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
Allusiveness
Barbaras on language:
Against the intellectualist conception which posits the material sign and the signification side by side as positive entities, linguistics discovers that sign and signification become positive beings and are then ordered to each other only by a process of active differentiation carried out first on the signifiers themselves. It is truly by this process that the signifiers become signifiers in the strict sense, that is, carriers of significations. The signification is not attached in a univocal manner to a sign but is situated between the signs as the invisible place where the signifying acts intersect. The sense intended in speech is a "qualified nothingness" whose unity is designed by means of the incessant differentiation of spoken words. Consequently, the sign is never truly isolable and the sense never strictly present in any spoken word; it is sketched in them as their secret web and remains therefore allusive, by principle disappointing every attempt to possess it in person. The sense is reached only in a lateral fashion, beside itself, across the figures in which it is incarnated.
(Being, p. 179)
Chaosmic Metaphoricity
In my usage "spatiality" hardly ever refers to bare geometric space but rather to space as it is lived; similarly "meaning" refers not to a purely intellectual realm of displaced and displacable abstractions but to an embodied gesture towards the world, an expression of mien. The orders of extensa and cogitans are not originary. From such a viewpoint metaphor takes on an ontological and chaosmological significance. "Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed," Barbaras explains, "things proceed from a general 'metaphoricity,' from a universal participation that they concentrate or crystallize in order to be constituted into things" (p. 195, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold). This view of a general metaphoricity apparently describes an inhabited world, a universe of life and of leeway. Can there a cosmos in which leeway as such exists without the possibility of response to leeway?
Anarchic (}∅{) Individuation
Barbaras says that "individuation does not designate an incomprehensible phase preceding the individual whose clarification then necessitates recourse to a principle" (p. 183, Barbaras' emphasis) and likewise, "individuality makes sense only insofar as it does not proceed from a principle, and . . . the individual has individuality only insofar as individuality cannot be assigned. The individuality of the thing can be maintained only by remaining unfulfilled, just short of the point where it could fixed as a principle" (p. 184). Does this argument about things also hold for persons, unique, living beings? I think it's rather meant to: "individuality is characterized by its ability to foil every search for a principle of individuation; to be attentive to the individual is to understand that the search for such a principle is meaningless. One must instead say that the individual produces its own 'principles' as asymptotic poles of its pre-individual life" (p. 186). Does }∅{ designate the total absence of principles, or the autopoetic generation of its own proper extempore "principles?" Can these be separated? Is general metaphoricity not a principle?
An errant thought: "sense at its maximum degree of errancy, nowhere gathered together, pure allusion, horizon" (p. 181). I allege that allusion is like enough to a gathering, a playing along, or a play towards. I note a tension between errancy and allusion; at the same time }∅{ means the absence of an apriori gathered; the allusive gathers up in itself even prior there being an in in itself. The allusiveness of this very concatenation of thought has not escaped my notice. Not even direct quotation erases the allusiveness of sense.
Barbaras says that the "ultimate ground of the real consists of . . . 'rays of the world' which do not lead to the rank of principles" (p. 190). To speak of the ultimate betrays a desire for principles. "Ultimate ground," "ultimate moment": }∅{ issues no ultimata. "Ultimate" must be understood figuratively. The desire for the arche is born autopoetically, in the leap. Rays of the world never arrive at the arche, but they approach the arche asymptotically. The penultimate is truer than the ultimate to chaosmic metaphoricity. It belongs with the spasmoreal, though it is "almost" ultimate. It alludes to another order.
Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, metaphor, spasmoreality, uniqueness
Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty's turn to speech:
[B]y returning to the world from the phenomenon of expression, by grasping the very birth of sense instead of referring it straightaway to a perceptual ground, Merleau-Ponty gains access to the genuine figure of the world as soil or source of expression. Then, to the infinity of the telos brought to light in the expressive act, there corresponds the infinity of an archē. Insofar as it is the soil of the expressive movement, the world will have this infinite depth inherent in the fact that sense is never completely fulfilled. Because no expression erases itself in the face of a pure sense, because expression cannot claim to be nailed down in a full meaning, the world will be given only as withdrawal, as this "presence" which, through its obscurity, gives birth to expression without ever being absorbed in the expressed. Considered on the basis of expression, the world can no longer be defined through presence but as that whose being consists in exceeding every presentation.
