Sunday, February 21, 2010
Kangas writes that by contrast with Plato, for Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, "the instant of eternity has to be thought of as the 'extreme opposite' of eternity" (p. 189). He continues:
The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a passage to reality, but reality itself. Or more simply: passage as such is real, identity is illusion. This evaluation of what remains between being and nonbeing is conditioned on defining eternity with a forward direction. Eternity is not what remains eternally self-present, or what can be reduced to that, but what never ceases to beckon and threaten from the future. The eternal cannot as such be integrated into the present but remains essentially futural: the present and the eternal are thus extreme opposites. This essential gap, the excessive futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the most strenuous demand upon the subject.
(ibid., Kangas' emphases, my bold)
Why would the recognition of a reality of passage be conditioned upon any sort of eternity, or indeed, an extreme dialectics? Is the real being reified surreptitiously for the sake of dialectic, in contradiction to any professed relaxation within the anarchy of the instant? Well, we are speaking of passage as such, passage considered apophantically. In what sense aren't we speaking of the real from within an idealism?
I harbor serious doubts about excesses of futurity. Are these doubts consistent with a practice of ataraxia? How does the skeptic deal with the sudden, existentially? Is there any existential import to skepticism—would it be arrogant to deny any such importance, as arrogant as the denial of edifying discourses, perhaps?
Possibly there is no merely about the evanescent.
Labels: dialectics, Kangas, Kierkegaard, spasmoreality, transcendence
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Barbaras tells us that the difference between fact and essence must be conceived as an imminent difference, "always already accomplished but also always on the way to being accomplished" (Being, p. 85). Would the difference between difference–haplopic difference?–and imminent difference be an imminent difference? Well, let's hear Barbaras out for a moment.
Taking stock of this ontological "diplopia" cannot consist only in taking note of it; one has to conceive it. Each position, that of experience or fact, as well as that of the "in-itself" or of essence, calls the other forth in the very moment when it excludes it. There is a deep-seated instability in the philosophies of essence as well as in those of existence. Neither of the two perspectives expresses the total situation, and this is why each of them is led to pass into its other. But if there is a truth of this "to and fro," of this duality, this truth does not reside in the duality itself. It is precisely the unilateral form according to which each position expresses itself that determines its reversal into its contrary, so that if there really is a truth to the duality of fact and essence, it is not expressed in the very notions of fact and essence. The to-and-fro corresponds to a more profound situation, to an original mode of the presence of Being in which the duality is rooted, which almost inevitably calls forth a rigid oppositional formulation, but whose true meaning does not reside in this duality. In order to understand the ontological "diplopia," therefore, one must return to a relation to Being that stops short of the opposition between essence and existence, a relation of which the to-and-fro is like the distorting trace. What is at issue is to rediscover the soil in which the necessity of this philosophical alternation is grounded, a soil that can only be located deeper than each of the terms, whose "unilaterality" alone determines alternation. One must therefore overcome the relation of fact and essence as an oppositional relation in favor of a plane where it will turn out to be a unity. By overcoming the fixity of the terms in which the opposition is expressed, we shall overcome the relation as oppositional relation. The notions of fact and essence lead us to conceive their very relation as an external oppositional relation rather than as movement; the point, therefore, is to overcome the antagonistic dimension of the to-and-fro in order to grasp the passage to essence as proceeding from existence itself, and the passage to existence as proceeding from essence itself. We must understand each term as its own passage into the other–that is, we must locate essence short of its opposition to existence and existence short of its opposition to essence.
(pp. 83-84)
One imagines an arrhythmia of the busy moment, the veryish moment of simultaneous exclusion and invitation, without pause, of the always, already, always again, and almost done enjambed within a single breath, the total breath, which exhales and inhales at once. Alternatively one plays with a floatier to-and-fro, a space of more emancipated movements. One leaps and swings amidst an undetermined canopy of philosophical conversations, phasing in and out like fruitions, or just words, utterances, even the most solid of them situations of near total incompleteness. One breathes. If rhythm exists–rhythmosophy must never cease to question how it is that rhythm exists–it sides with the alternation between its imaginary existence and its real essence, between its making itself appear as absence and its making itself absent. It exists thus as absurdity and ecstasy, but never already quite both at once (in any chronometric sense of happening at once; there is the phenomenon of the rhythmic happening to imagine: absurd, ecstatic, synkairotically phased). The son clave is the model of this flipendicularity. The sudden harmonziations of any two voices are the roots the bass walks, in steps unlocked, steady as freedom, measured, the pulse; yet the incomplete situation hangs on the syncopations with the three-two, steady as anything until it passes into the two-three; the conversation of any two or more voices, of many unconstricted passages.
