Potential

- Larval is right, I am invariably influenced by every text I read. I’m guessing he would also agree that by text I mustn’t necessarily limit myself to written words, but any film, event, piece of music, or even piece of news coverage in how they mould my perception of the world as I grow, how it styles my own personal discourse in an endless process, and – touching on his reference to the idea of eternal return – how the manner of my absorption of each new text must surely be determined by the events and perceptions which preceded it. In other words, any new fact or perception that inscribes itself in me must necessarily enter through the gates of an existing discourse in the subject's mind. Even if one is a blank slate at birth, he is sent on a particular and irreversible direction from the first sensible experience. I remember, for example, how watching films about the Holocaust shaped my perception of myself as a Jew when I was young, in a way that was entirely unintended by the film makers and which went on to affect my reception of any new image or text (more on this in a future post). In other words, we can say that any object has the potential to become many different signs, depending on the subject's already existing mental map. Each individual may react to such texts differently, depending on the utterly unique discourse which they already occupy (I am painfully aware, as I write this, of the crude manner in which I'm expressing myself. I lack the appropriate reading and terminology to convey my thoughts eloquently at this time, so any recommended reading on the topic would be most welcome).


An article in Scientific American from 2004 discussed the effects of different experiences on the the neurological processes which take place while listening to music. It's been a while since I read the article, but I believe experimenters monitored the response of gerbils (could have been some other unpleasant rodent) to certain note sequences, then administering an electric shock to the gerbil each time a note was played so as to completely alter its reaction to the sequence of notes as a whole. This may seem unimportant, but it's just one small example of how perceptions and neurolgical reactions may be dependent on past experiences.






> I finally understand what Nietzsche meant when he said “blessed are the forgetful”. I’ve just scared the shit out of my housemate by trying to philosophise with him. He was telling me about a Kiefer Sutherland film where angels of some sort would transform events in real-time, though the mortals involved would be unaware of the change even happening. A man walking down the street may be transported to India and to him it would be as if he’s been in India forever. Maybe it was that I was off my face, but I was fascinated. –‘What if you’ve just been placed here in the middle of this conversation and you don’t even realise it because your memory now tells you that you’ve been here the whole time?’ I asked J. Ideas came rushing into my head from reading and thinking about Derrida so much lately and gradually I became more animated. The more I talked the more excited I got, the more excited I got the more I talked. Lately I’ve been talking only to people with an interest in philosophy, and I’m finding it difficult to talk about other things. This was it, J. was under attack from a maniacal barrage of words and images of me trembling in a fit of geekiness and he didn’t know how to get out of its way. –‘What do you believe in, J.?’
-‘What do you mean?’ he says nervously, as if unsure whether I’m asking an innocent question or preparing the ground for another attack.
-‘I mean what are your interests? What are your opinions or beliefs on anything? I want to get to know you, J. We’ve lived together ten months and I still don’t know you!’ I hate these kind of questions, but can’t resist discomforting others with them. He looked at me for a moment and then began to snigger nervously. J. is scared. What is he supposed to say? What’s the right answer? What does one do in a situation like this? J. was knee-deep in shit and no-one could help him. It’s up to him now. He stutters a little while trying to say something, before managing to force out –‘Well, I like technology. A lot of people think it’s bad and destructive, but I think they just don’t realise how much it benefits us..... I dunno…’ he sounded unsure. –‘No, no, that’s a good answer!’ I assured him. I contemplate this for a moment and continue: ‘Have you heard of Derrida?’ He hasn’t. So I try to explain some Derrida to him and go into binary oppositions, and how in each particular discourse exist binary oppositions which are constructed through language and in which one end of the spectrum is privileged over the other. ‘These all operate unconsciously,’ I assure him so as to avoid sounding silly, and tell him how one side may invoke notions of authenticity or ‘presence’ to justify itself. I can't help but think that any system, anything 'logical' and rational decision or belief is fundamentally based on incommensurable contradictions which must remain hidden for the sake of sanity and order. This makes me think about Nietzsche when he said that everything we do is the result of a myriad wills vying for dominance. I think about how I would get angry and defensive when I was younger each time someone would point out a mistake or contradiction in something I said, or in some way questioned my conduct. I guess every time I felt angry it was because something in me felt threatened, some notion of wholeness, of a unified narrative, ordered and logical, and after all. I am almost tempted to say that if there’s one thing that’s fundamental about every consciousness it’s that something about it aims solely at the creation and maintenance of such illusions of unity. I used to think that whenever someone pissed me off in such a manner it was because they threatened to undermine something of my fragile identity, but now I’m convinced that what’s really defending itself is a logic which knows that underneath it there is nothing, so that when one threatens to remove something of my identity by pointing it out to me some goddamn self-defence mechanism is triggered to try and ward off the assailing thought, this attack on my personal logic or discourse, because if it doesn’t defend itself then it will be exposed for the collection of contradictory wills that it is, grounded in nothing. We are nothing but endless contradictions trying to disguise themselves as unity, because the one principle or need that appears to govern all human-beings is the need for unity, for order, for logic.
By this point I was already half-mumbling to myself, with Johnny sitting in his chair staring uncomfortably at the floor the whole time, until he took his advantage of a short pause to make his excuses and leave. –‘I’m actually pretty tired now. I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said and just left me there with all these ideas. Maybe that Kiefer Sutherland movie was stupid, and maybe these were stupid ideas, but I finally realised what Nietzsche had meant by “Blessed are the forgetful”. Yes, he may have meant it in the context of amor-fati. But isn't amor-fati a demand to remember and embrace rather than forget? What could he have meant by 'forgetful'? It seems to me that the philosopher must be one who can see something new and interesting in that which is most familiar, even the most seemingly absurd points, who no longer views things in as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, good art and bad art, and I remembered how Nietzsche had written that one day he wished only to be a ‘yes’ sayer and see that which is essential and valid in everything, not merely as amor-fati, I suspect, but as some sort of creative nihilist who, in spite of his nihilism, has more spirituality than the most religious person because he places creativity above all else and sees everything as creative; this is why even a Kiefer Sutherland film will appeal to me as intriguing. I, too, wish to be a 'yes'-sayer. The next day I remembered how some guy in first year asked wouldn’t it be great if we could forget a song each time we heard it so that each time would be the first and last time I heard it, and how fascinating that idea seemed to me then and now it seemed more fascinating than ever, and that all Nietzsche was doing was warn us against overlooking the obvious. I thought about this and I walked through the quayside on a sunny day when a butterfly white as a flapping summer’s cloud got in my way as if begging to be noticed and saying look at me, I carry within me a trace of true beauty! Are you? I thought to myself. But butterfly, surely any notion of beauty is always socially constructed and if that’s the case then what is this trace you carry? Only the infinite trace of earlier conceptions of beauty with no origin from which these conceptions may have originally been derived, because everything, every single concept and event in time is but an interruption of infinity, a time without beginning, a time of time’s absence – everything starts in a moment of infinity, an instant laden with infinite potential where everything is possible, but that spark of infinite possibility can only manifest itself within a system, within a moment of striation, within some finite order, so that discourse works like some kind of filter or sieve , imposing stability and allowing controlled doses of potential inside so as not to upset the system too much, because a system requires stability, but nevertheless the system only survives because it never remains the same, because it is not allowed to stagnate and turn to stone, because it always allows little pockets of difference to seep through the sieve every now and again, and how these pockets of chaos, while being subdued by stability, nonetheless carry with them a trace of infinity, of infinite potential, and a mark of that moment when it passed through the filter, and how discourse, the resonance of ideas, is always marked with each and every single one of those moments, and each idea is thus infinite but at the same time not entirely original, depending on the existing discourse through which it comes into existence, for nothing ever exists without finitude – without finitude there is only existence, there is, il y a. I thought about how it is that changes come about in the first place. Why is it that certain thoughts are allowed to filter through while others are filtered out? Then I thought back to the idea that each system insists on defending its apparent stability and unity by defending each and every one of its multifarious components in an illusion of cohesion.