(p.60, Barbaras' emphasis)
The rhythmosophic engagement with the expressive means this: the breach –}∅{, the sign which evades the instant archive–the improvisation of improvisations, does not wait outside correspondence. Its infinities do not hang around. (Infinities of broken limits.) The evanescence of infinities may touch on the teleological, or anyway feel the repercussions of telic logoi, without in any way ceding the power to onset radical causalities, causalities of middle voices and otherwise, harmolodically apperceived, that is, given a harmolodic temporality, as extensions of expressive movement. This is the grasp. It is the grasp where the grasp isn't everything. The door opened up by the breach, is it divarication itself? Straddle? It remains to rhythmosophy to describe the givenness of the world as plunge, and not to be submerged in this description.
Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, improvisation, infintity, Merleau-Ponty
}∅{ should not be asserted; non}∅{ should not be asserted. }∅{ must be taken as a suspended sign, understood in the sense Kuzminski gives that term (Pyrrhonism, pp. 96 ff.). To explain this we must first note a difference between commemorative or recollective signs, which refer to things temporarily nonevident, and indicative signs, which point to things nonevident in a variety of ways other than temporarily. (I'm not sure there's a Pyrrhonian term for the type of sign that refers to things plainly evident; perhaps this isn't the most useful typology. Anyway....) Because "indicative sign" has other meanings for students of the sign, it would be clearer to call indicative signs credulitive, or with fewer negative connotations, creditive signs. The language is clumsy but you can discern the meaning in saying "creditive sign" or its pupal morph, "suspended sign." Kuzminski further explains the idea of the suspended sign:
Even if we understand the soul as evidently nonevident [like the wind perhaps, FtY] , as present to consciousness but indeterminate, our sign for it necessarily remains empty, can literally have no content, no determinative, distinguishing character. Nor can we even say it signifies nothing, since the evidently nonevident seems to be something, though nothing determinate. A sign for the evidently nonevident has no efficacy, therefore, and can only mislead by suggesting some kind of determinate content. A sign for the evidently nonevident is a sign for a suspended judgment; indeed, it is a sign which itself should be suspended. Terms for the evidently nonevident, such as "soul" or "emptiness" are inherently selfdefeating if we think they can be of any use at all. Sextus no doubt would agree with Nāgārjuna, who advises us that "'Empty' should not be asserted. 'Nonempty' should not be asserted. Neither both nor either should be asserted." At the end of his Tractatus, in an oft-cited passage, Wittgenstein makes the same point as follows: "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following [w]ay: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them–as steps–to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
(pp. 96-97).
I like silences but I won't pretend to mandate them. Suspension I will recommend. "Psyche" should be suspended, as should therefore "the unconscious" and various other modalities of the psychic. "Imagination" should be suspended. "Repetition" should be suspended. Insofar as suspension may be regarded as an entity one might form beliefs about (and this is clearly the hazard with "}∅{", or more colloquially, "the breach"), "suspension" should be suspended. "The question" should be suspended: this could well be the same problem as the problem of repetition, however with different repercussions; I'll touch on repetition.
