Conditions II

1. Why philosophy? What are the (material) needs for which thinking finds expression in philosophy? These may be political (e.g., Plato), religious, scientific/physical, etc. What is at stake is not simply the articulation of the philosophy of “our time” (as if thinking required stimulation by the environment). Even if such an account were possible (e.g., in a so-called “sociology of philosophy"), we are not asking “what” philosophy is but why philosophy? What is the wisdom we need, if ever there is wisdom that we seek?

2. Against the ideology of “eternal wisdom”—which in the name of a vague humanist subjectivity ultimately reifies thought into the most sterile objectivity—philosophy today is not merely an inflated commiseration on the injustices of the human condition. Modern philosophy exists as an account of conditions. The first step for the philosopher is not to ask “what is it?” but to notice that this object (thing, situation, circumstance, affect) is and has come to be. In science we would speak of causality and in mathematics we would speak of entailments: i.e., a physics of place, time, mode, and manner. But any account of how anything is is also an account of how it is not (in this time, in that place). A physics is therefore always a science of complexes. The philosopher asks “why this complex? why this combination? (gyms and rock music, suburbs and chain stores, fate and circumstance, guilt and punishment, science and technology)”. This account of conditions constitutes the theoretical component of philosophy; the practical, of course, is nothing other than the material performance of philosophy in the formation of the body or the corpus (which is not, of course, merely to speak of the biological body); finally, the logical component of philosophy is the construction of the thinking subject (i.e., thinking the conditions for thought). Broadly speaking, philosophy has three allies for these respective tasks: politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.

The politics of music

“By voicing the fears of helpless people, [music] could signal help for the helpless, however feebly and distortedly. In doing so it would renew the promise contained in the age-old protest of music: the promise of a life without fear” (Adorno).

“… [music] is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon … music gives the universalia ante rem and the real world the universalia in re” (Nietzsche).

A sort of constellation: Adorno and Nietzsche. But, instead of drawing a line through Wagner (as Bauer and Ramply have already suggested in their respective ways), perhaps we need instead to detour through Kant’s first Critique.

The temptation is to think that what we need is an undistorted image of suffering, such that there could be a direct correlation between representation and the will by means of the concept. But it is precisely because of the distortion of the image that an aesthetics of thought is possible—through a secondary mimesis that refers thought to nothing other than non-coincidence. But this space is unlivable, perhaps even unbearable—and we express or discharge this experience in our bodies: in a tremor, the closing of our eyes, in the next step, in the sense that something—I know not what—has happened.

Addenda: 1. “Music” cannot be the name for a genus. There is no essence of “music”. We can only relate singular performances to a unique line extending to each of its inter- and contexts on the one hand and to its future effects on the other. Consequently, there is no one criterion for music (and its redemptive power).

2. After hearing “Blue Cathedral”, one would be quite justified in the hope of a truly feminine music from Higdon. Unfortunately many of the other works, such as “City Scape” ultimately amidst the bombast try to do too much, i.e., attempt to communicate a concept or a representation instead of quite literally creating a new space (a new aesthetic) through the material of the sound image (which is the greatest virtue of the tone poem). Instead of an image proper, “City Scape” gives us the self-indulgence of infinite romantic subjectivity masquerading as a beautiful object.

Discourse and democracy

À propos of our holiday today, I stumbled on this photo. I cannot think of a better rejoinder to anyone who still thinks "deliberative democracy" is an option or, for that matter, how anyone can still seriously defend the ideology of individualism--for only such an ideology would permit the conjunction of "Get a brain!" with "Morans" insofar as what counts is merely conviction and patriotism.

Why write? (On the prelude, à la manière de Sartre)

The danger of writing is falling into the false dichotomy of production and consumption. In both cases, writing is therapeutic and, therefore, outside the economy of use: either we write to “express ourselves” (discharge of affect) or we take pleasure in words that express what we are not ourselves able to say. In both cases, the appropriate response is merely “Amen” and our words fall flat despite our enthusiasm precisely by being absorbed into the economy of exchange according to which the meaning of our words is exhausted by either our intention or by our understanding. There is writing, however, whose existence is not that of understanding. This is not, of course, to say that the purpose of such writing is to be misunderstood. This is a writing that enables us to go on, i.e., not to persist in being but, in a precise sense, to ex-ist. This is the sense of the corpus that we get, for example, in its most profound sense in Nietzsche (here Gasché is most certainly correct). What, Nietzsche asks, is a writing that sounds? What is the body the writer creates? What is the experience that writing makes possible?

Mysticism and the mythopoetic imagination

Against the easy conflation of mysticism and “the ineffable”--and the ineffable and the unsayable--Wolfson continues to offer us the resources to think the passage from representation to knowledge in ways that are not beholden to the problematics of sense or reference. Framed as a hermeneutic/phenomenological investigation into kabbalah, in what is more than an account of the kabbalistic vision of the divine and a fairly damning accusation of androcentrism in medieval rabbinic culture, alongside the likes of Marion and Desmond, Wolfson provides an account of an imagining of the difference between idol and image, between remembrance and forgetting, particularly in terms of the mutual conversion of sexual difference into identity. i.e., the “suffering of eros as the indifferent identity (one-that-is-all) becoming identical difference (all-that-is-one), a process that is collectively conceived by kabbalists as amelioration of feminine judgment, her restoration to and elevation through the morphological prism of the divine, culminating in the reconstitituion of the male androgyne in Keter, the place that is no-place (atar law atar) …” In the space of a paragraph it would be impossible to approach the complex of speech and eros in the “process” (if we speak in philosophical terms) of the Sefirot. Consider, nevertheless, Wolfson’s treatment of the Song of Songs: “… the Song is directed to Binah, the “supernal world” or the “world-to-come,” which is also identified as Solomon (shelomo) … the “king” is Binah, who is called by this name on account of her demiurgical role in the birthing of the lower seven sefirot. The shift in symbolism underscores the fact that the theurgical purpose of the Song is to arouse the joy of Shekhinah, the “world of the moon,” in relation to Binah, the “upper world,” so that the two worlds may be aligned in one pattern”. Wolfson’s own analysis following this passage is remarkable in itself, but instead of inflecting this logic ontologically into a (para)logic of eros, what we have here is too a logic of affectivity whose resources call for immediate attention.

