The two realist paradoxes (not to say contradictions): (1) if you followed the demand to eliminate artifice, contrivance, manipulation, then you would eliminate art altogether, because you wouldn't show the Empire State Building or someone sitting there thinking, you'd be left with only those. (2) The more realistic you try to make the depiction, the more you are trying to ignore the device(s) of the depiction itself, which then is not being realistic.
This of course opens on the matter of (dis)simulation "itself," appearance, reflection, affectation, stance, bearing, tone, etc., that things already have this showing or giving for or standing for "themselves." The possibility of art is already there, cannot be closed off, any more than depiction, representation, writing, speaking, thinking, even some controlling discourse that would call for that, from the subtlest contrivances of the The Republic to the kneejerks of the most flagrant, infantile despots.
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Express or not express: Addendum to "Make Believe," Division of Power, comments about monotheism (see Monster)
St. Anselm's famous argument, also known as the ontological argument, is also an extension of what we'll call the monotheistic impetus, or perhaps we could even call it the Parmenidean thrust, or perhaps even the cosmological reduction.
In this light, it's also interesting to note that the argument has another function, and whether intended or inadvertent, though also an interesting part of the consideration, doesn't matter as far as the effect it has -- amounts to the same. It also has the function of closing off the progression: that which no greater can be conceived. So refering to the matters of comparative and superlative, as in the circular superlative again (see Monster), the argument of a supreme being is also that of a hierarchy with a singularity at the top (although at the same time this singulariy subsumes all else -- this is the real Parmenidean factor). This also corresponds to the first cause argument/problem, relates Anselm's argument back to Aristotle's conclusion which contradicts the premise. (We could rush in here -- or, rather, the implication(s) could let so much rush in here, about the subordination of ethics to logic [Levinas, whom we're coming to another way], the arbitration if not force move at the beginning of "generalized" logic that slips in this transcendental guarantor of arguments, to make them general or axiomatic rather than qualified as opinion or view or by the perspective or specifics of the holder; the ontotheological epoch; the complicity of science and Idealism, even theism, whether the tendency to see logic or mathematical rules or a priori as supervening order if not God or even just order is innocent or despotic; the metaphysical form of any statement, let alone argument, because of this hierarchical scheme for even representation; the metaphysical supervision of physics. But we'll concentrate on another thrust, as if we weren't saying all that outright, making that express.)
My other argument, which is more along the Kant line, is that existence is not necessary for perfection -- something which Anselm also, I think, manifests, the tension of in his discourse, and that's the tension too in the very impetus of monotheism, or supreme being -- back to "Make Believe" again, an extension of the Kierkegaard argument, that god is that which must be greater than any conceiving, conception of "him," thus a paradox, or aporia, of requiring terms with which "he" (another part of the very problem, by no means even a minor detail or attribute) can be expressed, described, demonstrated, etc. This outside of all comprehension cannot help but slip into it.
This bit from the Charles Hartshorne intro to Basic Writings, St. Anselm (trans. S.N. Deane, Open Court 1962) expresses also that tension. Express or not express:
St. Anselmus sees in the Trinity and the notion of God insurmountable difficulties and contradictions, which the human mind cannot reconcile. In his discouragement he is obliged to confess, with Scotus Erigena, St. Augustine, and the Neo-Platonists, that no human word can adequately express the essence of the All-High. Even the words "wisdom" (sapientia) and "being" (essentia) are but imperfect expressions of what he imagines to be the essence of God. All theological phrases are analogies, figures of speech, and mere approximations.
"Mere" -- an outside of figuration? The dream within figuration? What figuration gives?
A word about "essence" and "being." Is this a translation -- and what about the remainder of this translation, the unfitting, what is missed or left over or left out. Regardless of the etymological or philological routes -- but there is an awful lot there, considering also the Greek terms that would be involved -- even in current common parlance the difference between essence and being offers us also a glimpse at the problem, or part of it, the sort of distinction, if not duality, and at the very least nuance that we've come to, by now, whether this path is a progession or a degradation, a telos or errance. The force of it, right or wrong. The "right" of it in that sense. They are like body and soul.
