Fido the Yak

"In resonance the inexhaustible return of eternity is played–and listened to" (Jean-Luc Nancy, "How Music Listens to Itself," in Listening, p. 67). Routinely I would question "inexhaustible," "return" and "eternity," but what thoughts would turn up if I began by putting only one term into question? Can we admit that returns of eternity both exist and are exhaustible? Or can we acknowledge an inexhaustible return of the ephemeral? Aporias. The eternal's manner of coming into existence would require, to be a coming into existence, an incompatibility with the eternal, and likewise mutatis mutandis for the eternal's other.

Attack is followed by decay, to describe sound, yet in accounts of sonorous experience decay is frequently disregarded. "Sound has no hidden face," Nancy tells us (Listening, p. 13), though I'm still not so sure. He emphasizes the attack, the arrival of sound, while ignoring sound's departure. To me the departure of sound does suggest another facet of sound, a silence looming behind every sound. Of course behind the departure of sound is the arrival of sound–am I confusing conceptual faces with phenomenal faces here? I don't quite think so. I'd like to be talking about an eidos of sonorous experience, or an eidos of resonance, all the while pointing to an eidos of phenomenality in general. Sound is inside-out in relation to phenomenality, Nancy says (ibid.) This of course implies that sound does have faces. However, if what Nancy objects to is the idea of the hiddenness of any of sound's faces, then how should we interpret the disappearance of sound's departure behind phrases such as "the inexhaustible return of eternity"? Is this disappearance the sense of body that Nancy calls "soul" (p. 43)? (It is true, I'm excerpting from different essays ("Listening," "How Music Listens to Itself"); they are linked by common themes, such as resonance.) Could it be that the behind of sound is precisely animated? Perhaps only in order to be imagined. Just perhaps. So what makes it so difficult to imagine, for instance, the exhaustible return of eternity? Is it simply contradiction, or could it be de-animation, the flight of the soul which is at root an attack on the power of the imagination? To imagine the exhaustible would be far more painstaking than to live it. It would mean allowing exhaustion to resonate. Now that the idea's been put forward, can we think otherwise than that exhaustion itself is after all such a resonance of exhaustion? This is but one side of an equation. It should lead us to question whether or how the inexhaustible resonates. It is patently not clear that inexhaustion itself is the resonance of inexhaustion–but one wonders. If resonance is exhausting–in the manner it allows the eternal to come into existence, as return, or else more simply exhausting in the way it takes the air out of sound, slowly, one vibration after another–then listening to the inexhaustible can only go so far, and certainly not as far as the inexhaustible itself, whether or not it's its own resonance. But I'm puzzled. If resonance requires a distance from inexhaustion does it not also by the same token require a distance from exhaustion? Resonance is a phenomenon of distances–and passions. The sympathetic vibration clues us in to the essence of all resonance, which is not merely the antrum at the heart of the material, the chora, but the intensity of a feeling with (which points meontically to distances)–or do the antral and the distal measure the same space, a space that would exist in the absence of sympathies? Resonance would admonish us to be cautious about drawing too sharp a distinction between auditory and visual modes of phenomenality. Our responses to phenomena are imbricated with their arrivals–this defines their modality of arrival–which we perhaps never allow to occur all at once, despite what some have claimed to be true of listening, but always feel along with a feeling for or about their departures, which may be as good as having an intuition–not a pure intuition but an existential one, if you'll afford some meaning to the distinction–about the behind of sounds.

Labels: exhaustion, listening, Nancy, passions, phenomenology, resonance, sound

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:34 AM. 0 comments

"Music is not the origin of language, as people have so often wanted to think, but what withdraws and sinks into it" (Listening, p. 75, No. 42). Although I've taken a great interest in the musicality of language I should want to hesitate to adopt the position Nancy criticizes. Does music come before sense? Does it come before a kind of sense that might be called linguistic? What exactly is Nancy's view? "One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something, but in their own resonance" (p. 32). Music makes sense, but it is not the only sense to be made of the sonorous. There is antemusical sound, the sounds that have been silenced by music. Nancy quotes Wallace Stevens on the existence of an antemusical: "the self/detects the sound of a voice that doubles as its own" ("The Woman That Had More Babies than That," in Listening, p. 72, No. 21). Resonance is the stuff of bodies. Is embodiment a basis on which to deny music priority to language? I'm being crude, it's true. Let's listen to how Nancy speaks of resonance, and its relation to timbre.

Rather than speaking of timbre and listening in terms of "intentional aim," it is necessary to say that before any relationship to object, listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it. In truth, resonance is at once listening to to timbre and the timbre of listening, if one may put it that way. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens. (At the same time, this resonance is not an immobile given, since timbre itself is an evolving process, and, consequently, listening evolves along with it.)

(p. 40)

Timbre is an evolving process. If we are not to take the musical as given, and therefore simply project a received idea of timbre upon all sounds, interpreting all sounds through this musicological idea, but instead recognize its evolution, then it becomes of prime importance to investigate how one form develops from another, how listening might be said to evolve rather than merely change or manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps, though, the evolutions of listening are many. The analogy with life on Earth only goes so far. Was there ever a stage in the evolution of listening when music became language? See, already this is a misleading question because listenings are indeed surely many, and we wouldn't rush to say that any one adventure of listening recapitulates *listening, or that a listening must repeat or mimic other listenings, other developmental pathways. No outcome is predetermined. And so we confront the obvious problem of separating the given from the elaborated, and, secondarily, of describing the very how of evolution, and of justifying an implied distinction between a variance and a transformation. Now, in the passage immediately above, Nancy speaks of a nonintentional (in a phenomenological sense) listening as prior to intentional listening, yet in the earlier quoted passage he says that music makes sounds nonintentional. Is nonintentional listening made or discovered by music? If we are to speak intelligibly of the evolution of listening, don't we need an answer to this question of how nonintentionality in listening is arrived at? (I'm not completely sure, though I have enough of an opinion to pose the question.)

Do we move from babble to a speaking that is already listening? How does listening develop through infancy? Can we grasp listening in the context of a transcendental murmuring, "the condition of all words and all silence" (p. 25), without confronting what could be taken for a listening that transcends babble, and therewith a speaking that is already listening, at some stage or another? (I honestly don't know enough about transcendence to say whether it is one or many, or whether it really exists at all. It could after all simply be a reality of our linguistic life that we project onto things of experience in accordance with language's power to fashion reality–the withdrawal of the musical into reality, into the plasma of the real–but I'm just tossing ideas around here.)

This profound disposition [musical listening, FtY]–arranged, in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end–is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the sate of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. [T]he beginning of sense . . . takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack. . . a stridency where a weighty, murmurring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.

(p. 27, Nancy's emphasis)

Likewise, "sense consists first of all. . . not in a signifying intention, but rather in a listening" (p. 30). First of all. Hmmm.

Let's return for a second to the doubling of a voice, a voice of the self. In listening do we communicate with ourselves? "Communication is not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject" (p. 41). Perhaps we communicate with ourselves in our nascent states, but even so we should question the possibility of the frictionless voice, and, especially, frictionless doubling. How then might we describe any friction we feel in communication with our own voice? Is timbre really the bottom of it all? The musical? Now that we have discovered the musical, and brought its style of listening back from the language it'd sunk into, we can ask, paradoxically, whether there exists a voice without timbre, or any voice that isn't yet doubled, and the question may be not simply a variation on a theme of friction, but an evolution, a movement into the musical, from which we've been estranged. In timbre we hear bodies, hear that voices are voices of bodies. Are the voices of bodies bottomless? Is music? What is the bottom to listening? Is communication a condition for all doubling and all singling out? What are the primitive conditions of listening? Having an idea, perhaps? Or something that could double as a person's own idea?

Labels: babble, language, listening, music, Nancy, sound, timbre, voice

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:37 AM. 2 comments

At the moment I'm unable to deliver a proper meditation on the rhythmic listener. I'll get back to it. For now I need to mention that if you're going to be in Seattle you need to check out the Jason Parker Quartet, all of whom are sensitive listeners.

A passage in Nancy's Listening serves to amplify an idea of Lefebvre's that rhythm requires another time besides or outside of time in order to meditate upon time. Here's Nancy:

We should linger here for a long while on rhythm: it is nothing other than the time of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall, passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time: it bends time to give it to time itself, and it is in this way that if folds and unfolds a "self." If temporality is the dimension of the subject (ever since Saint Augustine, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger), this is because it defines the subject as what separates itself, not only from the other or from the pure "there," but also from the self: insofar as it waits for itself and retains itself, insofar as it desires (itself) and forgets (itself), insofar as it retains, by repeating it, its own empty unity and its projected or . . . ejected [protojée, ou . . . jetée] unicity.