-Spurious quotes Deleuze and Guattari:

'We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[....] The 'first' language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[....] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.'

Is this not how Heidegger concept of the-they operates? By endless impressions and reflections of impressions? I can sympathise with Plato's notion of the cosmos, and of our world as mere mirage - at best, an approximation.

Spurious goes on to add:

'Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to engage the 'one speaks' of language - to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.'

Spurious is right, it’s something between I and WE which speaks. But is it necessarily language of itself? I’m always fascinated by how new words pop up in idioms, how small groups of friends might create their own terms and words. And mostly, how is it that a new word might come about in the first place? Does it not originate in something outside of language? An affect which precedes it? The last time I visited some family in Argentina I was foiled in my attempts at deriding Argentine television by the absence of an equivalent to the word "cheesy". I could not think of a satisfactory replacement. What did people do before they had this word? Did they still feel something similar without having a word for it? Or, and I find this more convincing, do new affects appear in each new era? in each new Heideggerian 'world'? Affects which are singular and could appear only in this 'world'? Of course new words eventually tend to striate, and create a new, more homogenous signification through a process of approximation. But do these concepts not finally settle and striate precisely because it appears in roughly similar fashion in several individuals at round about the same time? A word could not become a concept if it alluded to an affect experienced by just one single person. "Cheesy" is thus a new concept because the affect has only surfaced recently. It may,however, contain many elements of earlier concepts which have become sublated in a new affect conceptualised as "cheesy".

Larval subjects says:

“Deleuze’s account of static genesis, actualization, or individuation allows us to explain the movement from structure to actuality or the mechanics and type of “causality” required by structural thought. However, as important as the idea of static genesis might be, it is nonetheless ultimately dissatisfying as while it accounts for the genesis of actualities it does not account for the genesis of structures themselves.”



> But of course, I thought to myself, each individual contains within himself his own logic and version of discourse, does he not? Then can we really speak of a social discourse? An episteme? It would be tempting to accept that each individual logic is singular, but I remembered my recent conversations with Ibitsu, as we were obsessed with the problem posed by the impression that people’s ideas are not entirely random, that they all seem coherent and as though they’re all alluding to the same thing. How can that be? And then I realised that each logic, while being entirely subjective, nevertheless gives the impression of being objective and timeless, and that this is a necessary condition of any logos or system. How does it achieve this? Any facet of logos or discourse is always reinforced by searching for signs of itself in other people, it looks for marks and traces of something similar to itself. The same, however, must occur in the person being observed as he observes me in return, looking for signs of sameness and approval, so that in fact what ends up happening is that each individual discourse continually feeds off another in an endless process of exchange and mutual shaping. Is this why people appear to be talking about the same thing – because they’re constantly approximating each-other, never quite reaching unity or perfect commensurability because in each individual there occur constant new thoughts beyond his control, instants of infinity which constantly strives for expression? Is this the only way discourse can be said to exist, only through he countless networks of inter-woven relations, logos within logos, creating ever new and endless logoi and possibilities, never present to itself, forever renewing, regenerating? But a renewal which occurs only as part of an attempt at stability and at legitimizing a logos’s own claim to unity and truth.
And how would these new thoughts make their way through a system that aims at stability? I recalled my conversation with Ibitsu about how a musician or performer may introduce a new element to performance which may appear genuinely new yet is embraced by a majority of people. And now I wonder – is a new idea or gesture embraced because there is already something recognisable in it which has occurred in others, or because there’s something truly new about it? I suspect the answer must lie somewhere between the two possibilities. Nothing can be entirely original if it passes through the filter of discourse and is thus marked by it. In fact, it can only be through discourse, through a system, as system and logos, that anything may be produced out of those moments of infinite potential. For that potential to become actualised and manifested it must give in to order and must give up the infinite amount of possibilities open at the time. Could this be something similar to what Heidegger had meant by Dasein’s already being-guilty in every decision it takes, or Derrida’s idea that each moment of decision is a moment of madness. Because at each moment there’s an infinite amount of possibilities, and ultimately no “objective”, fundamental justification for any decision over another, or for holding any belief over another. Beliefs are generally adopted insofar as they are conducive to the reinforcement of one’s existing discourse or belief system. Yet, once taken, no decision is truly mad, for it is made within a contingent discourse which provides the foundation for all decisions. But foundation is always contingent, we say. Perhaps this explains why some ideas may be born in such a manner that appears to almost escape and defy discourse. I’d like to think that these moments are the moments of writing in the Blanchotian sense, where the world falls away and one is left facing the Other. But then again, most trends are embraced precisely because they’re not so Other at all. Surely a shift in paradigm or episteme is something much more severe, yet at the same time subtle and unfelt?



-In reply to Ibitsu on Reading – can we not say that, while one does not experience reading or the work as an 'I', the 'I' is nevertheless irreversibly transformed by this experience? After all, the experience always occurs as a relation, and event, between the text and the reader. On a neurological level, perhaps the relation is an interaction of sub-conscious traces with the text that’s being encountered. Meaning, what really encounters the text is not strictly a conscious and immediate “I” , but rather the collection of conceptions, presumptions, images, meanings and significations which are already found in me, or in the brain (or wherever they may be inscribed) as a result of a lifetime of previous experiences. I think what I’m trying to say is that the “I” of the everyday (which never remains the same) is in someway founded upon and motivated by an endless array of traces, traces with no beginning and no clear or intelligible locus in the body, which make up the "I". In other words, the “I” is founded on, ultimately, nothing. This is not a radical point, Levinas makes it, and even Heidegger does in a way. Every such experience of an interaction with a text, then, occurs on a largely subconscious level, which in turn shapes the way in which the conscious “I” would interact with any future texts or signifiers. Ibitsu points, quite rightly, to the fact that it is never an “I” which experiences the work, and asks: “Is it subsequently this death we ignore when we speak of neurological and psychological impacts of reading, whereby an ‘I’ endures what l’œvre inscribes upon it? Are we not thereby assimilating the il y a of language into the mediating and dynamic logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung?” Ibitsu would say, as is suggested in the above quote (and I can speak for Ibitsu here because we agree on at least this much), that the notion of the “I” has for a long time been a mirage, a construct of language – a simplification of consiousness. What I fear is that Blanchot’s work may lead to an equally simplified misinterpretation by creating a new concept: the il, or the ‘he’, or ‘it’, or whatever you’d like to call this. Of course, this is a non-concept, and Ibitsu is in no danger of reification, I’m sure. What I am afraid of is that with the notion of the ‘he’, we create too clear-cut a distinction between ‘he’ and ‘I’, which may be misleading as to the intricacies and complexities of consciousness and neurological operations. Why make such a distinction at all? Does such separation not in fact reinforce the very notion of the ‘I’ of which we pertain to be so wary? I believe we must begin to assume, or at least entertain the possibility, that no such distinction exists. From day to day and moment to moment, one does not experience things or relations as either ‘I’ or ‘he’, but as something that constantly hovers between the two, sometimes leaning more towards one end of the spectrum, and sometimes towards the other. The spectrum itself is not determinate either. So that in any experience, even in that of reading, and even in the experience of reading or writing in the Blanchotian sense, one does not make a clear transition from one mode to another. The ‘I’ must always be ‘present’, as it were, in the experience, even if only in a marginalised capacity. Thus, the ‘I’ can never come out unscathed. I would therefore have no qualms about using the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, so long as we critically revise its significance to us. It must not be seen as part of a dialectical process pertaining to the Absolute, but rather an endless, and in someway senseless, process of infinite subsuming of trace after trace after trace, each trace being subsumed and absorbed in a manner which is dependent, if not entirely dependent, on the traces which precede it. Ibitsu chooses an eloquent quote from Thomas Wall when he says: “…the “he” who is never anyone-never anyone other than I, myself, but without me.” Indeed, even in the experience of the ‘he’, there is a ‘mineness’. And as Ibitsu himself so aptly and concisely puts it: “A collection of inscriptions from that which we have read, a collection which is constantly renewing and becoming, effected in each singular moment detailing our perpetual overturning of myself. An ‘I’ is penetrated by reading not as ‘I’ qua identity, but as the potential to be an ‘I’."