Labels: Barbaras, breathing, dialectics, monism, rhythm
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
A twist on the problem of the phenomenality of the Other: "For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced in the oecumenia of being the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. This simultaneity is not an abstract construction of dialectics, but the very essence of discretion" (Totality, p. 155). I don't believe it's so easy to escape dialectics. I say that despite not understanding exactly what Levinas means by "discretion," which I take to function as an antithesis to dialectics. When I say that human contact does not presuppose ideation–the imagination of an other self, for instance, and all that implies– I too am proposing an alternative to dialectics or any comparable totalizing system of thought, though in seeking to hew to the actuals of coexistence I've not yet arrived at a position on the experience of other selves, and, in dodging this issue, I know I'm not giving ideation a fair shake. This is quite damaging. At stake in the problem of the phenomenality of other people is a sure enough understanding of some ways in which experience is shaped by ideation. A caveat: I, who defend the reality and philosophical relevance of the person, don't maintain that ideation is the work of windowless monads or isolated psyches–despite the fact that solitude and loneliness, topics that authoritative thinkers of the present seek to avoid, have emerged as challenges for me–and as much I would resist reducing ideation to dialectic thought (possibly an other of one's felt own understandings), I would resist reducing it to "cognition" narrowly conceived or "behavior" in its most reductive acceptations, that is, as something a monad might do. It might be presumed that ideation begins in coexistence, in living with. . . ; however, the opacities surrounding ideation are such that at this incipient stage of investigations I'd rather not presume to know ideation in any detail except insofar as one must make presumptions, imaginatively, for purposes of exploring various possibilities of ideation.
Labels: coexistence, dialectics, ideation, Levinas, totalities
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Lefebvre and Régulier ("The Rhythmanalytical Project," in Rhythmanalysis) invite us to imagine a nonmechanical repetition. The invitation presupposes that we already know what mechanical repetition is, but there is nothing transparent or self-evident about the mechanical. *machine is no less an artefact than *language, *question or *rhythm, and in each case we find that anthropos (and then reflexively *anthropos), most especially in the form of a vision of human society, is the measure–naturally even the double measure–of the artefact and its other. Here's Lefebvre and Régulier:
For there to be rhythm, there must be repetition in a movement, but not just any repetition. The monotonous return of the same, self-identical, noise no more forms a rhythm than does some moving object on its trajectory, for example a falling stone; though our ears and without doubt our brains tend to introduce a rhythm into every repetition, even completely linear ones. For there to be rhythm, strong times and weak times, which return in accordance with a rule or law–long and short times, recurring in a recognisable way, stops, silences, blanks, resumptions and intervals in accordance with regularity, must appear in a movement. Rhythm therefore brings with it a differentiated time, a qualified duration. The same can be said of repetitions, ruptures and resumptions. Therefore a measure, but an internal measure, which distinguishes itself strongly though without separating itself from an external measure, with time t (the time of a clock or a metronome) consisting in only a quantitative and homogeneous parameter. In a reciprocal action, the external measure can and must superimpose itself on the internal measure, but they cannot be conflated. They have neither the same beginning, nor the same end or final cause. This double measure enters into the definition and quality of rhythm, irreducible to a simple determination, implying on the contrary complex (dialectical) relations. As such only a non-mechanical movement can have rhythm. . . .
(p. 78, their emphases)
As always I note the resistence to the idea of repetition in its rawest form.
Labels: anthropomorphism, dialectics, Lefebvre, Régulier, repetition, rhythm
Monday, February 09, 2009
"The role Kant attributed to sensible experience in the domain of the understanding," Levinas tells us, "belongs in metaphysics to interhuman relations" (Totality and Infinity, p. 79). Likewise he says that "metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted–in our relations with men" (p. 78). So why doesn't Levinas turn to social anthropology for any sort of metaphysical insights? Despite his emphasis on interhuman relations I think Levinas was profoundly at odds with the anthropology of his day. "The idea of infinity, the metaphysical relation, is the dawn of humanity without myths" (p. 77). Anthropology has yet to discover a humanity without myths, though of course we know of individuals who are critical of the myths which have been handed down to them. From the vantage point of anthropology infinity is a myth of the philosophers. It is reasonable, Levinas' infinity. It makes a kind of sense. For the anthropologist, however, the mythical need not be opposed to reason or sense (though for some it would of necessity be opposed to some category of thought). So while Levinas' infinity provides an instrument to critically examine the anthropologists totalizations, the anthropologists have given us a critical way of looking at Levinas' infinity. Where does the discussion go from here? Can one imagine an anthropology of infinities? Or, conversely, could one practice a metaphysics of the quotidian that, if not scientific, would not be inconsistent with a kind of scientific skepticism? How does one appreciate empirical studies of the face-to-face?