The interesting comparison here, also, is with Levinas's infinity: the concept of something exceeding conception. Although this could amount to the same, another way to express the same, the Levinas elaboration is precisely as opposed to totality, to an enclosure or encompassing unity or finality, approaches even Gödel in the implication, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem is another interesting argument itself, or suggestion, to put with if not counter to, even the ontological argument (despite, by the way, Gödel's own attempts at an ontological proof). (What need of any validation whatsoever has a supreme being, begging the question, what need has a supreme being of any other, of any recognition, conception, let alone acknowledgment, belief, loyalty, etc.) Infinity (via Levinas) is itself a "dynamic" -- to put it mildly, since it's more like radically or madly aporetic, a kind of vicious cycle motor of un-definition, non-meaning meaning -- version of this supremist progression, but it's precisely at the point of "no greater than" that it turns for the incomprehensible force, or force of incomprehension. We have not -- just or only -- the concept of that which no greater can be conceived, but the concept of that which exceeds conception, and that is an insuperable and unstoppable operation of the superable "itself" (not to mention rupture of even the notion of unity which would be co-"extensive" with this exceeding). As for Schopenhauer with casuality, it's not a taxi you can hire to take you just so far. To put it in childish terms, which also expresses the way all this operates as simplistic and profound, schematic and far-reaching, at once: infinity is bigger than totality. Enter also Cantor, everything and more, as the title of David Foster Wallace's rendition puts it. And Derrida's supplementarity.
[Constantin] Gutberlet [professor of philosophy, apologetics and dogma at the seminary in Fulda] realized that the study of infinity had entered a new phase with the appearance of Cantor's mathematical and philosophical studies. The question uppermost in Gutberlet's mind concerned the challenge of mathematical infinity to the unique, absolute infinity of God's existence.
-- Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton U., 1990)
In particular, neo-Thomist thinkers saw the existence of an actual infinity that consisted of something other than God as jeopardizing "God's exclusive claim to supreme infinity."
-- Davenport, "The Catholics, the Cathars and the Concept of Infinity in the Thirteenth Century" in Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, vol. 88, no. 2, June 1997
Hartshorne's introduction is a thick slice of petitio principii defending Anselm's argument as itself more sophisticated than its opponents' arguments suppose. He holds that most of the famous arguments against it make it a caricature, failing to approach its subtlety if not read all of it outright. Fair enough, as with Nietzsche, Derrida or anyone, but Hartshorne goes on to add casuistry, even in the form of logical notation, to the assertion that god is simply the definition of that of which no greater can be conceived (and a really ridiculous kink in the whole thing about including himself, whether this being can or cannot be greater than itself, itself begging the question of the unity of any being). If the argument about building the ladder from the sky is a caricature, this retort is that it's really a whole castle up there, from which to extend the ladder down to ground.
But this introduction augments how Anselm fits in with the whole monotheism compulsion, from Parmendes on, as I discuss with Kierkegaard. And then there's a paragraph that as much as says it. Hartshorne goes into Kant, and then another introduction has selections from the discussions of Anselm along the way: Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, etc. Also, the fact it's called the "ontological argument," how this sort of argument has to be developed, all the casuistry, precisely because it's all backwards, something for which there is no "sense," no empirical evidence, which is only not to say, no existence. As all the defenses, including Descartes and Hegel, act as extensions, it gives to think of the recursive absurdity as a formula for monotheism itself: if the argument [and then whatever extension of the argument that one thinks of] for that which nothing can be greater, then that argument is true. Compare this caricature to Levinas's infinity, the concept of that which exceeds the concept.
