Fido the Yak

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

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:49 AM. 2 comments

Edward Casey imagines a distinct variety of silence, a soundlessness that is not a strict silence but "an amorphous auditory state in which no specific sound is heard" (Imagining, p. 27, his emphasis). Let's flesh out this image and study it. Imagine an amorphous auditory envelope in which one can sense the presence of voices, one feels enveloped in voices, yet no specific voice can be heard. An intimate bustle, intimate and slow. Something like breathing, irregular, vague, on the cusp of being respiratory. Murmurs. Subvocal vibrations. An infrasonic, glacial ebullience. Swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. (Our images not nearly our own, we borrow freely from cultural memory.) Splashes of voices, mere splashes without any clear sense of being animated, or of having sense at all. What can we learn from such an image of a voicelessness, or such images, such a flow of imagining, if we can talk about flow while suspending a question of continuity?

Casey cites Bachelard on "the need to animalize which lies at the origin of imagination" (I might say the need to animate, or even the desire to animate.) Bachelard continues, "The primary function of imagination is to make animal forms" (Lautréamont, p. 51, IN Imagining, p. 30). The connection between the animate and the form brings to mind a passage from an interview of Michel Henry that Michael Tweed translated and Shahar blogged about. Henry says (my bold):

A form is not actually a kind of exterior entity, but the expression of a force. The point, straight line, broken line, etc., are the expression of specific forces that occur in different ways, continuous or intermittent, in the same direction or changing direction. And the theory of forms, which refers to forces, refers at the same time to subjectivity, because the forces inhabit our body, our lived body, our subjective body that is our actual body. Consequently the world of forms is, in some way, a coded universe the true meaning of which amounts to the play of forces within us, hence to life, for the living body is a body that is made of forces: such is the origin of painting. Further, it is an invisible element, the invisible force with which the living body is identified, that is the principle of the composition of a painting.

So, incidentally, we might think that forms are already animated, animalized, animal, or on the verge of becoming animal, i.e. dynamic. Perhaps we are speaking of an animot voicelessness–yet we have before us precisely an amorphous voicelessness. Is there a dynamism without forms? Would such amorphousness perhaps be chimeral, a blending of for(ce)(m)s rather than a negation of for(ce)(m)s? Does our voicelessness under study here reveal in any discussable way a desire to animate? What would wildness mean if it weren't animated? A journey behind the back of forms–but how does it feel, this voicelessness?

Casey says that for humans "the voice seems to be intrinsic to the human body and not just an accompaniment of it" (pp. 32-33). It's hard to imagine a disembodied voice, he argues. Is it hard to imagine a disembodied voicelessness? Imagine a body without gestures, the body as womb perhaps. Now imagine an amorphous collaqueation of bodies without gestures, bodies without voices. This image of bodies without gestures accords with my image of amorphous voicelessness, but before agreeing that it is indeed easier to imagine an embodied voicelessness than a disembodied voicelessness I'd want to make sure that being without gestures doesn't represent a kind of disembodiment. Perhaps it even represents a kind of de-animation, an inversion of the basic function of imagination. Wouldn't that also be a power of the imagination? Can't we imagine with our whole bodies being outside of our bodies? There are limits? Silence, perhaps, is such a limit. Our dubious silence of the indistinct voices takes place at a border between the felt body and silence. Perhaps it is a shadow place, or even a shadow silence. And whose silence would that be? Now that the thought is out there, can you imagine it as either belonging or not belonging to anybody?

Thus a paradox of unwilled spontaneity, an imagination that imagines itself as other, may be at play in the image of voicelessness. In speaking about the relative spontaneity of an image, Casey has three things in mind: (1)its unsolicited arising, its feeling as if it effortlessly appeared, (2) its instantaneous, and (3) its capacity to surprise (p. 34). He regards the first as most crucial. Possibly we merely forget that we have called upon the imagination, that we have in fact solicited an image, and this forgetting allows for the illusion of spontaneity. However, what if the "illusion" of spontaneity is a necessary precursor to our imaginings? Or simply another way of saying how we imagine? We let our imaginations run wild. We let them function. We let spontaneity be, and this letting be of spontaneity takes the form of images. To let be is decidedly not to will. To will a spontaneity would be to will it out of existence, out of all irreality. The image is an unclaimed spontaneity. If it is called for, it is called for by a surprise that it creates the conditions for. Spontaneous voicelessness vanishes in the instant it reveals itself as surprise, at the border between the emergence of a human voice and an amorphousness. Voicelessness is a image from an unclaimed life, from the wild.

