The litter of creation.
Think of every single leaf.
Even in Death's strong house there is something left / a ghost, a phantom -- true, but no real breath of life.
-- Iliad, 23.122-23
---
It certainly happens that we become content, happy with, insistent on and even stingy about our misery, but for those who would judge this for their own satisfaction, what about the miserable quality of any happiness?
---
The waste I mourn is as survivor, and it's this form that I use to consider "my" death. But this "I" will not survive that death to know this loss. Life is laying waste. We lay waste.
---
The indecisive and ambivalence (the future) is there also because of the arbitrariness of the sign. "Cardinal." Abstraction, the sky. The sign, so familiar, so automatic, so subservient, takes new meaning, allows it.
---
The candle burning again. Something about how it makes "now" a form. The "present" doesn't go through this moment. What is present is what is also this moment as the perpetual form of the unknown future of a past. It keeps making the past moments this destination, but that opens again to the abstraction of the future, as if the flow of the hourglass were emptying out all the content, that is, in the sense of making all content empty. (Do you realize this moment ("this moment") is given to the pure invention of this excision, as if to the ghastly discovery of its non-inception? I can't go off with you right here, right now, because I'm open to every moment as the change of life.) As if the fire burning, or the fact that it does this, behaves this way, again and again, the properties, condition or fact qua immanence or essence, is something I return to, as if outside of, or alongside of, thus making the incidental, the very banal, this eternity I don't belong to. The intimacy of this moment is this opening, displacement, removal of me, as if the vicarious sense of my own existence. X-sisting. This is the distance of even the revery in the intimacy of this moment, my associations, thus memory, experience, past, strung up on the line of this abstraction like so many decorations.
---
The contradiction of thinking, writing -- articulating? It is at once a withdrawal from the world and an engagement in it.
---
I think of this vacant building, the interest of that, occulted, what it was past. I think of the interest of the insignificant, and the sense of being in a place that has this sort of gratuitousness, again. "Vacancy." Then think of memory, and the building as a figure for that, going back to find an empty building, and trying to analogize the significance of it. I think of a poem, or a piece, one of those detached narrative fragments, that uses this very musing as protagonist or subject. Clip. The sensation of gratuitousness, vicariousness, outside, but comfortable. Office buildings at holiday. Hotels. This solitude wandering in the barrenness of people. But this moment, this rest stop of imminence and immanence, not only occurs [cf. etym., to run up to] in relation to, by virtue of, as an expression of, as, verging, memory-anticipation of other, else, where, but is even quiet or still only in the impending of its own passing. Occur/occult.
---
Love: There's no denying our sensation that it's the most wonderful and desirable thing we do. Since at least it is this sensation. What needs more stressing is that it's also the stupidest, worst, most impossible thing: as a demand on ourselves as well as each other.
The plight of each of us is to be left alone. The folly of it is to make it a conceit, an arrogance. Marriage is the agreement between two people to compound this plight and this folly.
Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.
-- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
---
Man is the creature that compares himself to all the others and finds himself superior. Is this not his greatest weakness? Solipsism.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
-- Cioran
---
Is it strength, courage, that we're led by such feeble dreams of power?
---
Stir. Spüren (Ger.). The function of music in any"thing" "else". Musical "theater," if not redundant, melo-drama, movies. Treatises, arguments, discourse, essay, philosophy. Does any of this lead anywhere, other than away from a kind of repose (even when it's motion is to give us the sensation of comfort, to mollify or appease or pacify us)? This is the announcement effect, the burst (onto the scene), the eruption. Which is, of course, all too easy to exploit.
---
The beehive: Thin membranes of significance relate us, but we only see one side of them, each of us in a chamber of forgetting.
---
Birthday: an abstraction you are reduced to so people don't have to remember anything else about you the rest of the year.
---
What have I in common with others, when I have scarcely anything in common with myself?
(Only expanding Kafka.)