For the whole predication argument, or way of looking at it, we can also say: but perfection is subtraction. Perfection is also built by subtraction -- from actuality (to use a bit of hair-splitting of Hartshorne's also). Abstraction, ab-solution, is also subtraction. We have a husband, wife, lover, friend, for whom we think of the things that disappoint us about them and wish those were rectified or there were other qualities added, and in that way we derive ideal, an ideal, the ideal. Even the "good," however ideal or higher in ideal we want to make it, cannot be removed from the rather uncomfortable, earthbound, compromised situation, point of view here perhaps being polite or euphemistic for self-interest, though we can also see how the latter is also a technical matter, details, physics (see remark here).
The impulse in me to respect all of this as the order of a kind of absolute lord or sovereign -- but what order? I have enough of an idea of a god and yet all my idea and reason is not sufficient. What good, what use, what significance is my sense of order? I also have the wit, caprice, winds, countless seeds of ideas, contradictory ones. Is this not also god? What could thus lie outside this compass, by definition the compass of all? The grace, goodness, kindess, beauty of a person can be wrapped up in their depression, maladjustment, malice. Sadness can be conveyed through or by happiness, and vice versa, as the pure elation of movement in life, also its passing. Does one "being," "essence" -- and really what about the distinction of "god" even from these -- subsume all these contradictions any better than a pantheon? Infinity is not just the extension of number, but "within" numbers. We contain god and infinity, the figures of gods and infinities, infinities of infinities, and the figures contain us and gods. Fractal, the Christ replication mechanism.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)
-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?
-- John 10:34
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The sublime and agitating line between something and nothing.
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The question why do I attract narcissists should lead to further questions: why am I attracted to narcissists, how does this attraction work, what is the function of narcissism, and what is the function of attraction. Or, for that matter, interest, care, love.
This may sound more dry, clinical, technical, less "caring" or mollifying, but isn't that precisely a symptom of narcissism, to make all this tend toward the personal in a zero sum way that is actually a worse, stricter logic? A trap. Of one's own making. The self is a trap for the self.
It's not so much finding that these things amount to the same, which is itself a salient or generative realization (or even just a move to make), as that they're all different projections of the "same" situation, interlocked or interworking factors. Reduced to neither the selfsame as pat subsumption nor distinction. It's not just that there is the narcissist situation that presupposes a co-dependent or even general co-dependency, providing or allowing by any others around. It's that the boundaries of that situation are not just between persons, not just the distinction between "normal" and some abject other of the narcissist. There are the larger frames or fields for all this, call it psychological, sociological, emotional, mental, or even epistemological, philosophical, conceptual, etc., but beyond that is the perhaps more complex figurative incorporation, if we can use something to provisionally or clumsily articulate what is not simply a module, point or discrete thing. This is where we have to understand the contamination, bleeding over or co-implication of even things like interest, care and love. And the complication even of "self" that cannot be resolved any more "outside" of narcissism than by the anguish to do so that is narcissism. And to make one implication of that more explicit: to repeat the scheme of narcissism for it.
Either that's not love, or love itself is bad. Or at least part of the problem, co-implicated. To what extent has love or does love become this -- proposition, projection, scheme we call -- narcisissm?
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At what time is this happening? We can think that all of us belong to the same now, the absolute set of time, but this has as little certainty as absolute place (not least because the former is thought as the latter). And this opening of location perhaps gives onto the larger -- general -- relativity.
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This remark by Kant: "just as the Creator does not with the world make up a whole."
This is in The Critique of Pure Reason . It finishes off a sentence in which Kant states that cause and effect, or principle and consequence, do not have a mutual relationship of -- well, how to put this exactly? Causality? Necessity? Significance? Substance? It seems pretty clear that it's simply a logical priority, and as stated or declared. Would this make it formal, a formality, merely a formality? Is this little example clause dashed to the end of the sentence just a passing example, or is it rather the presumption that makes the argument? The very idea that determines the logic, this relationship of Creator to its creation.
What does this do? What does it do to "whole"? To the very conceptualization of universe, unity, containment, set theory, even relationship or relation? Is this the gesture that betrays the most strain, force or contrivance by Kant to banish the theological relationship from the pure reason of the "world" -- and we add quotation marks this time because of the way that "world" is now just such a matter of the curious relationship of this scheme, this statement and situation. Does the statement not rather create the issue it seems to be referring to?
