"Don't you ever stop?" The discourse of another interferes with the discourse of myself. The mind running on -- but what mind doesn't run on even if to appease itself with a sense of quiet? How have the Buddhists ever absolved themselves from inflating comprehension to this pure grasping? In "clearing" the mind -- so, what, vegetative? -- thinking nothing, they at once reduce and lift -- sublimate (aufheben -- cf.) -- all thought to its operation, its gesture. The abstraction, precisely, of thinking, when intending to quiet it. The fullness of (the emptiness of) the circle -- resolution of identity as blankness, which means reduction of difference. This is like Beckett's exercise, for example with the trilogy, compared to Joyce, the figure of inward spiral made express in plot, such as it is. Of course this imperative, impulse, desire, to clear takes aim so often at "analysis," or some extraneous operation or overrun of thinking, as if the disquieting of things were only brought by a disquiet of thought. One nonetheless wants to control discourse, and the other person seems more often to require knobs for control of volume, a reflex against an external contribution to internal noise. We know, too, how this can occur within us, whenever we want to say to ourselves, "Don't you ever stop?"
Of thought, it must first of all be said that it is the impossibility of sticking to anything definite -- the impossibility, then, of thinking of anything determined -- and that it is thus the permanent neutralization of all present thought at the same time that it is the repudiation of all absence of thought. Oscillation (paradoxical equality) is the risk run by thought which is abandoned to this double requirement and which does not know that it must be sovereignly patient -- in other words, passive outside of all sovereignty.
-- Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster
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Life is the tiny sliver of a creature on the sidewalk, that I see just as I miss stepping on it. Why else must a god have the quality of mercy, of grace? God must be every quality or aspect that further abstracts the abstraction of an event, an effect, the impression of a turn done and all the feelings it provokes: fear, relief, gratitude, exuberance, grief, shock. My life held in that view, divided, between the menace of overarching subject and the contingent object, as desperate as that tiny sliver. This is why the gods were previously many and warring. One god must subsume all this conflict.
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The number line. The time line. Again, time thought of as spatial. Time's tracks are in space, but the strictly temporal aspect has not space laid out, determined. There is no line of time. How to chart this outward radiating with no point? Time is duration, and more pertinently, decay.
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Time is the measure of space and forgetting is the measure of time. Forgetting is the space of memory, the shape of it, the relief. The negative space, with which it is confused. Memory/forgetting give on, over to, suggest, something more general that subsumes the opposition, a complementarity, perhaps something like a principle of association. Associative chains (a la Saussure's axes) are this Moebius strip material that allow the diversion in the order of recall. The easiest way to blot out particulars is by repetition, re-iteration, making them generic.
Possibly associated observation: in biographies of famous people -- but this is why they are famous, because they are biographied -- anecdote tends to the epiphenomenal, to curious or singular or disjointed or coincidental moments that in other respects are quite opposite of telling us anything about the person, of depicting or informing.
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There are relations which not only do not require convention, but require that convention be exceeded, and
which dictate anew to convention.
They require convention only as the measure of what does not pertain.
So is the possibility, and the promise, the advent and the impetus of any relation. So would be heeding relation.
This is the convention of relations: that what would be most exceeding in relation, of relation, would also be the model for all relation.
Nothing predisposes us to good because there is no good predisposed. That good exists, separately from the behavior it would govern: (1) is itself derivative, and an apotropaic; (2) would be a contradiction, because cut off from behavior itself; (3) is a contradiction because can't account for failure to act so; (4) is the abstraction of an interest, thus not originally general, not the good, the imposition of one on things, itself already contaminated as violence. A thesis for the notion of the "fall"?
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The material is like a text. It turns out this is how we think of "reality" (Plato or otherwise, and how he got there), what the text supposedly refers to. The problem understanding relativity is thinking time, light, matter refers to something -- else. Something ulterior, more solid. This is what is meant by Derrida's famous comment, "There is no outside the text" (always mistaken by being taken out of its text). Same thing as frame of reference.