(p. 17, Nancy's emphases)

A quick thought. In addition to thinking about the methectic quality of listening, which Nancy invites, we should mull over the improvisatory attribute of (contribution to) methexis. Where is the methexis in a trumpet full of my emptiness?

Labels: Jason Parker, Lefebvre, listening, Nancy, rhythm, subject, temporality, trumpet

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:49 AM. 2 comments

Nancy talks about the ostranenie of the photograph, how it captures the familiar and strays into strangeness ("Nous Autres," in The Ground of the Image, pp. 100-107). At length:

Such is the straying and secret I am of the photo. Thus it does not say, "I is an other"; rather, it proffers the wholly other "I am" whose text consists in "we others." It remains to be asked whether there is ever any I am that is not laden in the depths of it-self with innumerable we-others: but that is perhaps exactly what the photograph charges itself with uncovering, with suggesting. Each "subject" in the photo refers tacitly, obstinately, to all the others, to this prodigious universe of photos in(to) which we all take ourselves and one another, at some time or another, this colossal and labyrinthine phototeque in whose depths there stalks–like a Minotaur–the monster, the monstration, and the prodigious image of our strangeness. The encounter is always monstrous, or monstrating, ostensive and threatening, invasive and evasive in the same moment, straying in its capture, released in being grasped. This is not a dialectic, or else it is the point–the seed or grain–of madness that vibrates at the heart of every dialectic, the labyrinth that disturbs its progress and throws it off course.

This grain, or this labyrinth, is called a body. A photograph is a rubbing or rubbing away of a body. We others, as others, are bodies. When we meet one another, we are bodies. We are in each case the brother or the sister of the Minotaur's human body, and it is this body's blood that flows through the beast's head. The bodiless, for its part, is the same, the self-same, hidden behind its body, the dimensionless point of spirit, the empty reference of a formal "I think." But what makes the photograph possible (and what once made people believe that it could capture spirits in its gelatin) is that in the photo it is a question of the body: it is the body that grasps, and it is the body that is grasped and released. It is the body, its thin surface, that is detached and removed by the film. This is the physics and the chemistry of the instant, the force of gravity of the click, this curvature of space and this impalpable lightness of a vision that precipitates and coagulates into a thickness of skin, a density of touch. The contact and the tact of the photographic click detaches a new body each time, an instantaneous body, unstable and fixed in its instability, as a loving or a suffering body, desiring or fearing, which is surprised and overtaken by pleasure or pain. We others, we difficult bodies, delicate bodies and exposed skins obscured by their own clarity, bodies gently pressed and released by another body, by its eye, its finger, its uncertain thought of being and appearing, which suddenly comes to take its place in us (others), as in the cavernous recesses in which it will carry on its rumination.

(pp. 106-107)

In the following paragraph why does Deleuze put "passage" in quotation marks?

The extreme mobility of the phantasm and its capacity for "passage" have often been stressed. It is a little like the Epicurean envelopes and emanations which travel in the atmosphere with agility. Two fundamental traits are tied to this capacity. First, the phantasm covers the distance between psychic systems with ease, going from consciousness to the unconscious and vice versa, from the nocturnal to the diurnal dream, from the inner to the outer and conversely, as if it itself belonged to a surface dominating and articulating both the unconscious and the conscious, or to a line connecting and arranging the inner and the outer over two sides. Second, the phantasm returns easily to its own origin and, as an "originary phantasm," it integrates effortlessly the origin of the phantasm (that is, a question, the origin of birth, of sexuality, of the difference of the sexes, or of death. . .). This is because it is inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin. Our early problem, "where does the phantasm begin, properly speaking?" already implies another problem: "where does the phantasm go, in what direction does it carry its beginning?" Nothing is finalized like the phantasm; nothing finalizes itself to such an extent.

(Logic of Sense, p. 217, my bold)

The instant labyrinth passes in the direction of adventure, in the direction of agility. To be a witness to its passage would I have to be haunted? Growing comfortable with transcendence would be an indulgence were it not for this sense of haunted/haunting, this sense of whispers.

Perhaps for the Epicurean the simulacrum represents the ultimate adventure, a greater challenge than suffering itself. However it should be doubted, by which I mean it should not be doubted perforce but with the sense of responsibility or commitment we should bring to our shoulds, to the extent we can do so prior to the constitution of any should. To live amid superstitions is to force the mind to suffer. Is force real? Possibly what compels us to dwell amid simulacra is the force of our own doubt. On the other hand "dwell" may be a poor choice of words. Do we exactly pass among simulacra? Such a passage would not be an Epicurean notion but an adventure. I'd like to believe that talking about how such a doubt exists would be an adventure, but I rather sense that you may feel as if you've talked doubt to death. Maybe instead of adventure we should speak of sidestepping, as if nobody had already made an adventure out of the detour. All of our conversations may be haunted that way too.

Agility is more real to me than Unconscious Thought or its Conscious Thought, more real than either the body rubbed away or the body I am left to inhabit, and impressively more real than any zone of difference between the two. Am I left then with a fantastic that can't "pass"? Why should I feel dismay that the instant labyrinth would be a passing thing, or a kaleideation of passing? What's its passing to me? What's its haunt?

Allow me a doubt about the instant. Perhaps the instant means no more than a copula, a bringing together of two affairs, two detours. I feel it necessary to decouple the instant labyrinth from the labyrinth of the straight line. Perhaps any affair is a celebration of the aleatory, but as I've noted before, celebrants of the aleatory are often uncomfortable with the aleatory encounter. It's as if we needed the copula to enable the affair as affair, and perhaps we only recognize the aleatory as it is carried on alongside; its birth would then be in the copula–the beginnings of a paradox I reckon, but perhaps one that we can happily set aside for just a moment, content to simply take note of a discomfort. Do we meet the instant Minotaur in profile? Is the instant labyrinth properly traversed?

Labels: Deleuze, imagination, labyrinths, Nancy, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:26 PM. 0 comments

Simha Arom agrees with Jean Molino's definition of the musical: "Whenever sound is shaped and recognised by a culture, it is musical" (quoted in African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, p. 147). By this definition we could, though it would run counter to the task Arom has appointed to himself, hear language as musical. We would stumble into trouble on a few points, for instance on the question of differentiating language from culture, which might also call into question the differentiation of language from music and with that the whole project of differentiation, perhaps especially as it is conducted in tandem with a project of thinking by analogy, or amidst analogy.

Sometimes every word is troubling. I probe into words and wonder about the transmiguration of forms and also their persistence (and also the and also), and I do so, in part, because words are tools I think with, and perhaps that gives me trouble. I am troubled by thinking with. What does it mean to think with, or to think by? Thinking about thinking with, in a wee hour, a bout of psychasthenia welcomes another inhabitant of the horizon of thinking. Is this the figure of a muse? Trouble itself? A list of troubles: music, culture, recognoscence, shape, sound.

The musical. You could hardly be blamed for objecting to the personification of thought's other, or, whether or not it means the same thing, its with. (Before we cast ourselves as the feminine of thought, a distinct alternative, we should settle the matter of personification.) We don't yet know what a sonus is, so perhaps it's premature to think of carrying it through, though we may yet find ourselves doing something like that, carrying a sound through to music, or possibly by music. (The interchangeability of by and with?)

Does music call forth sound? Sound may have its own raisons d'être, but what are its reasons for being musical, for being shaped and recognized by a culture as such? Does music dramatize? Does it have its theatre of the labyrinthine and its masks, for perhaps resonance is the destination of sonance and also its journey and its origination, a calling forth. Music's calling forth of sound would be less spectacular than Dionysian, we can imagine, but nevertheless it plays in the same amphitheatre as spectacle and also chorus, the double theatre, the labyrinth of threads and dancers. Its purpose obscure, its dramaturgy amounts to this: a calling forth to airs. The singer's mask, the resonance with listeners and listening, what Nancy refers to as the whole articulatory cinema of the voice (which we insist on calling its theatre, sung and staged before it is cut up and framed, but, here Nancy is most insightful, drawing the face), which is not around the face like an atmosphere, but labyrinthine, that is to say connected to the hip bone, to the knee bone, to the ankle bone to the ball of the big toe, grounded in poises: airs. A ball of airs: entrée, adagio, variations, coda. The disco of words (poussette of the breath) never ceases to astonish, to vary forms that defy pronunciation and at the same time rasp true: larynx (λάρυγξ), diaphragm (δια- + φράγμα), a form which invites us to anatomize the ancient, phrenes (φρένες), and hence phrenasthenia, a weakness of frenzy, of the Dionysian, or of Mynde, a coming unpoised, disequipoise—how quickly the figures recompose themselves.

