Sunday, February 21, 2010
Kangas writes that by contrast with Plato, for Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, "the instant of eternity has to be thought of as the 'extreme opposite' of eternity" (p. 189). He continues:
The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a passage to reality, but reality itself. Or more simply: passage as such is real, identity is illusion. This evaluation of what remains between being and nonbeing is conditioned on defining eternity with a forward direction. Eternity is not what remains eternally self-present, or what can be reduced to that, but what never ceases to beckon and threaten from the future. The eternal cannot as such be integrated into the present but remains essentially futural: the present and the eternal are thus extreme opposites. This essential gap, the excessive futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the most strenuous demand upon the subject.
(ibid., Kangas' emphases, my bold)
Why would the recognition of a reality of passage be conditioned upon any sort of eternity, or indeed, an extreme dialectics? Is the real being reified surreptitiously for the sake of dialectic, in contradiction to any professed relaxation within the anarchy of the instant? Well, we are speaking of passage as such, passage considered apophantically. In what sense aren't we speaking of the real from within an idealism?
I harbor serious doubts about excesses of futurity. Are these doubts consistent with a practice of ataraxia? How does the skeptic deal with the sudden, existentially? Is there any existential import to skepticism—would it be arrogant to deny any such importance, as arrogant as the denial of edifying discourses, perhaps?
Possibly there is no merely about the evanescent.
Labels: dialectics, Kangas, Kierkegaard, spasmoreality, transcendence
Sunday, February 07, 2010
While being administered a Wechsler IQ test I balked during a task of placing numbers and letters in sequence when the same number was given to me twice. Is the intelligent answer "1,2,5,8, b,f,h,r,t, or "1,2,5,5,8 b,f,h,r,t"? I became preoccupied with my problem of repetition. Does anybody else have a problem with repetition, I wondered. Am I afflicted by an abnormality of thinking, an inability to process repetition that causes symptoms of mental confusion, or, indeed, actually confounds me in a way that nobody else could clearly understand but merely diagnose? What am I at this moment bewildered by repetition? How is it possible to go on thinking at all?
Kangas writes (citations omitted):
If at any moment repetition were allowed to occur, the very idea of repetition, a movement "by virtue of the absurd," beyond representation, would be annihilated. Repetition is essentially deferred. To think repetition can therefore occur only by means of an even greater thinking of its difficulty, at a limit, its impossibility. Thinking repetition takes shape as a continual stepping back from the present and self-presence to the point where freedom—whose "supreme interest" is repetition—discovers its destitution, in the ordeal. To think is to arrive ever again at the point where though discovers an abyss (vibrations, rotations, whirlings) and freedom finds itself ungrounded. Thinking proceeds up to what cannot be thought.
(p. 123)
Labels: Kangas, Kierkegaard, measurement, noesis, repetition
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Kangas writes, "The ordeal expresses an event that is neither temporal nor eternal. It is not the direct presence of the eternal within time, which would annihilate temporality, but rather an interruption of it" (p. 116). He also says, "Receiving time is the most basic work of the of the living subject" (p. 105, his emphasis).
Does the living subject interrupt temporality in order to receive it? What relation might there be between the event, which could be cosmic, or material in the extreme, and exchange, a social relation? The gap of reciprocation, which is not exactly the gap of return, that is, the lag between the reception and the sending of gifts, stands out as a practical, coexistential temporality. The art of interruption—is it itself an interruption
What role is there for patience to play in the constitution of the event of the ordeal? Must it always remain yet to be determined—or is that already too much of a determination? Is it really so hard to wait and see?
Labels: event, Kangas, Kierkegaard, temporality, waiting, work
Sunday, November 01, 2009
The philosophical question of the moment is whether the spasmoreal is mediated by ideation or any passage through an ideality that would mean exposure to its repercussions. Where does the shudder of the sudden come from? Could this shudder be symptomatic of an awareness of recollection exactly as it happens? We couldn't be aware of such an awareness and still be in the process of recollection, could we? Yet there appears to be some trace of such a subterranean awareness in the shudder, which gives sense to the spasmoreal.