A glimpse of infinity?

Jack Kerouac pays the price for a months-long drinking binge in Big Sur:

"All my self saying suddenly blurting babbles so the meaning cant even stay a minute I mean a moment to satisfy my rational endeavours to hold, control, every thought I have is smashed to a million pieces by million pieced mental explosions that I remember I thought were so wonderful when I'd first seen them on Peotl or Mescaline, I'd said then (when still innocently playing with words) 'Ah, the manifestation of multiplicity, you can actually see it, it aint just words' but now its 'Ah keselamaroyot you rot' - Till when dawn finally comes my mind is just a series of explosions that get louder and more 'multiply' broken in pieces some of them big orchestral and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed."

An out of control reply

This post was started as a reply to Sinthome, Ibitsu and Laura's comments on my previous post, 'a punishing faith', as well as to ibitsu's latest post and the various paragraphs posted by Sinthome on his blog lately. But the more I wrote the more the ideas evolved, until I could no longer contain them or make any sense of them whatsoever. I therefore apologise in advance for the rickety nature of this post. It is intended as pure, unrestrained speculation, and if anyone is reading this at all I would appreciate any bit of advice or criticism you may have to offer in trying to make sense of these ideas.

First, I’d like to try and explain my understanding of faith in relation to failure in reply to Sinthome and Ibitsu's comments.

They make some interesting points, and I guess I'm just not sure where the "I" stops and the 'it' begins. They very experience of the 'it' in Blanchot (if we can call it an experience), appears to be not so much a complete dissolution of the "I", as some suggest, but more a blurring of the lines. As far as the matter of faith is concerned, it's become harder for me to talk about it lately, as the more I think about it the more confused I become about - as Larval Subjects says in a post - precisely "what is to be explained. I am confused as to what is to be changed. I am confused as to how change takes place. I am confused even as to the questions I am asking. I am confused about my confusion". I'm tempted to say that the idea of faith is inextricable from the notion of failure, and that both are inextricable from the process of writing, whether as "I" or as "it". But this is still too vague. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can still say that it is "I" to whom faith and failure occur here, at least in the sense that before one's self dissolves as he 'enters' the space of literature there is a kind of promise being made which makes us sit down and write anything at all. Perhaps we can all identify with a kind of tickling sensation or an itch begging to be scratched, which causes us to act at all. I mean, surely the "it", or 'space of literature', is not something which 'occurs' in parallel with the actual act of writing, rather it comes about as a distraction which occurs as we write, when we have lost ourselves in writing, so to speak. It's only through distraction that one truly 'writes', in the Blanchotian sense. As Blanchot says, one hasn't the power to control the hand that writes, but he can use the other hand to stop himself from writing. This suggests to me that the "I" is still present to such moments in some sense, albeit in a detached and powerless capacity, the role of an observer alone. Powerless to summon the "it" yet capable of banishing it. As such, I would say faith is not a matter of choice, but more of a recurring event necessary for the moment of writing. Perhaps writing can be thought of as this continual play of forces between faith and failure. i.e. each time I set down to write something it is because of a rekindling of faith in me, faith in the possibility of being able to say something tangible through writing. This faith is not a willing of any sort, but something which overtakes us and makes us forget about the world, with its notions of practicality and ends. As I see it then, the "I" is sent on this senseless search for the source of a trace, each time thinking he can see a different part of the source, perhaps even catch a glimpse of the source itself, as if there was such a source. Inevitably, however, the writer's faith can never be strong enough to last forever, and it ends up burning itself out in another moment of despair at not having achieved anything at all. Doesn't the same go for us, who believe there's nothing at the end of the tunnel yet keep going nontheless in the belief that something can be said? Writing is thus the eternal return of the rekindling of faith and of failure. We talked about the story of Moses the other day and decided that he was the writer par excellence. Recall that Moses, after having led the Hebrews through the desert for 40 years in search of the promised land with unquestioning devotion, was eventually denied entry to Cna'an as punishment for a momentary lapse in faith. Moses begged God to allow him to enter, even as a bird or any kind of animal, but God refused. For his lack of faith Moses would never come to see the promised land.
Doesn't writing follow the same 'principles'? There's always a promised land that demand pure faith, yet no person can ever live up fully to the demand of writing. As Derrida would say, something is 'produced', something occurs, only insofar as it is attempting to attain an impossible future. This future being also 'barely possible', as it may occur as a singular event, outside all intent and calculation. Failure, however, must consist not only in never being able to achieve an end in writing, but also in not being able to stop myself from trying to reach that end time and time again. Each time it is an exhausting and ‘meaningless’ endeavour, never quite satisfying, yet strangely enticing.

I hope I've somewhat explained what I mean by the relationship between faith and failure, it still feels vague so please let me know if I haven't made sense. I have a nasty habit of saying things without really explaining what I mean by them because they make some sense in my head.

Laura, I think you’re absolutely right in what you say and it fits pretty well with what we’ve been talking about on the blog lately. There is this inevitable frustration involved in never being able to precisely reproduce (if we can even say that) any emotion or idea that seems to occur to us. As to what it is that causes this frustration and where it occurs, well, that’s the million dollar question. The brain? I would never dispute that it must play its part, but any such arguments seem to always lead us to a fatalistic determinism. One of the reasons I love Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida so much is that they’ve problematised the question of free-will beyond recognition, so that it’s no longer a question of determinism or randomness, but something which appears forever suspended between the two, or even beyond them. I can’t go into it in much detail at the moment as it would warrant a full-sized essay, but the moment of decision would always have to be, ‘essentially’, a moment of madness, outside memory and cognition. A time of time’s absence and the dissolution of the “I”, as we keep saying here, yet also beyond determinism, for it lies beyond any notions of originary movers, an original spark or big bang which is needed to set everything in motion. But I’m just making superficial descriptions now.

