Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The so-named rhetorical question, an ironic trope at first blush, is in truth an example of the speculative question. The ignorance of the speaker doesn't really amount to much in this case. The totally ironic question is something altogether different, for total irony points to an irrevocable split between phenomenon and essence "beyond their recuperable identity" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 29). The opening up of the possibility for total ironic questioning readies thinking for philosophy, philosophy in its post-Socratic phase, which has become synonymous with philosophy itself. The ironic question, ironically both phenomenon and condition for a phenomenon of questioning, exists as a prepatory gesture, and hence its eidos remains in withdrawal. Its eidos forever becomes recallable as the unrecallable: "The infinite absolute negativity of the Socratic standpoint. . . is to have the Idea merely as limit, to recollect it only as the non-recollectable" (p. 33, Kangas' emphasis).
The critique of the eroticization of the question, which eroticism almost amounts to a paraphilia among the clerisy (as does, ironically, critique), paradoxically calls for a poetics of inquiry, and implies not the temperament—poetic temperament could only be determined in its cold state—but the life of a poet. Philosophy gives us to think, poetically as must needs be, the enigmatic existence of an original preparatory thinker, of a *Socrates, in the spasm of the question. Is it possible to emulate Socrates and still be critical of the philosophical question? How do we emulate enigma, or simply admire the enigmatic existence, without succumbing to obscurantism?
In the Socratic movement, philosophy, the question "receives a radical priority over any expository discourse aiming at knowledge" (p. 24, my emphasis). Is the search for knowledge via the question supervened in favor of an apeironic priority of questioning, a priority indifferent to being and nothingness? Kangas here at this juncture equates the radical priority of Socrates' question concerning the good with the radical priority of "the original possibility of questioning—Socrates maintains a relation to the excess implied in any new beginning. Remaining faithful to this excess is the condition for remaining faithful to Socrates' 'historical-actual, phenomenological existence'" (ibid.). Fidelity to Socrates' enigmatic existence paradoxically means allowing the figure of Socrates to recede behind the absolute priority of inquiry.
Having drawn a distinction between the ironic and the speculative, between the preparation and the journey, do we then, in inquiry, seek knowledge? Not in an expository way, one might answer. Yet we might still investigate how we imagine these things are put against one another, journey and preparation, if that's how our imagination approaches the problematic. Does the absolute irony of the question ever cross paths with the expository? Or is this crossing of paths what is meant by the "enigmatic existence" of the philosopher?
Labels: anamnesis, apeiron, excess, existence, ideation, Kangas, Kierkegaard, philosophy, questions, totality Socrates
Friday, July 17, 2009
Corradi Fiumara calls for a deeper appreciation of the reader on the part of writers of philosophical texts:
In a perspective of open systems, Danto suggests that we should not overlook the way in which philosophy functions as literature does, not in the sense of extravagant literary artefacts, but as engaging with readers in striving towards some sense of organic unity. Literature, in fact, can be regarded as being about the reader at the moment of reading through the process of reading. In his view the texts require the act of reading in order to be complete, and it is as readers of a certain type that philosophical texts address us at all; the variety of texts implies a correspondingly great variety of possible kinds of reader, and hence of theories of what we are in the complex attitude of reading something. The propensity to neglect the reader is a derivative of an inclination to leave creatures of the sort readers exemplify outside the situation which the text purports to cope with. Some outlooks almost constitute examples of such an oversight, as if supported by a view of philosophical writing which renders the reader nearly evanescent; it is a view which sustains a sort of "disembodied professional conscience," in Danto's language. He also remarks that science can get away this largely because even when it is about readers, it "is not about them as readers and so lacks the internal connection philosophical texts demand because they are about their readers as readers." If we rotate the discussion in this sense, then we come to appreciate an inescapable live relationship between any living beings engaged in philosophy in its real sense.
(Metaphoric, p. 25)
Noting a movement from regarding the philosophic text as artefact to a forum of vital philosophic engagement, this would present an opportunity to revisit any obligation the writer has to produce readerly texts–but do we read necessarily with an ideal writer in mind?
Like a fern choreosophic textuality unfurls in the direction of the spasmoreal. The evanescence of the reader implied by the gesture towards sudden reality, evanescence is at the same time made evanescent by the implication of a choreography. A rhythmic reading of the text is solicited, a reading which calls into question any finitude attached to reading. Did it have to be there in the first place in order to be called into question? In saying something is "called into question" do we affirm its reality at any level?
The relation between rhythmosophic reading–a style of reading that reads and rereads, relearns and therefore unlearns–and spasmorealization is akin to preparation, and also to unlearning. Just as one selects which texts to read, one selects which texts to reread. Which are the texts that are most likely to lead to spasmorealizations? What are their attributes?
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, philosophy, reading, spasmoreality, text
Monday, June 22, 2009
"A philosophy of nothingness," Barbaras writes (Being, p. 121), "is still not realized as long as it defines nothingness as pure nothingness. Nothingness is genuinely nothingness only if it is not nothingness through and through." What is it about nothingness that's not like itself, adulterated through and through? Say that silence is a way of experiencing nothingness. Has there ever been in your experience a moment of unadulterated silence? What would you want to say about it?
Labels: Barbaras, nothingness, philosophy, silence
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Every word I set before me violates the thinking I want to venture, thinking I ask you to take up, knowing all too well that in asking I present you with a dilemma. To talk about loneliness is to disturb loneliness. Loneliness makes itself difficult to talk about, and, concomitantly, difficult to talk to. Its withdrawal is complete. Look. Already I've offended it. Is this reticence the only recourse loneliness has against thought? Is that the problem, that loneliness not only does not want to be spoken to, but that it does not want to be thought, not even in loneliness, not even in being desolate, in being able to say, in full conviction, "I am desolate." Cruel loneliness, because it's also the case that to be lonely is to be alone with one's thoughts.