Culture (adagio). The truth of culture is that it is not a person. To even call it an it is deceptive. Were we to conceive of culture as an it, as a neutral person, we would recognize a defining characteristic: it takes its time. What we affectionately think of as ancient Greek civilization is still becoming civilization, still becoming Greek, still becoming ancient. It takes its time. It veritably drawls. We speak of cult-ure (Kult-ur, though we might have to reclaim a meaning) to call attention to, rather than an instance of caring, an activity of care, an activity that extends even beyond the seasonal, though we can use the seasonal to remind us of the time it takes, to get a foothold on what it means to take time, what it means to till. To think by culture is to become a witness to the intermarriage of the fast and the slow, and to let things into and out of our hands. Culture is not nurturing. It has no womb, no matrix, no biomechanical integuments of its own. It is precisely nurtural. It is in our hands, and, alternatively, out of our hands, or so to speak. It can't be dissociated from passage. That is, it takes its time.

Recognoscence. You know the dilemma. You recognize it. To know is already to know with, already and also again. Turn it on itself again: to recognize is already and also again to recognize by culture. How will you recognize the muse?

Shape. Would a departure here be on a theme of variations? Depart we must. The thought must occur that plasticity itself is a metaphor—feel free to worry about which way the action flows, about what it means to shape by culture. Let's leave form aside for a moment and pla-y with shape. To shape is to skop, and it is skopping (the activity of skops, commonly misspelt as scops) that nurtures its meaning. (Is skopping an end in itself? Wait, please.) Perhaps to nurture is to blur a line between helping along and allowing to be; perhaps it strikes a balance. The skop steps out of the synkairotic, skip skop, and so gives passage to it. The skop becomes, through donation, all about passage, passage through and through. The skop is all over that thing, a virtuoso of passages.

Sound is how we know the world has depths—or, rather, before we can know what a world might be, sound is how we know depths. It would be stupid to consign sound to surfaces, though it would be equally stupid to deny the surfaces their due. Sound unravels the how of depths. The howl is the sound of sounds on the slow, the slow tongue. The slow tongue calls forth the drawl, the ripple of the howl. Does the howl have a bottom? What is the nurture of our inquiry? To hear the howl of existence in a ripple, to know disturbance at its reaches: to sound sound as a double resonance, without priors, a true rap. It was already and also again called forth by passage, the door held open by the figure of the skop, and maybe in that double theatre the figure was doubled too, and you could feel the vibration of trouble itself. Sound.

Labels: Arom, labyrinths, Molino, music, Nancy, shape, sound, Terpsichore, vibration

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:31 AM. 0 comments

Nancy says that "there is doubtless no saying that is not in some way imaged" ("Distinct Oscillation," in The Ground of the Image, p. 67). No doubt. Conversely, is there any image that does not in some way say something? This is a question of ekphrasis, I guess.

Are text and image primitives of showing? That seems to be the drift of Nancy's oscillation, insomuch as an oscillation can have a drift. I would question that, but I don't have a ready answer to the question of whether images that say nothing actually exist.

Let's put it another way. Are there images that go without saying? The philosopher may want to say that while uneducated persons allow images to go without saying, philosophers insist on making them say something. Perhaps what they say is questions. Do you suppose that is why images are beloved? I don't. I would look to whom what the saying that goes with the image is said for answers. And questions. Oh, but there is this business of ekphrasis. Does ekphrasis speak to anybody? Just anybody?

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. I might suppose that rules out a certain kind of ekphrasis, but I am not so quick to suppose. Is it fair to call my imagination of sunyata an embrace? Haven't I, in previous posts, exactly embraced the formless? Well, it wouldn't be difficult to misidentify things. Doesn't the formless resist identification?

Can it ever be truly said that one has found the image that says nothing? Shall I draw you a picture of finding? (Naturally, I am missing the point here.)

Labels: ekphrasis, formlessness, imagination, Nancy, speech, sunyata

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:45 AM. 1 comments

The country is the corner of earth that one is attached to, by which one is held;as a son or daughter of the earth–which we all are–one can only be from one corner or another; one cannot be from the entire earth

–Jean-Luc Nancy, "Uncanny Representation," in The Ground of the Image, p. 53

The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

–Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues,
Coucher auprès du ciel, comme les astrologues

–Charles Baudelaire, Paysage

Eclogue is a word in English but ecologue is not yet a word, though I am sure you will know what the latter means. Could it be something bucolic?!? Well, it's difficult to avoid romanticizing the traveller (I'm mindful of qualms about travels), the exile, the wanderer, the pirate. Piracy! But no pirate roves today. Today I'll take the wanderer as my figure, the ribbon of enunciation of the ecologue. The ecologue is the discourse of the son or daughter of Earth who, if not from the entire planet, is not entirely from this or that corner of Earth. The Volkswagen, the Ford, the Dreamliner, the Backpack: All heterotopias. We live in an age of superfluent heterotopias, which proabably says something about the market value of ordinary places, Earth's ordinary corners. I'm wary of nostalgia so I'll tread carefully here.

Paysage resembles passage. I speak an ancient language, a fact which Nancy brings home to me. I can't quite say where my home really is. I've felt estranged from places I once called homes. To say that one inhabits language is misleading unless one can speak of the heterotopology of the itinerary or of the pure roam. (The pure roam follows no paths, though it might come across a path now and then, might ramble along a path the way a path rambles along a stream, for instance. It's akin to the perigrination.) In addition to being ancient, language also has a transmigural quality. (Transmigural or transmigurational aren't quite words, but I'm pretty sure you'll be able to suss out a meaning and maybe see why I said neither transmogrifying nor transmigratory). Language displays a superfluity/superfluency of the mutation, the perversion, the corruption, the away. Why does away get such a bad rap? Does language have anxieties about losing its places? Is it uncomfortable with its heterotopology, its passage through the mouths of the wanderers?

So we return to the ecologue's ribbon of enunciation. Today we will leave the potatoes to their moist revery and uncurl up against the dome and the words we speak will be voluptuous. What corner of Earth is voluptuous? (The away corner–is it only in language that the corner and the away can intersect? What are the corners of the mouth?)

Labels: Baudelaire, Foucault, language, Nancy, peregrinations

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:53 AM. 5 comments

A scene from the film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle:

Kumar: How were Katie Holmes' tits?

Goldstein: You know the Holocaust?

Kumar: Yeah?

Goldstein: Picture the opposite of that!

Kumar: Nice!

This is, if one turns it around as one must, a voyeuristic image of the camps produced by a voyeuristic culture. It might also fairly be called juvenile. If the opposite of juvenile is mature–words like "experienced" and "wise" also spring to mind, perhaps unfairly–what is the opposite of voyeuristic?

Jean-Luc Nancy, the French philosopher, wants us to think of the Shoah as "an ultimate crisis of representation" ("Forbidden Representation," in The Ground of the Image, p. 34). He presents us with a particular understanding of representation (or rather two entwined ways of understanding representation). He notes that, "The re- of the representation is not repetitive but intensive (to be more precise, the intitially iterative value of the prefix re- in Latinate languages is often transformed into an intensive or, as one says, 'frequentive' value)" (p. 35). I'm sure I'll be returning to this idea at a later time. Here I'll just paraphrase Nancy's argument about what representation is not: it is not the repetition of a thing, or the reintroduction of a thing in a context that differs from its original context; it is not recontextualization. He says that it is essentially the "presentation of an open absence within the given itself" (p. 33). He continues:

Representation is not a simulacrum; it is not the replacement of the original thing–in fact, it has nothing to do with a thing. It is the presentation of what does not amount to a presence, given and completed (or given completed), or it is the bringing to presence of an intelligible reality (or form) by the formal mediation of a sensory reality. The two ways of understanding it do not exactly coincide with each other, neither in the divisions they afford nor in their intimate entanglement. Nonetheless, they must be taken together, and the one taken against the other, in order to think the dispute, or the secret, of "representation."

(ibidem, Nancy's emphasis)

Nancy's description of Nazism utilizes some familiar tropes, including the representation of the Aryan body.

The figure of the "Aryan" is the very principle of this [Nazi] vision; it entails nothing less than the presentation of man regenerated as super-man. I propose that we call this regime "super-representation" to emphasize that it is not simply a matter of representing triumphant humanity as a type (as is also the case, in the same era, with Stalinist art). Rather, what is involved here is the (re)presentation of a type that is itself a (re)presentative, not of a function like the hammer and sickle, but of a nature or an essence (the Aryan body). It is in this body that the presence of a self-creating humanity would truly consist (a humanity that is, in this sense, divine, but with no separation of the divine, that is, with no "sanctity"). The Aryan body is an idea identical to a presence, or it is the presence of an idea without remainder: precisely what the West has, for centuries, thought of as the idol. In the terms employed by Hitler, moreover, it is called "idealism": the idealism of the founder of civilization (Kulturbegründer), whose supreme virtue is that he gives himself over to the service of the community upon which he has bestowed "the civilizing spirit." "The Aryan alone can be considered as the representative [Vertreter] of the race of the founders of civilization." "Civilization," here, has no other meaning than the conformity of a world to its representation. The Aryan is the representative of representation, absolutely, and it is in this precise sense that I propose the term "super-representation."