I’d like to try and touch on something which seems to be bothering Sinthome at the moment, and which has been on both my mind and Ibitsu’s of late. How do social networks come about? How does striation occur, and what is it that striation is attempting to subdue? The following section will deal with something for which I have neither an adequate vocabulary nor a clear idea of what it is I’m trying to express, so please excuse me if this sounds even more vague than usual. This is also highly speculative, far more so than anything we’d ever be allowed in an academic essay, as I haven’t read half as much as I should do before going on to talk about such matters. I’m still nothing more than a novice when it comes to Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida, and virtually a foetus where Deleuze is concerned.


Ibitsu asks – are we always talking about the same thing? Are we bringing back a trace of the space of literature? A trace of the impossible? I’m not sure. I’ve always been tempted to think of differance in terms of a pool of infinite potential, giving birth to finite identities. This pool, however, - and we shouldn’t even call it that – surely cannot be said to be some-thing to which all writing or language refers, for to assume so is to go back to an essentialist notion of Being, a la Heidegger. As both Derrida and Deleuze explain to us, nothing can be said to be genuinely referred to in writing, as that ‘thing’ itself never remains the same, is never present to itself, is never itself. ‘It’, this infinite potential, can only be given expression to by means of finitude. These finite words and concepts, while appearing to point at something stable or present, only do so retrospectively, after the act, deductively. Maybe some deeply ingained human tendency to make sense of things, similar to the tendency to see things in terms of causality, which Nietzsche so aptly critiques in the Genealogy of Morals. But here I seem to be suggesting a fundamental human nature, so I will move away from this point as I don’t wish to be sucked into this argument right now. Perhaps in this sense we can say that every being or identity carries with it a trace of infinity, or is even founded on an infinite nothingness. I believe Levinas says the same thing, and Thomas Wall does a much finer job at explaining this. I wonder, however, whether Derrida and Blanchot don’t make the same mistake as Heidegger by prioritising chaos over stability or striation. As Ibitsu pointed out, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Sinthome points out that the laws of physics needn’t necessarily constitute an absolute logos, but a plethora of logoi that are always open to change. This reminds me of Hume’s argument that one can never be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow simply because I see it rise every other day. Such laws as deduced from empirical observation are exactly that – deductive. It’s possible, then, that I will wake up tomorrow to find that the familiar logos has changed, or been replaced entirely by a new logos where the planets no longer move in the same manner. Nevertheless, it seems that the stability of any particular logos (be it the laws of physics, human nature, language or whatever) isn’t simply shaken arbitrarily from one moment to the next. Stability appears to prevail for long periods of time, even when it’s not absolute stability and small micro-changes occur within a logos almost unnoticed. I’m also aware that any such assumption of the stability of any logos is purely deductive and that I’m in danger of contradicting myself. But if we do accept that stability is maintained, to a degree, for long periods of time even as it is has the potential to collapse, then perhaps we may suggest that it is not difference or chaos which gives birth to stability, but rather that identity is always born out of friction between the two, as Ibitsu mentioned earlier. To use a Derridian way of talking about this, we may say that there is no absolute chaos or stability, only degrees. So, whereas many of us have become accustomed to taking Nietzsche at his word when he says that all is becoming, we may want to consider a new alternative: everything is not strictly becoming, but an endless struggle between becoming and being. Perhaps any identity is thus the result of a collision between the two, being neither entirely chaotic (i.e. constant becoming) nor absolutely stable (i.e. being), but rather constantly carrying a trace of the two. I’m not sure how to talk about this struggle. Is it a struggle between two forces, two wills? This sounds too crass and even idiotic. But I’m nevertheless convinced that there is something in this idea which warrants further contemplation.

How can we think this in terms of discourse? Sinthome makes reference to the idea of resonance. If I understood Sinthome correctly, we seem to be returning to the idea that one thing is apparently being alluded to by different individuals, something in the air. This is where my thought process becomes really flimsy, so in the next few paragraphs I only wish to throw some ideas into the air without them being taken as statements of any sort.
George Orwell says in 1984 that the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know in a manner we could never express. This sentence has stuck with me ever since, and I suspect it is because it, too, told me something I already thought of in one way or another. This experience is not limited to myself; every single person I’ve spoken to can relate to the frustration of reading one of ‘your own’ ideas in somebody else’s book. What does this tell us? Surely, if everything was governed by pure chaos, then members of the same society would have an infinite amount of different incommensurable ideas that seem to come out of nowhere. Yet what makes a society? I don’t want to answer that here, it’s far too troublesome a word. Suffice to say, for now, that a prerequisite would have to be a certain shared environment or conditions within which all members of society have developed and existed for the majority of their lives. We may think of the Heideggerian idea of ‘world’, which must, to an extent, be shared by various Dasein at once. The problem with Heidegger, as far as I could understand him, is that he conceives of ‘world’ as something under which lies Being. Being always being the same ‘thing’ which gives birth to truth only through the creation of a ‘world’, thereby concealing something of itself at the same time. ‘World’, then, may be seen in this sense as a kind of trace of Being. A similar thing appears to happen in his later conception of the setting-to-work of truth in the work of art, where ‘earth’ gives birth to ‘world’. However, an interesting turn occurs in his conception of the work of art: ‘earth’ is no longer that which gives birth to truth via the medium of ‘world’. Instead, truth is the result of a ceaseless conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’. This is how I like to think of the idea of constant conflict between chaos and stability, Being and Becoming, so that nothing is ever either this or that, but only a degree. In that sense everything is indeed always becoming, but only insofar as it is also always stable. Now, let us recall Sinthome’s pointing out that there mustn’t necessarily be one absolute logos, but a multitude of logoi. If that the case, perhaps we can assume that each logoi may spend itself after an unfixed and unpredictable period of time, just like the idea of drops creating waves in a pool. Perhaps we can think of the instant a drop clashes with the pool as an instant of conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’, chaos and stability. The resulting ripples would then be a new logoi or ‘truth’ in a Heideggerian sense. Thus, what we’re envisioning here is not an essential notion of Being, but a continual and infinite rekindling of new kinds of being or different logoi. Nevertheless, I find it too simplistic to think about logoi in terms of emergence and dying out. I mean, I don’t believe clear-cut transitions are made from one paradigm or episteme to another. Rather, change must occur continuously on a micro-level. So that ripples and waves in the pool collide and merge with each other infinitely. What is it that allows the introduction of a microchange to an existing discourse in the Foucauldian sense, for example? I like Sinthome’s reference to resonance. Could we now say that, after everything we’ve said above, these ripples or waves, these temporary logoi, affect all members of a particular discourse? Meaning, a human being can only have any ideas insofar as he’s in relation to other human beings. This is not to suggest a kind of Habermasian shared basis, but a shared basis nonetheless. This shared basis would be fragile, with pockets of infinite possibility permeating it throughout. This is not too far from Deleuze, I guess. There appears to be a kind of zeitgeist, then, albeit never a tangible one. Or, more appropriately, a kind of echo of being which seems to resonate. Discourse, as such, can be thought of not as something stable or an asolute shared basis, but a kind of echo which seems to resonate. Would it be too much to assume, then, that as human beings exist and grow-up exposed to the same echo or resonance, they will tend to produce similar thoughts? Surely this isn’t too far fetched, particularly is we no longer tend to think of thought as something summoned by us, but as something which occurs to us.