Labels: Bachelard, Casey, imagination, silence, spontaneity, surprise

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:53 AM. 0 comments

Irigaray says that "Brahma exists only through the capacity to pose a question beyond what already exists" (Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček, New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, p. 41). Should we think of questioning as a transcendental gesture? Does transcendence even begin to do justice to the question. Imagine then a yonder side of already being. Does the question bring to light a yonder that otherwise wouldn't have been anticipated? What is a yonder that is not? A mediated yonder?

Is surprise a yonder of already?

Think of an idea like "the being of the question" or "?-being." In succumbing to a desire to bestow being upon the question, if only, perhaps, for the sake of fixing a topic of conversation, do we not risk asking less of ourselves than the question invites? What is there of ourselves beyond what is? The question is prejudicial. Who is there of ourselves beyond who we are? A transcendence both of and beyond–don't think there isn't any risk involved in asking too little, or in allowing too little to be asked. Too little risk is also a risk to be weighed, to be questioned.

Was the question already beyond what already exists, or was it posed there? To compose a beyond that questions what already exists: who are they that exist through such a capacity? Those who surprise? Who isn't ("(non)-being") most authentically surprising?

I wouldn't say that I know Luce Irigaray, if only through her writings, because that might imply that the capacity to surprise had somehow vanished from her works. We go back. We read anew. I'm not sure how we could say that the text is what already exists while it yet affords possibilities of posing questions beyond itself. Do we want things to be depleted? Is that a meaning of the bestowal of onticity? What is the silence that comes with the relinquishment of words? It may constitute a kind of violence to hear such a silence as impersonal. It may constitute an imponderable stupidity not to hear the implicit question in the silence that comes with the withdrawal from words.

Labels: Brahma, Irigaray, ontology, questions, silence, surprise, text, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:53 AM. 0 comments

Ellen Dissanayake brings a wealth of knowledge and a sharp intellect to bear on the question of the origins of music ("Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction," The Origins of Music, Wallin et al. (eds.), Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 389-410). The Abstract:

Speculations about the biological origins of music, like other human social behaviors, typically assume that competition affecting reproductive success was and is the ultimate evolutionary driving force. A different approach maintains that human music originated in perceptual, behavioral, cognitive and emotional competencies and sensitivities that developed from primate precursors in survival-enhancing, affiliative interactions (using ritualized packages of sequential vocal, facial and kinesthetic behaviors) between mothers and infants under six months of age. Thus music in its origins is viewed as a multimedially presented and multimodally processed activity of temporally and spatially patterned–exaggerated and regularized–vocal, bodily, and even facial movements. It is held that because of increasing infant altriciality during hominization, the primate propensity for relationship or emotional communion, not simply sociability, became so crucial that special affiliative mechanisms evolved to enhance and ensure it. These mechanisms in turn could be further developed (as in the temporal arts, including music) to serve affiliative bonding among adults in a species where close cooperation also became unprecedentedly critical for individual survival. That musical ability (like any variable attribute) can be and is used competitively in particular instances is not denied. However, the hypothesis offered here is able to address and account for music's specific and widely attested power to coordinate and conjoin individuals both physically and psychologically.

Any evolutionary argument about Homo sapiens that notices extreme altriciality is probably on the path to some sort of knowledge. Here I only mean to comment on a few of Dissanayake's observations rather than continue her argument against predominant conjectures in the field of sociobiology. However, we should be clear as to the kind of activity she means for us to attend to, and it's helpful in that regard to clearly understand her argument:

The trend towards increasingly helpless infants surely created intense selective pressure for proximate physiological and cognitive mechanisms to ensure longer and better maternal care. I suggest that the solution to this problem was accomplished by coevolution in infants and mothers of rhythmic, temporally patterned, jointly maintained communicative interactions that produced and sustained positive affect–psychobiological brain states of interest and joy–by displaying and imitating emotions and motivations of affiliation, and thereby sharing, communicating, and reinforcing them.

(p. 390)

Dissanayake would direct our attention in the first place not to maternal singing but rather to rhythmic interactions between infants and primary care givers prior even to the onset of babble.

I do not refer to lullabies or to maternal singing but to early interactions, ritualized packages of sequential behaviors, vocal, facial, and kinesic, between mothers and infants under six months of age. I thus view music in its origin more broadly than as vocalizations, rather, as a multimodal or multimedia activity of temporally patterned movements. I also emphasize its capacity not only to attract and charm individuals, but to coordinate the emotions of participants and thus promote conjoinment.