---
Holding one note: While nothing should be ruled out as a variation, a possibility, for rhetorical situation, doesn't it seem all too often that this is the lack of imaginative variation?
---
Above: You only have to go higher, high enough, to discover there is no height and there is no ground. The abyss is that way. (For Nietzsche and Levinas, too.)
Wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich.
-- Paul Celan
---
Mathematics or logical facts stated as self-sufficient -- because tautological. In Derrida's "Introduction to the Origin of Geometry of Husserl," [p. 45, n.37 (from p. 44)] he quotes Descartes: "Whether I am awake or asleep, two and three add up to five, and a square has only four sides." Why not say "the color white is white" or constituted only of its whiteness? The tautology creates the division of the fact attributed to the denial. (Leaving aside, of course, as if it could be -- but that's just the point -- metaphor, the making equal what is not, which would be «precisely» the accounting of dream(s)).
---
Where do you go with a story? Purveyors -- also "consumers." The truth of the lie. Thoughts on seeing the "new" "Dr. Who" and the necessity of plot turns as false complications, resolving to the silliest assurance. Short circuit.
---
"Before you know it." This expression, compared to "blink of an eye," and the nachträglich, or belatedness of consciousness. One cannot precisely anticipate the moment because of all the intervening, and a double cast is made that -- as if -- would eliminate all the intervening. This makes even the duration of life itself the out-of-synch, what can't be pre-comprehended, rather like death. What is the phrase -- expected but not anticipated? Or vice versa.
---
The echoes of memories from the past, as apprehensions. Like the phantom limbs of memories themselves, tasks or things we were supposed to remember.
---
Good/evil abstraction. The function of this as magic-mysticism-religion produces this result now: that real harm, relationships (i.e., "politics," though through further complications) are eschewed as a disposition, while a cosmology, an even grander scheme of good/evil is maintained. We have outlived the time of forever.
---
An emphasis or view not to be forgotten: fascism didn't use tyranny, but vice versa. Despotism looks for anything to generalize, divert -- an alibi.
---
Conviction is the fruitcake of knowledge.
---
I am the pure wake of self-consciousness, with all the blindness that entails.
---
We don't need sex. It needs us.
---
The fact that rhythm is reduction only allows the ascription of essentialism, thus it is constructed. But this is subtraction, to hold one thing as determinate of all. The pure is pathological, or antiseptic. But rhythm "is" precisely not "is": not "Being" instantiated, but interval, breath, expiration. (Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others.)
---
Politics begins where sense is not common.
---
Eternity is the form of desire, says Borges.
That's why we're so fickle.
Eternity is an alibi.
---
The weak owe the strong, the poor owe the rich? Then why don't these owe the intelligent for such stupidity?
---
The paradox of the death penalty is the interest in it. The paradox is similar to that of obscenity and reduces to the same thing: thou shalt not means who reserves the right for themselves. Those who are for the death penalty have either no conscious objection to or are outright for despotism, i.e. government as the refined mob, the racket; as might, privilege, extorsion, plunder rather than justice. Only this can ignore the hypocrisy for a moral proscription of killing, i.e. murder.
---
When we're young, we're affectation, wanting to be. And we become: a train of affects.
---
Financial regulation has not been disqualified by some imaginary historic vindication of capitalism or "free" market any more than laws against murder have been by genocide.
---
If I meant nothing to you in principle, then I resent my conviction. If I did mean something to you, then I resent yours.
---
You claim nothing of me by destroying me, especially not control. You only claim how you cannot control yourself.
---
What did it mean for you to listen, to want and be able to? To steal into this dialogue of loss? What did it mean for you to become my time? It meant for you to say, "Oh, my friend, for you to tell this there can be no friend."
