Monday, October 13, 2008
Who imagines us? I can't yet permanently dispel the thought of a phantom imagination, an imagination whose function would be to make animal forms. Am I not animated? How has that come about? I don't think I can begin to answer this line of questioning on my own. Irigaray says:
We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, other than us.
Thus, if we precisely grasp all that makes the springtime, we would without doubt lose the wondrous contemplation in the face of the mystery of springtime growth, we would lose the life, the vitality, in which this universal renewal has us participate without our being able to know or control where the joy, the force, the desire that animate us come from. If we could analyze each element of energy that reaches us in the explosion of spring, we would lose the global state that we experience by bathing in it through all our sense, our whole body, our whole soul.
We sometimes, at least partially, find this state again, I would say this state of grace, in which the spring puts us, when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. We are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escapes our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this "mystery" is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation.
(Between East and West, p. 121-122)
Do I believe in a life of the world? Well, not as a precept but I remain open to the possibility. (A life in the world but not of the world must be imagined.) Perhaps believing in the life of the world would be like believing in the life of phenomenality. The horizons in which things appear are certainly not dead as far I can fathom. We might want to object to a reduction of the world to horizons, but if this is yet another way of talking about how the world is lived we might want to expand our own horizons and let the thought be thought through. It may be that the world has a structure of openness, a source of ambiguity worthy of respect. Yet it's difficult for me to sort these two out, life and world. What exactly is meant by saying "life" remains unclear to me; it seems to be said in at least two senses when talking about the life of the world, implying one sense in order to say explicitly another. Perhaps life itself hesitates to settle on a meaning, and the world's openness and the ambiguity we feel in our encounter with the world's openness are echoes of this more primordial hesitation.
In talking about an imagination that escapes imagination I'm playing with at least two senses of imagination. (I'm committed to this play with imagination, possibly at the risk of playing with commitment.) Imagine an imagination that excludes itself and then imagine as its other an imagination that includes itself. Now imagine an imagination that excludes its other and an imagination that includes its other (a thought similar to }∅{, perhaps, or simply the tao of imagination): are these two imaginations one? With respect to Irigaray's thoughts on the life of the world, would an all-inclusive, absolutely or exclusively inclusive imagination lack a necessary power of imagination, a power not to be included? In short, does the power of escape work reflexively? Does the power of escape work both ways and absolutely at the same time? Can I be open to a world that isn't already open? What does it mean to surpass, to transcend? Where do you go when you transcend? Another world? Another imagination?
Labels: Brahma, horizons, imagination, Irigaray, life, lifeworld, Taoism, transcendence, world
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Irigary, in a criticism of Hegelian dialectic, recommends a turning away from "an absolute saturated with language. . .in order to return to the absolute silence that the respect for other as irreducible to oneself calls for" (Between East and West, p. 100). She continues, "Negativity is then applied to the absolute itself as the accomplishment of the subject, an absolute reduced not to nothing but to a silence attentive to the other" (ibid.).
I'd like to give a moment's thought to the possibility of a meontic mode of silence, a mode of silence that invites us to hear what isn't voiced in order to better hear the voice. (It is appropriate to speak of voices, to hear voices in these words. We are indeed speaking in interpersonal terms. At issue is something like an egalitarian imperative, what Irigaray refers to as "horizontal transcendence," and the whisper of a radical panecastics that would resituate negativity, thought and the question without the violence of a depersonalization.
Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that the duration of silence is dialectical in every direction. Naturally. The attentionality of a silence is dialectical in every direction, open to interlocutors from all corners, speakers of the between, so it is might be expected that its duration should be multidirectional or polyvalent. Is this true of even the most intimate silences? The nature of the most intimate of silences is to not be widely known. That limitation too represents a kind of meontics. Maybe to be intimate is to be incompletely answered in a special way, to not know all of the valences of a silence's duration, to not let them be known.
Where would our interiors be without silence? Could we then build an interior without attention to others? This is an anxiety I think many people have, that one can indeed build build an interior away from all attention. People fear being trapped, and at the same time they fear a threat to betweenness. Perhaps though it is a question of durations. One attention span does not perfectly synchronize with another. Silences overlap, perhaps even lay askew. They seem not to attend to each other, and for a moment at least, the each other is thrown into doubt. Where would each other be in the absence of attention? Well, let's not rush to fill every silence with a lack of attention.