(ibid., Dissanayake's emphases)

Dissanayake is saying that music and movement are originally one. This perspective leads her to be critical of various theoretical assumptions about music, language and cognition. "As theorists tended to neglect the importance of gesture to language and thought and the importance of prosody to spoken language, so the integral importance of bodily movement in musical behavior has been overlooked," she says (p. 397). It is silent and motionless listening which would need to be explained (making one point of agreement with James H. Johnson). Further, she asks us to be critical of the established science of mother-infant interactions, arguing that an "overemphasis on vocal behavior in mother-infant studies also distorted and confused theoretical debate and conjecture" (ibid.). She clearly asserts that "[d]espite the research emphasis on highly vocal, dramatic, American middle-class interactions of mothers and infants, kinesics is the dominant interactive modality at four months" (p. 398, my bold).

I have to admit a soft spot for anybody who would trace the idea the temporal arts are about the transmission of emotional dispositions from one generation to the next back to The Andaman Islanders. I'm going to have to raise a quibble though, for what it's worth. Dissanayake says that it's not enough to look at rhythmicity alone in mother-infant interactions. She argues that instead we need to look at how violations of expectation structure experience; we need to look at how anticipations are created, manipulated, delayed and satisfied (or not, I reckon). This is an argument about affect and sharing affect. Theorists of affect, she tells us, regard affect in general as "a response to some change–to novelty, strangeness, or uncertainty"(p. 395). She cites Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann's "Representation and internalization in infancy: Three principles of salience," to tell us that infants' expectations in dyadic interactions are organized according to (1) regulation, (2) disruption and repair, and (3) heightened affective moments. Dissanayake says that "[e]xperience is organized by contrast, disjunction, and difference" but perhaps she means only to describe experience in one phase of disruption and repair on the way to heightened affective moments. In talking about music and its antecedents should we be talking about experiences organized by contrast, disjunction and difference, as well as the emotional response to such strangeness? If so, then a question arises in my mind. Although we may grant that our emotional responses to music are difficult to describe, they should in principle be empirically knowable. I would propose that the agent of musical experience and the agent of knowing a musical experience should both be called "consciousness," though I am not unaware of the problematic nature of talking about consciousness and agency in such a way. So we're coming up to my quibble. Dissanayake reports that "[t]ogether, mother and baby practice and perfect their attunement by engaging in mutually improvised (jointly constructed) dyadic interactions in which each partner tracks the durations of movements and holds in emotionally expressive behaviors of face and body, or vocal phrases and pauses (sounds and silences), of the other." She then concludes that "[t]he rapidity with which these sequences are performed suggests that they occur partly or fully out of conscious control"(p. 391). Well, nothing of the kind has been suggested to me. On the contrary learning about the emotional capabilities of infants leads me to believe that consciousness is not as slow as some theories, folk and scientific, would have us believe. If we're going to accept Dissanayake's invitation to look beyond rhythmicity to coordinations of expectation and surprise, and I presume, conjoinments of emotional responses to the unexpected, i.e. conjoinments of surprise, wouldn't we have to be talking about conscious experiences even if we meant, for some reason, to talk about the conscious mind's encounters with the unconscious, that is, irruptions of the uncanny or some such? Just a quibble, and one I've left in the form of a question because I'd like to be open to a variety of ways of talking about consciousness.

Labels: Dissanayake, dyad, infancy, motility, music, passions, rhythm, surprise

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:48 AM. 0 comments

A memory of taking the blue bowl down from the kidaka. A secret object enclosed in a pouch will have been placed behind the bowl. Or in the bowl. It will come back to me, but it won't all come back to me. In the center of the room a bowl of oranges. Come sit. We may be on Lamu, or we may be on Unguja. We may be in Malindi. My thoughts return to the mountains, as always.

Sean M. Kelly (not to be confused with the Sean Kelly of Seeing Things), in an essay (pdf) for the latest Integral Review, quotes part of a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga concerning a capacity for having a memory of the future. Kelly's quotation leaves off just before Aurobindo says, "But this capacity works at first sporadically and uncertainly and not in an organised manner" (Part 4, Chapter 26). This sentence of Aurobindo's vitally qualifies the idea of a memory of the future. It invites us to examine experiences of imagination, or specifically imagined events (and thus also our understanding of time) in such a way as to not obliterate the vicissitude or otherwise completely level out experience–it should be clear that here I am not pursuing a perfection of consciousness but rather attempting to gain some insight on a phenomenon of experience. How would a memory of the future be experienced? Would we say that the future is remembered, or might it be memorized? What can't we commit to memory?