Now that you mention it. Once this statement is made, it causes a double take. In exactly what "frame" -- but wait, this is already a matter of the relation, the designation, the assembly, the circle or box put around things -- would we say that a creator and -- its? -- creation do not make a whole? Exactly the creator, of all that is? Is there no other relation "in" the world that would give us this notion or figure of "creator" to created? Can this only be a statment made of the superlative extrapolation of cosmosolgy? Of theology, onto-theology, monotheism (itself the superlative extrapolation of gods)?
And if this is a logic that applies to the break or distinction between the world and its creator, then there is a logic, or law, that supervenes or subtends those together -- is both extraneous and more determinant -- and how can that logic then be a logic only in this world?
What does this logic do for the logic, or reason, or "pure reason" of this world, separated as it is from its creator, if not cause?
Even if this were merely for the purpose of banishing the creator from the purview of this "pure reason" -- something you can see is already problematic, paradoxical, a conundrum, for how can we know what holds there enough to even make such a statement if even the statement itself declares that we cannot know what holds there -- if it were a kind of propadeutic or hermeneutic necessity or convenience, it ends up having all sorts of ripples, suggestions, implications, that would be hard to ignore. Unless, of course, one simply does that: ignore them. Banish them by fiat, or simply by the force of going on with something else, leaving this statement as if it were no more significant.
For even if one could suspect atheism behind Kant's banishment of the cosmological from reason, that this is a gesture which, whether one has faith in god or not, can free up the matters of this world from the imposition of so much authority and bad reason in the name of god or the creator -- what business is it of ours to meddle in god's affairs -- to put it this way in a statement would still have strange implications in a "world" or universe or whatever part or whole or set without god. What, then, is a creation -- what is creation? Can we not speak of the way a craftsman or an artist creates? And would we then say, the author and what he writes do not make a whole? Could we say this of Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, whether referring to only the set of writing -- words, ink, paper -- that bears that title or to the critique of pure reason "itself," or themselves? Yes, on the one hand, that statement seems to involve the rather messy business of finding any absolute unity or identity, anything that isn't mixed up with things or fuzzy. But the statement falls rather sharply on the side of a very big distinction itself that seems difficult to situate.
Or is this the very principle of organization, creation, identity -- state, being, as in statement? Like the set -- the name is the organizing ideal and the "whole" or unity can only be by this supplement, completed by that which is not contained. The name of the set, or the "creator," perceiver, the position of a supplementary perspective to "hold" the whole. Is this the way things are, cosmology, ontology, logic, physics, semantics, mathematics? With or without god, the world without god even with "him"? The law that applies as the logos even of the mythos. Is god the source or the projection of the analogy? How can the analogy be closed to "see," infer, god -- or the "whole"? Everything or anything?
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Official story. History. Bios. A continuity like a varnish, a patina, ice. Not the sense of fog and space and grasping of the first person experience.
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Everything "good" about the I, subject, person is the same "logic" that becomes pathological.
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God sacrificed himself for you. Are you willing to sacrifice him for yourself?
In any case, what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?
-- Borges
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The cost of every society has been that assholes succeed. If you want to put it politely, you can say those for whom the society is a means for themselves, so that even sociological, anthropological, religious or patriotic platitudes become this deceit, hypocrisy, contradiction. Any larger organizing principle, "order" or tradition becomes the brittle pretense of the heirs who no longer see the same horizon, the same purpose, but only seek to maintain their own status. It's easy to see how the more solipsistic a society becomes, the more it becomes nothing but an antagonism of its cells, internal division, practically, all the more so the more homogeneous their refrain. Degradation is always this internal weakening, the becoming brittle, hollow, vapid, of the principles of organization, the distillation of this into the ideal of sheer power, the most feeble dream or semblance of it, to replace the "content," the works, as it were, that made up the society and were milked dry. The surest symptom of this degradation is the diversion of the symptom, the scapegoating, the externalization of the blame, whether on some outside enemy or such an internal division which amounts to the same. This is the "progress" of civilization, the degradation of its success. It's microcosm, it's distillation, is venture capitalism.