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The "purpose" of life is life. Tautology in several ways. But division, death, self-effacement, oblivion, the passage (division) of identity, is one. To claim or state a purpose as if it were otherwise essential, immanent, is to immediately contradict that immanence, to make it redundant, tautological. What need is there to make an imperative of something sine qua non? As if it were necessary to plea for life outside it. Life's "purpose" is not telos, as in a conceptual end (final cause), the B that determine's A's action, as if forward and back at once. It is more like the material or formal cause as the efficient, generative and derivative, in the same way as that telos, but as a purely technical or operative function.
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(Intelligent) Design -- Might as well say "motive." The superstition, naivetée that things have an interest in us, that there is motive in the turns of our fortune -- and note how this suspicion of interest in turn resides on our own interest for ourselves, a projection, then, of selfishness, a counter-selfishness -- comes before any "science" or detachment or dis-interest. The equivocation is the term "reason." It comes before any presumed objectivity as well as any more high-falutin notion of design (as if the abstraction towards nobility could be rid of this interest).
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To think, believe that "things" lie still, that they are fixed, that numbers have them screwed in place, signs only stuck to them, is to be subject to the very play of figure, the ranging of it, even to repose on some order or program and not see that figures dance about and haunt.
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The luxure of struck (structure of luck). What was supposed to be in place for one thing to turn it? How to fall to one thing? The "structure" of the sign has to be "open" -- essentially open. That is where essence is supposed to be, there is an opening. Essence is not essence. Essentially not essential. Relations with others, who we know -- the determinative, derivative [structure] -- already turning, as much as seen stable. Calculus.
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Family: If anyone -- but who would that be, what would it be, what alien, what creature, what eye, what view or perspective outside of this -- *super*-man, indeed? -- were to look at what is the efficient (material, too) cause of everything that is "wrong" with "society" it would be the family itself. Nothing ensures more the loss of every civility, the loss of precisely a broader sense of society. Not only are there the real, actual, behavioral effects of this TV nursery: that terrible zoned out state that is required for so much clamor, flabby-headed indulgence that throws the guardian herself over for the worst sort of pandering on behalf of the poor little gluttons, this terrible, nasty, self-centered proprietary sense of protection and love
that makes the family socially inconsiderate in the most immediate physical ways, its own sloppy expedient intimacy inconsiderate of others outside it. But it's also that all this is lifted to the insanity of a principle, of precisely "good," a good, the good, and thus justified by every other type of discourse, and for this, the most otherwise disparate, even hostile or antinomic ones are in amazing agreement: religion, science, for example. There is nothing more assuredly evil than a self-serving conviction that cannot be touched -- isn't that precisely what would be? Despotic, tryannical, fascist? And this is the concept of "family," overstated and made redundant and bloated up and stroked and fattened into the biggest idol of them all with all this crap about "nuclear", etc. Family, in the name of which everything that is society or civilization gets hijacked.
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Something before the division justifies the division. Internecine (cf. etym.). Animals, i.e., consumption, strife, but intra-species as well, packs or prides. This latter was picking up an earlier thread of thought about how to think in a way not teleological. (Also more recently, read somewhere the idea of -- how did they put it? -- "soft" order? That order just happens without design, but as if there is still then order, qua or equivalent to that of the conception of design. The absurd thimble analogy, of the other side, but still demonstrative.) Not only that we try to make a model out of some example of nature, and thus always end up being selective, but what "nature" is thereby doing, what this entails. The division itself that pushes forward, «generates». The sheer sine qua non impetus of replication. The only essence is this non-essence, this
immediate division of a self or reductive thing, entity, principle. So then, thought of this in political terms for Schmitt-like notions hypostatizing "us" and "them," native and foreigner, friend and enemy, family or blood and exogamous.
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Voluble -- volubility. What else? Appetite, hunger, urge, oral fixation. What is the way to describe this impulse, pulsion, that is more general a sense than touch. To group or hold are too fine, overdetermined by the sense of privation, need, desperation. Clinging. To caress lacks the fuller sense of action of those. To suck (or suckle) imposes the same sense of privation, but more particularly, even more strongly, as nourishment or physical function. There needs to be a term that means or draws or suggests -- well -- drawing itself? Is that it? To draw -- both to take in and to articulate. This is the caress of the mouth, the consumption of touch. The urge to the urge to, the urge to urge.