In suspending belief in repetition don't we risk pulling the rug out from under Pyrrhonian skepticism? (Obviously many people are more credulous about repetition than I am; though I have not been convinced of its existence I remain open to hearing evidence, to which it must be added an openness to contrary indications and negative experimental results is clearly desirable for anybody who seeks to understand repetition nondogmatically.) In acknowledging the commemorative sign, the Pyrrhonian accedes to memory, to the collection of evidence over time and therefore as well, implicitly, to cogitation as a modality of consciousness or sense, and in some sense he thereby escapes arrhythmia and inferences based on the premise of arrhythmic existence, such as those that arise from the intellectual error of occasionalism identifed by Bourdieu. If we suspend judgment about repetition, for the sake of putting it into question, to name one reason for doing so, are we are then obliged to also suspend commemoration? If so, and I'm not saying it is so, that shouldn't preclude us from talking. Crudely, to start things off, and breathlessly, we could say something like "repetition:commemoration::}∅{:improvisation:::}∅{:repetition::improvisation:commemoration;:}∅{::}∅{}∅{}∅{:}∅{}∅{:::...}∅{:::{}∅{:}{}∅{:}{...}∅{:::}{{...}∅{:::}}}∅{}∅{}∅{}∅{," and be talking about "repetition," "nonrepetition," "commemoration," "as," "just as," ("analogy," ("chiasmus," a shadow discussion)), "shadow discussion," "and so on," "could be otherwise," "substitution" or "alternation" (""shadow alternation" or "parenthetical shadow alternation"") and """""not" "really"" ""finally" "or" "primarily"""" "or" """really" ""really" ""finally" "or" "primarily"""" "}∅{,"" where """" means something like "being talked about." Everything can be balanced against }∅{, but ("but" itself being an alternative which may or may not appear according to }∅{, used here to introduce another alternative that as well may or may not appear according to }∅{) it could be otherwise. What is the structure of this "could be otherwise?" Starting from a primitive association of the "and so on" with repetition it appears that the "could be otherwise" functions as a contrary principle, a disruptive force or a technology that could have been expressly designed for the purpose of upsetting the "and so on" and, practically, problematizing repetition (as if "and so on" weren't properly disruptive–these are gross simplifications); however, we are talking here about a primitive association. Alternatively, we could begin with a more sophisticated coupling of the "could be otherwise" with repetition, a coupling that opens the door to an alternative metaphysical belief about time; this reversal doesn't demand that one must then accept a belief in repetition as "could be otherwise," or repetition as dually structured, or that one must accept any belief at all about repetition; indeed, the sophisticate's coupling of repetition with the "could be otherwise" invites us to hold in suspension the idea that repetition refers to anything that could actually be brought forth, anything that could actually be made evident. That is to say as well that the "could be otherwise" could be otherwise, that it could be sequenced in other tonalities, but in offering }∅{ as a "could be otherwise" of the first principle no assertion is made beyond the implicit assertion of the value of conversation, even in some of its weirder modes. One needn't have beliefs about the breach, which is neither rule nor nonrule, neither inclusion nor exclusion (nor inclusively "neither inclusion nor exclusion" and so on) in order to pursue an improvisatory practice of the breach, of keeping conversation going, conversation being one of several modalities of the breach. Perhaps repetition also has such a nonassertive value. It may yet be shown to exist, and it may then give itself as the key to understanding the commemorative sign. The commemorative sign might then be viewed as something other than a heuristic device, though one shouldn't infer from such a statement that heuristic practices lack worth or validity or fail to touch on reality in the same way one might criticize speculative practices for their disengagements with what really really touches thinking. So, if the Pyrrhonian commemorative sign does not hinge on an unsubstantiated belief that repetition is among the things that can be pointed to, does it then hinge on merely a hope that repetition may exist? On a related note, would this reliance hope unveil heuristics as principally a hopeful mode of engagement with the real? I'm ambivalent on that point. Does one hope for an end to repetition–isn't that one explicit meaning of the wish, hope's dear friend, a symptom of a belief that there may yet be a way out of a rut of suffering, a chance to undo? (Are we being confused by an oafish grasp of a cinematic idea of love? Heuristics relies upon conversation. Does one in engage in conversation hopelessly? I'm not sure.) On the other hand, under what conditions does heuristics depart from a concern for the reliability of experimental results, a concern which would demand a possibility of repetition? Imagine all that could be undone if we suspended "repetition." Now, what would a suspension of "}∅{" undo? (So we return to undoing, undo it and so on.)