In spasmorealization are we technically operating within consciousness, i.e., one observes spasmoreal moments within a more or less phenomenal unicity of existential duration, or do we instead in spasmorealizing enact a modality of sudden consciousness, a modality that would paradoxically carry within itself both an awareness of its coming into being and simultaneously an inability to be fully aware of itself (in its ongoing recollective aspect)? Now imagine that irrealization is a condition of possibility for any spasmorealization. Immediacy is the condition of possibility for any mediacy. And why not?
You may well accuse me of misreading Kangas. He relates that according to Kierkegaard recollection is a specific kind of repetition that is neither reality nor ideality, but both reality and ideality that has been. But let's look for a second at what's being said of repetition. (We'll come back to it again, I'm sure.) Is repetition either reality or ideality? "Repetition indeed has the same structure as mediation: reality is cancelled (hæves) and set into the light of ideality at the same time. The real is made plastic for consciousness" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 84). Is the spasmoreal plastic, and if so, has it been made plastic for consciousness? (In such pathways one risks thinking that if consciousness plasticizes itself with a sufficient feeling of suddenness one may speak of spasmoreality, and the problem remains that, being conditioned upon irrealization, the imagination may have surreptitiously canceled reality in the very giving of the spasmoreal; the spasmoreal is always spasmoreal—and in that cancellation its sense of suddenness is jeopardized. Could we really then be talking about the spasmoreal as such?)
Anyway, to return to my misreading, Kangas says very clearly that as repetition, "consciousness is itself the gap between reality and its re-presentation" (p. 86). Let's play along for a second. The spasmoreal would not then be a mode of consciousness but something like a place where consciousness finds itself, and, one might add, finds itself duplicitously. Does consciousness really belong here, it seems to ask almost itself. The point of the misreading is that repetition is decidedly outside of reality, even if it's only outside in the sense that there used to be something real which people called repetition. However, if I believe that, what do I make of the shudder of the spasmoreal? Does this signify for me in any way a manifestation of repetition? Indeed it's hard not read the shudder as itself expressive of repetition at the same time the shudder is the attenuation of a trauma, not the trauma itself, but a repercussion. The repercussion is the blur within apophansis. It gives a sense that consciousness is not merely intentional, that is, consciousness of something, but also of something else again. We can give the something else again the name recollection but are we thereby any closer to understanding it? How much closer to understanding could we be than sudden? We could say this recollection is ongoing. Does the spasmoreal, in order to be sudden, carry within itself the cancelation of this ongoingness?
Labels: Kangas, Kierkegaard, spasmoreality
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Kangas' thoughts about the traumatic raise questions for our project of thinking about the question.
The trauma is less an experience than a quasi-experience, for what defines trauma is a tear in the fabric of presence itself. Consciousness is exposed to more than it can integrate and, unlike the experience of the sublime, does not recuperate itself in a secondary moment. The effect of the traumatic event is a dephasing of consciousness from its own temporality: the temporal "now" is no longer lived as an integral moment, relating to past-present and future-present, but placed out of time and out of being.
(Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 53)
Should we move then to thinking the quasi-experientiality of the question, the "as if" nature of the way the question unfolds in what we provisionally identify as experience? Let's note a rupture. Something about the question escapes the moment. Something escapes recuperability. Do these "somethings" have the status of things in our apprehension, or do we call them "things" only in the vaguest way possible, not to grasp them, but to feel our way around them. If it would be more exact to speak of the escaped or the irrecuperable, it would still leave something unsaid, something "out of being."
The question (the lovely question of rhythmosophy) appears to have an "as if" dimension, as if it were extramomentarily sprung from being. This sharing of space with the epoché, the bracketing of onticalities, occurs by virtue of its quasiexperiential irruption, which is nonetheless for being out of the present still yet spasmoreal. Is the quasi-experience in general spasmorealized? Question appears as if by surprise and interiority is dragged into question, as-if-dragged; is that the same way the questioning person is dragged into question?
More than anything the question interrupts. What kind of beginning is this?