Capitalism would not be one form of society, but this engine of egoistic blinders at work in any. The critique of bureaucracy, whether antiquated Mandarin or central committee, would be that of every business organization as well. It makes no difference that it's fractioned through society as "private." Of course the paradox works both ways, that even the greatest collective works are wrought by this vanity, as Napoleon transforming Europe, or even now, the anonymity of medical pioneers being further concealed behind that of executives for the sake of pharmaceutical brands or, moreso, stock symbols. The Nietzschean reminder of the blood with which civilzation is built does not absolve those who want a name to stand for all that immerses the rest. It's both sides of the equation. So much, too, for the sociological naiveté of any abstraction of collective purpose or teleology, the more so however much less the understanding of the gloss itself of "society," "culture" or "civilization."
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Another point for "where does me occur" [adjunct to "The Subjunctive" (see Monster), and "Kant and The Flash"]:
Aftereffect. "Unity" -- even the history of usage of this term demonstrates this, from "one" or "unique" -- presupposes a division or number. But this division is also curiously the experience of this overlap, haunting, bleeding, trace effect. A "me" or conscious instant to which this consciousness of consciousness occurs is also like the cell divided, or the clone or duplicate effect. "Me" is then perpetually this alienation. The "me" that is "conscious" of my body at the same time feels distinct from it. Why did this me happen to me?
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How would it be known, the difference between how much considered for so little said, and not considered at all?
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Constative -- imperative -- law. Tautology v equation -- which is value by correspondence. Do statements, axioms reduce, deduce or produce? a = a or a = x (or a = 1, a = 2, etc.). Correspondence. Bringing the terms, the things, together the way they occur (correspond) which is also corresponding to what is not, other. The force of the statement of truth cannot also eliminate this circumstance of the statement itself. What this face is. Self-evident (apodeictic?) requires no force, as such -- except for that statement. The construction, effort required to get to this -- the statement, description, account, narrative, of the way (some)thing is by itself, which is supposed to render the statement itself moot, without the value. Even the reduction to subject and predicate, Kant's assertions as much as Aristotle, the whole sense of substance, core of identity, property, the idea that the statement even of copula or equation is essentially passive, tautological. But these predicates, properties state the subject, make it, do it.
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Anything is lifted over itself as it's own differential value, inflated, an affectation, and "real" as that: appearance, impression, aspect, version. Any thing requires corroboration, and this may be it's contradiction in some way.
Sex with someone: say they are or aren't sexy. The weight of this is the fact and truth from different standpoints, this non-correspondence of the correspondence. One may have no sense whatsoever of this affect of the other. Each person is looking with their own impression and feelings as if that were bare fact, without being immediately aware of the tilt of the other's perspective. Of course this weight, pull, differential is also what we come or learn to sense, too, if only anticipate or apprehend. And then our susceptibility to this is betrayed. The world of my lens is betrayed as an other view. How could the other negate me if it were only the way things are? Just as the formality and opacity of our language -- that it is language, and not just the window or link to things -- is betrayed when we're around those speaking a language we don't know. Again, how could this be a threat if we were really so sure of things themselves, without the grasp of this tool. Fending it off is every bit as much an affectation as being too influenced by it.
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They lived happily ever after, got married to other people, got fat or wrinkled or saggy, and even forgot all about it, lost even the care for what they lost. But in flashes, those moments came back to haunt them, what they were or were not, those moments somewhere else when they were wanting to be somewhere else, desire always missing.
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By the time you're a storehouse of knowledge, nobody cares about it.
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The exceptional. The exceptional is a state of mind. Coming away from, with that, there is then this turn:. the problem with that statement is "state."
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The notion or right of offence.