(pp. 38-39, my bold)

Why aren't representation, idolatry, iconograhy or propaganda adequate to describe Nazi imagery? The inadequacy of these terms follows from Nancy's casting of Western civilization. If Western civilization is a representation its excess can only be superrepresentation, and excess is one of the tropes one uses to talk about Nazism, especially if one is a French intellectual writing in the last twenty-five years. (Kristeva showed us an example of this, to give just one name.) But I'm using shorthand, which means I may well end up putting my foot in my mouth. Nancy actually calls the West an event and a configuration. He says it's a "configuration whose history is rushing toward its completion before us, having already undergone the total crisis that beset the order of representation" (p. 35). Is there a question here of a world conforming to its representations? (I'm aware of playing on two senses of "its," and also pointing "its" in different directions, i.e at the West, at its iconography, and at Nancy the iconographer– how many ways are there for a representation to belong to a world?)

Nancy brings a great erudition to the question of how one describes the Nazi camps. I can't match his erudition at this time, nor can I pretend to offer much in the way of a critique. I have qualms, and I will share those with you. I question what erudition accomplishes in this case. I question Nancy's strong stand against allowing for the ineffable (the "idolatorous mysticism of the 'ineffable,'" he says), and I suspect that his writing on the topic has actually scored a point for the other team. Possibly, I wonder, Nancy has misnamed the ineffable as "absence" (or absense). I don't know. There may be something to say here about female nudity in the movies and superrepresentation, but I'm not going to be the one to say it–what I have are qualms, and I'd like to talk about having qualms.

Is the qualm mystical? Is to speak of qualms to reject philosophy? Frequently a person who has qualms will keep her thoughts to herself. My inner voice warns me, Fido, just because you have a qualm doesn't mean you have something to say. Don't upset people for no good reason. Don't upset yourself. I may and probably will upset myself–after all, these are my qualms. Now here I am talking about the qualm itself and my question is, What is the proper attitude to take towards the qualm? Is it good to eliminate qualms? Can they be interrogated without seeking to dispel them, to somehow resolve them as if they were logical contradictions?

There is some uncertainty about the etymology of the word qualm, an ambiguity about the word itself. In one sense, the sense that I initially had in mind, qualm is related to an early modern German word qualm meaning "swoon, faint, half-conscious or unconscious state" (that's according to the OED). The half-conscious intrigues me. My qualms about representions of Nazi Europe's death camps may be only half-conscious, which is not to say that they aren't meaningful or can't be (half-)said. My qualms themselves may be a psychic indication of halving and its remainder. They may themselves be halved. Qualm is probably related to a Danish or Swedish word kvalm meaning "nausea, sickness, or indisposition." Is indisposition like a bad hexis? It's striking that there would be a word that implied feeling intensely an indisposition. The implication is there in a meaning that comes out of the word in later centuries, "pang" or "distress." To be qualmed is to suffer. (Ethically then it would seem that the proper course of action when confronted with a qualm is to do away with it because it causes suffering. More on that in a moment.) There is another, obsolete word qualm that goes back to Old English (and Old High German). The Old English cwealm meant, in part, "torment, pain, injury." The Old Saxon qualm meant death of a violent nature, and the Old High German qualm meant "torment, torture, (rare) downfall, perishing." The obsolete qualm meant violent death or murder. It also meant "general or widespread death or mortality; pestilence, plague," and, in an extended sense "calamity" or "disaster." Qualm appeared in the compounds qualm-stow, a place of execution, and qualm-house, "a house of torture; a prison, esp. one for those condemned to death" (Incidentally, the sequel to Harold and Kumar go to White Castle will be titled Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay).

Sometimes I feel like the world interrogates me. Language interrogates me. How do I feel about the existence of qualm houses? How do I feel about qualms? Blasé? (A word of uncertain etymology, btw.) No, that might imply that at some time in the past I actually found qualms enjoyable. How familiar am I, personally, with qualms? I say I feel them, but my feelings are half-conscious. If you said to me, "Fido, here is your chance to escape your qualms, leave them behind, be free," why on earth wouldn't I follow your lead? I am drawn to my qualms and they to me, half-drawn, half-dead, half-qualms. What is half of a violent death? The other half of a violent death? What is half a binary opposition?

It would be wise to know what saying does. Before even speaking of the ineffable, it would be wise to know what saying is and what it does. I don't even know who is saying this, and surely who is saying must figure into what saying does. I feel there must be something ineffable because I can't say it, whoever I is. Have I said too much to count myself among even the half-wise? Here is the ethical problem: there are worse things than qualms. And philosophy may yet offer worse alternatives to the ineffable.

Labels: death, death camps, excess, ineffable, Nancy, nudity, representation

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:00 AM. 0 comments

Nancy speaks of the force of the image, a force that is "a unity woven from a sensory diversity" ("Image and Violence," in The Ground of the Image, p. 22). I don't believe this jibes with the immobility of the image Nancy posits in "The Image–the Distinct." It seems closer to my initial feeling about the dynamism of the imagination. Anyway, here Nancy speaks of the force of the image and its relation to forms:

Under this force, forms too deform or transform themselves. The image is always under a dynamic or energetic metamorphosis. It begins before forms, and goes beyond them. All painting, even the most naturalistic, is this kind of metamorphic force. Force deforms (and so, therefore, does passion); it carries away forms, in a spurt that tends to dissolve or exceed them. The monstrous showing or monstration spurts out in monstruation.*

*The word monstruation comes from Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: "Communication is the attempt to restore, through the repetition of some sign, the intensity of an affect to which this sign is connected, but phenomenally this repetition must fail: there would be no affect without this perpetual failure, without the incessant monstruation of signs in the Heraclitian flux that is perceptuality." See his Esthétique du chaos (Auch: Tristam, 2000)

(ibidem, and page 142, note 10, emphases in original, my bold)

To see the violence Nancy sees in the image requires acknowledging a kind of violence without violation. I'm not sure that I can ultimately accept such a broad definition of violence, though I won't close the book on it. (It's curious that intellectuals would feel that their truths are violent. I'm keeping my eye on those intellectuals.) That leaves us with a discussion of the force of the image and the question of forms or, especially, deformation. Is it right to call this force of the image deforming? If the force of the image is truly metamorphic it might seem that it must do violence to forms. Does the image's being the other of forms ("The Image–the Distinct," p. 3) mean that it does violence to forms? I'm not sure of this. I doubt that the imagination makes a study of the forms left in its wake. The consciousness that would see the imagination as destructive of forms must be retrospective or reflective, and I would be cautious about the assimilation of such a consciousness to the imagination. Do forms and imagination share the same consciousness at all? This is a difficult question.

Can there be a metamorphosis prior to forms? I'm wondering if Nancy hasn't misidentified the force of the image. Perhaps form itself introduces violence into the imagination, or the expectation that form creates and which cannot be fulfilled manifests itself as a kind of violence. The force of imagination itself however, were we to allow it to flow without imposing forms upon it, may not be violent. It may not violate forms because forms and the force of imagination don't really touch on each other, and it's really only a belief in forms that misleads us into thinking that they should be in contact. Monstruation then would represent a distorted view of what happens in the imagination, a view from inside the form, from the inside of a repetition destined to failure, a view from outside the image. But I am not sure of this line of thinking. I have to seriously consider Nancy's suggestion that the image has no inside (ibidem p. 11). Wouldn't it follow that the image has no outside?

Let's take up the idea that the imagination touches upon forms. To reiterate, if the force of the image is prior to forms what is the sense in calling it metamorphic? What would be the problem with regarding the imaginataion as morphogenetic? (Is the force of the image not being violent a problem?) If the force of the imagination is indeed prior to the emergence of form would it be prior to the existence of a morphogenetic field? (Could the imagination be just such a field?) By the time a mnemic entity can survey it the morphogenetic field is littered with broken and ruined forms. Who destroyed them? Who created them? Who can remember whence the forms came? How could the imagination be capable of anamnesis?

If monstruation has an other it is kaleideation. Kaleideation also speaks to the failure of repetition, yet it keeps going. The kaleidoscope is its symbol, its instrument and its perspective–how odd. Can we avoid being spectators of our imaginations? The deformations of kaleideation are invisible to us, if they ever in fact take place. Nonetheless, the kaleidoscope gives us a sense of being able to witness the imagination's metamorphic force. Collisions without horrific consequences? It seems that now I'm only looking at the metamorphic force of the imagination with one eye. Where did I put that other eye?