Will silence tell us whether it masks attentiveness or inattentiveness? Will words?
Labels: dialectics, Irigaray, listening, panecastics, silence
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Irigaray says that "Brahma exists only through the capacity to pose a question beyond what already exists" (Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček, New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, p. 41). Should we think of questioning as a transcendental gesture? Does transcendence even begin to do justice to the question. Imagine then a yonder side of already being. Does the question bring to light a yonder that otherwise wouldn't have been anticipated? What is a yonder that is not? A mediated yonder?
Is surprise a yonder of already?
Think of an idea like "the being of the question" or "?-being." In succumbing to a desire to bestow being upon the question, if only, perhaps, for the sake of fixing a topic of conversation, do we not risk asking less of ourselves than the question invites? What is there of ourselves beyond what is? The question is prejudicial. Who is there of ourselves beyond who we are? A transcendence both of and beyond–don't think there isn't any risk involved in asking too little, or in allowing too little to be asked. Too little risk is also a risk to be weighed, to be questioned.
Was the question already beyond what already exists, or was it posed there? To compose a beyond that questions what already exists: who are they that exist through such a capacity? Those who surprise? Who isn't ("(non)-being") most authentically surprising?
I wouldn't say that I know Luce Irigaray, if only through her writings, because that might imply that the capacity to surprise had somehow vanished from her works. We go back. We read anew. I'm not sure how we could say that the text is what already exists while it yet affords possibilities of posing questions beyond itself. Do we want things to be depleted? Is that a meaning of the bestowal of onticity? What is the silence that comes with the relinquishment of words? It may constitute a kind of violence to hear such a silence as impersonal. It may constitute an imponderable stupidity not to hear the implicit question in the silence that comes with the withdrawal from words.
Labels: Brahma, Irigaray, ontology, questions, silence, surprise, text, transcendence
Sunday, October 07, 2007
I want to follow up on one of Nancy's ideas in a sober voice. He says that in the experience of freedom that is thinking as freedom, we know that in every thought there is an other thought, which is the burst of freedom (The Experience of Freedom, p. 59). This reminds me of Tengelyi's discussion of the wild sense, the spontaneously emerging shard of sense that appears as other than belonging to one's life history determined according to a retroactive fixation of sense. Dylan, who has begun reading Tengelyi's The Wild Sense, notes a difficulty in the distinction Tengelyi has drawn between singularity and self-identity. Nancy, of course, has had a few words to say about singularity, but so far his thinking is a little opaque to me. It's fair to say that his thinking about singularity is existential. Ex-istence, he says, "signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is 'itself'" (p. 14, Nancy's emphasis). If we put these two ideas together, the argument would seem to be that singularity is given by that which is other in thought, an other that is not thought but that thinks thought itself. (This strikes me as a thinkerly way of approaching existential singularity) Nancy speaks of a hither side of difference: "a difference of being in itself, which would not simply convert being into difference and difference into being (since precisely this type of conversion between pure substances would become impossible), but which would be the difference of its existence, and in this existence, inasmuch as it is its own essence, the difference and division of its singularity" (ibidem). Nancy's singularity is tied to essence, and even though essence is understood existentially, it appears to be a markedly different approach than Tengelyi's. And yet Nancy speaks of the division of the singularity of existence. So far in this work he has not thematized plurality, but the idea seems to be nascent, presaging a dominant theme of Being Singular Plural. This idea of a division or a difference in singularity does not seem far from what Tengelyi means by the positionality of singularity, despite the noticable differences between their two approaches.
In the last decade or so the problem of singularity has been noticed in many corners, but the thoughts around it still appear to be inchoate. The later Nancy (along with Adriana Cavarero) insightfully conjoin the problem of uniqueness with the problem of plurality, and I believe this conjuncture is an implication of Tengelyi's approach as well. Of course Luce Irigaray deserves credit for treating plurality as an ontological problem, though her works are not cited by these other authors. (I mean to take up To Be Two again before too long). The question of finitude seems to be a problem for plurality; can a world consist of as many nows as it takes to make a world? I'm sure I'll be rereading Being Singular Plural again too.
Labels: Cavarero, freedom, Irigaray, Nancy, plurality, Tengelyi, Trigg, uniqueness