I am forsaken. Wonder flees from the things of this world. The trees refuse understanding. Has wonder taken refuge in solitude? Solitude. I should hesitate to think that loneliness would be content to die in its own arms. Loneliness does not say "contentment" on its own. Yet neither does the impulse to fly into another's arms arise from loneliness alone. Such an impulse, with respect to loneliness, can only be a response. Loneliness doesn't do responses. Perhaps a philosophy of loneliness could only be like an invitation to a dialogue that couldn't be refused because it couldn't be responded to, an invitation as if from the dead.
Appearance disappears as appearance, disappearance behind disappearance. Loneliness remains as an unknown–I ask that we resist thinking that we know what the unknown represents in order to appreciate the dilemma of loneliness, to contemplate the dilemma of loneliness a moment, just one moment, before discussing it. When I say "I know loneliness" I believe I'm speaking honestly, yet at the moment I can honestly say "I don't know loneliness." It resists being known. Does it merely resist being the object of a thought, destined for speech, perhaps, or does it resist knowledge as such? It has occurred to me that loneliness can only be known as a dilemma. That would mean, however, that loneliness would be open to being philosophically exposed as a dilemma, as an unknown that we can all remember, despite its turning its back on discourse. Could loneliness then only be approachable through philosophy? Not all discourses are equal. It needs to be said. Does loneliness preliminarily refuse every discourse, or just those directed at it? Those directed at exposing it as contradiction? Those may be the least able to speak to loneliness. At the same time, I feel that its contradiction, its stance against saying, means something.
Loneliness has a world, but it is an empty world. I risk contradicting myself. "Loneliness doesn't do responses." Yet its inwardness could be seen as a response to an emptying of the world, or to another movement of discourse away from a soul that has the auxiliary effect–loneliness doesn't do auxiliary, it would isolated from that effect–of emptying the world. I hesitate to note a difference between the manifestation of loneliness and the existence of loneliness if only because, in setting loneliness before consciousness in this way, in treating it as a thing that can be set before us, we risk talking about something else instead of loneliness, risk losing it in our very approach. Nevertheless I feel that loneliness wants to be talked about, that perhaps its suppression holds a secret to centuries of conversation. I see symptoms of a desolation, symptoms of a powerful it, though I may perhaps find that loneliness is first experienced as happening to me, or even as purely me happening to me. (Apparently now I am speaking of events in an inner world, an inner stage, and yet....) How do I feel about being separated from loneliness? Do my feelings about loneliness matter if they appear in an empty world?
Fragile, irrefragable loneliness–I've already said too much.
Labels: dialogue, loneliness, noesis, philosophy, solitude
Friday, November 10, 2006
If Deleuze is right that philosophy is about creating concepts, then I wonder if I will ever be a philosopher, because the simplest concepts stupify me. Lately I've been ruminating on concepts of thinking, being, life, the body, the subject, the world. I don't know what these concepts mean, not conceptually, not with any certainty. I don't have knowledge of them, don't know what such knowledge would resemble or how it could be described. I read descriptions and occasionally offer some of my own, but they remain provisional in my mind. I'm not dead certain about anything I write here. Even my recent disagreement with Judith Butler, which I feel strongly about, really boils down to little more than a sense that the kind of evidence that would support her assertion isn't the kind of evidence that would matter; it's a question of having the right perspective about what is originary in experience, and while I can't say exactly what the right perspective is, I feel I can recognize a strong claim such as hers as being dubious, as not being true to life. That's not a whole lot offer, I know.
Nontheless I remain open to creative philosophical concepts, and I take some pleasure in reading and sharing those with you. So allow me to mention "passibility," as understood by Jean-François Lyotard ("Something Like: 'Communication....without Communication,' in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, pp. 108-118). Passibility is neither an activity nor a passivity, but rather a feeling, a possibility of experiencing (pathos) that presupposes a donation (pp. 110-111). This feeling is "the immediate welcoming of what is given" (p. 111).
Lyotard is talking about aesthetic sentiment, but I wonder whether this mode of experiencing (pathos) isn't more generalizable. It's not perfectly clear. Lyotard states that the donation, equivalent to what Heidegger calls Being, "which is experienced before (or better, in) any capture or conceptualization gives matter for reflection, for the conception, and it is on it, for it, that we are going to construct our aesthetic philosophy and our theories of communication" (p. 111). Now is this passibility then the inauguration of a philosophy of the aesthetic or an aesthetics of philosophy? Perhaps it depends on what we make of his emphasis on the word "in." In one sense the conceptual, philosophy's stock-in-trade, becomes like so much gift wrapping, an inversion of the priveleged relation of concept over style.
Should philosophy be disconcerting? If so, there's a lot to be said for Lyotard's passibility. But even then I don't know what to make of gift wrapping. People handle it in all kinds of ways, and I can't say any one of them is the only right way to do it. Here's Lyotard to walk it home:
Passibility: the opposite of 'impassibility'? Something is not destined for you, there is no way to feel it. You are touched, you will only know this afterwards. (And in thinking you know it, you will be mistaken about this 'touch.') We imagine that minds are made anxious by not intervening in the production of the product. It is because we think of presence according to the exclusive modality of masterful intervention. Not to be contemplative is sort of an implicit commandment, contemplation is perceived as a devalorized passivity.
(p. 118)
Labels: givenness, Lyotard, philosophy