Monday, October 19, 2009
Perhaps Morris is being fair to Levinas when he writes, "Far from an ethics of seeing, remoteness, and the face, when we become attuned to our sense of space as a sense of living movement that crosses us with the world and other bodies, we find an ethics of being in touch, of movement, that goes back into the prior movement of development, place, and the social, a movement limited by death in the here and now, rather than the infinite of God, as in Levinas's ethics of the face" (Sense, pp. 178-179). Be that as it may, I'd like to recover from the concept of the face something of a physicality and a phenomenality that doesn't efface the infinition of the other person, a phenomenality that does recognize singularity and radical exteriority even as it's characteristically encountered by way of chthonic temporalities and indeed a certain fugaciousness of existence, for, this may be paradoxical, in order that the world be intelligible, the infinition of the other person's face necessarily functions as a hermeneutic measure of finitudes, or, more broadly, horizons. We can't properly know what finitudes mean absent the appearance of the face of the other person, and conversely and simultaneously, we need to perceive limits in order to feel transcendent ourselves, to feel our own openness to the world upon which so much of our existence depends. I suggest then that the face be thought of as radically exterior to consciousness, but not by that token remote from phenomenality, for remoteness appears in phenomenality as remoteness from, and implicitly also as remoteness from a horizon. What belongs to the from, what's embedded in the from, is not shaken free in the movement away from phenomenality; such a freedom would require yet another movement, a necessarily invisible movement decidedly not connected to the world of perception. Yet there is however a spasmodic quality to infinition, a suddenness of instantiation, implying a sudden and immediate ethics. The spasmorealization of a cadacualtic—apologies—aspect of coexistence is given in every important sense by the face of the other. Infinition so far as we know it touches upon the contingent, in so many words, which leaves us to think of not what the unknowable face would look like, or some such, but rather the meaning of the con-, which changes everything we should want to say about touch, and thus, insofar as we use touch to interpret the phenomenal world, our statements about the world or indeed even about reality, if we were given to such talk. To sum up, Morris's criticism, regardless of whether it treats Levinas' philosophy with due fairness, would be unfair to a conceptualization of the face as touchable. More strongly, the touchablity of the face informs our understanding of the infinition of the face of the other person which is not arrived at by any detour around remoteness, but through "remoteness" such as it appears exactly.
Labels: ethics, face, infinity, Levinas, Morris, singularity, touch
Friday, September 11, 2009
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
Friday, August 28, 2009
Let's begin by thinking of the temporality of the limit, the path between fields, for the limit is not tacked down but unfurls or advances–in a meaningful sense it consists of its own advance. The nature of its existence is existence, that is, the animate surpass, but much more can be said about it. We should want to know for instance whether the limit as such is necessarily schematicized. Schematicization is an aspect of embodiment, and if the limit were discovered to be a bodily phenomenon it should have this aspect. Things aren't so clear, however. We may know the limit bodily if not viscerally yet, as Morris says, "the body as a whole appears as a center of indeterminacy" (Sense, p. 66). The "body," not yet "my body," appears as the turning point of infinitions, as if the limit were, in order to be turned inside out, buried in the movements of the chiasm, earth and sprout. The limit must be passed through in order to be a limit. Such movements, infinitions, are schematicized, but the schema is not like a solid thing. It continuously arises from its own activation, autopoetically. The bodily schema, like Bergson's motor schema, is, to paraphrase Morris, a phenomenon of the limit, of chiasmic movement that (unlimitedly) limits itself (p. 67). The bodily schema unfolds in "real" time, as a limit, Morris insists (p. 69). In a sense then the limit becomes its asymptotic approach, the positioning of the telos that never quite arrives, a course of turns felt as the inhabitive cunicularity of styles of approach. The temporality of the cunicular leaps with studied suddenness, a leporine quality of both evasion and celebration, a novelty of approach; at the same time the world intrudes into the cunicular, earthy itself. The paradox of the leap: only in the leap does the earth becomes earth, take on its heaviness as earth. Earth as limit is turned inside out. Infinition reconfigures its own beyond, the repertoire of to/from structures native (as second nature) to existence within the leap. Says Morris, "The moving schema is already beyond itself, open to the world and development, ready to run into kinks that develop into new folds. The formation of such folds is a gross reorganization of body-world movement. . . that rearticulates our exploration and interaction with the world" (p. 70).
