The limits of my language are the limits of my world, as every reasonable and cultured person knows.
My education—which feels so inadequate, yet whose exorbitant costs are still yet to be reckoned by some future debt—has taken the better part of a young adulthood. As I recently overheard upon leaving a lecture by the philosopher Alain Badiou in Westwood, it is good to know that little has changed since this study began some time ago. The names of the theorists, philosophers, professors, and writers have remained but shadows on the walls of the cave. There must be, he thinks, after years spent lost in this shadow metaphysics, some fire to make the shapes animate. It is difficult to express one’s participation in this ritual, and not wanting to reveal my ignorance, which churns ever softly beneath a film of laziness and self-medication, I have lost touch with the institution and whatever network of peers I once had the opportunity to create. Graduate students are meant to feel this way I have read, and the acuteness of my circumstances, however distinct to this particular school, is nothing new. Yet, in driving along the ugly white interstate from Echo Park to Claremont, and arriving here at this summer quiet library, I am filled with a kind of sadness that is responsive to the frame of pine and mountain the windows create. The time has not been wasted, but it is as if an opportunity has been spent. Alone, with no master and no students, and with only these books I cannot comprehend to read. Must philosophy grow in the cunning silence of a natural theology?
My own conclusions regarding the reading of Derrida involve an absolute stance on the remoteness of the system as such. Whatever platitudes we may repeat regarding the difficulty of the text would surely be true. Reading them is to solicit a beast and the true index of its dogma. Walking outside to drink coffee in the sun, I sit on the concrete ledge of library courtyard. In the near distance I see a campus building nearly transparent with novelty, a structure whose architecture behaves as if simply conjured from the blueprint so lucid and slight its lines. It is as if water was added to a child’s precocious model and it bloomed amphibious here on land. The small plaza where I sit is long and bulbs at the end like a thermometer jigged out of stone. The red steel sculpture planted in the bulb, its curved sickles pegged upright like a staff of tools hampered within a bin, sways unexpectedly in perverse little wiggles from the upland breeze blowing up from the valley into the low foothills. The plaque at the square reads the names of directors after whose “vision” the plaza is named. Further below, there along the ground of the low terrace like the “base” itself reads the name of a family whose funds provided the necessary means for the plaza.
Within the ignorance of this scene, the question of lack is ultimate. There must always be more words to circulate with precision, to penetrate the animate tones of this moment. More than a purpose, what animal must the reader be stalking, with what tools will the kill be made? What kind of beast will come to fill the void? What signs are necessary to include in order to determine the maker? In his eulogy of Derrida, Badiou wrote that Derrida was like a hunter capable of stalking an animal until the last instance of coming as close as touching before the emergence of its escape, that obscene moment when the animal moves without moving, when it is caught by death without dying.
In looking at the signs in the plaza, the building across the way, the stains of coffee along the rim of the cup, the question of origin is sublimated not only utility, but by the sensibility of objects in their repetition qua objects. As Wittgenstein wrote, “if someone sees a smile and does not know it for a smile, does not understand it as such, does he see it differently from someone else who understands it?” As in this moment, or the one before, the question before us is always what is in the object more than the object. What is possible within the engagement of the instance and what is subtracted by transcendental conditions of time and spacing? No choice is possible: whenever you try to speak against the transcendental, some matrix—striction itself (the strangulation of the concept)—constrains your discourse and forces it to place the non-transcendental, the outside of the transcendental field, what is excluded, in the structuring position. The matrix in question constitutes the excluded as a transcendental of the transcendental itself, as a simili-transcendental, as transcendental contraband.