What is the relation between memory and thought? If it seems that the cogito remembers, that it exists temporally, is it also apparent that memory thinks?

What is the relation between memory and imagination? If we view a relation to the future through memory as paradoxical or nonsensical does it follow that we are viewing memory as something other than a mode of the imagination? Must there be in memory an unquestioned relation to the past? I ask again, what is passage? If we reject memories of the future on the grounds that memory must concern the past, are we in danger of being baffled by passage? Are transcendental consciousness and the passage of time ideas equally about passage? (It is not my place to deny extension to consciousness, and I have not yet assigned any such meanings to interiority.)

We may be lead to believe that the dream takes place in the loneliest of lonelinesses. If we stay true to the path of the dream, however, the loneliest of lonelinesses is shown to be a place reserved for the appearance of demons who offer demonic choices as to how we are to respond to their riddles–demons only ever offer demonic choices. They are after all not sphinges but demons. Let's ask whether the oneiric temporality properly takes place, or whether it represents a passage out of place. Have I just presented you with a demonic choice? To answer dreaming with dreaming. The residue of a contour.

What would oneiric translucency say to us about passage? I follow the aporetic ways of anamnesis; aporetically is how I begin to see through to the meaning of passage.

A trailing off into the dew. It's still like being inside the brool. The bedroom window. Waking up from a heart attack into a heart attack. Adrenaline. They dragged the lion off for questioning, the police. They broke his throat. Two or three blows and he went silent, limp. They dragged him away while we lay dreaming. For anamnesis.

When I hand you an orange the surprise of your laughter has been no less dreamy for having been remembered as a surprise. To live with our vicissitudes means to allow for surprise. Does memory concern those things which may be repressed, things which may be disallowed? What would make surprise irrepressible? That surprise would be irrepression itself?

Labels: aporia, dreaming, imagination, memory, Sean M. Kelly, Sri Aurobindo, surprise, temporality, transcendence

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:59 PM. 0 comments

Jean-Paul Sartre claims that introspective reflection on the imagination yields a statics of the image and nothing more (The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber, Routledge, 2004, p. 15). Based upon my own intropection I dispute this claim, and therefore I also question some of the distinctions Sartre has drawn between imagination and perception which presume that images in their rawest form are isolated and static.

Imagine a chair. I imagine a chair like an egg cut on the bias with a pedastal or base. The base narrows, and then widens to encompass the whole of the body of the chair. It narrows again. The chair swivels on the base, then it wobbles, then it is fixed. The base is black, then off-white like the chair. It emerges from the wall instead of the floor, and then the ceiling. It is a net. It is an electrogravitational field of some sort. The chair materializes when Pierre drops his butt into it. It is ecru, egg-shell, winter white, bright white, mushroom white. The chair is a mushroom. The chair is an off-white recliner. The sections drift apart and spring back. It is soft as a baby's bottom. Pierre is embarrassed that I spotted him carressing the upholstery. It has little bumps. The arms of the chair are flanges, wings. The chair flaps its wings. They are flanges again. A control panel is set in the right flange to adjust the chair's dopamine levels. A wicked thick needle emerges from the head rest. An internet jack at the base of the skull. On the flange is a tray for the dental equipment. A bright light shines in Pierre's open mouth. Molars you could sit in. The chair trembles. It rattles. It clasps Pierre's ankles and wrists and then lets go. Hoppity hop chair. Bouncing pony saddle with gold stirrups. And so on.

Did I imagine one transmogrifying chair or forty different chairs? (The number forty is rhetorical. It could have been forty thousand. This is important when one considers the putative infinite inexhaustibility of perception and how this compares to the repletion of the imaginary. If forty won't cover it, perhaps forty thousand will.) Does the imagination deal in static images, or does it deal in imagery, projects of imagination, or, indeed, phantasmagoria? I think it's easier to imagine that the image is wrested from the phanstamagoric flow than to imagine that the phantasmagoric is composed of pasted-together static images. Is the consciousness of the chair as imaged static or dynamic? To answer such questions I can only recommend that you yourself imagine a chair and study your imagination.

Some further questions arise from Sartre's investigation of the image. He says, "An image is not learned: it is organized exactly as the objects that are learned, but, in fact, it is given whole, for what it is, in its appearance" (p. 9). By learning objects he means multiplying possible points of view on them. (Hmm.) He says that things in the perceptual world are characteristically overflowing while things in the imaginary world are impoverished. The image, he says, contains only what is put there by consciousness. Perhaps there is some truth to this, but I would question whether imaginative putting is typically exhausted in a single act, like a snapshot.