Labels: ambiguity, body, infinity, inhabitations, lagamorphs, Morris, peregrinations
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Levinas says:
For a body that labors everything is not already accomplished, already done; thus to be a body is to have time in the midst of the facts, to be me though living in the other.
This revelation of distance is an ambiguous revelation, for time both destroys the security of instantaneous, happiness, and permits the fragility thus discovered to be overcome. And it is the relation with the other, inscribed in the body as its elevation, that makes possible the transformation of enjoyment into consciousness and labor.
(Totality, p. 117)
I'll note the primacy of enjoyment and get back to what that means. What more can be said to characterize this time that is had in the midst of the facts? Is it a time of expectancies, seeing as how expectancy seems to go along with a sense that there is something yet to be accomplished? How do these expectancies manifest themselves in relation to memory, or, less thematically, to sedimentation? "Enjoyment is made of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching" (p. 112). Levinas characterizes pure existence as ataraxia while happiness, he says, is accomplishment. (Enjoyment, he says, is "the very pulsation of the I" (ibid.)). I'm not sure that ataraxia is easily attained, and, to the extent that is attainable, as freedom from worry, I'm not sure it does away with either joy or suffering. I'm not sure that raw existing, like pure existing perhaps, doesn't alternate between joy and suffering. Isn't this the very pulsation of the self, this alternation between joy and suffering? And isn't suffering made from the memory of joys? What happens to time as the beats of the self become memory? How does the process of becoming memory move through the body?
If we insist that the alternation between joy and suffering is the pulsation of the self, Levinas is then quite sure he disagrees with us. For him life is personal because it is enjoyment, not the other way around.
Life is affectivity and sentiment; to live is to enjoy life. To despair of life makes sense only because originally life is happiness. Suffering is a failing of happiness; it is not correct to say that happiness is the absence of suffering.
(p. 115, my bold)
I'm sorry but this argument makes it seem that unhappiness, instead of being a modality of experience, is something that one discovers philosophically, something that one, correctly or incorrectly, reasons one's way into. I don't think the Epicureans have been adequately responded to, much less refuted. My characterization of Levinas' argument is of course directly at odds with how Levinas asks ut to imagine enjoyment, which would not be inconsistent with a pluralism that acknowledged feelings as having priority over reasoning. So my criticism may well be unfair. Another word from Levinas:
Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an involution. What is termed an affective state does not have the dull monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in which dawns the self. For the I is not the support of enjoyment. The "intentional" structure here is wholly different; the I is the very contraction of sentiment, the pole of a spiral whose coiling and involution is drawn by enjoyment: the focus of the curve is a part of the curve. It is precisely as a "coiling," as a movement toward oneself, that enjoyment comes into play.
(p. 118, Levinas' emphasis, my bold)
Can we enjoy a vibrancy of ex-istence without withdrawing into the self, or, more promising, a vibrancy that involves and evolves at once? Is the body, the body for whom not everything is accomplished, already a vibrancy?
Labels: body, infinity, ipseity, jouissance, Levinas, memory, vibration
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
Saturday, December 13, 2008
It was the snow that drew me in under the trefoil neon illuminations on Nevada Avenue, or the shelter from the snow that drove me in. An apostate from repetition. An enigmatic thought that equivocation might only be possible on the basis of a surreptition. A clear thought. No. Vestibulary thoughts. Between the perpetual and the maginational I knew I was leaving something out, or turning things around all widdershins for some crazy reason. Was I seeking poetic closure? In any event my way was made inside.
The alfaqui told me that there are no chairs in the hypercathedral, the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Refuges, only doorways and aisles. For that reason it is also called the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Aisles. The clerics in the cathedral are well-versed in the archeology of perpetual flights. They study the pigeons several hours a day, the alfaqui assured me. "All the doors here are in the vernacular," he added. He didn't look like the type who would intentionally deceive.