Labels: form, imagination, Kacem, kaleidoscopes, Nancy

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:03 AM. 1 comments

As a consequence of Nancy's materialism of the image–which may be a biopolitical materialism, for what it's worth, but is still a materialism of the image in the tradition of the Epicureans#150;the question of transcendence will need to be rethought. The theme of touching in Nancy's thought has, it seems, been leading in this direction, away from transcendence, away from ecstasy though not from jouissance. The idea of touch is balanced by the idea of withdrawal–but I may not need to delve into that. In any case I see an opportunity here to question what transcendence means, and whether it can finally be surpassed by more subtle thinking.

As I was saying, the image according to Nancy is always material ("The Image–The Distinct," in The Ground of the Image, pp. 12). Nancy finds that the image concerns sameness, but it is an other sameness than the sameness of the concept and of language. Is this imagistic sameness a material sameness? (I am sure it's a coexistential sameness; we will have to decide if that means it is of the material.) He says, to quote him at length:

The thing as image is thus distinct from its being-there in the sense of the Vorhanden, its simple presence in the homogeneity of the world and in the linking together of natural or technological operations. Its distinction is the dissimilarity that inhabits resemblance, that agitates it and troubles it with a pressure of spacing and of passion. What is distinct in being-there is being-image: it is not here but over there, in the distance, in a distance that is called "absence" (by which one often wants to characterize the image) only in a very hasty manner. The absence of the imaged subject is nothing other than an intense presence, receding into itself, gathering itself together in its intensity. Resemblance gathers together in force and gathers itself as a force of the same–the same differing in itself from itself: hence the enjoyment [jouissance] we take in it. We touch on the same and on this power that affirms this: I am indeed what I am, and I am this well beyond or well on this side of what I am for you, for your aims and your manipulations. We touch on the intensity of this withdrawal or this excess. Thus mimesis encompasses methexis, a participation or a contagion through which the image seizes us.

(p. 9)

(Since Nancy is obviously reading Sartre, I'll note, for those keeping score, that Nancy appears to agree with Sartre on the immobility of the image, though he finds that images do in fact have worlds, a world being defined here as "an indefinite totality of meaning" (p. 5)). The image seizes us. It touches us, which means that we touch it. As long as we hold it up for consideration we are in the image, but without passing into the image (p. 7). I'm going to quote Nancy at length again, keeping in mind that the thing to look for is an alternative to the idea of transcendence:

But the distinction of the image–while it greatly resembles sacrifice–is not properly sacrificial. It does not legitimize and it does not transgress: it crosses the distance of the withdrawal even while maintaining it through its mark as an image. Or rather: through the mark that it is, it establishes simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does not pass. The essence of such a crossing lies in its not establishing a continuity: it does not suppress the distinction. It maintains it while also making contact: shock, confrontation, tête-à-tête, or embrace. It is less a transport than a rapport, or relation. The distinct bounds toward the indistinct and leaps into it, but it is not interlinked with it. The image offers itself to me, but it offers itself as an image (once again there is ambivalence: only an image / a true image. . .). An intimacy is thus exposed to me: exposed, but for what it is, with its force that is dense and tight, not relaxed, reserved, not readily given. Sacrifice effects an assumption, a lifting and a sublation of the profane into the sacred: the image, on the contrary, is given in an opening that indissociably forms its presence and its separation.

(p. 3, Nancy's emphases, my bold)

Nancy doesn't say as much and perhaps wouldn't want to; I do and I will: the relationship between the free and the given is not one of transcendence but one of rapport. Well, I've been sidetracked. I am not thinking the distinct quite the way Nancy would have me think it. Indeed, on the contrary, I am drawn to the vague. I might want to align the image with the vague, and on the other side I wouldn't even speak of an indefinite totality of meaning because "totality" is too precise a word–obviously then I'm in danger of totally losing the meaning of the distinct, and that may in turn jeopardize my ability to think the vague. Nevertheless, I am intrigued by this notion of rapport. To offer rapport as a designation for the operation of the image is to suggest that our relations to other people structurate our psychic lives. (You might reasonably say that Nancy's rapport has nothing to do with structuration; I think the choice of words matters, and this is what the choice of "rapport" suggests to me.) At a basic level we treat "psychic" phenomena as persons. Nancy's materialism of the image, according to my reading, notably thematizes intimacy. His is a materialism, rarest of all, in which the intimate matters. In this intimate setting what does distinction mean? What does sameness mean? Does it have a personal meaning? Do we have a rapport with the same that is other than the same of representation? Would the inquiry into a rapport with the same address the question of the meaning of the same, or would it lead away from meaning? Speaking of the image, Nancy says it is "the other of forms. It is the intimate and its passion, distinct from all representation" (p. 3). On the other hand Nancy speaks of the image as a jouissance of meaning (p. 13). The meaning of the same, then, with regard to the image and its sameness that is not the sameness of language or concepts, would then be bound up with the passions, which are to be regarded as material, as mixed up in the material. Rather than thinking the passions as forces that must be transcended, they must be thought as forces that touch. They open up rapports. Does this describe anything like reality? Any reality that transcendence fails to capture? I would like to think so, but I will have to continue to bounce the idea off Nancy (and you, dear reader, should you choose to add your two cents).

Labels: imagination, materialism, Nancy, passions, rapport, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:11 AM. 0 comments

The narratable self that listens to her story, and is one because of the familiar, narrative structure of memory, transfers this irreflexive unity, even in the most manifest fragmentarity of the text. Moreover, it is above all the autobiographical impulse of memory that produces discontinuous and fragmentary texts, which, although untrustworthy and elusive, can nonetheless never be exchanged for someone else's story–as happens in the magnificent textual games of Jorge Luis Borges. This everyday certainty of the self, which comes from sensing oneself to be 'this and not another,' indeed continues to resist both the inimitable pleasure of Borges' inventions, and the more refined enticements of contemporary theory–which continue to impose upon the self the pleasure, if not the necessity, of the infinite dissolution of her internal and multiple alterity.

Signigicantly, with this spontaneous resistance–which seems, at first sight, to be based upon the banality of good sense–the narratable self ends up doing a good service for philosophy. Indeed, philosophy ought to be more cautious in playing around with the endless game of the other. By continuing to transport the category of alterity into the intimacy of the self, contemporary philosophy in fact produces the inevitable consequence of impeding every serious naming of the other in so far as he/she is an other.

As Arendt teaches us, a unique being is such only in the relation, and the context, of a plurality of others, which, likewise unique themselves, are distinguished reciprocally–the one from the other. The story of a unique being is obviously never the monotonous and monolithic story of an idem, but is always the unpredictable and multi-vocal story of an ipse. Although it changes in the course of its life and in the course of its story–even to the point of no longer seeming or feeling the same–this ipse, like Oedipus, is 'this and not another' from the beginning to the end of this life and this story.

(Relating Narratives, p. 43, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)

Nancy's intrus has been haunting me. As I've been doing physical exercises the body I call mine has been changing. What makes this body a body, what gives it the consistency of a body? The heart–but Nancy's intrus haunts me, stands between me and the heart–and yet I feel the heart grow stronger. It doesn't feel disembodied, yet I can't precisely give it boundaries. I drink water prodigiously. It feels like water is also my body, woven in with my muscles. Pumped. A realization about my watery body came to me Monday night after forgetting to take my meds. I couldn't sleep. It was as if a demon possessed me, the mirror image of a beast that comes to me sometimes in nightmares. The beast is not exactly familiar, since it always frightens me, surprises me, it takes many forms, and still I am familiar with its force and its anger, its refusal to lie down. It feels like I'm repressing a tremendous rage, and also something more vital. Joy perhaps. Who is this person who refuses to sleep? How can I have an everyday certainty of the self in this situation? And is it really so unusual to be uncertain about the self? Whose thoughts are these? I don't imagine I'd want to give Nancy a big wet kiss, but I take his words (translated mostly) and put them in my mouth, allow them to circulate, allow them to go to my head. I read a description of psychasthenia and think oh yeah, this too describes a reality. Under the right set of circumstances it could be my reality. The psychasthenic self would be no less of a self than Cavarero's narratable self with its everyday certainty. In counterpoint to this certainty of self, Cavarero notes an unpredictability and a multivocality of the self. Could my familiarity with my unpredictable and polyvalent ipseity be anything but a desire? If I recognize the uniqueness of existents I wouldn't want to say that estrangement draws its boundaries in and around me exactly as it does in and around you. The boundaries of estrangement are negotiated in the context of a plurality of others. In our life together there is the remains to be seen. I have my doubts about the exposure of the existent, chief among them the sense that the existent is exposed in an instant, or already always exposed. If there is a desire for narration of one's life story, perhaps there is also desire for the remains to be seen. Oh yeah, and ghosts.