Now, assuming that language never constitutes a direct representation of reality, we may say that language acts as a kind of echo or resonance. Meaning, communication is only made possible by way of hinting. Even in everyday conversations we don’t talk directly of things, because our own words do not represent anything directly or tangibly. We speak in approximation, which, upon being heard by a fellow interlocutor, appears to resonate with him. There is, therefore, a kind of “hinting” occurring continuously within any discourse or paradigm. So, when a musician comes out and does something which appears completely new, or when a philosopher expresses a new idea, it is embraced precisely because it resonates in some way. I realise that we’re still left with the problem of determinism versus randomness, but I would still like to try and think of this as something beyond randomness and determinism, or at least something which is forever suspended between the two. Not an either/or, but a degree. A constant play of forces between being and becoming. This is the only way in which a discourse may allow the introduction of new aspects – by making sure that they are never entirely foreign, never purely outside.

As a final point, I would like to pose one more question: I tend to agree with Sinthome that there is no absolute logos, only different logoi. But then I find myself asking why it is that logoi must emerge at all, and what it is that governs the emergence of logoi in the first place. Is the emergence of logoi dependent on the existence of a more fundamental law? Similar to the question of dark matter. If dark matter is to an extent that which gives birth to space and matter, what space does dark matter ‘exist’ in? can it occur outside any notions of space or occurrence? It’s tempting to simply say ‘the time of time’s absence’ and leave it at that, but I just can’t stop thinking about it.

Also, as an aside, perhaps we can say that in writing or speech we are never referring to differance as such, but merely to the disguise differance ordains at that particular point in time. This, however, would suggest a Heideggerian essential Being underlying all disguises. but what if this differance, or whatever you'd like to call it, only exists as disguise, never present to itself.

I'm not sure whether at the end of this post I've managed to say anything at all or just make a greater mess of things, so again, any comments would be most welcome. Help. Please.

A punishing faith

Larval Subjects wishes to rediscover his conviction that writing ‘makes any damned difference at all’… How pointless to try and find a point to writing. What difference does it make if writing makes a difference or not? Writing is a form of faith, I now realise, and true faith involves great risk. How many times have I stopped myself in the middle of writing, asking myself what I’m doing with my life, wondering how many more years I can waste away before regret catches up with me. For that’s what life seems to consist of – a continual warding off of guilt and regret. Amor fati has served me well so far, though I fear at times that I have not yet had good reason for it. When the time comes, will I stand the test? The prospect of great regret terrifies me. It’s this fear which petrifies me, freezes me in my place and drains me of all my faith. I’ve been weak, I’ve not been stern enough in my faith; I can never give myself over wholeheartedly to anything, that much I realise. Always a “What if? What if?...” I would’ve made a lousy Christian. I’m inspired by the story of Kafka writing The Judgment in eight hours straight, without leaving his desk once. Such faith! An exemplary believer. Whenever I write I find myself asking –‘What if this is wrong? What if it’s shit? It is shit! Where is this going? I’ve been writing for two hours when I could be doing something practical, something important’. This disease of practicality pervades us all from one time to another, usually most of the time. And so I go, time and time again, and time and time again I find myself called back into writing, by god knows what, and I don’t want to know about it. Yet over the years I’ve found that each time I write the experience becomes more intense. I remember Nietzsche talking of those exalted sensations that can last for hours or even days in the noble individual until one has become a mood incarnate. I thought I understood Nietzsche as I read those lines for the first time. What a joke! I’m only now beginning to have an inkling of what he must have meant, though that inkling is enough to show me that I can never understand completely, but always begin to understand anew. If I only understand one thing, then it is this: these sensations cannot be subjected to the will of the world. They have neither goal nor justification. They are not practical. They don’t put food on the table or help old women cross the road. They are good to no-one; in fact, in terms of benefit to mankind and practicality they may even be harmful. Most of all (and here I must contradict everything I’ve said so far), we can’t even say that writing isn’t good for anything, as the Blanchotian writer, by ‘definition’, does not know what lies at the end of writing. As such, he has no knowledge of what isn’t there either, nor can we be certain of its having or not having an end. Recall that in The Gift Of Death Derrida criticises Christians for not being true givers and not having true faith, as they believe in a reward to be reaped after death. True faith, we suspect, is impossible. Yet it is also ‘barely possible’, as Derrida would say, in that it may occur only unexpectedly, unbeknownst even to the believer. Then can we say that true faith would depend on our giving away our own death, making the gift of death, so to speak, and thus giving up the very possibility of an afterlife. But how can the writer give away that which is not even in is power to give? (This is but another interpretation of the term ‘the gift of death’, a term for which Derrida himself offers numerous interpretations, so that we may continue to speculate ceaselessly) The writer alone strives for death. Striving only to achieve glimpses of it when he finds himself removed from the scene of acting.

What happened to Rimbaud? Maybe he gave up, realising early on that he could never bring his writing to an end. Maybe he didn’t have the patience, the patience Blanchot speaks of each time one becomes the il. A patience imbued with impatience, a continual struggle between the two. He gave up. And perhaps he was right to do so? Wise and strong beyond his years. It is we who are weak, we who keep writing and can’t bring ourselves to stop, who can do nothing but say ‘yes’, even when at the end of each experience we vow ‘never again!’.

In the wake of my poor performance on the degree I’ve decided to become more disciplined at any cost. I’ve set up a schedule for each day from which I’m forbidden to veer. 8-9 am – Shower and breakfast. 9-13 – read, etc, etc. But every time I sit down on my trusty rocking chair with the best of intentions I get the urge to write! It’s hard to read anything without getting ideas. This workless demand of writing is ruining everything for me. Writing, if I may be poetic, is like a fart. You can only hold it in for so long before it remains painfully trapped inside, only to come out eventually with considerable discomfort and in unsatisfying intervals, or it forces itself out at an inopportune moment (beautiful, I know). Writing tears up all plans and calculations. As Derrida says, to truly respond to something is to relinquish all calculations. It must be an event occurring beyond all intentions. Writing is always intention plus a little extra, always n+1. That ‘little extra’ lying forever at an infinite distance from me, even as it appears to happen.

Ibitsu told me the other day how in an interview, after being asked how he knows when a song is finished, Maynard from Tool replied that a song is never finished. There comes a point where one simply has to say –‘this is enough’. And here lies our weakness, both Maynard’s and mine, or anyone else’s who ever tried to write or compose; we cannot finish writing, only leave it indefinitely. Like Ibitsu said in his last post, ‘the weakness of suicide belongs to one’s strength to commit it’. Our very setting down to write is each time attempted suicide, and each time a failed attempt. A powerlessness to bring about our own end. Such horror; at least until Blanchot one could take comfort in death as the end of existence. And now? We can’t even die. All that’s left is this never-ending dying, an incessant failure to die – a dying stronger than death.

Writing is and forever will be a matter of faith. To keep writing, to return to writing time and time again, to keep returning to such punishment knowing that it is only ever an interruption, requires the strongest faith. That faith is forever our strength and our weakness. I hear of these people who lock themselves away from the world in a small room for years, perhaps decades, and dedicate their whole time to writing and to reading philosophy. And for what? to get nearer to the space of literature? But don’t they harbour, in the deepest and most secret crevices of their hearts, a desire to bring back something of it with them? To bring back some proof, a piece of evidence to show that magical place really does exist? Yet anything from that place would dissolve in the air of our world, and vice versa, for the world and writing are mutually exclusive. It’s precisely this constant failure to bring back proof of the slain giant, except in the form of traces, which keeps us writing.