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The political fiction of "now." Future, no past. "Mortgage," cf. etym. Politics is only peddling.
From The American Heritage Dictionary:
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The realist paradox. The "problem" of realism. The "realist" convention in an art form, visual or dramatic, produces the absurdity that the more realistic the representation is -- the more transparent -- the more it ignores itself. How can it be "realistic," for example, that a real scene is on this flat square on the wall, or that this "real" living room is surrounded by an audience full of people in the dark? This problem comes back to language itself: that it is for us naturalized, so that the more we take it for granted to "see" or believe in the referent, the more we are ignoring the effects of acculturation, of figure, rhetoric, etc., by the means of which we accede to that natural realm beyond it. This very notion, distinction, is a figure within language, cannot be expressed without it. "Language" (by virtue of this something "itself" already folded, divided: articulation, depiction, conceptualization, representation, conveyance, comprehension), is at once inside and outside nature, represents -- is -- this fold of nature "itself."
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Disposition (mien, cast, etc. -- see other terms) -- There is no neutral fact, no neutral spread, array or image. This neutrality or objectivity can only be achieved as an allowance by consideration of all the various types of affectivity. To see the spread of a city -- a bridge, skyscrapers, a particular intersection. How can this be uprooted, dissociated, from all the types, impressions, moods, it has?
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The theatre -- compared to church on one hand, to «television» on the other.
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Not just where barbarism is still in civilization, but the barbarism of civilization.
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Why do dreams "play back," play out image? Or, another inflection of this matter, what is the dream-image, what is image itself as a matter of dream, and thus in turn, as a matter of the general mental activity? This is a question for «fiction» as well, poesis, making, and emotion. Sense perception, image impression or visual impression must have this mental correspondent. This is intersection of mental and ideal, the "conceptual" juncture. Intersection of empiricism and psychology. (This all thought after a dream where walking among people with dogs, a dog grabbed my arm with its mouth. Anticipating the pain.)
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The privacy of thought is overtaken by the generic aspect of language. What solace can there be in "universal" when it washes away the individuals it would comprise? Taken this way, the generic aspect of this incomprehensible multitude returns me to the non-identity of nature, as if language came along only to express that. Better for the privacy, singularity, individuality of thought if there were nothing with which I could express even this. Which leads to another absurdity.
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I cannot prove god does not exist when non-existence refuses to be demonstrated, believed in, made into persona. It is as if non-existence cloaked itself in nothingness, ran and hid behind space, and left us alone to decide for ourselves.
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Being and non-being -- Is it not rather that a subject wants to not be? Gyges as a figure as much as Oedipus. To evade all falling into being? This would be the eschatological in even the idea of conscious mastery. Borges's desire as eternity. Via comments Kamuf made in Without Alibi about singularity v. resemblance, as opposed to what I thought of Blanchot's idea that there is nothing but resemblance, in the whole drift of Derrida about without alibi, then the invisible man, Gyges and power, sovereignty. To escape the condition of being, to escape being. Cf. this for the matter of cruelty Derrida discusses in "States of the Soul." One wants to determine being rather than be determined by it. Convenient being, which is not being. Not appearing. Not being seen. (Cf. seeing/being -- confusion of this in Plato or Gyges account. Seeming, appearing, being.) The absolute gaze.
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Technocratic -- the rule of correction. Literal-mindedness. Bound to being right. The cult of correction? It is also possible that the technical sense of rightness is worshiped, submitted to not only with the sense of any governing concept, transcendental signified, but apart from it, by itself, like pedantic grammarians. Adequatio, one-to-one correspondence -- think of the "1" as a stick casting a shadow. Heidegger's opening, clearing, as further complication of light, but the cast, the situation, the stance, station, bearing, aspect. Particular objection to "aspect." A sense of rightness based on this objection to relativism? (Cf. etym. "aspect." Appearance, look. The matter of appearance and substance again.)
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Behavior circle -- observation -- behavior. Am I the cause of behavior, or the effect of it? And what about that question? Perception is this behavior -- the result of behavior. Reflex.