---
"Star Trek" -- the theatre of imagination. Like the Green Lantern, this matter of always imagining the unrestrained or unconditioned ability of the imagination, of the will in the comic, of the mind in the TV series. The bridge is this conundrum, this overlap of the theater and the theatrical, this "television" of it. The circle jerk. The exaggeration I imagined of one man -- the captain (cf. head) -- sitting alone taking his pleasure in imaginary manipulation, whether with others who "actually" join him on the bridge, or whether those are as imaginary as the universe represented by a screen. The matter (if not problem) of the omniscient view always referred to, in spite of itself, by these screen views on "Star Trek." The universal, or unconditioned viewing device, view. Even seeing is freed from any material, practical, "logistic" condition. The various "sensors" extend this comprehension. The bridge is like this absolute gaze of the ego. Cf. the paradigm: god. Not fortuitous that "Star Trek" repeats this concern with or interest in the godlike, like an obsession.
---
A society so secret, no on knows who's in it.
---
What if nothing happened?
---
Even a sentence to express the irresolution of it gives it a false resolution.
---
Because you are the one the message is addressed to, you do not get the message.
---
Why this contradiction about the trinity? The god that has three personae, but yet must bear the insistence that he is still one and that this is not contradiction? Is it not easy to see the strains of identity itself? As I said here, more than one god represented all these conflicting, contentious powers, thus feuding and warring among them. A single god must subsume these contradictions, contain them in a single identity. There is no way for identity not to tip over, bleed into what it must define itself by, what is other, even an abstraction of other: otherness itself, or "the" other. Apart from all the history it suggests, sociologically or even philologically -- modifying monotheism for this Dionysiastic incarnation, mixed with all sorts of neo-Platonic maneuvers of trumping conflict -- this gainsaying imperative of the one and only god, above all other gods (another expression of the superlative that can't eradicate it's presumption of the comparative), can't stop the slippage of identity, while the latter must not do away with the coercive force of this supreme alibi. The whole history of this contention of the "Godhead," with it's arguments and councils and doctrinal divisions and wars and determinations and effects on everything else, suggests the Church at pains to contain its own polytheism, conditioned also by the impetus of this monotheistic principle that was set off, while polytheists had managed somewhat more agreeable coexistence of temples and sects of the various avatars of their circular superlative. Alexander the Great certainly had no trouble trumping every other god and demigod by collecting them into Greek culture. Meanwhile, there was the Hindu attempt at the resolution of this aporia as an exponential hierarchy: each being having its superior being.
And this monotheistic principle, like childish gainsaying, simply resolving any contradiction by will, presumption, petitio principii. Which nonetheless curiously parallels the push towards the encompassing grasp ("consciousness") of everything, and what that has run into: Einstein and his expanding the frame to include more problems each time; and Gödel with the projection of the possibility of total grasp being unable to verify itself. Never mind the very complications and paradoxes, the greater degree of them, these very projections turn up, all the better for this motive of the superlative cosmological comprehension.
---
Doubt is also deference to others, modesty, grace. Self-doubt is a protection against despotism, not only for others: against the tyranny of the self. To have to be right at all costs is to betray the fear of a self unmoored from conviction.
---
A kind of reference as if to a place in time where the features of this reference were somehow homey, familiar. Native? The sense of this, which would return to that moment -- repeat it? -- only to find that was the connotation then. Movies do this. Perhaps movies are most suited to this in the way that, in the recording of an image of people acting, in both senses of either playing at or doing, at a certain time, they seem to, not so much reflect as, refract experience as this impression. Making a writing of act (itself) (thus also the act of writing). Of course it makes no difference that the kind of records that most suggest this are projections, formal, fictions. In fact, it's these which serve this function better, as opposed to mere recordings, home movies (which are now a kind of pervasive crossing, double imposition, of the spectacle on the banal and vice versa). This is a kind of naturalization of fiction, a process of mythification or projection, subsumed by the process of association itself. It's the recording of people acting in the duplicity that includes formalism, artifice, projection in this sense -- the cheaper, the kitschier, the more ephemeral or throwaway, the better to serve this -- power, function, effect: suggestibility. TV in airports or bars. The feeling of being both outside of and utterly banal with this society at once. Tranistory belonging, belonging as this transitory. Fern-sehen, tele-vision -- as (un)canny. The distance of the nearness. This is also the necessary exotic perspective, even projected or surmised, of one's nativity, a whole other factor of narcissism (cf. Blanchot).