Labels: epoché, Kangas, Kierkegaard, questions, spasmoreality
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The so-named rhetorical question, an ironic trope at first blush, is in truth an example of the speculative question. The ignorance of the speaker doesn't really amount to much in this case. The totally ironic question is something altogether different, for total irony points to an irrevocable split between phenomenon and essence "beyond their recuperable identity" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 29). The opening up of the possibility for total ironic questioning readies thinking for philosophy, philosophy in its post-Socratic phase, which has become synonymous with philosophy itself. The ironic question, ironically both phenomenon and condition for a phenomenon of questioning, exists as a prepatory gesture, and hence its eidos remains in withdrawal. Its eidos forever becomes recallable as the unrecallable: "The infinite absolute negativity of the Socratic standpoint. . . is to have the Idea merely as limit, to recollect it only as the non-recollectable" (p. 33, Kangas' emphasis).
The critique of the eroticization of the question, which eroticism almost amounts to a paraphilia among the clerisy (as does, ironically, critique), paradoxically calls for a poetics of inquiry, and implies not the temperament—poetic temperament could only be determined in its cold state—but the life of a poet. Philosophy gives us to think, poetically as must needs be, the enigmatic existence of an original preparatory thinker, of a *Socrates, in the spasm of the question. Is it possible to emulate Socrates and still be critical of the philosophical question? How do we emulate enigma, or simply admire the enigmatic existence, without succumbing to obscurantism?
In the Socratic movement, philosophy, the question "receives a radical priority over any expository discourse aiming at knowledge" (p. 24, my emphasis). Is the search for knowledge via the question supervened in favor of an apeironic priority of questioning, a priority indifferent to being and nothingness? Kangas here at this juncture equates the radical priority of Socrates' question concerning the good with the radical priority of "the original possibility of questioning—Socrates maintains a relation to the excess implied in any new beginning. Remaining faithful to this excess is the condition for remaining faithful to Socrates' 'historical-actual, phenomenological existence'" (ibid.). Fidelity to Socrates' enigmatic existence paradoxically means allowing the figure of Socrates to recede behind the absolute priority of inquiry.
Having drawn a distinction between the ironic and the speculative, between the preparation and the journey, do we then, in inquiry, seek knowledge? Not in an expository way, one might answer. Yet we might still investigate how we imagine these things are put against one another, journey and preparation, if that's how our imagination approaches the problematic. Does the absolute irony of the question ever cross paths with the expository? Or is this crossing of paths what is meant by the "enigmatic existence" of the philosopher?
Labels: anamnesis, apeiron, excess, existence, ideation, Kangas, Kierkegaard, philosophy, questions, totality Socrates
Friday, September 11, 2009
What do we make the positing of the instant that cannot be posited? Does one always come late to the instant, the instant that refuses to be even partially anticipated because it emerges as a surprise? What are we to make of this metaphysics of birth? In Kierkegaard's Instant: On Beginnings David Kangas rereads Kierkegaard's philosophy in light of such an instant, a coming into existence, he says:
that falls essentially prior to any beginning that could be represented, posited, or recollected by a subject: a beginning prior to all beginning, prior to the total horizon of presence—hence, an "anarchic" beginning that will always already have begun. This is what is meant by "Kierkegaard's Instant." The problem is one of thinking a beginning that cannot be translated as a first principle or ground, a beginning that neither serves as foundation nor can be posited. Self-consciousness, we learn from these texts [of Kierkegaard's], arrives always too soon or too late to the instant in which existence is given; it cannot be made to coincide with itself. Vis-à-vis this infinite beginning, existence shows itself as absolute departure, without foundation or goal.
(p. x)
If we take Kangas' reading as impetus to institute a logic of letting go of first principles, might we then also desire to let go of the coupling of the instant with a givenness of existence? Another passage may edify:
What transcends self-consciousness is not what stands over against it, but falls prior to it. Through paradox after paradox Kierkegaard's early texts exhibit a movement toward the radically anterior, the irrecuperable, the unrecollectable. They return thinking to an "infinite beginning," which he names "the instant" (Øieblikket), in which temporality itself begins. The instant is the name for a beginning that cannot be interiorized, appropriated, recollected, represented, or possessed. It is not a work of self-consciousness, not mediation, but rather the event through which self-consciousness is first enabled. The instant is the gift or birth of presence. An instant cannot claim to be. Of itself it is nothing, it is nowhere; it neither is nor is not. And yet everything changes in the instant. An instant enters into experience, or becomes present, either essentially too soon or too late. Anytime one says "and before I knew it," or "and then suddenly," one will have felt the residual effects ("traces") of the instant.