The alfaqui pointed me down the corridors towards the asymptotic doors. I passed through the corridors, and I never passed through the corridors. I was joined along the way by an epopt of the Ogival Mysteries.
"What have you witnessed?"
"We study the pigeons several hours a day," said the epopt. She pulled me aside into a zero-gravity intrados where no pigeons could be seen. She touched a voussoir with the palm of her hand, and it touched her. "This is the Cathedral of a Thousand and One Refuges," she explained.
"Can you tell me more?"
"The cyma reversa represents the union of the concave and the convex." She illustrated this with her hands.
"Are all the doors here metamorphic?"
She became a pigeon.
Labels: Casey, imagination, infinity, pigeons, repetition, snow
Saturday, November 03, 2007
I've been reading David Foster Williams Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ which contains some discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. Here I'd like to say a word about the Dichotomy, and hopefully explain how a pluralist can believe in motion, that is, move and be immersed in world of motion without being paralyzed by doubt. I'd also like to say why I feel that Diogenes the Cynic, whose answer to the paradox was to silently walk, has been given short shrift.
The Dichotomy states that "that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at its goal." That's incorrect. Motion, or any abstract continuum expressly meant to represent something like motion, does not have an intrinsic halfway stage or halfway point. Only a second step of abstraction can add a halfway point to a motion. Taking that second step creates two problems, the first being that one is likely to forget one is dealing with two distinct levels of abstraction, the second being that the abstractions involved may be incommensurable. Motions and divisions are separate realities. Lines and points are separate realities, though both may be brought together under the umbrella of geometry. A certain kind of infinity, Zeno's infinitiy but not all infinite sets, may be considered an artefact of incommensurability. A pluralist is not somebody who believes in the infinite divisibility of the world, but rather in there being multiple incommensurable worlds. There's no hidden monism behind pluralism, as Zeno wrongly suggests with his infinite divisibility. There's just more than one reality.
By remaining silent while he walked, Diogenes gave a brilliant answer to the Dichotomy. He demonstrated the existence of at least two realities: the logos and locomotion. The logos isn't the only reality that philosophy might be concerned with, though it might be said that the logos is the way philosophy concerns itself with various realties. Diogenes faults the way Zeno has deployed the logos. As easily as the logos can contain, it can be contained. Diogenes contained the reality of the logos with his silence. With his feet he not so much refuted or disproved the Dichotomy according to its own implicit terms (logic) as he demonstrated an alternative mode of being that one could, if one were so inclined, believe in. The existence of an alternative to the logos having been demonstrated, the Dichotomy is shown to be inadequate to the critical task it was meant to accomplish, viz., a critique of pluralism. This is not a case of common sense versus philosophy, but of philosophical error and correction. Diogenes was undoubtedly correct.
(There might be a paradox or inconsistency in the way I've argued this. Is Diogenes' walking merely an alternative to the logos, or, as a response to a riddle, is it therefore part of the of the logos? We could see the logos as expansive, perhaps bending its own rules as it encompasses more and more activity. That might suggest a kind of monism, a crumpled monism, if one were inclined to go looking for monisms (and if one weren't so inclined one might also speak of logoi). If the logos isn't so expansive, however, Diogenes' walking takes the measure of the logos in the sense that it marks a limit. That might suggest that different realities aren't so incommensurable. I don't think that's quite right, though, because marking a limit doesn't measure a reality so much as it signifies the existence of another reality. Can one criticize monism from outside the logos? Etymologically, "critical" (κρῐτῐκός) means able to discern, able to separate. (In fact the meaning of the logos may be a mirror of criticism, of sifting and separating.) It would be imperious to say that criticism can only happen within the logos. If I say, then, that Diogenes criticized Zeno at the limit of the logos, as I'm tempted to think, am I therefore accepting of Zeno's infinity?)