A faithfull reply

Ibitsu is right to point out that Heidegger’s call of conscience must not be confused with the ethical experience of Levinas or the il in Blanchot. Of course, as Ibitsu himself is aware, our intention with these posts is not to stick blindly to the writings of an individual philosopher, but to be faithful to them in the manner in which Blanchot conceives of fidelity when he writes of Levinas, - namely, that we must reappropriate their ideas in such a way that challenges their accuracy and allows us to develop a new and unique understanding of their ideas. Bearing this in mind, let us think the significance of Heidegger – a significance which he may not even have intended – further. As Ibitsu points out, in the Blanchotian experience of death, ‘the world is now and henceforth severed’. Why should this not be the case with Heidegger as well? After all, is this not precisely what ‘occurs’ during the mood of Anxiety, which is itself a prerequisite for the call of conscience to be heard? In this experience Dasein may be said to be horrified by death, i.e. by the lack of concrete foundation underlying one’s existence, and by the realisation that Dasein has thus far existed as the they-self. For Heidegger, it is this stripping away of the world as constituted by the they which allows Dasein to become acquainted with his ‘authentic Self’. But now let us re-elucidate this notion, in faithfulness to Heidegger, by using some of Blanchot’s ideas. If we accept that the “I” can really exist as meaningful only within a world, then we may say that this dissolution of the world is in fact an instant of the Self’s dissolution as well. But when Ibitsu says that at this instant ‘the world is now and henceforth severed’ we must ask ourselves: ‘”Now”? “Henceforth”? what do these words mean? By using the word “now” are we suggesting an intelligible beginning? And “henceforth”, what does that mean? Until when? the end of time, perhaps?’ For we mustn’t forget that this experience is, for Blanchot, one without beginning and without end. Ibitsu reminds: ‘one must heed the warning of the verb occur, for its temporal constitution leads us astray’. This being the case, and considering that the “I” does not even experience this instant of a time of time’s absence, we may conclude, as Thomas Wall himself states several times, that this experience cannot be registered in memory in the same way with which we usually record events and images. This would mean that one cannot escape the they-self, as the dissolution of the world and the “I” cannot themselves be remembered by the “I” which is itself constituted by the world. Once the experience is ‘over’, the “I” has missed any lesson that such an experience may have taught him, for in reality there was no tutor, no lesson to be taught, and most importantly, no pupil. In that case, we may assume that this experience cannot pertain to an overcoming of the they-self, but merely a temporary dissolution; an interruption, as Blanchot would have it, an experience of failure and eternally recurring failure at that. A failure to liquefy the they-self once and for all. These events of authenticity (as I would like to term them), are only authentic insofar as they consist of, and insist on, a kind of meaninglessness – it insists on our failing the world. And why is it that, as Ibitsu rightly states, ‘the meaning occurs in that there is no meaning’? Perhaps we can even say that these events are the only one’s with ‘meaning’ at all? For every other meaning in the world is forever dependent on something else for its meaning, everything holds meaning only insofar as it serves an end of some sort – which is to say, nothing holds any meaning at all. Rather, meaning is always deferred, much like in Blanchot’s understanding of language as relational. As such, we may say that this experience, this event, is the only ‘thing’ that holds any meaning at all, for it has no end, and so has only itself as any source of meaning; itself, which is to say – nothing at all…
Nothing, for there is no memory of this event, no “I” to experience it, just interruption, suspension. As the il takes over, the they-self may itself be said to be suspended; suspended, not merely as frozen and paralysed, but as the dissolution of the they-self (if we may return to thinking of Heidegger). The dissolution which not simply unearths a deeper more authentic Self, but the very vacuity of one’s existence. When the they-self is pulled apart, all that’s left is the bottomless chasm, a space empty of all matter, in which one can neither fall nor rise, but merely remain infinitely suspended.

Ibitsu also reference Thomas Wall (“this crepuscular event is the writer’s most quotidian milieu”) before going on to reference Bukowski as one who has no desire for the pain of writing. Writing fails Bukowski, for it is an experience of horror, yet one which nevertheless leaves the writer seeking it time and time again through methods and different concoctions for the inducement of creativity. Bukowski wrote in a poem:

‘And I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating the final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both’

One may ask, though, what right has Bukowski to accuse the world of failing him? What business does he have looking for writing in the world? Has he forgotton that in order for one to become a writer he must first fail the world? The writer is a traitor par excellence.

Interruption number #?!^*£

We’ve decided to take things a bit more seriously here at Still Water Springs, which means that from now on we’ll be posting full-sized essays on various topics, always with a philosophical eye. We decided that it would be more efficient to have some focus, particularly now as our degree is over and we have no-one telling us what to do again; a naked feeling. What does this mean for the scattered, sporadic posts which seem to appear every once in a while? It appears to us that ever since we first set-up the blog we’ve been engaged in a search for the blog’s meaning. And perhaps along the way we forgot that that very ‘meaning’ of the blog is in this continual opening of new possibilities of meaning. Instants of deterritorialization alongside constant striation. For this reason we cannot simply close off openings in the blog through predetermined and dogmatic goals. At first I thought of starting a new open-ended category under the title musings, but decided that even this would threaten to be too constrictive. After typing the previous post I decided to assign it to several categories to which I felt it belonged, but as I began to do so realised that the list could go on endlessly. I was not merely talking about authenticity, Heidegger, Derrida or deconstruction. Blanchot, Deleuze, Kant, Foucault, and a multitude of other names and ideas could have fitted the post just as well, even if they were not mentioned directly. Thought cannot be restricted to a particular topic, and that is precisely what these bastard and orphan posts are – instants of thought. In these posts we make no commitment to scholarly rigour or accuracy. Instead, they are to be seen as an opportunity to through any ideas into the air as they’re evolving. As such these posts may appear at times incoherent, even nonsensical, but we feel that we must allow ourselves to entertain any thought to the best of our abilities. And who knows, we may even come to see an identifiable thread going between all the thoughts, building-up to something, trying to express something, perhaps even giving birth to a large essay – but forever searching, never culminating.

The Other This

During a long and intense conversation with Ibitsu the other day we found ourselves pondering yet again Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as laid-out in Being and Time. Most details of that conversation have now been forgotten, but I’ll take the liberty of continuing that line of thought independently. ‘Was Derrida right to criticise the notion of authenticity in Heidegger as metaphysical and as holding out for some ineffable essence?’ we asked ourselves. Are we to understand that the concept of ‘authenticity’ as conceived of in Being and Time is suggestive of an irreversible enlightenment? Nowhere in the ocean of passages laid out systematically across the book does it say that the instant of the call of conscience cannot be repeated. Indeed, the call may be made several times before it is actually heeded for the first time, with Dasein fleeing the call of conscience and remaining within the milieu of the they-self.
For now, however, let us leave the question of whether the ‘heeding’ of the call can only occur as a one off, as it requires a much more detailed argument. We will come back to this later. Let us consider the fact that in order for Dasein to exist intelligibly it requires a degree of inauthenticity. Dasein exists within what Heidegger calls ‘world’, i.e. a pre-conscious and even pre-conceptual network of meanings and significations. As Being-in-the-world Dasein finds all he comes into contact with as ready-to-hand, viz. as already occupying an understood place, role and function within Dasein’s world in such a manner that we must think of it not as an ‘understanding’, but a pre-understanding of sorts, an intuition. Not the intuition of a thing-such-as-it-is, but rather a kind of intuition which intuits itself, as Thomas Wall says. As in Kant’s intuition of space and time. As such, this ‘intuition’ of ‘world’ may not point at anything ‘objective’ (we really shouldn’t use such words anymore), yet it is like a necessary piece of programming without which Dasein would be entirely paralysed. It is the concreteness of this intuition, amongst other things, which is brought to the fore of attention as precarious and fragile in the experience of the mood of anxiety. The experience, then, much as in Levinas ethical experience, is a paralysing one. Being-in-the-world is a lie of sorts, a kind of illusion, though not in the negative sense, for it is a lie which obscures no deeper truth, nothing which can ever be uncovered. In fact, only from this lie can any ‘truth’ arise at all. For ‘truth’ in the Heideggerian sense can only exist as correlative with the totality of meanings and signification embedded and interlinked within a ‘world. If we thus accept the lie as necessary, we come to understand that absolute authenticity is not possible, as this would mean the very undoing of Dasein. This is implied in Heidegger’s magnum opus based on everything we’ve mentioned so far.