The OED word of the day is meronym. In the first, rare sense it means a word that is midway between two extremes, e.g. convex, flat, concave. (I'm afraid in its second sense the word metonym will be more commonly used.) Is it possible that a meronymic quality can be found for every concept. Take infinity. What's its midwayness, its meronymy? I suggest that the contour may be seen as a meronym of the face-to-face.
Labels: dialectics, face, infinity, Levinas, parataxis
Monday, February 02, 2009
Happily Lefebvre, in his study of rhythm, begins with a critical attitude towards repetition. He says that "there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference. When it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fêtes, rules and laws, there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference" (Rhythmanalysis, p. 6). Well, how critical is this stance really? Does difference relate to something that doesn't exist by a relation that doesn't exist? Does difference not exist, or not exist in some special way, say, indefinitely in an identical absolutely way, or even differently?
Lefebvre says, "Not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them. Sooner or later it encounters the event that arrives or rather arises in relation to the sequence or series produced repetitively. In other words: difference" (p. 7, Lefebvre's bold). We should be critical of all kinds of mythomanias of difference and also repetition. So how does repetition, which doesn't exist indefinitely in any identical absolute way–in other words, we might conclude, there is no apeiron of repetition, no repetition of apeiron–actually produce difference? By encountering it, Lefebvre says very clearly. Of course previously he had said difference "introduces itself," we have not forgotten. But let's stick with this second attempt to think a relation between repetition and difference. Is a squirrel produced by any old encounter with a squirrel? Are we to imagine that to be is to be encountered?
Lefebvre has a method. He begins with abstract concepts, which he pioulsy mistrusts as being inadequate to the real (which apparently is not a concept), and he then moves from abstractions to the concrete. Dwelling in the concrete beforehand, making observations based on experience, and then making abstractions: this would not be a phase of Lefebvre's critical research method. And we can see the results. Something that doesn't exist in any certain way that we have been able to nail down gives rise by a process that we can't be completely certain of (because even if Levebvre didn't contradict himself the process doesn't resemble other processes of giving rise to things and would force us to adopt without any argument a radical belief about how beings arise) to something of critical importance (namely difference), though we are not sure why it is of critical importance nor how it exists.
The dreary monism of the dialectic: "everything is cyclical repetition through linear repetitions" (p. 8). The "depths of the dialectic" indeed. And we might note that this thinking both assumes and contradicts panta rhei, if we are to vigorously interpet "indefinitely": it assumes that everything exists in this indefinite way consistent with panta rhei, an assumption that follows from remembering Lefebvre's definition of repetition, and it contradicts panta rhei by positing the cyclical. That contradiction of basic assumptions I suppose is the charm of dialectical thinking. I don't mean to complain. It does have charm.
Are there secret rhythms? No! Lefebvre assures us, because there are no secrets (p. 17). Yet when Lefebvre begins to classify rhythms he identifies secret rhythms (including memory and the unsaid and the said), public rhythms, fictional rhythms, which relate to false secrets (the imaginary!–I so share Leferbve's excitement I would even speak of imaginary rhythms) and dominating-dominating rhythms (just one class here), which are also imaginary but last longer than fictional rhythms and aim for an effect that is beyond themselves. Hmm.
Labels: Anaximander, dialectics, Heraclitus, Lefebvre, rhythm
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Irigary, in a criticism of Hegelian dialectic, recommends a turning away from "an absolute saturated with language. . .in order to return to the absolute silence that the respect for other as irreducible to oneself calls for" (Between East and West, p. 100). She continues, "Negativity is then applied to the absolute itself as the accomplishment of the subject, an absolute reduced not to nothing but to a silence attentive to the other" (ibid.).
I'd like to give a moment's thought to the possibility of a meontic mode of silence, a mode of silence that invites us to hear what isn't voiced in order to better hear the voice. (It is appropriate to speak of voices, to hear voices in these words. We are indeed speaking in interpersonal terms. At issue is something like an egalitarian imperative, what Irigaray refers to as "horizontal transcendence," and the whisper of a radical panecastics that would resituate negativity, thought and the question without the violence of a depersonalization.
Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that the duration of silence is dialectical in every direction. Naturally. The attentionality of a silence is dialectical in every direction, open to interlocutors from all corners, speakers of the between, so it is might be expected that its duration should be multidirectional or polyvalent. Is this true of even the most intimate silences? The nature of the most intimate of silences is to not be widely known. That limitation too represents a kind of meontics. Maybe to be intimate is to be incompletely answered in a special way, to not know all of the valences of a silence's duration, to not let them be known.
