Monday, December 10, 2007
Attali says, "Memory and courtesy are conditions of survival for the nomad, and for that of the future inhabitants of great urban labyrinths" (The Labyrinth in Culture and Society, p. 60). I rather suspect people sometimes follow discursive pathways in order to exercise politeness, or in order to exercise memory. To suggest that the furtherance of a way of life is a question of survival is to devalue it, to misapprehend its integrity. (Are furtherance and discursion truly at odds?) What explains the romance of the labyrinth? Boredom? Memory? Deep down in the deepest deep down do people yearn to remember? Would it be a question of longing for the attachments that memory creates? Do we feel that memory yearns to be enacted, or is the yearning we feel some other power that demands the enactments of memory? Don't we sometimes make paths to follow our yearnings?
Labels: Attali, desire, discursion, memory, phatic communion
Monday, September 24, 2007
Should we speak of desire in the singular or the plural? Tengelyi may be able to shed some light on this problem, but first let's take a look at the Ethics of Spinoza (the latin is here), which is a starting point for some of the ideas Tengelyi considers. Part III, Proposition VII, reads, "The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question" (Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam). In the note to Proposition IX, Spinoza explains that conatus when refered to the mind alone may be called will, and when it is refered to the mind and body together it may be called appetite. Appetite is essentially the same as desire (cupiditas) except that in desire there is a consciousness of appetite, and it is therefore the correct term to apply to humans. Spinoza says, in the beginning of his discussion of the emotions, "Desire is the essence of humans themselves, insofar as it is conceptualized as determined to some agendum by howsoever given affection of itself" (C u p i d i t a s est ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus ex data quacumque eius affectione determinata concipitur ad aliquid agendum). Elwes has translated affectione as "modification," which captures one meaning of the word, but obscures some others. The Lewis and Short entry for affectio offers two main definitions: (1) "the relation to or disposition toward a thing produced in a person by some influence," and (2) "a change in the state or condition of body or mind, a state or frame of mind, feeling (only transient, while habitus is lasting)." They note under the second definiton that affectio can especially mean "a favorable disposition toward any one, love, affection, good-will." Is the conative desire to persevere in one's own being equivalent to desire determined to some agendum by some affection of itself? Is perseverance in ones own being an agendum one must take a (temporary or permanent?) disposition towards? Is one affected towards one's own perseverance the same way one is affected towards objects?
In Tengelyi's discussion of conatus, chiefly covering the works of Paul Ricoeur and Jean Nabert, the conative desire is shortened to a "desire to be." In the words of Ricouer, "I posit myself as already posited in my desire to be" (De l'interprétation: Essai sur Freud, p. 443, IN The Wild Region, p. 146). This is the basis for speaking of "wounded" cogito. This shortening of the conatus, however, cuts off the question of what it means to abide by one's own being. When we pull desire out of the realm of the subject, which is where Tengelyi is leading us, the affection of and towards one's own perseverance is more intriguing than a simple desire to be. Let me put it this way: must we imagine the endeavor to abide by one's own being as a persistence of the same? Is there not also a sense of the be-coming of being implied by the endeavor to persevere in one's own being? And isn't self-preservation, especially in the case of humans, a matter of assuefaction? In our endeavor to persevere "our" affections are precisely a problem for us.
Tengelyi makes a partial appropriation of Lacan. He takes up the idea that the law of discourse creates a split in desire (p. 152). "The shift in meaning that necessarily occurs in a diactritical system of the demand's signifiers [Lacanian metonymy] results, at the same time, in the continuous transformation of the object of the desire as well. Desire wanders from one object to the other" (p. 154, Tengelyi's emphasis). I'm tempted to say that the conative desire also wanders. However, if we allow that the object of desire has never never actually been lost, is our desire to persevere in our own being likewise a search to find what has never been lost? Is there a Wiederholungszwang ("compulsion to repeat," Tengelyi renders this as "constraint of repetition") expressed in the desire to find again the lost object? I feel that this would be misleading conceptualization of what it means to desire to abide by one's own being, but I'm throwing it out there. Would it be desire itself that wanders in our endeavor to persevere or would it be the consciousness of an appetite to persevere that wanders? It will take a minute to work through that last question.