Let us try to think of authenticity in terms of deconstruction. What if authenticity can be thought of as the experience of singularity, as this paralysing experience we’ve been discussing so far? We may yet find that we would be right to understand authenticity and the call of conscience as unrepeatable, but only insofar as we make of ‘call of conscience’ a synonym of deconstruction, and think of authenticity as an event of singularity. Can the call of conscience be that event of deconstruction which occurs ‘within me’ time and time again? As Thomas Wall reminds us: the call of conscience is not mine to make, as my ‘self’ was not mine to forget in the first place. To take it a step further: just as it isn’t in my power to make the call or to forget (for it is always ‘it’ who always calls and forgets in the Blanchotian sense), it isn’t even in my power to heed the call. The consequences of heeding the call will be felt entirely by me as an “I”, but the heeding itself will never be registered or undertaken by me. It must be an event which paralyses and dissolves the “I”. The instant of heeding – or event of authenticity as I would like to think of it – are each time singular and unpredictable, and it is only thus that they are paradoxically prone to ‘recurring’. The next instant of ‘authenticity’ infinitely singular, infinitely different from the last, and infinitely different from ‘it-self’. Yet it will also be infinitely of the same ‘genus’ of singularity as any other such event (can we entertain this thought for kicks?). The next instant will be entirely singular and new because each time it recalls us to the guilt of a forgetting that was not ‘done’ by the same “I”. I am not the same “I” that I was before that last event of authenticity precisely because that which ‘precedes’ the “I” is and is forgotten by the “I” – namely, the Other in Levinas – is itself never the same, never itself, but always becoming. We could even say that the forgetting is the forgetting of the very moment of forgetting and of the forgetter, by the forgetter itself. Always Other because it manages to remain other, different, nothing but difference, in the Deleuzeian sense. To conclude, the event of authenticity, this ‘call of conscience’, is never the same, not only because ‘he’ who forgets is never the same, but because that which is forgotten is never the same either. It is the split atom, that which continually disguises itself and shape-shifts at the same time as it is revealed. Therefore it cannot be traced. It merely leaves a trace, this trace being but the trace of a trace of a trace of a trace…

Exhaustion

I have worked so hard lately, all I want to do now is actively distance myself from anything that might even remind me of the idea of work. I sat in my room, then, with nothing to do. What to do, what to do? Do not! Don't do! Do nothing. So I began to read a novel that's been lying half-read on my nightstand for months. But I could not be absorbed by the reading, the way reading demands one to give up himself and denounce mastery, to be soaked into it like wine into the carpet, like vapour trickling upwards into the ceiling, stealthily, unawares. Instead the book merely succeeded in awakening in me a passion for reading; I became excited about the idea of reading, and as soon as this happened I could no longer read. I got the urge to go through my pile of unread books and decide which ones I would read this summer. I put a bookmark in each, and so felt as if something had been done, a decision had been taken. As I climbed off the chair I'd just used to reach my books, I noticed it was next to the bed, where I always placed it whenever I studied these past few months. Should I sit in the chair and read the novel? I wondered. But the very idea of sitting in the chair reminded me of working, so I sat on the bed instead, and for all the discomfort this brought could not bring myself to sit in the chair. I need a break from that chair and the chair needs a break from me. It was then that I began to write these lines, which I am still writing now. How long has it been since I'd experienced the joy of writing? I've written a lot lately, enough to fill a small book. Yet even though I've been writing good stuff, interesting stuff, it hasn't been a complete pleasure; it was calculated writing, writing with a purpose. How long had it been since I'd written anything spontanaeously? joyously? when was the last time I was surprised by writing? I realise now why I've been so lax in the past with self-discipline; I was afraid. Afraid that I'd be closing off the possibility of ideas visiting me. Ideas will come even in strictness, but they will struggle and wear out along the way. One can't force thought; he may try, but in doing so will only push it further away. This is not the place to remain concentrated, to stop yourself from being distracted - this is the place of constant distraction, constant yet inconsistent. If you find the impetus of writing waning, allow it to wane, fiddle with something else, though never too far away from your pen and never too seriously. Soon enough the urge to write will return, as soon as you are absorbed by the other activity. Why? Because writing only occurs as a distraction, a distraction from a distraction ad infinitum.

Authenticity - reply to previous post

That's interesting, I've been thinking a lot about authenticity again lately. I understand the problems philosophers like Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida have with this notion, and I agree with them to an extent. After all, we can't assume that there's some unified 'self' to Dasein, hidden under the veil of the they-self, and which offers Dasein the possibility of being present to itself. I remember that for the Heidegger essay I tried to write against the elitism that can be interpreted from this notion of authenticity after a few people on the course started saying that some people are just 'inauthentic' (in the Heideggerian sense that they're not in control of their own thoughts and decisions). How can we fight such a claim? It seems to me that the very nature of inauthenticity requires that one not be aware of his own inauthenticity. I mean, how can I ever know whether I'm inauthentic or not? No one ever thinks they're inauthentic, because to recognise oneself as inauthentic is the very moment of "breaking free" from inauthenticity and into authenticity. Yet, at the same time, it appears that in order for one to be authentic, he must be aware of his own inauthenticity. The moment he's no longer aware of a trace of inauthenticity still present in him, he can no longer know whether he's authentic or not. Therefore it seems that we have a Derridean aporia here: one must be inauthentic in order to be authentic! Authenticity is impossible without the coexistence - in the same Dasein - of inauthenticity. Perhaps we can say that inauthenticity is the impossible limit of authenticity? There can be no clear cut distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. So perhaps there's still room for thinking about authenticity? Maybe we shouldn't discard it so disdainfully. I still do think Heidegger was on to something there, and though he may have taken it in the wrong direction it's up to us to reappropriate it. Let's give authenticity some more thought.