Bluntly, out of tune: Is the trace Derrida’s version of metaphysics, that which is both present and absent, that which is presence and absence altogether, but in some non-dialectical way, and which absolute spirit can seemingly not even perceive or register, let alone tolerate? Is it possible to read into Derrida a series of statements such as these? When representation finds the infinite in itself, it appears as orgiastic rather than organic representation: it discovers within itself tumult, disquiet, and passion beneath the apparent calm, the limits of the organized. It rediscovers the monster. At that point it is no longer a matter of that happy instant that would match the entry and exit of determination into the concept in general, a relative minimum or maximum. On the contrary the eye must be myopic, hypermetropic, in order for the concept to take all the moments upon itself: the concept is now the ALL, whether it extends its benediction to all the parties or on the contrary grants a sort of absolution to their scission and misery as those are reflected back onto it. The concept thereby follows and unites with determination from one end to another, in all of its metamorphoses, and represents it as pure difference by delivering it over to a grounding or foundation in terms of which henceforth it makes no difference whether we decide we are confronting a relative minimum or maximum, a large or a small, a beginning or an end, since all those pairs coincide in the foundation as one and the same total moment which is at one and the same time the swooning away of difference and its production, its disappearance as well as its appearance (DR, 42).
What is the difference between metaphysics and ontology? Is it because dialectics cannot be another word for being? Just think of the digging and pedantically directed labor necessary to discern these words at all. It hurts to extend the motif this far, to return to the uncertain melody of a chorus, but these words, and the books that contain them, these remote spaces are like animals. The book and its languages copulate by the dominion of nature. Fantasy itself, pure idealism, is this mapping of nature, this capture without kill. The division of human contra animal is foreclosed as reality and its returns—the conditions of possibility available as thought (which I am want to call metaphysics)—have the value of Truth. A black mouthed snake falls into a dry pool. After the drop, with its poor vision and its tongued coordination like a shaman staring into the fire, the hard steep nothing led only to a pool of water. The water was shallow and nothing more than a puddle in stone. How would the question of survival arise, and after how long? What could it have made of the situation strategically? Were there vibrations in the water one black dawn? I could show you a video of what I am attempting to describe. You can follow the reference from here to somewhere else. Perhaps a machine could bring it to you, but it would not be here, literally, as it were. The video clip is entitled black mamba snake in pool. It is grainy with a low-pixel rate, which makes everything seem sort of live and out of focus. The quality improves from time to time as it becomes apparent that what you are watching is a long-thin grey snake with a black mouth being poked at with the grip end of a skimming net in Mozambique. It is not the thing of the word that brings the dominion of nature, but the reality of the logos. Do animals dream?
June 15th 2011
In the face of the event of another’s text
There is as it were a duel a singularities, a duel of writing and reading, in the course of which a countersignature comes both to confirm, repeat and respect the signature of the other, of the ‘original’ work, and to lead it off elsewhere, so running the risk of betraying it, having to betray it in a certain way so as to respect it, through the invention of another signature just as singular. Thus redefined, the concept of countersignature gathers up the whole paradox: you have to give yourself over singularly to singularity, but singularity does then have to share itself out and so comprimise itself, promise to compromise itself (Derrida 1992: 69)
Metaphysics is said to be a totalizing form of intellectual colonization. It is regarded as being insensitive to the many differences of human culture. The project of the Enlightenment to anchor freedom in reason is seen as culminating in a vicious will to power that seeks domination through technological control. Arrogant in logocentric pretensions, hegemonic in its totalizing tendancies, and domineering in its continued allegiance to hierarchical structures of thinking, metaphysics is an obstruction best cast aside. (Grange, 2000: vii)
The thing would therefore be the other, the other-thing which gives me an order or addresses a demand to me which is impossible, intransigent, insatiable, without exchange and without transaction, without any possible contract. Without a word, without speaking to me, it addresses itself to me alone in my irreplaceable singularity, in my solitude as well. I owe to the thing an absolute respect which comes from no general law: the law of the thing is also singularity and difference. I am tied to it by an infinite debt, an endless duty. I will never be free of it. So the thing is not an object, it cannot become one. (Derrida, 1988:19)
It is a mistake to privilege these forms of distorted intelligibility, of neurotic derangement, as the normal case in textual interpretation. Gadamer speaks of Derrida’s ‘well-known position’ although he doesn’t so much as define it, however vaguely. It is un-locatable, unelectable, obscene. Donald Marshall calls it feeble and embarrassing. Gary Madison believes it to be ‘manifest nonsense.’ Marshall believes Derrida learned nothing from Gadamer, evading the danger to go on “his merry way, jetting here and there and ignoring the whole thing” (Marshall, 1991: 206). The problem of alterity in hermeneutics proscribes, in the words of Levinas, a relation without relation. No mediation can bring it back to the common world. “Interpretation would thus be about preserving difference rather than about overcoming it through consensus and correct understanding” (Davis, 2010: 40). The positions taken by the partisans of this debate between Derrida and Gadamer define the negative position as either a hermeneutic free for all, or a “closet” essentialism, too dependent on prejudice and the authority of tradition, respectively. Play is never trivial; tradition is something which must be acknowledged rather than blindly obeyed.