As I said, Tengelyi only partially appropriates Lacan. In addition to, or in contradisctinction to, desire as lack, Tengelyi offers Bernhard Waldenfels' idea of the responsive desire. Here we are speaking of the Levinisian desire of the appeal: "an alien appeal, which has its origins precisely in desire, will not restrict my desire but will–almost literally–appeal to it: the appeal will turn to and count on it. Thus the response we may give as a reaction to an alien appeal grows necessarily out of desire" (p. 160, Tengelyi's emphasis). Thus for Levinas there is a split in desire, but it is the split between all of the self's desires and the desire of the other. "Desire, it might be claimed, gets multiplied because it does not 'arise purely by itself' but as a result of appeals coming from alien desires, or to put it more simply, it arrives as a response to the desire of the other" (p. 161). There is then a sense in which responsive desire involves a desire for the undesirable: "our desires, constantly marking out the lack of complete satisfaction, keep shifting and transforming along the lines of associations of linguistic origin, but also . . . here desire bumps into something which is nondesirable" (p. 162, Tengelyi's emphasis). Now I'd like to think this split or any split in desire in terms of a Levinisian fissibility of the self. Tengelyi writes:
Indeed, where no orginal unity can be taken for granted, there can be no question of an orginal scission, either. However, it is not difficult to see that the idea of an original unity of consciousness does not apply to the relationship between appeal and response. This relationship may rightly be characterized as an intertwinement, an entrelacs, that is, as a connection which, precisely, does not take away the heterogeneity of its elements. In addition, here the connection of the elements is made by reply and correspondence rather than by a synthesis. It is only afterward that appeal and response can be united in a single consciousness; at the moment when they arise they are separated from each other by an unbridgeable gap.
(p. 181, Tengelyi's emphasis)
If there is no orginal unity of consciousness, does it make sense to speak of an original unity of desire in Spinozist terms, even of the desire to persevere in one's own being? We can also question the orginal unity of an appetite for living. Certainly our affections testify to a certain mutability of our desires, probably including our desire to persevere. My feelings about abiding by my own being differ from day to day. Why would I think of my endeavor to persevere as a constant desire, or as testifying to a constancy? Spinoza rightly says (Part III, Proposition VIII) that the conatus involves an indefinite time. Being open to this indefiniteness implies a desire other than the desire to conserve one's own being, if that's what the conatus amounts to. The difficulty here is to think the fissibility of desire without obliterating the heterogeneity of its elements.
At this point I think we are past the notion that desire resides exclusively in the self. I don't know whether that helps us decide whether desire should be spoken of in the singular or in the plural. My inclination is to want to think desire in the plural, but the idea of scission in desire, and thus the postulation of an orginal desire is not something I can rule out entirely. All I have are questions.
Labels: desire, Lacan, Levinas, Nabert, Ricoeur, Spinoza, Tengelyi, Waldenfels
Friday, July 13, 2007
Renaud Barbaras argues that "if phenomenology opens onto a cosmology, the latter can only have the meaning of a cosmobiology" (Desire and Distance, p. 134). To get where Barbaras is coming from it is necessary to define at least three terms: cosmology, life, and knowledge.
Barbaras quotes Ricœur's definition of a cosmology as "a universe of discourse that would be 'neutral' with respect to objectivity and subjectivity," offering the possibility of a "material ontology common to the region of nature–known by external perception and objective natural sciences–and to the region of consciousness known by reflection and by phenomenology of the subject" (Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, p. 423, IN Desire and Distance, p. 132). Barbaras' material ontology purports to radicalize an Aristotlean theory of act and potency by suspending the question of the primacy of substance (ouisa), thereby avoiding an anthropologization of being, "the projection of the structures of life and action onto natural reality" (p. 133).
In making this argument Barbaras may be relying upon two senses of what life is. In speaking of an eternal "explosion of being" (following Merleau-Ponty), of a primordial movement (following Patoĉka) that doesn't distinguish clearly between the movement of manifestation and the movement of desire, Barbaras points to "an originary life short of the distinction between living and appearing" (p. 133). Since I've come to the view that life should be a univocal concept (though I'm not fully committed to asserting it), the notion of an originary life is a bit of a (not insurmountable) problem for me.
Anyway, by anchoring perception in vital activity, a question is raised about the problem of knowledge.
Finally, at the conclusion of this study, one question is essential: How can knowledge be accounted for? In a more general way, How can we account for the order of meanings on the basis of this analysis of perception? Perception has been separated from the reference to a positive object in order to inscribe it in life itself; however, in doing so, an insurmountable gulf may have been introduced between the order of living and that of knowledge. Ther alternative would be between a philosophy of perception (which does not lose sight of the possibility of understanding and which is therefore forced to define it teleologically from this posssibility) and a philosophy that, by clarifying the rootedness of perceiving in vital activity and consequently in separating out a nucleus common to the human person and to animals, abandons the attempt to account for the rational order and thus adopts a sort of displaced Platonism. In reality, this objection is unfounded because it presupposes a certain idea of knowledge, and above all life. Thus it is not because we regrasp perception on the basis of living that we compromise the possibility of accounting for the continuity of perceiving and knowing; rather, it is to the degree that we conceive of living in a reductionist way as a subjugation to needs.