(p. 4, Kangas' emphases, my bold)
Labels: anarchy, delay, infinity, instant, Kangas, Kierkegaard, surprise, temporality
Friday, February 13, 2009
Has philosophy eroticized the question? Improperly? That is, in a way that would disguise its true beauty? Or its original difficulty? You see, I've picked up Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). The difficulty I'm going to have is that I'm going to prematurely conclude that the distinction between metaphysics and hermeneutics is specious, or perhaps not rigorously followed. Caputo is, it cannot be denied, a true believer in repetition, a belief redolent of metaphysics. By all means let's go to Berlin twice and compare notes.
So we have now a kind of ébranler of the question, a trembling that Caputo and possibly some other philosophers find exciting. This is why he is passionate in his disdain of metaphysics, a disdain I could easily agree with given certain understandings. "Metaphysics always makes a show of beginning with questions, but no sooner do things begin to waver a bit and look uncertain than the question is foreclosed. The disruptive force of the question is contained; the opening it created is closed; the wavering is stilled" (p. 1). This objection comes from a thinker whose metanarrative demands that all philosophy question majuscular B Being as presence, as if questions alone weren't demanding enough. There are reasons, then, to suspect that Caputo's hermeneutics will put a question or two into foreclosure, despite his being the George Bailey of philosophical questions.
Can we turn the tables on our lovely question? Are you androgynous? Are you comfortable with your sexuality, lovely question? Are you underwater? Just thought I'd ask.
Labels: Augustine, Caputo, Kierkegaard, mortgages, questions, repetition, sexuality
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Boredom is mainly . . . characterized by the present, or rather: boredom knows neither past nor future, whereas melancholy is characterized by a longing for a time that once existed (or possibly a future that is hoped for). Using Kierkegaard's terminology, we can see that the melancholic is someone who lives in the memory, i.e., someone who repeats backwards, while true repetition takes place forwards. Neither repetition backwards nor forwards is applicable to boredom, whose very nature is recurrence and not true repetition. Boredom is pure immanence, whereas genuine repetition is transcendence. This transcendence leads to happiness, Kierkegaard claims. And he even says, acutely, that if the repetition is not possible, human life dissolves into empty, meaningless noise.
(Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, pp. 92-93)
Kierkegaard has misled Svendsen. True repetition does not present a path out of the meaningless of boredom because repetition can only be false. Existential boredom reveals the falseness of repetition but it obscures repetition's lack of meaning within a general indifference. Meaning, according to Nancy, is an alterity (Sharing Voices). More insightfully, I think, in Being Singular Plural, he argues that meaning "is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are." The meaninglessness of boredom is precisely a withlessness. Its temporality is a withless temporality, one long, drawn moment of indifference.
Svendsen understands that moods can be shared and sees that in a certain sense a community can be defined by its shared moods. Some moods, however, like boredom, tend towards loneliness (p. 112). He says, "When one is in a mood, the world seems to be a particular field of possibilities; boredom differs from most other moods by the fact that the possibilities withdraw" (p. 113). It would be difficult for an existential phenomenology–such is Svendsen's bent–to acknowledge a mood that. rather than coloring the world, simply withdrew from the world. Phenomenology weakly grasps the withness of worlds.
Svendsen, however, does say that boredom is characterized by a loss of world (p. 128). And he says, "Boredom is mood which is reminiscent of an absence of moods. Since the mood is essential for our relation to objects, and boredom is a kind of non-mood, our relation to things also becomes a kind of non-relation" (p. 129). Does the recognition of this paradox of the mood that isn't a mood lead beyond an existential phenomenology? I'm not sure. Svendsen's critique of Heidegger, which basically amounts to substituting the concrete life for Being while acknowledging the shallowness of existential boredom, is firmly attached to the pursuit of phenomena of existential boredom. It is nevertheless, a difficulty.
Is there a phatics of boredom? ("I'm bored." "Me too.") Would saying "Let's be bored together" promise to put an end to the suffering of boredom? Would it put a dint in its indifference? I'm keen to read Svendsen's final chapter on the ethics of boredom, because I started reading from the beginning with the question in mind of how, if at all, boredom might be shared. In the mean time, I will not look towards repetition for a solution to the problem of boredom.
Labels: boredom, Kierkegaard, meaning, Nancy, Svendsen