---
Rule, authority, must be separate from practicality. Is a separate thing and must be a separate thing. This is the contradiction, by contradistinction, by redundancy, of natural law and imperative. This is the "logic" of power which is not (strictly) logic. And look what this does even to the statement of this -- by it, by way of it, because of it as to it. Cause and effect. Power must not be "power is separate from logic," which it nonetheless is, as logic says, but must be that "power must be" separate from logic. (I don't want it to be that I'm merely submitting to a programmatic "it makes sense".) In a practical way -- look at the privilege claimed by every boss as by every tyrant, every sovereign, every authority (the parent) -- authority must say, implicitly if not despotically, (it makes sense) I am not simply following what makes sense. At the same time authority must refer to this sense as alibi, as greater force, as not mere subjectivity.
§ Associated: Capitalism -- capitalization -- capitalizing. This is blinders. This is distillation, reduction, convenience, expedience. A programmatic short circuit or feedback loop whereby every bit of information that might turn off the path to a goal, be critical even for attainment of the goal (when it is considered to have the appearance of anything "negative" or contrary to the goal, and there is a more and less simplistic, if not absurd, degree of this), or even qualify the reality of the goal, is rendered moot, collapsed into justification. By this route, it's not fortuitous that there is a connection between despotism, religion and capitalism. Witness the survival of the miserly impulse when all other faculties deteriorate.
---
The karma of partisanship. Not in the sense that karma as a fixed value has its particular application in partisanship, but the force of the genitive ("of") working more the opposite way, that it's through this matter of partisanship that we even have an idea what karma is, means. Certainly we know how there is the more immediate "payment" -- and this has to be examined, we have to pay attention to this gloss, to the all that's "packed" into this, this general idea/sense of recompense, retribution, consequences. (Cf. "pay" and the sense of appeasement, pacifying.) The aporia of the specific made into a general rule or imperative, an abstraction thus neutralizing specific reasons, justifications, as with a patriotic argument that one must love one's own country. This defies resolution by either extreme, what are contradictory but impel each other. Similarly, this explication is to defy at once the sense of proper, of propriety, for example, on the one hand, sports fans, for whom all the particulars and details of their own involvement are naturalized, supposed to be transparent, and cannot see the results of this projected outside, a kind of provincialism within provincialism, rather like accent or language and the matter of its location among others, and, on the other hand the anti-sports fans, whose dismissal of the whole phenomenon is often as kneejerk as, thus curiously mirrors, the sports fans. Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster: "He who criticizes or thrusts the game away, has already entered into the game." Conversely, refusal to accept criticism of the game and of one's part in it, of the "parti pris des choses," is the same kind of dismissiveness on the inside, of conditions, qualifications, costs, "payments," consequences. This same inside/outside the totality of sport is what goes for any partisan v. general spectator view within it, and vice versa.
---
Blanchot is not a book (or even books) that one picks up and finishes. He did not write books as such, that serve as time or event as acquistion, lesson or moral, an excursion executed, nor even maxim as the discrete service of platitude. He is not a pastime, because he opens the passivity of time. Blanchot gives the audacity of, or perhaps finally stops resisting, the incessant murmur of writing, the dispossessing shadow that is there in -- as if behind, the beyond within as if under -- the clamor of all our lights. It is what is in the train of thought, its wake, that makes childish fleeing of responsibility out of our most grown-up pronouncements. You can't be finished with Blanchot. That is to think you can be finished with the call that makes authors because it has none, with not writing any more than writing -- to think you can be finished with dying. To read Blanchot is to give over to the nagging disruption of truth, its separation of you, the persistence that is the ghostly we already are.