The time of perception. The complication to what is now becoming a more widespread, if not quite commonplace, notion of the psychological complication of time is that there are not only various filters of perception that are time, but the time of these. The cycles -- as much lapses, discontinuous, a-rhythmic -- by which these nodes of perception are stitched together. The time of forgetting -- so what does this do to perspective?
The complicated formula/diagram of this: the main arc or function would be decay. It would form something like a line or curve in a negative sense, like the inference of relation. Forgetting would be related, almost as the expression or medium of this. Every sense of progress tracked against this would be particular segments, aimed at the point of some objective.
Time travel? But that's just it. A redundancy. Time is travel, travel is time. We rather want timeless travel.
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What can we do with a truth like this: what is present and what is obscured and simply not present. "Reality," presence, right now, all these phrases that try desperately to stop all passage, of phrase as time, that strain and reach for what they want to say is already there, what is supposedly so perfectly vivid, solid, imposing, waking -- is at the same time covering or blocking out the very paths that led here. This ipseity is thus blank and empty in its solidity. The truth is "exposed" as if through chinks in this brickwork of banality. "Reality" is a palimpsest. What lies beneath is even more partial, in one sense because of another: decay of matter, brains as well as any paper, wood or rock, even silicone. This is the very materiality of the truth that the truth as ideal, consciousness of itself, would master. Just look at geology.
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That we spend time in a place, and conversely that a time is circumscribed like a place. When we are driving and place becomes this time passing by outside, but for the the bubble of the car. Imagine driving next to another car, looking across at your friend in it. And doing this for a long time. You are spending time together -- where? Place is this matter of time, frames of reference.
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If god existed, it would be necessary not to believe him. The premise of St. Anselm's argument is incorrect. Perfection has most demonstrably not had need, nor contained the attribute of existence. Therefore, god's being perfect greatly suggests, if not assumes or requires, his non-existence, something he's most noticeably taken advantage of over the years.
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Philosophy -- now take up this word, this term. Casting it as the love of wisdom, as something reverent, ardent, sanctimonious, that one is beholden to. A term abused no less by those who bear it than by those who scorn it or think they can simply renounce it. Perhaps there is a tribute to wisdom itself in a kind of negative way, a shadow of even Plato's shadows, by inference: there must be something worthy of the all these sycophants have made of it. It's those who believe by "love" of "wisdom" possession for either, in either sense: that love would grasp, hold, comprehend -- keep -- or that wisdom could be a property. This possession is thought of even as pursuit, so that there is the trick of benefitting from one's infinite deferral and modesty. One does not approach "wisdom" by this self-flattery of the juvenile suitor, imagining all that the object of one's own ardor would be, but by being tangled in knots.
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For god to become man, to experience humanity, would that not also be, to be an atheist? A lesson for any subject.
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Presumption of cause and effect in natural selection: as if one thing is a solution for the demand of another and this relationship only worked one way. Why is the female shaped the way she is? (Although this is also heterogeneous, another aspect of the matter perhaps further down the line.) Answers preponderantly come in the form of presumptions about the efficiency of this form for the sake of reproduction (as if this weren't the absurd extent of this very teleology, the treadmill factor which nonetheless is another way of expressing life: nothing but sur-viv-al, reproduction the very principle of principles, the principle that is not a principle making all principle possible and undoing principle, including this one): this or that trait or attribute succeeds at getting copulation to occur. (As with mimicry, this always supposes greater variety, the simultaneous exceeding of its own reduction.) But another axis: the attribute that draws (cf., the direction of desire, suckling) must also meet up with the attribute of being so drawn. One might as well say that if the human female figure looks a certain way, is more "voluptuous" or "alluring" (as if these qualities, too, could be fixed, distinct, separated out of the complex), there is the male trait of so looking, so that what is thus propelled by such a selection is as much the trait of the "predilection" for that trait as any sort of absolute efficacy of that trait. Again, it is not so much the survival of the fittest, as the fitness of the survivors.
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Beyond the purpose of anything within life, as far as life, living, survival, there lies masked, but can then rise up, like the chasm for the rest, this: why life. What is the purpose of life? To come up with an answer for this that would be outside it is to immediately invite a paradox that a god is merely the symptom of trying to cure.