Where would our interiors be without silence? Could we then build an interior without attention to others? This is an anxiety I think many people have, that one can indeed build build an interior away from all attention. People fear being trapped, and at the same time they fear a threat to betweenness. Perhaps though it is a question of durations. One attention span does not perfectly synchronize with another. Silences overlap, perhaps even lay askew. They seem not to attend to each other, and for a moment at least, the each other is thrown into doubt. Where would each other be in the absence of attention? Well, let's not rush to fill every silence with a lack of attention.
Will silence tell us whether it masks attentiveness or inattentiveness? Will words?
Labels: dialectics, Irigaray, listening, panecastics, silence
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has issued a smog alert for Seattle where I happen to be visiting. Should I logically conclude that the sunshine has an ugly side? Or would that be the meanest form of obscurantism? Anyway, here I am cooped up in a hotel room with Kristeva and Winnicott and no inclination to really write. So here is a list of some books I've picked up in Seattle (with one exception either used or deeply discounted):
Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town, by Leela Prasad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
Mothers in Mourning, with the Essay Of Amnesty and Its Opposite, by Nicole Loraux (trans. Corinne Pache, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Man and People, by José Ortega y Gasset (trans. Willard Trask, New York: Norton, 1957)
Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective, by Dan Zahavi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, by Luce Irigaray (trans. Mary Beth Mader, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
History, the Human, and the World Between, by Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
The Philosophy of the Present, by George Herbert Mead (ed. Arthur E. Murphy with a preface by John Dewey, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1959)
Sharing the World, by Luce Irigaray (London: Continuum, 2008).
The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, by Albert Murray (New York: Pantheon, 1996)
Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile, by Harold Skulsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
The Vocation of Man, by Johann Fichte (trans. Peter Preuss, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
Labels: breathing, dialectics, reading lists
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Verbal sequencing may be broken by an impulse–perhaps an impulse belonging to somebody–to think otherwise. Would such an impulse then be pathological?
Panecastic translation, to be communicative, would have to consist of something other than brute transpositions.
An idea of distributive meanings might be helpful, a distributive idea of distributive meanings. Disambiguate.
If one does not feel the impulse of a meaning, one is without that very meaning. That's a transposition. Does it leave room for questioning? Can we question that which has not been lost? In what sense is something lost when only its verity appears to be lost? Is there ever anything we can find by losing its verity? Does our transposition leave room for true ambiguity? Can we be true to ambiguity on anything like an equal footing?
The breach, when it's at home, means the impromptu thought. It means, among other things, thinking on the spot rather than on the basis of first principles. It is not a call for the destruction or negation of principles. It does call upon a capacity to step away from first principles, and an ability to think otherwise which may lead to a practical negation of first principles, were practice dialectical, a fact which would have to be posed and decided in practice, or, perhaps it might be said, in the breach. Just as the breach brings us to think urgency or exigency–and also a certain kind of indigence that would pull us back from the boundaries of thought–so it brings us to think the impulse. Do we give in to the impulse? A distributive idea of pulsation.
How do we let the impromptu be?
I say in a thousand ways that the aleatory encounter is a high ideal that few reach in practice, but when will I learn?
For what reason do we say that misunderstandings are pathological, abnormal, accidental, or, in the jargon of the sociologist, dysfunctional? When I call academic disciplines "curiosities" I am playing with the professor's mYrror. However, if things like discursive formations exist, we might rather wish to not represent a professorial self at all. On the other hand, perhaps we have evidentiary reasons to inquire after connections between distributive misunderstandings and professorial selves.
Who is the self we know through misunderstandings? How does meeting this person impact our habits of feeling?
My interest in the misunderstanding is not merely descriptive but rather therapeutic. I would like to alleviate the suffering that comes–perhaps indirectly, belatedly for sure–from having understood too much, even while knowing that I feel compelled to reach for further understanding. I should be careful of taking that feeling with me into any effort to understand. A compulsion to disappear.
Why wouldn't a distributive misunderstanding be therapeutic? Under what circumstances should we want to make an effort towards misunderstanding?
My problem with placing the iter-able before the iteration, which is generally a problem with intellectualism, amounts to this: I won't assume that the things I have made essential to my life are also essential to your life, because if I were wrong it would feel as if something essential between us had died. My world has more than enough grief as it is.
Labels: dialectics, improvisation, Kristeva, meaning, misunderstanding, panecastics, paths, pulsative function, repetition