Labels: body, Cavarero, ipseity, Nancy, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:33 AM. 0 comments

Adriana Cavarero speaks of a paradox of Ulysses, by which she means the situation that we recieve our own stories from the narrations of others (Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul Kottman, Routledge, 2000, p. 17). In other words, we are the protagonists but not the authors of our own life stories. Cavarero's perspective, suspicious of autobiography, contrasts with László Tengelyi's (The Wild Region in Life-History) emphasis on a life history that one tells oneself, although on the question of the irreplacable uniqueness of the existent there is perhaps some agreement. Where does the unicity of an identity come from? It is tempting for me to think that experience has a unicity, that all of my experiences seem to belong to me alone, and thus perhaps my consciosness could be a source of my identity. Cavarero (and in a different way Tengelyi) will have none of that. In her view the unicity that pertains to identity is given by others; identity is not substantial but rather relational and expositional. On the topic of the expositional character of identity, she is of course interpreting Hannah Arendt, which is her strong suit. When discussing the self-disclosure that pertains to action, she says that identity is expressive. It is not then consciousness which exercises an esemplastic power over experience; rather, relations between singular exposed existents constitute identity and, if I'm reading her correctly, give meaning to a course of life events.

When Jean-Luc Nancy says "birth" I'm not sure if he literally means birth from a womb. Cavarero, who reads Nancy affectionately, leaves no doubt that natality is about birth from the womb. The mother, she says, "embodies the ex- of existent" (p. 19). She says appearance is "rooted in the materiality of the context" (p. 21). I think maybe she means "the context of exhibition," which doesn't really say much, but the mere acknowledgement of a context is perhaps important, and of course there's the question of its materiality, which primarily interests me. Cavarero's thoughts on materiality are fleshed out in For More than One Voice which argues against the primacy of the visual that she posits in Relating Narratives. In any case, she appears to be committed to a kind of materialism. We might call it an expositional materialism, though it is also a materialism of natality. Here is a display:

The expositive and the relational character of identity are thus indistinguishable. One always appears to someone. One cannot appear if there is no one else there. It follows, to say it again with Nancy, that 'the un-exposable is the nonexistent'; that is, existing consits in disclosing oneself within a scene of plurality where everyone, by appearing to one another, is shown to be unique. They appear to each other reciprocally–first of all in their corporeal materiality and as creatures endowed with sensory organs. Put another way, the language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness. Starting from birth, from the 'naked reality of our originary physical appearance,' [Arendt, The Human Condition] each of us is who appears to others uniquely and distinctly.

(pp. 20-21)

"[T]he language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness." I find this intriguing, but I wonder about the distance between language and the existent that has been opened up in the paradox of Ulysses. Whose story is the Odyssey, or the story told at the court of the Phaecians? I'll quote another paragraph at length which shows, I hope, why the paradox of Ulysses is a paradox, or at least an irony.

To be sure, by emphasizing heroic action, the constitutive unmasterability [impadroneggiabilità] of the 'who' is made hugely evident. No one can know, master or decide upon identity. Each one of us is only capable of exhibiting it, of exhibiting that unrepeatable uniqueness which he is, as he appears to others in the actual context of his exhibition. Our Ulysses, who interacts with his peers on the Trojan plane, is thus not an extraordinary case at all. As happens not only with heroes, but also with all of the other actors, he does not know who he is because he could in no way know it. The one who is revealed never knows whom he reveals. Given that everyone's identity lies completely in the exhibitive character of this who–who the agent reveals is, by definition, unknown to the agent himself.

(p. 23)

Is the narrator a master of identities in any way? A master of anybody's language? When Cavarero goes on to speak of a desire for one's life to be narrated, I rather doubt she will be thinking of a desire to be mastered. What exactly is the power that the narrator holds? Who speaks the language of the existent?

Labels: Arendt, Cavarero, Nancy, narrative, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:54 AM. 0 comments

See if you don't see a contradiction here: Nancy says that there is nothing either philosophical or literary in writing, but rather "writing traces an essential indecision of the two, between the two, and consequently, an indecision in each one"; then he says that "[w]riting is of the community or it is not writing" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 152). I assume that there are different communities of writing, some of them more literary, others more philosophical, and there would be no sense in calling them communities if they lacked boundaries, identities or differences as you prefer. If writing must be of the community it must then be at the same time, if it is to trace an indecision between the literary and the philosophical, not of the community. Well, this may all be nonsense, or it may touch on a paradox of community. Are communities trismegistically sealed? Some communities are more trismegistic than others. A completely closed off community would perish with its members, but it would still have been a community. An age cohort would be an example. What social groupings deserve to be called communities? Who decides among whom obligations to each other exist? A commensality, at least, has discernable boundaries. Does a community finally decide on itself?

Nancy says, truly, that writing issues from reading, and also that writing is for reading and for other writings. I would stress that writing isn't merely for its own reading but for other readings. Writing is a gobetween. It has an emissary function with respect to communities of the literate. Nancy says, "Writing is the movement of meaning in the suspension of signification, which withdraws meaning in giving it, in order to give it as its gift" (ibidem). How very generous. In fact the gifts of writing are most frequently trade items, and its gifts must always be understood in the context of the emissary function, as the gestures of an emissary. Its meanings are emissary meanings. The community gives but it does not give meanings. It gives the suspension of meanings, which may or may not be a refusal of meanings. The community gives neither decisions nor indecisions, but entrusts them both to emissaries. What writing requires, to present meaning and also to be sent forth, is immunity, or rather immunities. It must be for and from other readings without obligation, or, precisely, without the decision of an obligation. This as I see it is the paradox of community: it covers what it refuses to decide with an immunity; it allows emissaries to partake of its indecisions with immunity for the sake of its self-interepretation; it is of the emissary. In this sense, then, all communities are trismegistic.

Labels: community, meaning, Nancy, writing

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:24 AM. 0 comments

Nancy says that freedom "is not pure spacing, it is also 'habitation'–habitation in the open–if the nomad does not represent errancy without at the same time representing a dwelling, and thus an ethos" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 146, Nancy's emphasis). Nancy's thought meanders towards enunciating a surprising generosity of being. I want to linger a moment here on the idea of habitation in the open. The open as such isn't given prior to habitation. We can speak of a dwelling being more or less open, the boxed in or the wide open. We can speak of a dwelling as being more or less in the open. In fact the decision for there to be any open at all was made with the act of dwelling. Yet who made the decision? If we're unhappy with the decision perhaps we should negotiate. Openness would have no business saying it's not open to negotiation. And habitation would be nowhere without openness. Let's hold that over its head.

A favorite image of Nancy's is the open mouth, the mouth opened in a cry. Should I reverse myself and say there is an opening given prior to habitation, an opening of the body? I don't know that the body isn't also a habitation. If we understand what it means to inhabit a building, we are able to witness the suffering that abides there, that seeps through its pores. Doors also open in laughter.

An ethos, then, does it demand that there be something like the open? Is the open the space where differences are negotiated? How would it be possible to truly inhabit a space of negotiations? Really, this has me turned around. Wouldn't it be a space of no secret places, but only promises and secrets of secret places? Is habitation as good as its word? And why would habitation give such a thing as the open? What's its angle?

Labels: habitation, Nancy, the open

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:37 PM. 0 comments

Nancy says, emphatically, "Evil is the hatred of existence as such" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 128). As it happens existence is met with a plethora of attitudes and emotions. Most of them are ambiguous. Indifference is ambiguous (I could say "ambivalent" to tip the scales). Emotionlessness may be a kind of banality, make of banality what you will.

I'm curious about, teased by, fine shades of malice. Would the contempt of existence be more or less evil than the loathing of existence? Contempt may be more bourgeois, for what it's worth.

Resentment (I'll mention "ressentiment" out of fondness for the Gaulish tongue) may be a bourgeois feeling, but the word itself has been a polyphiboly ampolyboly. I enjoyed delicious resentments at your party (the lamb kabobs, etc.), for which I thoroughly resent you. How did a word meaning "to feel deeply or sharply" come to overwhelmingly mean "to feel oneself injured or insulted"? What sadness and pain accretes to the joys we've shared? Does recent European history tell of the proliferation of inferiorities or of injuries? Well, there's only so much the history of a single word can tell us. Can "resentment" tell us that evil begins with the feeling of existence as such? That evil is neither simply pain or hatred, but the whole pithos of feeling? Can resentment tell us that? Nah.