(p. 134, Barbaras' emphasis)
Barbaras insists that desire is not need because whereas needs can be fulfilled, desire is never satisfied. He also holds that "[a]ll desire is desire of a world," indicating that his cosmology has been accessed phenomenologically. Desire is negative not in the sense of negating something that would have to be assumed to exist positively in order to satisfy it, as if it were a need; but rather desire is thoroughly and always negative with respect to its own being. The living subject, in Barbaras' view, is fully capable of negativity, that is, of desire. The negativity of desire is "by no means the attribute of the human person and of its anguish; instead it emerges from the vital level" (p. 136). (Incidentally, this idea could serve to distinguish Barbaras' cosmobiology from an existentialism.)
Because living is always already desire, we can say that life is always in the mode of exploration, always reaching out. From that point of view there is a continuity between living and knowing, so long as we understand knowledge not as "the apprehension of positive meanings," but rather as interrogation (pp. 136-137). The movement of questioning and the movement of desire are fundamentally the same movement, inscribed in life.
Labels: Barbaras, desire, life, ontology, phenomenology, questions
Monday, July 09, 2007
My philodendron doesn't rest comfortably on the couch, but Barbaras has induced me to put it there momentarily while I pretend to psychoanalysize it. I don't quite believe that the psyche is a modality of being that the philodendron is capable of, naturally, so what I'm really doing is interrogating its mode of being using Barbaras as a guide, and if it resembles psychoanalysis, this is because Barbaras' phenomenological ontology claims some territory traditionally inhabited by psychoanalysis.
Barbaras begins his chapter on "Desire as the Essence of Subjectivity" with the idea that subjectivity equates to movement. By movement here Barbaras does not apparently mean motility as it is commonly understood, but a movement that coincides with life itself (pp. 108-109). The thinking here seems very similar to what Jonas discusses under the rubric of metabolism, but Barbaras doesn't quite say as much, and he has other sources. One source is Erwin Straus, from whom he borrows the idea of the approach: "It is not the physiological functions of sensory organs that make a being a sensing being, but rather this possibility of approaching, and the latter belongs neither to perception by itself, nor to movement by itself" (Straus, IN Desire and Distance, p. 162, note 20). As I am reading Barbaras, he is not just talking about sensing beings, but living beings, and he means to point to a more originary movement than either motility or perception, an intraworldly movement of surpasssing, that is common to all living beings (pp. 121 ff.). "The living subject," Barbaras writes, "does not have sensations with whose aid it would relate to the world; it is originarily a relation to the world, and sensing is a modality of this relationship" (p. 118, emphasis Barbaras'). Thus it becomes germaine to ask whether my philodendron has this possibility of approach, and whether it, as a living being, has desire as its mode of existence.
Desire for Barbaras is not a psychological concept, but rather an ontological one. He claims that "desire has no other reality than that of the movements to which it gives rise" but at the same time he argues that desire is not a property of the body (p. 126). The mind and the body are in Barbaras' view not entities but moments of an organic totality, "generic ways of conserving a coherence with the environment" (p.117). Here he draws on Kurt Goldstein's Der Aufbau des Organismus, a line of thinking that leads to the treatment of the human sciences as an offshoot of the life sciences, with a strong rejection of common ways of approaching the problem of human intelligence:
Human behaviors cannot be qualified as such by the fact that they issure from a consciousness, that is, from lived experiences; but on the contrary, their conscious being refers to their humanity as the mode of the specific behavior of a living totality.
(p. 117)
If conscious being cannot refer to the philodendronality of my philodendron's vital activites, presumably then my philodendron should have nothing to do with the unconscious. (That is to say, the enigma of consciousness has been displaced, but remains enigmatic.) Yet this isn't quite clear from Barbaras' analysis of the unconscious, which he regards as being of ontological rather than psychological significance. He means to put forward an understanding of the unconscious that is totally free from the order of representation, an unconscious rooted in desire that has as its content the world itself. This understanding forces a reconception of repression as not a psychological mechanism, but rather something that is intrinsic to desire as a way of relating to the world. "Since the desired, the world, is its own withdrawal behind the manifestations of experience, repression is inherent in desire and no longer due to a process that would be exterior to it" (p. 127).
So what does my philodendron desire? The world? A whole of being that it can never completely attain so long as it remains existentially autonomous? Is repression a problem for my philodendron? I.e., does Barbaras' analysis explain why repression is a problem for the organic totality that is human? I'm not sure.