Let's hone in on the immediacy of the image according to Sartre. He says that in imagining something that moves "there will never be the smallest time-lag between the object and the consciousness. Not a second of surprise: the object that is moving is not alive, it never preedes the intention. But neither it is inert, passive, 'worked' from the outside, like a marionette: the consciousness never precedes the object, the intention reveals itself at the same time as it realizes itself, in and by its realization" (p. 11, Sartre's emphasis). Sartre remarks in an endnote that hypnagogic imagery may be an exception to this, that hypnagogic images resist consciousness. I wonder though whether hypnagogia doesn't teach us something essential about the imagination, and whether we have in our wakeful lives the capacity to be surprised by our imagination. I believe that if I allow my imagination free rein (again with the horses) I can be surprised by images. Since digging into Sartre's study of the imagination I can't be certain about whether this is true for others.

Now Sartre says something about the imagination that I think must be partially true (or, in fact, mutably true). He says that the imaging consciousness "is spontaneous and creative; it supports, maintains by continuous creation, the sensible qualities of its object" (p. 15, my emphasis). Of course in this post I am questioning whether or how the imagination maintains or conserves the object as imaged. I would argue that precisely because it does operate by continuous creation the imagination does not have conservation or maintenance as its goal, and because the image springs from a "deep spontaneity that cannot be assimilated to the will" (p. 18, my emphasis) it has surprise as one of its possibilities. However, I must confess that my imagination of the chair this morning is in part a remembering of an episode of imagination that occurred on Thanksgiving, an episode that has been relived, in parts, since then. Though I am able to imagine newly–at this moment for instance the chair is a red button–I also imagine oldly, which suggests that indeed the imagination does maintain sensible qualities and in various aspects conserve the object as imaged. Remembering is generally part of my writing process, as I often think in bed, in the shower, while reading, exercising or otherwise occupying my mind away from the computer, and I typically write in the mornings when my mind is clear and strong, as far as that goes. So there does appear to be an element of maintenance involved in the imagery of the chair I've given. Is this the work of memory completely separate from the work of imagination, or do the imagination and the memory operate on the same wave lengths? Do they produce the same sort of results? Sartre says that imaging consciousness "feels itself to be consciousness through and through and homogenous with other consciousnesses that have preceded it and with which it is synthetically united" (p. 14, my emphasis). I remain uncertain about the relationship between imagination and memory.

(I will take the opportunity to announce here that I will be devoting some thought to Mnemosyne, and thinking memory as a mindfulness of something other than la même, though perhaps la même cannot be avoided.)

Finally, does the imaged object give itself as a nothingness? Well, Sartrean nothingness may be especially replete. It may make sense to speak of irreality and a transversal consciousness that has no object. I don't know what this nothingness has to do with certainty though, and it is certainty that Sartre is claiming to uncover in these opening chapters. I don't doubt that Sartre was imaginatively conscious of some objects or that he reported honestly on what he observed. Nevertheless, I can't share his confidence in the certainty of the data of introspection. I am certain about the imagery of the chair that I've had, and I suspect that my imagination does traffic in uncertainties, but I have no illusion that I therefore know how the imagination works in every instance, for everybody. What is the relationship between the phantasmagoric faculty that I've discovered and your own imagination of a chair? And how would such a faculty actually relate to memory or to other consciousnesses? Is perception really the arena of inexhaustibility, or is it the imagination that supplies the forty thousand aspects of a thing?

Labels: chairs, imagination, introspection, Sartre, surprise

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:57 AM. 0 comments

Nancy thinks that freedom must be thought in its absoluteness, which means that it must be distinguished from every concept of freedom that would be opposed to, and therefore relative to, anything like fatality (The Experience of Freedom, p. 110). In the course of exploring this idea Nancy thinks the temporality of surprise in a way that put me in mind of Tengelyi's idea of a present that has never been future. However, whereas Tengelyi thinks such temporality as belonging to a destinal event, Nancy wants us to imagine a suddenness of time that would happen without happening in time. The time of the surprise seems to be a time outside of time that, if it belongs to anything, belongs to freedom. "This is the structure of surprise (and it will form the exact reverse of the structure of the present): it takes place without having happened; it will therefore not have taken place, but will have opened time, through a schematism of the surprise whose 'I' would surprise itself" (p. 114). Nancy doesn't explain what "the structure of the present" means, so I am a little fuzzy on what he means by its reversal. I note his consistent use of the future perfect tense to talk about the time of the surprise, and wonder if it's something paradoxical like a future that has never been present, but, then again, the sudden time doesn't really happen according to Nancy, which is another kind of paradox. He offers a few concrete ways of thinking about the time that happens without happening in time, the open time. "Open time could be the time of astonishment and upheaval, or that of interrogation and explanation" (ibidem).