But it's a strange thing to resent existence, no less so for its being ordinary. (Insert ontodicy here.) If we were completely at the mercy of our feelings it wouldn't make sense to speak of good and evil. An existence of pure feelings would be like early infancy, a time without memory, and yeah, innocent of evil and good. But I regress, which reminds that to yearn to be at the mercy of feelings can't be morally unambiguous.

Once we acknowledge that existence as such can be felt, perhaps even that it must be felt, then what is existence? Is its whatness a big impossible nada? Only if we're not attuned to our feelings. And yet the big nada hangs around with its friend passivity, and it looks like existence may be in with a bad crowd. Do I resent existence, or is it feeling I resent, pure feeling? Hmm, I'm just as sharply resentful of pure thought. The resentment of feeling as such can't be good, though it may have once seemed harmless enough. As it happens feeling is felt in a plethora of ways, most of them ambiguous.

Labels: existence, Nancy, resentment

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:37 PM. 0 comments

Nancy thinks that freedom must be thought in its absoluteness, which means that it must be distinguished from every concept of freedom that would be opposed to, and therefore relative to, anything like fatality (The Experience of Freedom, p. 110). In the course of exploring this idea Nancy thinks the temporality of surprise in a way that put me in mind of Tengelyi's idea of a present that has never been future. However, whereas Tengelyi thinks such temporality as belonging to a destinal event, Nancy wants us to imagine a suddenness of time that would happen without happening in time. The time of the surprise seems to be a time outside of time that, if it belongs to anything, belongs to freedom. "This is the structure of surprise (and it will form the exact reverse of the structure of the present): it takes place without having happened; it will therefore not have taken place, but will have opened time, through a schematism of the surprise whose 'I' would surprise itself" (p. 114). Nancy doesn't explain what "the structure of the present" means, so I am a little fuzzy on what he means by its reversal. I note his consistent use of the future perfect tense to talk about the time of the surprise, and wonder if it's something paradoxical like a future that has never been present, but, then again, the sudden time doesn't really happen according to Nancy, which is another kind of paradox. He offers a few concrete ways of thinking about the time that happens without happening in time, the open time. "Open time could be the time of astonishment and upheaval, or that of interrogation and explanation" (ibidem).

"Freedom always surprises when there is no longer or not yet time. That is, when there is no longer or not yet time for time, and for the oppostion of a 'freedom' and a 'fatality,'" says Nancy, returning to his theme of freedom's absoluteness (p.115, Nancy's emphasis). He says, "Freedom separates itself from resignation and revolt not in order to do nothing, but in order to open up this separate place, which is that of the free act in its proper and revolutionary force" (p. 116). He argues that freedom is neither free will nor destiny, but an exposed existence. And, importantly, he says that surprise does not determine existence but exposes it "as an infinte generosity to time's finitude" (p. 117).

Does the revolutionary force of the free act pertain to anything that actually happens, or is it completely outside of happenings? Is it vulnerable? Exposure connotes vulnerability, and I can easily imagine the vulnerability of the giver. Does existence possess revolutionary force or any agency that would have within it or about it revolutionary force? Would "I" be surprised to find a revolutionary force at the heart of "my" exposure?

When I really start to imagine a free time, I imagine a floating time, time unmoored, dipping in and out of the course of events, giving birth to rhythm. The forces that touch upon the rhythm of events, do they have a quality of irreality? We need more ways of talking about reality. Alloreality and spasmoreality. Spasmoreality is a revolutionary force that touches upon the course of events, a force of reality sustained not by belief but by surprise.

If tragedy can be imagined according to a spasmoreality of the free time, the time of the question among other things, without opposing free will to destiny, what then becomes of destiny? On the side of freedom, we have not leveled a skepticism but instead pursued a radicalization of freedom. Do we likewise pursue a radicalization of destiny? Might that lead into a synthesis of freedom and destiny that wouldn't compromise freedom? Or do we abandon destiny to its fate? If freedom and destiny aren't spasmoreally opposed, does destiny surprise itself, as if it will have become unrecognizable? According to Nancy we are born to and die to freedom. They are verso and recto of the infinite generosity that is existence, in which we infinitely accede to freedom (p. 119). The generosity of existence is surprising, and for this reason "destination" and "liberation" say too little, because they mark conscious, willed action (p. 120). Should we be surprised by the generosity of the tragic hero?

What, concretely, is a politics of generosity? Just throwing it out there.

Labels: astonishment, freedom, generosity, Nancy, reality, surprise, temporality, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:10 AM. 2 comments

Nancy imagines that freedom is the sole allocutor of its own injuction: be free!

"Be free!" . . . commands the impossible: there is no freedom that is available or designable before this injunction or outside of it–and the same command commands impossibly, since there is no subject of authority here. Once again we touch the limit of comprehension. But we do so in order to find ourselves once again before the necessary anteriority of freedom, which is no longer illuminated here only in regard to thinking but also in regard to freedom itself (if we are still permitted to make this distinction). Freedom must precede itself in its auto-nomy in order to be freedom. It cannot be ordered, its advent can be prescribed only if it has already freed the space in which this prescription can take place without being an absurdity, or rather without being anterior to the slightest possibility of meaning in general (and yet, is it not also a question of this?. . .). We cannot say "be free!" except to someone who knows what this phrase means, and we cannot know what it means without having already been free, without having already been set free. In the imperative in which freedom differs in itself, it must also have preceded itself. "Be free!" must occur unexpectedly as one of freedom's orders. Freedom must have already freed itself, not only so that the imperative can be pronounced, but so that its pronouncement can be an act endowed with the force of freedom. (In this sense, if it is correct to claim that the imperative, in general, is powerless over the execution of what it orders–it is not the cause–it would not be correct to claim that it is without force. This force is what makes intonation (a form of intensity) a remarkable element in linguistic descriptions of the imperative mode. This force forces nothing and no one. In a certain way, it is a force without function, or is only the intensity of a singularity of existence, insofar as it exists.)

(The Experience of Freedom, pp. 108-109, Nancy's emphases)

If freedom speaks through us rather than to us, are we free to intone it? To caress, sweeten, roughen or bend the note of freedom? Is there a prejudice against intonation, that it would not really be part of the logos, not really be thought. If I start to veer towards the singularity of the voice, I may find I've made a mistake in regarding the singularity as the interlocutor of freedom. If freedom addresses itself, does it tolerate interlocution, that is, interruption? Uninterrupted freedom would seem to be a rarity in this world, but that may be what Nancy is asking us to imagine as the only possible way of freedom.

Labels: agency, freedom, Nancy, voice

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:05 PM. 5 comments

Nancy draws a distinction between the body and the existence of the body, which at first blush may appear to set his thinking apart from other approaches to embodiment. He equates the reality of freedom with the existence of the body, and says:

The existence of a body is a free force which does not disappear even when the body is destroyed and which does not disappear as such except when the relation of this existence to another and destructive existence is itself destroyed as a relation of existences, becoming a relation of essences in a causality: such is the difference of relation between the murderer and his victim, and the difference of nonrelation between the exterminator and his mass grave. This force is neither of the "spirit" nor of the "body"; it is existence itself, impossible to confuse with a subjectivity (since it can be deprived of consciousness and will) or with an objectivity (since it can be deprived of power).

(p. 102)

There's room here to explore the ethics of abandodment and also withdrawal, to question whether Nancy's communitarianism is up to the task of outlining a livable ethics. I'd like to stay focused, however, on his notion of the body and the kind of materialism he calls ontological. He argues that because existence as such has its being in the act of existing, i.e. as a praxis, it has the actual character of a force. Thinking the force of existence implies "the thought of a transcendental materiality, or if we prefer, an ontological materiality: the withdrawal of being as a material Setzung of singularity, and the difference of singularities as a difference of forces. Prior to every determination of matter, this materiality of existence, which sets down the fact of freedom, is no less endowed with the material properties of exteriority and resistance" (p. 103). So there is something about Nancy's existence of the body, in contrast to the body as such, which is impervious or resistant to outside forces– even the annihilation of the body can't touch the existence of the body.

I think a careful reading of the phenomenologists of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, Henry, Patočka) would show that their conceptions of the body are praxiological in key respects, are neither subjective nor objective, and tend to be existential. But where they would recognize a distinction between the body as object and the body as it is lived, Nancy has a distinction between the existence of the body and the body. Is Nancy's formulation simple and elegant, or is it a kind of metaphysical trickery? If we want to appreciate its elegance we need to be mindful of all that Nancy has said about existence. That's a dizzying prospect. Here's a start: once existence neither precedes nor follows essence, but precisely "lies in," that is constitutes essence, then, "Freedom can no longer be either 'essential' or 'existential,' but is implicated in the chiasmus of these concepts: we have to consider what makes existence, which is in its essence abandonded to a freedom, free for this abandonment, offered to it and available in it" (p. 9). Nancy's topic is freedom, and to mind the chiasmus of existence and essence we can't ignore this; however, the idea of the persistence of the existence of the body as a free force strikes me as similar to a concept of the soul, an existential soul, but precisely a soul. And though I am unsure of exactly what Nancy thinks about the soul, I wonder whether his ontological materialism is a materialism solely of living organisms who maintain a transcendental relationship to "dead" matter, or, indeed, whether it is a materialism only of those who are born. Nancy says, cryptically, that "all existence is new, in its birth and in its death to the world" (p. 11). What does death matter to an existence that is always and forever new?