---
Absent authority -- autocratic -- "God" is the alibi for authority, does not exist. This is why politics and economy seek solution in god, or are analogous when not directly related. It is the attempt to make one claim superior to another. The reason any material or practical analysis is "false," opposed (such as Marx) is that it does away with this mysticism.
---
Schopenhauer -- "the animal is the present incarnate." Consequences of this with respect to the tradition. That "animal" is greater presence than man. For Schopenhauer, is there a different sense of this than Kant or Locke's indestructible presence? Vis a vis Derrida and animal. But isn't the present, as anything, the past incarnate? Impetus -- the sense of drive as the most irreducible of relations, sine qua non of replication. A predilection -- vector -- a future determined by past, but vice versa! Note the tricks of his paragraph in which animals are not refused pain, but greater pain. Higher. Schopenhauer shows the reversals. Due to theological difference?. Also, the proof of will. Schopenhauer as a link or bridge between idealists and materialists, between the logical literalists and psychology.
---
The matter of god's existence is not an excuse for our behavior. God is not a justification for evil, nor a condition for our good.
Of course that's the converse way of saying, that's exactly what a god is.
---
Alien form -- How the story of the making of "Alien" demonstrates an( -)aesthetic: an aesthetic that is not one. The force of one form on another, the contention or confrontation of forms, how they serve, mostly inadvertently, to eliminate disadvantages of or at least temper each other. This is in turn a figure for what is in the movie itself, which in turn is a figure of the contention of forms that is "nature." The paradox of what this means logically, form v. nature (although not in all senses historically), at least as far as what has priority, is also "nature," born(e) out by it. There is no order beneath an order of representation subservient to it. There is only an "order," one form, predicated on another, thus precarious and dependent, rather than self-contained.
Then the sense of this again reading The Story of the Stone. The passage about the truth being the void, then illusion being form, then passion. After the disquisition on literature itself dropped into the "story" (the introductory maneuvers of the first chapter), there comes a passage about the names of the streets of the city of Soochow, how they are allegorical, like Carnal Lake and Worldly Way. The translator had described this sort of word play (a Chinese name working something like Hardleigh Hewman), and there is the order of the author conveying the sense of places after the fact, but it gives also the sense of an aesthetic decision or arbitration, the demand of fidelity, realism or (merely or already itself or contained in) portrayal/portrait, this: the names of city streets cannot merely describe what the district is like because the districts can change with time. This gives the cross-purposes (the xs) of form that goes on by "reality" itself, and how often form is imposed on reality, but itself no less a part of it, and what is given to imagine about another path for reality to take. Fixion.
---
The question is why god requires belief.
---
To be or not to be. How is that the question? Whether tis nobler -- in the mind? Existence, life, repute or recognition. Existence as the sense of the latter for the former. Tree in the forest. The repute in, of, one's own mind. Beyond the choice, it is already the circumstance that binds and liberates, the binding and liberating of circumstance. The Stranger v. Hamlet -- nobility, justice, freedom. The latter in a kind of gratuitous or waste sense. To give over, relinquish, to the chance of life itself. The life that has me.
---
Levinas on Bergson and Jankelevitch. "And yet it includes joy . . ." In a flash, what is this thought of non-system that then "includes"? Math or science v. Bergsonian temporality. Attestation v. formulation. Won't "thought," whether philosophy or literature or math, always have the problem of attestation, of witness, or representation? In that there are "things" outlying it? And won't this always be the (reproach?) "included"?
All content this page unless otherwise noted © 2011 Greg Macon
That is the dis-inter-estment of duration and a summary (if possible!) of Jankelevitch's ethics. It is an ethics without eudemonism, and one that would be the very "temporalization" of time, so to speak. And yet it includes joy and a way of being open to art and the beautiful, but not as pleasure or self-satisfaction resulting from its own virtues!
-- Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (trans. Michael B. Smith)