Purposeless

Lately I’ve been facing the question of the nature of our blog. ‘It’s pretentious’, a kind friend said. ‘It’s narcissistic’, suggested another. Why do we keep up this blog? Is it to prove ourselves to the world or to each other?
Perhaps we need humbling. Self-deprecation is not genuine humbling, because it suggests disappointment in oneself, which is only possible so long as one has special expectations of oneself. To be truly humble is not to see the fact of one’s ordinariness as negative, but to embrace it and even love it. Indeed, amor fati applies even here.
And yet, I have been in a rotten mood for the past few weeks which I can’t seem to escape. My only moments of happiness (yes, I use a word that strong) come during these moments of stirring and unsettled excitement when something in me pushes me to write. This has been true writing – when I completely forget any notion of a potential reader while writing. For the idea of being read by anyone has been my problem, particularly when attempting fiction, as I’m constantly worried about what image of myself I might be projecting onto the world; this is corrupt and dishonest writing. Are we guilty of this to an extent on the blog? But we have kept our anonymity. Nevertheless, the question of the very purpose of the blog has been kept open throughout our time on the blog. Is this a problem? Are we to decide upon or even discover some sort of essence to our activity? And here we are again, tempted to measure and justify, falling back into the trap of putting a price on our writing, viewing it in terms of value judgments. This is our biggest flaw. This is our biggest flaw! What do we want, then? We’re inspired by Blanchot’s communism. We wish to write and act for a community, and for that community to do the same for us. We want our thoughts to be read by others, not so that we may be admired and applauded, but as part of an endless free exchange of thought and ideas; because we desire to be read by others just as much as we would like to read their thoughts. We desire merely to have a perpetual opening of possibilities, a never-ending stretching of our horizons, and an incessant blurring of the lines of friendship. To be not in competition (this primitive survival instinct surely must be overcome, that is to say, subdued to a certain degree of restraint or even mastery), but to help each other realise our fullest potential and extract as much joy in wonder out of this life, whatever this may mean (I realise these last few points raise a host of ethical questions, which I will not deal with here). This, to us, can include the exchange of music, literature, abstract thought and whatever else we feel like. Our community can be open to anyone.
This is an impossible future, a messianistic belief, in Derridean terms. It will forever remain in the realm of the ‘to come’, never realised, yet perhaps ‘barely possible’. This ethic of a pure exchange of knowledge or ideas is what friendship or a Blanchotian community must surely be based on. What we desire is the impossibility of pure trust and sharing – pure co-operation. And so, to answer the aforementioned question: is our indecisiveness regarding the nature of our activity a problem? No. For our activity is grounded in having no grounding, its essence is the activity itself which may never come to an end. And yet, along the way to an impossible future may lie some truly wonderful moments.

Untitleable

Here I am again, at writing’s departure point, writing’s beginning, and yet I see again that it has already begun, begun before its beginning, before its time, “A beginning anterior to all beginnings”. It has begun because it never begins, nor does it ever end – it always is. Always, because it is eternity, and eternity because it is only ever eternal repetition, always repetition. To return, time and time again, to that same point from which I never depart in the first place. Time and time again, yet it is beyond time itself. Time and time again return to that same starting line – that line which is never there in the first place, which always eludes me; the line I only become aware of once I’ve started running, once I’ve crossed it, as I catch myself running, never myself starting to run. And sometimes it morphs, always it morphs, it becomes the finishing line and I am drawn back toward it. But here in writing’s expanse, in writing’s space, death’s space, these distinctions carry no weight. This is the space of eternal differentiation and incessant merger. I run neither away from the starting point nor towards the finishing line. Here there is only one point, and all one can do is circle it, revolve endlessly, not drawing nearer because one cannot draw further away either. And at that, one does not revolve as an act, but rather is given to the inertia of an orbiting satellite, to stagnation and impossibility. The more I read Blanchot the more I feel that Blanchot is the only way to write, that Blanchot is writing par excellence. Yet I feel that now I write only in an inability to write; that ‘truth’ can only be written in error, only in failure, can only be spoken in silence as it is only heard in silence. And what is truth to us? By using that word I become a utilitarian traitor, a liar. One can only, must only, write error.
“I need weed”, I thought to myself. So much time without an idea. How does anyone ever manage to write without drugs? They don’t, they only think they do. And yet, what’s the use of using drugs? To write the same all over again? To never begin anew, but “to begin all over again”? And in the end… Discover that there is no end. Nevertheless, as I sat in my trusty rocking chair – that sturdy rocking chair which hasn’t let me down yet, which hasn’t broken like the last one – I got the urge. Why, why does it always come as I’m reading? –‘Write’. –‘But I’m reading. No, I’m sick of you. I won’t write.’ –‘Write’. I go on reading, but it’s hopeless now. The words fall away from the page; not a single one enters my mind. All I can think of now is this urge to write. The tingling sensation is getting worse and worse, and the leg begins to shake again. I read the paragraph again, I make another effort – nothing. –‘Bollocks!’ Impatience. And perhaps this is what Blanchot spoke of – not only the need for patience once one has started writing, patience not to try and term the interminable, but to patience not to begin writing, not to grab hold of what has already begun itself within you, without you. Patience to prolong and defer writing as if it were an orgasm. Patience not to reach an end. And even this patience is insufficient on its own – it is only significant when it contains within it impatience, when it holds an inevitable impatience at bay. Allow ideas to ferment. Who knows, we’ll see… Writing, only ambiguously. Anyone else is a liar.

A post about nothing

This is getting to be a real problem. I read something and am immediately caught by the urge to write, when I should be reading and doing work. Why is it I only feel inspired to write or play music when I should be doing something else? That's why I can't finish reading my books. Good writing is too inspiring. Here I am, 24, and nothing has changed. I'm still the lazy waster I always was. The worst thing is that it doesn't look like it's gonna change any time soon.
I've always tried to find out what it is that typifies our generation, for it seems that there's something to be said about every generation. So what is it that typifies ours? Our generation is characterised by its emptiness. By its struggle and utter inability to cope with its nothingness, its meaninglessness. It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. It's always warmer under the sheets, and there's very little outside that's worth giving up that comforting warmth for. Everyone I know is a waster. Those who are not wasters I don't want to know. My housemate is watching Gordon Ramsey in the next room. He's not a waster. He's 18 and has a full time job working almost 15 hours each day. He knows what he wants from the future and doesn't have to worry about uncertainty. He makes me sick and I can't stand to spend any time with him. P. came over for new year's. He, too, is a great waster. As great as me. 'Greater', he would probably insist. He's been unemployed for almost a year. I think that's his greatest achievment, as well as the most endearing one in my eyes. 'We're better than them', he assures me. 'Why?', 'Because they're monkeys! At least we're interested in films and music and literature, and we can still laugh at Spongebob and Ren & Stimpy!'. 'But look at some of these people. They wouldn't be caught dead with us.'
That's why we always end up in dingy shitholes at the end of every night instead of at some classy nightclub. And what's more, we love it that way. That's the only place where we can be happy at the end of a night of drinking, when we're too pissed to stop our eyeballs from oscillating wildly, unable to fix on anything, and are so slow that we must help eachother complete our sentences. We're content with being here at the end of the night, surrounded by these middle-aged wrecks who attend nightly, carried inside on their own powerlessness to help themselves. This is where these women belong. This is their lair, where they like to inspect whatever unlucky young creature happens to wander in. It is the web, and they the spiders, returning for leftovers. Well, you can't have any of this meat, you old hags! I'm just here to watch. you intrigue me. Why do you all have such interesting stories? 'I'm raising my girl to be proud of her Geordie heritage. 'Cos it's a dying dialect, you know?'. 'If I had my roots in you', I think to myself, 'I wouldn't have much to be proud of'.
So we eventually leave the bar and make out way towards the studios behind the Cluny. We'd been told there was a party taking place there. 'As if they'll let us in. I've told you, P., we're not good enough for those kind of places!'. We walk up the steps and I ring the bell. 'Hello?', says a voice. 'Hi, I was told to come to the party'. 'By who?', 'Harry'. The voice consolts someone in the background and returns with a verdict. 'Sorry, don't know any Harry'. 'But you must know Harry! Everyone knows Harry!'. Thus ends another night of nothing.