraction, lies perhaps this fundamental choice: whether to address the genesis of thought through an account of the names of being or whether to name the indiscernible point at the chiasmus of thought and being (what Badiou nominates as the “void”) but which therefore cannot be either. If Badiou right to insist that, for the constructivist, the event is prohibited from thought, we must decide if the vocation of philosophy is to culminate in the science of thinking (logic and metaphysics) or in the affections and passions of movement (physics).
10 April 2011
Words and reason
1. Perhaps the greatest embarrassment to Enlightenment philosophy is the persistence of the extremism of stupidity that we must suffer as one effect of the proliferation of social media. On the one hand, according to critical philosophy, the free individual is identical to the activity and substance of the World Spirit that has no other meaning except the existence of politics as historical existence (which distinguishes modern from the ancient state). On the other hand, Ronell has brilliantly demonstrated that stupidity remains equally embarrassing for empiricist philosophy: “as concerns its need to observe and experience the idiot, it crashed against the wall of the real” since any attempt to describe the non-discursive non-disclosivity of the idiot forces us to postulate the natural that, ostensibly, the idiot simply is. Free from the corrupting influences of culture, the serene idiot would never pass into civility and would remain forever dumb. Thus “nature, like idiocy, is an effect of the erasure of naturality, a figure of lost literality” (Ronell).
2. And as both Ronell and Nancy have shown, Kant duplicates this circularity of culture and idiocy within pure reason (both theoretical and practical). On the one hand, pure practical reason only appears, empirically, in the silent will of actually virtuous individuals who possess virtue “as a gift from the gods” (Plato, Meno), quite indifferent to any (philosophical) account of it. On the other hand, Kant’s own self-conscious failure as a writer leaves critical thought “scrambling, ever searching to write itself” as neither philosophy nor literature (Nancy); Kant could never arrogate to himself the name of the monstrous genius of the Third Critique that “gives the rule to nature” at the cost of being so intimately bound to it. Since Kant’s renunciation of literary finesse, “beautiful writing has been feminized and homosexualized, as so many attacks on theory reveal (or try to conceal). Kant, for his part, openly struggled with two heterogeneous entities: philosophy, on the one hand, style and elegance, on the other, feminine, one” (Ronell). Kant writes the limits of reason by a parody of the idiot. Hence Nietzsche: “I have some idea of my privileges as a writer; in a few cases I also know the extent to which familiarity with my writings ‘spoils’ your taste. You just cannot stand other books any more, philosophy books in particular” (Ecce Homo). What Nietzsche’s imitators failed to grasp is that style is not a disguise for thought but its very language. The idiot has no style; in response, the philosopher and the postmodernist make equivalent mistakes, i.e., either to renounce style or to substitute style for form. Style is, rather, the ability “to communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs” (Ecce Homo)—and is not this passion the origin of all philosophy? The inequality of thought and experience moves the philosopher from complicity to speech and any philosopher worthy of the name speaks to be heard for a single reason: that to remain silent would be an affront to those for whom experience has been neither just nor magnanimous.*
*This is also why, moreover, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a book “for all and for none”: how does one speak to the idiot? “Let us take the most extreme case, where a book talks only about events lying completely outside the possibility of common, or even uncommon, experience, — where it is the first language of a new range of experiences. In this case, absolutely nothing will be heard, with the associated acoustic illusion that if nothing is heard, nothing is there. At the end of the day, this has been my usual experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience” (Ecce Homo). But where sense passes into non-sense, Nietzsche no longer speaks as a philosopher but as an artist.
2. And as both Ronell and Nancy have shown, Kant duplicates this circularity of culture and idiocy within pure reason (both theoretical and practical). On the one hand, pure practical reason only appears, empirically, in the silent will of actually virtuous individuals who possess virtue “as a gift from the gods” (Plato, Meno), quite indifferent to any (philosophical) account of it. On the other hand, Kant’s own self-conscious failure as a writer leaves critical thought “scrambling, ever searching to write itself” as neither philosophy nor literature (Nancy); Kant could never arrogate to himself the name of the monstrous genius of the Third Critique that “gives the rule to nature” at the cost of being so intimately bound to it. Since Kant’s renunciation of literary finesse, “beautiful writing has been feminized and homosexualized, as so many attacks on theory reveal (or try to conceal). Kant, for his part, openly struggled with two heterogeneous entities: philosophy, on the one hand, style and elegance, on the other, feminine, one” (Ronell). Kant writes the limits of reason by a parody of the idiot. Hence Nietzsche: “I have some idea of my privileges as a writer; in a few cases I also know the extent to which familiarity with my writings ‘spoils’ your taste. You just cannot stand other books any more, philosophy books in particular” (Ecce Homo). What Nietzsche’s imitators failed to grasp is that style is not a disguise for thought but its very language. The idiot has no style; in response, the philosopher and the postmodernist make equivalent mistakes, i.e., either to renounce style or to substitute style for form. Style is, rather, the ability “to communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs” (Ecce Homo)—and is not this passion the origin of all philosophy? The inequality of thought and experience moves the philosopher from complicity to speech and any philosopher worthy of the name speaks to be heard for a single reason: that to remain silent would be an affront to those for whom experience has been neither just nor magnanimous.*
*This is also why, moreover, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a book “for all and for none”: how does one speak to the idiot? “Let us take the most extreme case, where a book talks only about events lying completely outside the possibility of common, or even uncommon, experience, — where it is the first language of a new range of experiences. In this case, absolutely nothing will be heard, with the associated acoustic illusion that if nothing is heard, nothing is there. At the end of the day, this has been my usual experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience” (Ecce Homo). But where sense passes into non-sense, Nietzsche no longer speaks as a philosopher but as an artist.
Some critical orientations
1. If there is at least one lesson to be learned and retained from phenomenology, it is the irreducibility of consciousness and of conscious experience. Consciousness is not primarily cognitive, however, but affective.
2. There is no such thing as a purely “literary” criticism. Criticism is not defined by its objects (just as science is not defined by the objects of its study); nor must criticism begin from the presupposed unity of a genre. The dependence works in the other direction: the definition of a genre requires a particular critical orientation. For this reason, despite himself, Leavis more than anyone has understood that the supposed rivalry between literature and philosophy concerns the right to pronounce on matters of value. Criticism is not a third term between these two (since criticism is not itself a genre) but, rather, is a method. The error of continental philosophy is to assume that philosophical criticism must resemble literary criticism in either substance or style (whence the perhaps irreparable damage to the good name of continental philosophy by the sycophants of deconstruction). The rigorous definition of criticism as method remains the unfinished task of continental philosophy.
3. Where the logic of critical philosophy was dialectical, that of philosophical criticism is chiastic.
2. There is no such thing as a purely “literary” criticism. Criticism is not defined by its objects (just as science is not defined by the objects of its study); nor must criticism begin from the presupposed unity of a genre. The dependence works in the other direction: the definition of a genre requires a particular critical orientation. For this reason, despite himself, Leavis more than anyone has understood that the supposed rivalry between literature and philosophy concerns the right to pronounce on matters of value. Criticism is not a third term between these two (since criticism is not itself a genre) but, rather, is a method. The error of continental philosophy is to assume that philosophical criticism must resemble literary criticism in either substance or style (whence the perhaps irreparable damage to the good name of continental philosophy by the sycophants of deconstruction). The rigorous definition of criticism as method remains the unfinished task of continental philosophy.
3. Where the logic of critical philosophy was dialectical, that of philosophical criticism is chiastic.
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