The circle of exceptions. No absolute can be made that doesn't "violate" some other. Call attention to the language. Mutually exclusive axioms, demands, statements or even principles. But any one, anyone, is on both sides of this, then, can be according to circumstance. And this problem at the formal level is analogous to the "real" problem of society that we may call political -- perhaps just living together, for pragmatic or practical. It even demonstrates the performative mode of this. Does it really, merely, passively, represent the real -- realpolitik? Or is it not formulating it? And this would require a much more detailed, patient analysis, opens up so many directions: the form of the statement that is an axiomatic reduction, but also the level of the statement of identity, the way this is or must be done in a kind of social or political marketplace, the kinds of statements that come to be required.
Reduction, equation -- quid pro quo -- exchange, zero sum of identity.
What is offensive? Considering even the etymology of the word as not only insult and attack, there is the problem of active and passive, or perhaps of the origin of the offence. Of course we know of the persecutory tactic -- whether conscious or unconscious, involuntary or shrewd -- where the line is drawn so far out, or the territory is so arbitrary, to invert taking offence itself into an offensive, and attack always justified by offence as defense. Anything, everything other can be objected to, but the offence projected on the other. This is also arbitrary, not without reason, the "logic" underlying even the irrational or the rationality itself, the larger frame of simply the right of sheer assertion -- the interpretation of sovereignty that is beyond egocentrism, despotism, tyranny, though this doesn't mean any less mundane or ordinary. Not just in political formations or situations, but in persons first of all to even get to the political.
But how is any offence nonetheless partaking of, or creating a similar situation as, this sort of zero sum ad absurdum? How is it not producing the same?
[M]ore than ever one must guard against reproducing the logic one claims to condemn. Precisely from a "moral perspective." Be on your guard for morality and thus the well-known immorality of so many moralisms.
-- Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" (trans. Peggy Kamuf)
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There are those who remain silent to hide and those who are frank. But there are also those who hide behind frankness and those whose silence is a refusal to do so. A quick draw, snap judgment, can be used to foreclose consideration, not merely ignore it.
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Against the inclination for relationship. Reservations, apprehension, fear. The reflexes developed are all gathered up in this one: the whole thing, the whole idea, is wrong. Being together, being with anyone. Wrong of me, for myself, for my sake, but also for the sake of the other. It occurs like this: Why should we -- me, I -- ever think that liking, desiring, caring for anyone gives us a right to do anything whatsoever or that anything should follow from it? I believe this question should always be there, a kind of relief of any consideration (at least to guard against the worst presumptuousness the other direction, the worst self-justification). But after the worst of it, the most reactive and unconscious kind, and on top of a whole history or range of experience, it occurs as a bigger reflex. And it occurs precisely when, because, everything seems the best, right, appealing, good, encouraging. I think, Oh, no, here I go again thinking all this is so nice, right, etc. Am I doing this again to someone else, and to me?
This requires a lot of patient consideration, tempering or measuring, to understand how it works. It's many different responses from many approaches. Because this is not just, in the way it would be seen simplistically, as defensiveness, fear of intimacy or commitment, or love. It's also the interrogation «of» love! Going in both directions. Both what love leads to itself, operated by love, in perhaps the most extensive or far-reaching, or at least hyperbolic way, and it's also what is turned on love itself, even by love. Shouldn't love also offer this sacrifice of itself on behalf of the other -- but not only on behalf of the other, but for me, even as other, as anyone? The vigilance of the self one keeps for anyone, for all of us, for the other, too. And isn't that what the experience of that sort of black hole of narcissism leads us to, or calls for: a sort of opposite extreme of self-vigilance to guard against the extreme blindness of the self?
This is the discourse that catches up all those questions, all the details and minutiae, the reactions and recriminations, the generalization of all of that. Perhaps this is the double sacrifice -- what I -- the subject, any subject, each one, each "I" -- has to do in the "self," the division that must be made there for this sacrifice, in order for it to be possible for the other, with the other, among. I have to be willing to sacrifice my self and you, myself for you, and you for myself, at least symbolically, in order to invert or counter or suspend this movement of (absolute or ultimate) justification or rationalization.
