Barbaras tells us that the difference between fact and essence must be conceived as an imminent difference, "always already accomplished but also always on the way to being accomplished" (Being, p. 85). Would the difference between difference–haplopic difference?–and imminent difference be an imminent difference? Well, let's hear Barbaras out for a moment.
Taking stock of this ontological "diplopia" cannot consist only in taking note of it; one has to conceive it. Each position, that of experience or fact, as well as that of the "in-itself" or of essence, calls the other forth in the very moment when it excludes it. There is a deep-seated instability in the philosophies of essence as well as in those of existence. Neither of the two perspectives expresses the total situation, and this is why each of them is led to pass into its other. But if there is a truth of this "to and fro," of this duality, this truth does not reside in the duality itself. It is precisely the unilateral form according to which each position expresses itself that determines its reversal into its contrary, so that if there really is a truth to the duality of fact and essence, it is not expressed in the very notions of fact and essence. The to-and-fro corresponds to a more profound situation, to an original mode of the presence of Being in which the duality is rooted, which almost inevitably calls forth a rigid oppositional formulation, but whose true meaning does not reside in this duality. In order to understand the ontological "diplopia," therefore, one must return to a relation to Being that stops short of the opposition between essence and existence, a relation of which the to-and-fro is like the distorting trace. What is at issue is to rediscover the soil in which the necessity of this philosophical alternation is grounded, a soil that can only be located deeper than each of the terms, whose "unilaterality" alone determines alternation. One must therefore overcome the relation of fact and essence as an oppositional relation in favor of a plane where it will turn out to be a unity. By overcoming the fixity of the terms in which the opposition is expressed, we shall overcome the relation as oppositional relation. The notions of fact and essence lead us to conceive their very relation as an external oppositional relation rather than as movement; the point, therefore, is to overcome the antagonistic dimension of the to-and-fro in order to grasp the passage to essence as proceeding from existence itself, and the passage to existence as proceeding from essence itself. We must understand each term as its own passage into the other–that is, we must locate essence short of its opposition to existence and existence short of its opposition to essence.
(pp. 83-84)
One imagines an arrhythmia of the busy moment, the veryish moment of simultaneous exclusion and invitation, without pause, of the always, already, always again, and almost done enjambed within a single breath, the total breath, which exhales and inhales at once. Alternatively one plays with a floatier to-and-fro, a space of more emancipated movements. One leaps and swings amidst an undetermined canopy of philosophical conversations, phasing in and out like fruitions, or just words, utterances, even the most solid of them situations of near total incompleteness. One breathes. If rhythm exists–rhythmosophy must never cease to question how it is that rhythm exists–it sides with the alternation between its imaginary existence and its real essence, between its making itself appear as absence and its making itself absent. It exists thus as absurdity and ecstasy, but never already quite both at once (in any chronometric sense of happening at once; there is the phenomenon of the rhythmic happening to imagine: absurd, ecstatic, synkairotically phased). The son clave is the model of this flipendicularity. The sudden harmonziations of any two voices are the roots the bass walks, in steps unlocked, steady as freedom, measured, the pulse; yet the incomplete situation hangs on the syncopations with the three-two, steady as anything until it passes into the two-three; the conversation of any two or more voices, of many unconstricted passages.
Labels: Barbaras, breathing, dialectics, monism, rhythm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Fido the Yak front page