An uneasy alliance: Nietzsche, Cioran, Heidegger

What Cioran offers us is the immanence of death against every image of life and givenness. Death is not, Cioran insists, an end, a goal, a limit, a gate, a horizon. Death as such cannot be the object of the will; and although he will often speak of the “thought of death”, more perspicuously we might instead say that it is the thinking of death that raises the intensity of an individual existence to the level of the impersonal “there is”. Suffering, of course, individuates (for in suffering I imagine that no one else has suffered before me: “I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only existence”), but only to expose the myth of the given: that although thinking is the activity of the (reflective, existential) ‘I’, this ‘I’ is the product of a tremendous and terrible work, i.e., the work of death under the illusion of life. Or, to put it in more Nietzschean terms, the ‘I’ is nothing other than the appearance of appearance, i.e., a pure phenomenon. ‘I’ can never be given to exist nor do I give myself to exist—for in neither case can we explain the simultaneous individuality of suffering and the anonymity of death. There can never be such a thing as “my” death (strictly speaking, this is also true of the treatment of death in Being and Time); the referent of this term is always not-I, an other. My death is always the death of an other and another’s death is always mine—but without any relation (coincidence, reduction, substitution) between the two. It is this non-relation that constructs the illusion, the excess of life: “the irrationality of life manifests itself in this overwhelming expansion of form and content, in this frenetic impulse to substitute new aspects for old ones, a substitution, however, without qualitative improvement. Happy is the man who could abandon himself to this becoming and could absorb all the possibilities offered each moment, ignoring the agonizingly problematic evaluation which discovers in every moment an insurmountable relativity”. The condition—the impossible condition—for such life, however, is sickness, which manifests not as effervescence but seriousness, thought. Thought, however, is only able to offer us the image of becoming.

Affliction; or: fate and circumstance

1. The existence of fate depends on the extent to which we have ceased to believe in it. This will seem paradoxical only to the one for whom fate is nothing but circumstance—especially those circumstances in which we find ourselves burdened by the weight of exteriority (including the projected aspects of our character that we assign to the carelessness of nature)—“my father was an alcoholic”; “our family has always been susceptible to heart disease”; “what are the chances we would both cross this intersection right now?”; “I had the moral good fortune to be born into a democratic state”; “I just have an addictive personality”.

It is by crying against the injustice of fate that we are able to love everything about ourselves that we hate—for if this is our fate, then there is no one to blame. It cannot be the fault of God since to hold God accountable for our miserable fate would be to believe in him (and to believe in God we cannot hold him accountable for our suffering); neither can we blame a nature indifferent to my own sense of dessert (apart from the providence of God) in which I have merely the illusion of uniqueness due to the fact that I must experience the world from its exterior—I am only “in” the world by being able to separate myself from it in/by thought.

But, of course, fate is not always unkind. But we all know how difficult, how terrifying, and how breathtaking it is really to affirm fate and not simply to delight in the immediate enjoyment of our present circumstance. This is precisely why we can be afflicted only by fate and not by circumstance. Fate is neither the cause of circumstance nor its justification, for we would then be affirming fate by suffering it. We suffer fate when we consign ourselves to “the way things are”, even if we are merely accepting the consequences of our own decisions. The most terrible psychological task is not to affirm fate but to deny it, i.e., to be afflicted by it. To deny fate does not mean simply to rail against its injustice but, rather, to strive to be all one is not. But such a task is by definition impossible—we can only be that which we are. If it is a matter of will, then we might say that to be afflicted by fate is to will one’s inexistence (which should not be confused with the impulse to non-existence or, in other words, the will not to exist—we all know why suicide cannot be the will to non-existence, since it has meaning only from within the immanence of life), which often manifests, confusedly, as feeling trapped under one’s skin, as a rebellion against the state of the world or an incongruity between self and world. But at stake in such a will is not the preservation of what one is. But we can have no knowledge of what is not and, therefore, we cannot will what is not. To be afflicted by fate, then, is to have an objectless will or, in other words, a purely subjective will, an I willing nothing—not the will “to be nothing” nor the feeling of “being nothing”, but willing as the middle term between the phenomenon of the I and the mark of nothing.

2. There is a vulgar materialism that is simply another name for an inverted dualism and not, as it would have us believe, a pure monism according to which there are only bodies. The thesis that “I am my body” still accomplishes the feat of imprisoning the soul by reducing soul to body. The mistake here is to consider soul as “immaterial” (and therefore not-body) or to confuse materiality with body. The political consequences of such a materialism are banal at best and deadly at worst: in the reduction of personality to the shape of a contorted face (equivalently in pleasure or in anguish), we are left with the figure of a “bare humanity” (to adapt one of Agamben’s terms)—a humanity defined biologically, yet in such a way that separates humanity and nature even when, ostensibly, such a “materialism” should do the opposite—for the meaning of “right” ceases to have any meaning unless humans have a special kind of body. But, we should wonder, what exactly is so special about the human body? This is the ideology behind the banality “prick us, do we not bleed?”. To accomplish such normalization, do we not need precisely to prick? to test? to abstract? What is then left of such a humanity other than objects in place of bodies?