Labels: anarchy, epoché, improvisation, Kuzminski, Nāgārjuna, Pyrrho, repetition, signification, Wittgenstein
Recalling my statement that "[i]mprobably the plus one, as in 'infinity plus one,' will be revealed as something other than thought," I now read that Levinas defines infinity as the desirable, which he explains as "that which is approachable by a thought that at each instant thinks more than it thinks" (Totality and Infinity, p. 62). In pointing to the improbable I expressed symptomatically a desire to escape a noetic enclosure I will now call metaphysical, knowing too well that our understanding of that term could quickly come undone. If I wanted to steer a philosophical discussion away from metaphysics would I not be aided by the desirable? Escape is not so easy, I know–or so experience has taught me so far.
Is language easy? Language is so plainly multifarious we might well point to its improbabilities. Hmm. Here Levinas reveals (which according to my grasp of English is synonymous with saying "Levinas discloses," a grasp which doesn't fail to realize that Levinas draws a meaningful distinction between his idea of aperspectival revelation and Heidegger's thinking about "disclosure") a key to his dialogism:
One can, to be sure, conceive of language as an act, as a gesture of behavior. But then one omits the essential of language: the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face, which is accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us–in teaching. And, conversely, gestures and acts produced can become, like words, a revelation, that is, as we will see, a teaching. But the reconstitution of the personage on the basis of his behavior is the work of our already acquired science.
Absolute experience is not a disclosure; to disclose, on the basis of a subjective horizon, is already to miss the noumenon. The interlocutor alone is the term of pure experience, where the Other enters into relation while remaining καθ αύτό, where he expresses himself without our having to disclose him from a "point of view," in a borrowed light. The "objectivity" sought by the knowledge that is fully knowledge is realized beyond the objectivity of the object. What presents itself as independent of every subjective movement is the interlocutor, whose way consists in starting from himself, foreign and yet presenting himself to me.
(p. 67)
My views on teaching are way more relaxed than Levinas'. Apparently my views on the difference between writing and speech also differ from Levinas', not merely because I favor the trismegistic over the magisterial, I reckon, but because I don't regard writing as an act of simply representing spoken language, and this permits me to be cautious about the kind of qualities or deprivations of qualities I attribute to writing. Notwithstanding our differences, Levinas may have something to teach me about language. The following passage (it's long, but worth studying) occurs as an elaboration of a response to Buber's philosophy, which Levinas reads as a corrective to a kind of "neutral intersubjectivity" (p. 68) he finds in Heidegger. Again the field is language:
The claim to know and to reach the other is realized in the relationship with the Other that is cast in the relation of language, where the essential is the interpellation, the vocative. The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him, to classify him as sick, to announce to him his death sentence; at the same time as grasped, wounded, outraged, he is "respected." The invoked is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category. He is the one to whom I speak–he has only a reference to himself; he has no quiddity. But the formal structure of interpellation has to be worked out.
(p. 69, Levinas' emphasis)
Hi. It's me again. Sorry to interrupt. I wonder if the best antidote to the notion that one understands before one listens is the notion that, in conversation, one simply does not understand the person to whom one listens. I have a few books on the topic of listening on my wish list, including Nancy's. We'll see where that leads in the coming year. To continue with Levinas, then:
The object of knowledge is always a fact, already happened and passed through. The interpellated one is called upon to speak; his speech consists in "coming to the assistance" of his word–in being present. This present is not made of instants mysteriously immobilized in duration, but of an incessant recapture of instants that flow by by a presence that comes to their assistance, that answers for them. This incessance produces the present, is the presentation, the life, of the present. It is as though the presence of him who speaks inverted the inevitable movement that bears the spoken word to the past state of the written word. Expression is the actualization of the actual. The present is produced in this struggle against the past (if one may so speak), in this actualization. The unique actuality of speech tears it from the situation in which it appears and which it seems to prolong. It brings what the written word is already deprived of: mastery. Speech, better than a simple sign, is essentially magisterial. It first of all teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which alone it can teach (and not, like maieutics, awaken in me) things and ideas. Ideas instruct me coming from the master who presents them to me: who puts them in question; the objectification and theme upon which objective knowledge opens already rest on teaching. The calling into question of things in a dialectic is not a modifying of the perception of them; it coincides with their objectification. The object is presented when we have welcomed an interlocutor. The master, the coinciding of the teaching and the teacher, is not in turn a fact among others. The present of the manifestation of the master who teaches overcomes the anarchy of facts.
