Is it desirable to live with absurdities? Perhaps the question is similar to the question of whether paradoxes enrich thought. We might imagine that absurdity thwarts reason, or even that it thwarts our access to the sweet life. Possibly, however, it is not absurdity that thwarts.
My distress at the thought that repetition may be neither real nor possible led me to an impasse, because I am sure that there is some sense to what people mean by talking about repetition. I'm humbled to say now that the possibility of doing a tango with the impossible never entered my mind. The dance floor here is Deleuze's discussion of the paradox of the absurd, or the paradox of impossible objects (Logic of Sense, "Fifth Series of Sense"). The paradox is summed up thusly: "propositions which designate contradictory objects themselves have a sense" (p. 35). They are not nonsense, but they are absurd. Deleuze says that impossible objects (his examples do not include repetition) are "objects 'without a home,' outside of being, but they have a precise and distinct position within this outside: they are of 'extra being'–pure, ideational events, unable to be realized in a state of affairs" (ibidem).
If I recognize repetition as an absurdity, like the squared circle, I am still at odds with the many thinkers who see repetition as real, possible, fantastic or any combination of these. I may be at odds with Deleuze. However, if absurdity is not an obstacle to living the sweet life, then I see no reason to sweat it. And yet I'm unsure of what to make of absurdity. Perhaps the paradox of the absurd is itself an absurdity, and then the problem of what to make of absurdity reappears. Do we treat a problem as something that must be gone around or as something that must be gone through? How do we go through infinity?
Labels: absurdity, Deleuze, repetition