Labels: criticism, Diogenes the Cynic, infinity, paradox, Wallace, Zeno
Friday, October 05, 2007
The problem with infinity is that it exhausts itself in saying "inexhaustible."
I've taken the stance that exhaustion is a condition of existing in this universe. My ambivalence towards the abyss of nothingness amounts to this: if it exists, it is woven into the fabric of being. Perhaps we need a new word for the intersistence of being and its annhiliation. Flopping down in exhaustion, the mind launches into space, thoughtless. But no condition is permanent. Thoughts return. Strength returns. The ground again becomes a ground. Someday, we imagine, impermanence too will be exhausted. When exhaustion exhausts itself, it will realize its finitude which has always been real. I don't want to exhaust myself waiting for a day that has already arrived.
Labels: exhaustion, existence, infinity
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Kristeva writes about "processes that underpin symbolicity":
Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. Fecal matter signifies, as it were, what never ceases to separate from a body in a state of permanent loss in order to become autonomous, distinct from the mixtures, alterations, and decay that run through it. That is the price the body must pay if it is to become clean and proper. Psychoanalysis has indeed seen that anal dejections constitute the first material separation that is controllable by the human being. It has also deciphered, in that very rejection, the mastered repetition of a more archaic separation (from the maternal body) as well as the condition of division (high-low), of discretion, of difference, of recurrence, in short the condition of the processes that underpin symbolicity
(The Powers of Horror, p. 108)
From my vantage point, which is rather removed, this is a case of the psychologist believing too strongly in her metaphors. I'd prefer not to doubt Kristeva's idea of an archaic separation, yet our separations from our mothers are many and complex. Here I question the belief in repetition not in order to supplant it with an idea of the ongoing, but rather to clear a space to question what it means to have faith in a metaphor. To be faithful to metaphor, what beliefs are required? Must we believe in source (mouth) and target (anus)? Must we believe that boundaries may be crossed, and if so, must we believe in boundaries? If we take seriously the defense of the psychoanalytic position, according to which the metaphor belongs to and is perhaps bodied forth by the in-fant, then must we also believe in conditions of processes that underpin symbolicity? Must we beleive in meaning? To use another metaphor, does metaphor ask us to become monotheistic or polytheistic in our beliefs? Possibly metaphor doesn't ask us to believe anything. Being faithful to metaphor expresses a commitment to expressivity or even a commitment to meaning, but such commitments do not require a foundation of belief. They require a sending with, but who can say what the truth of the sending is.
Since I don't believe in the clean and proper body (corps propre) its infinitude doesn't impress me. But I'll play along. Is infinitude an entailment of metaphor itself? Faithfulness to metaphor situates itself within the disorientation of metaphor, betwixt widdershins and deasil flows of sense. Neither difference of flows nor senses across boundaries hit me over the head with infinity, though disorientation does appear to carry beyond finite points. It's a mystery to me how finite ever got to be infinite, unless it was by a short cut–metaphor is the long way home.
The paradox of infinite becoming, i.e., the paradox of infinite identity, has not yet become a real problem for me (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, "First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming"). By the same token, I neither believe nor disbelieve in the pause. Possibly the pause is relative to the speed of metaphor, although the speed of metaphor is not constant. Metaphor is an upper mantle beneath a subterranean dualism of the hard and the soft, of that which receives and that which eludes the kneading of Dough. Metaphor can just as easily be a Tree. Metaphor disorients without asking that we be sent to infinity. Is this a paradox? Metaphor is a parable, a circumlocution. Would the infinity that metaphor would carry over to–were we prepared to believe it–be a meaninglessness? That might contain a genuine paradox, though I might still hestitate to call it a problem. The destruction of meanings is de rigueur in metaphor; it happens most casually. Does the destruction of meanings require a faith in meaninglessness or a faithlessness in meanings or neither. Perhaps a commitment to the destruction of meanings is concomitant to a commitment to expressivity. If only to clear a path. I remain agnostic about metaphor, though I follow its path.
Labels: Deleuze, infinity, Kristeva, metaphor, repetition