To use this another way, to re-orient the problem of the relationship to the narcissist: it becomes necessary to identify this as other, even abject, in order precisely to get out of the cycles and the trap that such relations become. But this creates another problem, a side-effect. The discouse becomes only this kind of pat distinction of identity, "I" versus the other (him or her), us versus them. This is of course reproducing the logic of the narcissist. The evidence of this, if not the symptom, is the tons of results that will turn up with any search on the Internet for just "narcissism," not even specifying particular situations, problems, relationships, etc. Not even specifying "narcissist." The preponderance is of self-help, friendly advice, a kind of social influence approach or a general hearsay manner. The position of the one who suffers the behavior of another, of the "victim" of the narcissim, is thus generalized. But as Lacan was at pains to address, by countering the relegating function of diagnostic assignment (as with the DSM), the larger issue is that we're all a matter of psychological development. There is no zero degree of affectivity. There's only a kind of spectrum of coping, so to speak, of reactions, mechanisms, approaches or styles. And all of it is interaction, not just a subject in a vacuum, or in a bubble with outside stimulus, but the relation going on before we even make (any) relation "conscious."
Which leads to this, another way to express that double sacrifice, or what it's expressing another way: The more acute forms of narcissism, splitting or schizoid behavior or disorder show a failure of the subject to account for the differences in the self (not always, but with difficulty, and certainly to maintain any counter-measure). This is part of the mechanism of projection, as well, even blaming the other for their response to the swings that are incongruent, wild, contradictory. But there is not a "whole," unified or organic personality to oppose to this. Being "sane," and certainly being capable of civility, understanding and sympathy towards others, means being able to account for our own difference, inconsistencies, the division within the self. To recognize that the war of personalities goes on within me is to be able to not reduce it to myself and the other(s) outside me -- and to better "integrate," thus temper and recognize the difference in mood or position and account for it on behalf of the other: which is precisely then the agency of the other within me! I am already other, and it's this I have to negotiate within me to negotiate with the other "outside" me.
Another way to put it, again, something like the catch-22: I have to acknowledge how I'm crazy in order to be sane.
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We "are" by the force of the statement itself. This is not, then, essential and deterministic. It is exchangeable, alterable, repeatable, contradictable.
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On Fintan O'Toole's "Trial runs for fascism are in full flow," The Irish Times, June 26, 2018:
It's not just that fascism is already here because of all the tactics already in place under the nose of a blind good conscience, or that racism is already here because as innate as the attributes that racism itself assumes for whatever denigrated class, or that civilization is already a document of barbarism (Benjamin). In the constative logic of psychology and language itself, identity, if you want -- although this is a much more complex analysis than "identity politics" usually entails -- the straight line of order, is already bent, already a spiral, a precarious Moebius strip. Logic is already twisted, because it always involves a twist, arbitration, contamination. To short-circuit even this analysis, that's why it requires not only ever subtler discrimination -- an infinite division and multiplicity that never arrives at a singular, a simple autonomous one, monad -- and analysis (even the childish "why why" regress opposes sheer axiomatics), the checks and balances within any one, any supposed unity, to keep this proclamatory tactic at bay.
There is no ultimate shrewdness, and fascism or any kind of despotism is the most naive form of this shrewdness, because of this gullibility. The spiral of "power" is formed by the sheer ignorance -- stubborn or stupid, wilful or incapable, it's the same thing -- of any qualification, and the deference to this, the failure to counter this sheer belief, sheer assertion. Any attempt at control, any conspiracy theory, must contend with the lack of any absolute grasp, the fact there is no perspective that encompasses all others and is itself outside of perception. The equivocation is in the term itself: oversight. This ideal of supervision would be the biggest oversight of all. Is it any wonder that this occurs, when assertion must be the form, all "right" must assume the form of might? The law of necessary power requires fighting the monster we are already becoming.
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Animal love. Every lizard and rare Mexican salamander and poisonous snake and horseshoe crab and sea anemone does not cry out to be smothered with human affection. Every gibbon swinging freely in the wild does not need to be ushered. Live and let live.
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