We must not say that language conditions consciousness, under the pretext that it provides self-consciousness with an incarnation in the objective work language would be (as the Hegelians would say). The exteriority that language, the relation with the Other, delineates is unlike the exteriority of a work, for the objective exteriority of works is already situated in the world established by language–by transcendence.
(pp. 69-70, Levinas' emphasis)
By transcendence. Is it so unrespectable that I should want to emerge from metaphysics, or that I should want to emerge from metaphysics and still have something to say about the journey, something honest, if that's not being too assertive? Let's back up, take a look at this world established by language, and see what, if anything, distinguishes it from other worlds. Speaking of temporality, Levinas says, "This world that has lost its principle, an-archical, a world of phenomena, does not answer to the quest for the true; it suffices for enjoyment, which is self-sufficiency itself, nowise disturbed by the evasion that exteriority opposes to the quest for the true" (p. 65). It's my opinion that one should not put antipluralism ahead of the quest for the true. }∅{ presents an opportunity to listen to questions that come from other worlds (as many as it takes); so, following my own advice, the world of dialogue that exclusively identifies the quest for the thing itself with the quest for the true, indeed creates an opposition between "evasion" and this quest, as if there could only be one true path, this world of dialogue commands respect as a place where ideas are put into question. Surely one emerges from this world with the power to improvise. What of this power? Has one called upon this very power in order to come to the assistance of instants of dialogue, utterances really? Did it never cease? Was it never held in abeyance? Should we not apologize for the incessance of our improvisations? If we do have to reason to apologize, however, if we must put our powers of improvisation on hold for the sake of the quest for the true in this special world of dialogue, don't we then at the same time call upon those powers in order to put thought into question? Or could it be that our entrance into this world of dialogue entails–a cutting to shape–a transmutation of the power to improvise into a power to question. Two points then: such a transmutation would provide a reason for understanding the work of this world as maieutic in a meaningful sense, though the malleability of this power would teach us to be careful of conflating the transmutational with the permutational; such a transmutation would be accomplished by virtue of an abiding power of improvisation which belongs to a world ordered not in line with the arch but in departure (starting) from the breach (}∅{), as far as departure (starting) goes. That is to say, this special world of dialogue is not one but many. Hasn't Levinas already said as much, already spoken of plurality, and in particular the plurality "required for conversation"(p. 59). But he also said, "The inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as plurality" (p. 58, Levinas' emphasis). Shall we put into question then the idea that plurality pertains to worlds? And why not? Is there a question of plurality not enjoying itself with our conversation? Does our respect for plurality obey a principle or are we free to put our respect into practice, free to extent that it's meaningful to speak of freedom, to the extent that we can depart from plurality, that we can go so far as to disrespect it. Is it plurality that's an entailment of freedom, or freedom that's an entailment of plurality? How do we question these sometimes premises apart from each other? Transmutation? And aren't we free to distrust transmutation?
Levinas says, "The distinctive characteristic of forms is precisely their epiphany at a distance." Does the transmutation of this δυναμις–perhaps we could say faculty if we knew what to make of the question–this power of improvisation into this power of questioning, a transmutation that itself is not beyond question, but only appears in this world of dialogue, does this transmutation occur at a distance? Well, it appears at a distance in our case. We observe our experience of dialogue.
The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and beyond form. Form–incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into a plastic form, for it is adequate to the same–alienates the exteriority of the other. The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato's expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents.
(pp. 65-66, Levinas' emphasis)
How will I come to the assistance of my persona when he comes asking about the unformulated question, brings it into conversation, opens it to incessant deformulation? Is this not a true inquiry, this deformulation of the question? It too may have as its horizon the }∅{.
Labels: anarchy, dialogue, form, improvisation, maieutics, plurality, questions