Labels: Barbaras, desire, humans, life, philodendron, the unconscious
Monday, June 11, 2007
How can we experience nothingness? Or, better, perhaps, in what way is nothingness available to experience? Marion says that profound boredom is a way to experience nothingness. Trigg points to silence as a way nothingness can be experienced. Both Marion and Trigg, each in their own way, are reacting to Heidegger. Barbaras' discussion of nothingness confronts Husserl directly, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Patoĉka, Granel, and Bergson (informed by Deleuze). Now, Barbaras says that "to desire is to focus on reality as absent, and it is therefore to refer to nonbeing as such" (Desire and Distance, p. 55); yet it is not altogether clear to me that Barbaras is saying that desire is a way to experience nothingness. He may be saying that nothingness can be felt and thought in ordinary perception, but not directly experienced. Or he may be saying something altogether different. Before I unpack this, I want to look at Barbaras' critique of Husserl.
Barbaras argues that Husserl's idea of the époché is undermined by a principle of sufficient reason, which, following Bergson, he views as a false problem. Asking why something exists rather than nothing, Barbaras says, presupposes "that nothingness can precede something, that being can emerge on the basis of nothingness, which is tantamount . . . to reversing purely and simply the respective ontological status of being and nothingness" (p. 48). This, according to Barbaras, is the root of essentialist thinking, which he regards as non-phenomenological.
The natural attitude is situated on a deeper level that Husserl himself understood it to be; it consists not in the thesis of "unique spatio-temporal reality" so much as in the implicit positing of a positive nothingness that leads one inevitably to conceive of this unique reality as an ensemble of objects. Therefore the époché, whose function is to clarify the status of the thesis of existence characteristic of the natural attitude, to elucidate the true meaning of the being of this unique reality, can consist only in a suspension of this naïve idea, which is to say, the positive thesis of nothingness. Otherwise stated, what makes the thesis of existence problematic is not the thesis of the existence of a world so much as the determination of this world as an object. The naïveté does not reside in one thinking that there is a world there, but rather in admitting that it is governed by a principle of absolute determinability and that it can therefore be attained as it is in itself. It is in the objectivist characterization of the world that the naïve opposition between the in-itself and for-itself, between being and appearance, is rooted. Furthermore, the purpose of the époché is to rejoin the thesis of the world in its purity, precisely as a thesis of existence; it is meant to grasp spontaneously the event of appearance before it is concealed by the appearing, to capture the the pure burst of "there is." This is why it must suspend what gives rise tot he degradation of this "there is" in in-self (or in object), namely the thesis of positive nothingness; it does not consist in suspension of thesis of existence but in suspension of what compromises the access to the meaning of this thesis of existence
(pp. 56-57, emphases Barbaras')
The nothingness of sufficient reason, Barbaras argues, "can in no way proceed from an experience" (p. 51). Again, he says that the idea of nothingness "can in no way be based on an experience, because there is always something, the flux of things, because fullness always follows upon fullness" (p. 52). And furthermore, "all experiences are experiences of something; the essence of experience implies the meeting with something real, however simple or indeterminate it may be, so that an experience that could refer to something other than what there is (to nonbeing) would not be an experience (it would unquestionably be something like a thought)" (p. 52). This isn't altogether unqeustionable in my mind. It's possible that thought is a subset of experience, rather than being something completely distinct. (And I note in passing that intentionality is indeed an aspect of Barbaras' phenomenology, though he is talking about experience instead of consciousness).
Citing Bergson, Barbaras breaks the idea of nothingness into two parts: an idea of substitution, and a feeling of desire or regret (p. 52). But, he says, "[n]othingness is in reality a mirage, in triparite sense that it assumes the horizon of perception, represents a reverse image of the real, and is the expression of a desire at the heart of reality that does not lend itself to it. It vanishes therefore when consciousness seeks to approach and thematize it" (p. 53). So far, he seems to be saying that desire refers to nonbeing as such, but that nonbeing cannot be thematized, and cannot be directly experienced. Does this make sense? Barbaras says, further, that "[i]f desire can indeed be reduced immediately to the confrontation between a positive feeling and a full reality, then taking into consideration desire's meaning reveals precisely a mode of negativity within things that does not provide an alternative to their presence" (p. 56). This brings us back to the idea of perception being given in adumbrations.
In Husserl's phenomenology, "givenness by adumbrations is like the arrested image of the very emergence of being against the backdrop of nothingness, the threat to being by nothingness. Adumbrations are located in an extremely rigorous way between being and nothingness" (p. 58, emphasis Barbaras'). Barabaras, however, gives a different reading to givenness by adumbrations. "In reality, the fact the adumbrations are situated between being and nothingness can be interpreted in an entirely different way: the adumbrations would reveal an original mode of being, one more profound than the crude distinction between positive being and negative nothingness, a being-at-a-distance" (p. 58).
So then, I'm unclear. Does desire point to nonbeing as such, an idea that comes from Barbaras' reading of Bergson, of does desire point to being-at-a-distance?
Labels: Barbaras, desire, Marion, nothingness, ontology, phenomenology, Trigg