From this vantage we can see another problem that by stating seems startling, but its absurdity ought not to strike us from this approach, rather as the fundamental absurdity of the proposition we haven't heretofore questioned: Does (a) god live? Can a god have, properly speaking, life? Similar to the contradiction of St. Anselm's argument at its very premise, that perfection has never had need of existence, and most certainly god has never wanted to be conspicuously part of it, the idea of an eschatological level, a realm beyond life as the answer, purpose, cause, destination, teleology of life, simply raises the question of purpose to that level, just as for causation (as at least as far back as Schopenhauer demonstrated, and as Aristotle lays down as a premise but immediately contradicts with the conclusion of the prime mover). Any decision about life, any esteem of it, any sense of necessity, value or volition cannot be made outside it, before the fact, so to speak. If a god is what creates other creatures merely for his pleasure, then this god does so in its own life, and thus the matter of the purpose of life falls back on the god. If, however, the god is outside this life or its creations, then god cannot be said to be, properly speaking, alive, of life. What would make Judge Schreber not so altogether mad.
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The extent to which morals are self-justification, convenient in that respect, can be indicated in the way we are prone to respond to a quality we imagine for ourselves in another person. There, en face, obversely, we take it as a conceit, or as an angle being played, as something suspicious: precisely as a sort of affect or adaptation.
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It's not a matter of fact or belief, but a matter of use, purpose, worth. The structural irrelevance of god qua fact. If god is truth, "he" has no need of acknowledgment, my belief or your profession.
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It's not that you think I should care about you that is presumptuous, it's that you think I should care about you.
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Does a prick, a chink, a dent, a hole in Absolute Knowledge constitute absolute knowledge? The next? Another? Does the extrapolation of this necessary incompleteness of absolute knowledge constitute absolute knowledge (and for this, we must submit to neither Hegel nor Neitzsche, nor Heidegger, but to Gödel)? Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe gave an excellent study, and another such turn of the frame, to this entire impulse of the 1800s, the superlative push of Romanticism, the competition and gainsaying of historical models between the French and Germans, for example: The Literary Absolute.
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What thou art -- The round robin of reason, excuses for art. The relay of "but" arguments, of retorts or counters. The situation of "art" is precisely this "ain't," what it is not.
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Point of view. What is redundant about this expression? Or is it more precise, presenting the slippage of "view" into that sort of lazy noun? To portray a view -- what is it about this representation, this matter of representation, that makes singular "point of view" impossible, but at the same time, by virtue of returning the possibility of a transfer(ence) of view to the ineluctable situation of (a, singular) view? This does not amount to the same thing as, does not leave us back at or with, self-sufficient, self-efficient, identity -- undisturbed or absolute place, presence. What Derrida says about how you can't portray looking into someone's eyes, what I've written about the paradox of portraying solitude (in biopics, for example).
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Desolation (etym., "without companions," "make lonely," "leave alone") -- The empty of any scene. Concavity/convexity. (Cf. Levinas, "curvature of space", and how, earlier, few pages before, he comes to concavity/convexity.) Any and every place can be brought this desolation. The psychological sense, the mood, attitude, and the simplistic, psychologistic causality it can be reduced to (climate therapy) owe as much to the exchange of these interior/exterior transfers, analyzed or not, and the former becomes the latter perhaps because of the failure to account for the interior predisposition, the whole problem of self-causality, holding the reins, etc. The scene, the environment, the climate of the self.
All content this page unless otherwise noted © 2009 Greg Macon
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English morgage, from Old French : mort, dead (from Vulgar Latin mortus, from Latin mortuus, past participle of mor, to die; see mer- in Appendix I) + gage, pledge (of Germanic origin).
WORD HISTORY: The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, “dead,” and gage, “pledge.” It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged to the mortgagee as security for the debt “is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, etc. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the [mortgagee].” This etymology, as understood by 17th-century attorneys, of the Old French term morgage, which we adopted, may well be correct. The term has been in English much longer than the 17th century, being first recorded in Middle English with the form morgage and the figurative sense “pledge” in a work written before 1393.There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
-- Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.
The mystics and their collected works. When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read.
-- Cioran