Does an ontological materialism for which "dead" matter ceases to matter warrant being called a materialism? It is a kind of dynamism, which may be implied in materialism but doesn't itself necessarily imply materialism. It is significant, I think, that Nancy chooses to come down on the side of materialism, and that he sees exteriority and resistance as material properties. I ask myself whether Maine de Biran was a materialist, and the question seems unduly limiting. For all I can tell, Nancy's ontological materialism could also be a materialism of the soul. I remind you, dear reader, that I am agnostic about animism and other doctrines of the soul, and ignorant of theology, though of course I have some curiousities. So, sticking with Nancy's terms, I am being asked to believe in freedom and to believe in its chiasmatic relation to existence and essence, concepts which might also require some belief. The question for me though is not quite one of belief, but of what kind of commitment I should have to freedom even though I don't fully understand it. What kind of commitment does an ontological materialism call for?

Labels: body, existence, freedom, materialism, Nancy, ontology

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:47 AM. 0 comments

Imagine a nothingness that is not negating but intensifying and therefore affirmative. Nancy says that the truth of the abyss and of intensification can be designated as experience (The Experience of Freedom, (p. 84). It is tempting to think that Nancy is thinking freedom completely without foundation. But he is cryptic, and he plays with foundation more than he abandons it. He says, "It is a finite freedom which is the 'foundation of foundation'" (p. 83, Nancy's emphasis). The foundation of foundation is also the abyss, I venture. Can we ask how the abyss is experienced? I have a feeling that inasmuch as Nancy approaches the experience of experience as a thinking, he would say that the abyss is experienced in thought. This isn't quite right, because he might say that thought rather than experiencing nothingness measures itself against nothingness. So presently the question as to how we experience the abyss remains unanswered. Let's see how Nancy plays with the idea of foundation and see what it tells us about experience or the experience of experience which is thinking.

"The act of founding is indeed the act par excellence of experiri, of the attempt to reach the limit, to keep to the limit," Nancy says (p. 84). He argues that where the foundation takes place there is nothing but indeterminable chora (ibidem) and goes on to say:

We have related, through concepts and languages, "experience" to "piracy." But foundation always has something of piracy in it, it pirates the im-propriety and formlessness of a chorā–and piracy always has something of foundation, unrightfully disposing rights and tracking unlocatable limits on the chorā of the sea. In order to think the experience of freedom, one would have to be able ceaselessly to contaminate each notion by the other, and let each free the other, pirating foundation and founding piracy. This game would have nothing to with amusement; its possibility, or rather its necessity, is given with thought itself and by thought's freedom.

(p. 85)

Experience, I take it, as the gesture of founding, pirates the formlessness of the chorā. Does thought take form or does it take formlessness? It will have to be thought at the limit, a sublimely mathematical twilight. "The experience of founding takes place at the limit," Nancy says. "What is founded exists (it is not only projected, but is first thrown, as founded, into existence) and it exists according to the limit's mode of existence, that is, according to the mode of the self-surpassing (overcoming and emancipation, gestures of liberation), which is the very structure of the limit" (ibidem, Nancy's emphasis). Is the thought that takes place in the chora thought as in a dream, something itself wonderous (θαυμαστός)? Nancy wants us to think of neither a founding subject nor founding object, but rather a founding gesture that "carries itself–at once anterior and posterior to the tracing of the limit traces–to the contour, path, and outward aspect of a singularity whose freedom and existence it makes arise simulataneously" (p. 86, Nancy's emphasis).

I'm intrigued that Nancy sees an outward aspect to singularity, but I'll let that pass to get to the meat of the argument here. There is, in thinking in the chora, at the limit, a resonance with Derrida's thinking about the chora, which he says alternates between a logic of participation and of exclusion ("Khōra," in On the Name, p. 89), and with Agamben's thinking about abandonment in Homo Sacer. First Nancy says that "experience does not experience anything, but it experiences the nothing as the real that it tests and as the stroke of luck it offers" (p. 86, Nancy's emphasis). Then he says that "freedom is the foundation that is discovered in the fact that being is essentially abandoned" (p. 92, Nancy's emphasis). Now I might say that the abandonment of being is its haplessness which has nothing to do with luck, having been abandoned by luck. There must be a feeling among those who insist on being of having been marooned by the philosophers. Whose Image is abandonment? I'll revisit Derrida's thinking about the chora later. In the meantime I'll be trying to wrap my head around the chora of the sea and how this might relate to abadnonment or to experience.

The metaphor of piracy is more fun and perhaps truer to thought than the metaphor of founding. As Nancy vacillates between piracy and founding, the word "shipwreck" also springs to mind–which is not say that Nancy's brigantine is foundering. I'm just having trouble finding my sea legs.

Labels: abandonment, Agamben, chora, Derrida, experience, ground, Nancy, nothingness

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:37 PM. 0 comments

Jemeinigkeit, according to Nancy, defines mineness on the basis of an "each time," and he says there is nothing between each time, because being withdraws between each time. Each time "opens itself as relation to other times, to the extent that continuous relation is withdrawn from them" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 67). He says emphatically, "freedom withdraws being and gives relation," and more lightly, "freedom is the discrete play of the interval" (p. 68).

A note on singularity: Nancy sees singularity in the relation given by freedom according to the each time. "Singularity–for this reason distinct from individuality–takes place according to this double alterity of the 'one time,' which installs relation as the withdrawal of communion" (p. 68). And emphatically again, "the ipseity of singularity has as its essence the withdrawal of the aseity of being" ( p. 70). Nancy here begins to think the singular plural in light of a disruption of a continuity of being that might be associated with a self– another ipseity plays here that isn't grounded in itself, not originating in its own continuity.

Nancy says there is no being between existents, not a tissue belonging to all and none (p. 69). Not even freedom fills the space between existents, but rather it spaces the space. He says freedom means "to measure oneself against the nothing," and adds, "Measuring oneself against the nothing does not mean heroically affronting or ecstatically confronting an abyss which is conceived as the plenitude of the nothingness and which would seal itself around the sinking of the subject of heroism or of ecstasy" (p. 71, Nancy's emphasis).

By defining freedom as the play of the interval, and by refusing to see either an ecstatic or heroic confrontation with Nothingness, Nancy leads us towards a critique of humanism.

On the archi-originary register of sharing, which is also that of singularity's "at every moment," there are no "human beings." This means that the relation is not one between human beings, as we might speak of a relation established between two subjects constituted as subjects and as "securing," secondarily, this relation. In this relation, "human beings" are not given–but it is relation alone that can give them "humanity." It is freedom that gives relation by withdrawing being. It is then freedom that gives humanity, and not the inverse.

(p. 73)

When Nancy says, "Free space is opened, freed, by the very fact that it is constituted or instituted as space by the trajectories and outward aspects of singularities that are thrown into existence" (p. 74, Nancy's emphasis), we are not free to think of these singularities as human if we are to take Nancy's meaning. They may be delivered over to humanity, and yet even this proposition may be dubious if freedom gives relations all at once– that would make us, we who are thrown, instant cosmopolites, ecopolitical singularities. I don't think Nancy would say we can't be ecopolitical singularities, but I'm not sure that he means to argue that freedom gives relations all at once. Maybe that's what he does mean. Each time freedom gives all the relations there are, in which case "humanity" is just the tip of the iceberg. All the relations there are: does it make sense to say that there are relations when being is withdrawn? Now, this business of the all or nothing seems to go against the spirit of the play of the interval. If the space between existents doesn't represent a tissue or a plenitude of nothingness, what does measuring oneself against the nothing mean?

When I think about the space instituted by the trajectories of thrown singularities it occurs to me that randomness may be an exceedingly improbable description of the movements of things that are born. The question is, Does the aleatory have something to play with (something from which we could induce grounds for a field of probabilities), or does it just push or drag around a space of nothing? It's unclear to me whether the field I am wondering about would be given by the systematic movements of lifeforms or by Karma. In either case it would be outside the ken of Nancy's inquiry. I'm risking a grave misunderstanding of what Nancy means, especially what he means by "birth." I will be giving it some more thought.

Labels: freedom, Jemeinigkeit, Nancy, nothingness, singularity

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:53 AM. 4 comments