PATHS IN THE SHADOW ROCK
Of your hand.
Out of the four finger furrow
I grub for myself the
Petrified blessing.
Derrida wants to encounter, countersign, the poem’s unnerving strangeness rather than hear a thematisable message.
The world is gone, I must carry you.
Thinking is a handicraft.
For Heidegger, the stone is worldless (there is no sense in which it inhabits the world); the animal is poor in world (it inhabits but has only limited access to it); man is world-forming (he can constantly extend the range and manner in which he relates to the world). If the world is gone, these distinctions fall away.
Recently, on radio, there was a debate of positions regarding a state bill on the legality of the shark fin trade in California between the director of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and a State Representative from the San Gabriel Valley, which has a large Asian population. In Asian cuisine, the fins of the shark are used to make traditional dishes, most notably that of shark-fin soup, which is served at weddings. Another commentator made the analogy that shark-fin soup was the equivalent of a wedding cake in the ceremony of an Asian wedding. In passionate terms, the aquarium director argued that the slaughter of sharks merely for their fins counted as a form of cruelty, for after the fins are removed the shark is thrown back into the water, now essentially rudderless and paralyzed, slowly to die. Moreover, from an ecological standpoint, the director also argued that it was highly detrimental to remove the top predator from any ecosystem. Hence, the removal of sharks from the food chain throws the entire system out of balance. In response, the representative from the San Gabriel Valley took the tact of criticizing the legislative bill itself, stating that while it protected sharks in California, it did little to stop the global trade, and that any prohibition at the state level would simply drive the trade underground into so-called black markets.
June 16th 2011
Fuck to Never Actually Learn Anything: the most mythic, or thus, the most susceptible to narration.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari present an alternative version of ideological critique called noology, which they define as “the study of the images of thought and their historicity” (MiP, 466; 376).
The schizophrenic is the universal producer. From Levi-Strauss, again, we have the handyman, the amateur who makes do with what is at hand. In The Savage Mind he writes, “the bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of this game are always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogenous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”
What could we find inside the pages of the book? On this page, we may have missed a proper name or the explication of the concept we wish to articulate. Some notion to prove where we have been, some token of the isles, and the most important experience to tell. There is a joke that Berlusconi and Zizek like to tell. A man is stranded on a desert island with supermodel Heidi Klum. Through this twist of fate, Klum falls deeply in love with the man, who is merely an average person, one who ‘back in reality’ would never be capable of attracting anyone so exceptional. The months on the island progress and despite Klum’s voracious love for the man, he begins to fall into a deep melancholy. Worried, the beautiful supermodel asks the man whether there is anything she could do for him to arouse his interest again. Anything he wants she will do. Anything at all, such is her love for him. After some pause, the man replies that there is something she can do, and so he requests that she pull her hair back and paint a mustache on her face with tidal mud, so that she will look like his friend Carl. Perplexed, but willing, Klum pulls her hair back and paints the mustache with tidal mud. At last, she comes to him and says here I am, I am your friend Carl. To which he happily exclaims: “Carl, you won’t believe it, I’m fucking Heidi Klum!”
Yet, perhaps what we are looking for the 3M Tattle Strip™, which once ripped out, allows the producer to exit without registration. The sociopath is the universal consumer; the parable of the oarsman. Perhaps yet the text fails to deliver, in any case. That it is incapable of solving its own problems, or actually doing what it claimed it was about to do. This, writes Jameson, is something notoriously difficult for literary texts (even the philosophical exiles) to achieve, for intentions are reconstructed only after the fact, and in which case never “know what they think till they see what they say” (VD, 102).