"Freedom always surprises when there is no longer or not yet time. That is, when there is no longer or not yet time for time, and for the oppostion of a 'freedom' and a 'fatality,'" says Nancy, returning to his theme of freedom's absoluteness (p.115, Nancy's emphasis). He says, "Freedom separates itself from resignation and revolt not in order to do nothing, but in order to open up this separate place, which is that of the free act in its proper and revolutionary force" (p. 116). He argues that freedom is neither free will nor destiny, but an exposed existence. And, importantly, he says that surprise does not determine existence but exposes it "as an infinte generosity to time's finitude" (p. 117).

Does the revolutionary force of the free act pertain to anything that actually happens, or is it completely outside of happenings? Is it vulnerable? Exposure connotes vulnerability, and I can easily imagine the vulnerability of the giver. Does existence possess revolutionary force or any agency that would have within it or about it revolutionary force? Would "I" be surprised to find a revolutionary force at the heart of "my" exposure?

When I really start to imagine a free time, I imagine a floating time, time unmoored, dipping in and out of the course of events, giving birth to rhythm. The forces that touch upon the rhythm of events, do they have a quality of irreality? We need more ways of talking about reality. Alloreality and spasmoreality. Spasmoreality is a revolutionary force that touches upon the course of events, a force of reality sustained not by belief but by surprise.

If tragedy can be imagined according to a spasmoreality of the free time, the time of the question among other things, without opposing free will to destiny, what then becomes of destiny? On the side of freedom, we have not leveled a skepticism but instead pursued a radicalization of freedom. Do we likewise pursue a radicalization of destiny? Might that lead into a synthesis of freedom and destiny that wouldn't compromise freedom? Or do we abandon destiny to its fate? If freedom and destiny aren't spasmoreally opposed, does destiny surprise itself, as if it will have become unrecognizable? According to Nancy we are born to and die to freedom. They are verso and recto of the infinite generosity that is existence, in which we infinitely accede to freedom (p. 119). The generosity of existence is surprising, and for this reason "destination" and "liberation" say too little, because they mark conscious, willed action (p. 120). Should we be surprised by the generosity of the tragic hero?

What, concretely, is a politics of generosity? Just throwing it out there.

Labels: astonishment, freedom, generosity, Nancy, reality, surprise, temporality, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:10 AM. 2 comments

A theme of surprise has surfaced in my recent readings. Nancy talks of the surprise of freedom, Tengelyi of the surprise of new sense, and now Corradi Fiumara speaks of the emergence of something with an "almost unhoped-for spontaneity" when we properly listen to the philosophical tradition (The Other Side of Language, p. 76). I think that something is meaning. All three authors discuss meaning in some way, but whereas Nancy and Tengelyi thematize experience as the opening onto meaning, Corradi Fiumara's discussion of experience (pp. 120-123) connects the surprise of the experienced event to an attitude of not listening, rather than aligning listening directly with the unexpected. In Corradi Fiumara's existential hermeneutics the "almost" is key.

Something "speaks," in Corradi Fiumara's opinion, if it is listened for, rather than their being something said that one would subsequently listen to (p. 72). Does her thinking take us beyond the hermeneutic circle? It's not an easy question. She speaks of a "connubial listening propensity" (p. 75) and a "propensity for conjunctions, possibly similar to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling by something'" (p. 78). I feel that "dwelling by something" is not the best guide for the problem of coexistence Corradi Fiumara's work poses. The idea of the connubial, if wed to an idea of the experience of listening as that which surprises, might offer an alternative to a paradigm of meaning according to which an interpreter constructs meaning out of an engagement that requires a prior understanding of the whole of the engaged. That is, while Corradi Fiumara takes notice of coexistence, and will thematize dialogue, I'm not sure she fully appreciates plurality as it relates to meanings. Perhaps she almost does. Perhaps she will surprise me.

Labels: Corradi Fiumara, experience, Heidegger, listening, meaning, Nancy, surprise, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:45 AM. 0 comments