Yet, we are professionals, or such would be the desire for perpetuity. Whoever opens his mouth wants to be understood. How often have dumbstruck baseball players expressed their wonderment over ‘being allowed’ to play a child’s game for money. Writing need not present an argument to be worthwhile, but a narrative is non-negotiable. But there is a law of gravity. IF you analyze weight and the dispersal of matter into exteriority, you are obliged to recognize a tendency in this process: a strained effort towards unity and self-reassembling. But as a tendency towards the center and unity, matter is the opposite of spirit only insofar as it resists this tendency, insofar as it opposes its own tendency. But in order to oppose its own tendency, which defines it as matter, matter would have to be spirit in the first place. And if it yields to the same tendency, it is also spirit. It is spirit in either instance, its essence can only be spiritual: All essence is spiritual.
Matter tends towards ideality, for in unity it is already ideal. Spirit is nothing but repetition. Nature is not a determinate essence, a unique moment. It designates all possible forms of the ways in which spirit can be external to itself. It therefore appears—while in the process progressively disappearing as well—at every stage of the becoming of spirit.
The Idea is necessarily obscure insofar as it is distinct. I should apologize at the outset for what is written here. How was I to know what I was searching for beyond the languages by which to express it? Time and time again, I am distracted by Wittgenstein’s phrase: the limits of my world are the limits of my language. How pathetic to believe this has something to do with being a writer, the vulgarities of production. So much moves in silence, and we speak not of what we know, but what comes to know us. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense, it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object, which can be recalled, imagined, or conceived. The sensible is referred to an object, which may not only be experienced other than by sense, but may itself be attained by other faculties. It therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and the exercise of the other faculties in a common sense. It is not a quality, but a sign. It is not a sensible being, but the being of the sensible. The object of the encounter, on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible.
June 22, 2011
Hollow time, a kind of exhausting void between the blades of cutting wood, nothingness calling man’s trunk the body taken as man’s trunk.
A necessarily unique event, nonreproducible, hence illegible as such and, when it happens, inaudible in the conch, between earth and sea, without signature. By means of a breach of philosophical identity, a breach which amounts to addressing the truth to itself in an envelope, to hearing itself speak inside without opening its mouth or showing its teeth, the bloodiness of a disseminated writing comes to separate the lips, to violate the embouchere of philosophy, putting its tongue into movement, finally bringing it into contact with some other code, of an entirely other kind.
Another event, and one that I bring here without the authority of an direct reference, comes to us as gossip. The prominent professor, after lecturing at a unique summer seminar organized under intercollegiate funding, lingers behind with a few of her graduate students. Perhaps they are walking back to the department, or standing outside in the California dusk, but none of this should matter. The professor begins to tell a story about an evening she spent in New York many years ago. It was after a conference, or maybe a lecture, but she was standing in art gallery talking to a group of notable persons such as the philosophers Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari. As the event was over, and perhaps they were drinking wine, the conversations were tending to become heated. Some of the people there could only argue in French, poor Guattari, and so the terms and folding of sound must have been quite complex. At some point, a soiled looking man wandered in off the streets, and walked into the gallery. Standing near the door, he looked over the assembled crowd and screamed out: “What the fuck are you talking about?” Indeed, the prominent professor smiled at her young graduate colleagues, what the fuck were they talking about?
We are to assume that they laughed at such a good joke. Hearty laughter involves such amazing company. But here, coming to us as it does, there is something so cynical and obvious to the premise. As if the truth is spoken from the mouths of babes, or even worse, the contemptible charges against the philosophers for obscurity are the most boring solidarity. It is the translation of this obscurity, the pious work of the pedantic who wishes to bring the ecclesiastical word to the dumb show of the street, to the chattel of an education. The shrunken hag with her ruler of endless etymologies, that pathetic cheerleader of professional organization, fluent speaker, we are waiting for you to die, as we are tired of living in the age of apprentices. The masters cannot be free until you release their estate. You have carried the work nowhere but for your own private names.
Timbre, style, and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper. They make every event possible, necessary, and unfindable. This implies a vestible in a delicate, differentiated structure whose orifices may always remain unfindable, and whose entry and exit may be barely passable; and implies that this text functions as a writing machine in which a certain number of typed and systematically enmeshed propositions represent the conscious intention of the author as reader of his own text, in the sense we speak of the mechanical reader.
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