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Coro-nations: The Crowning Ultimatum of Truth

DANGER, DANGER!

In brief story of the salt mine (see here), everybody has their “duty” to perform.

That is, we are all fellow laborers here, each facing roughly the same dangers – say, of injury, imminent collapse, flooding, or monoxide poisoning – despite our differing tasks. As such, we each have our own relatively unique experience and perspective in the mining business, though with much overlap.

Francois Laruelle, for instance, is self-described as “a miner rather than a surveyor” (Anti-Badiou, xl). Thus, Badiou is named as the “surveyor” in question.

We find this to be true also by way of Badiou’s own auto-biographical references (see here):

There are two periods in the history of my rupture with the official Left.

The last, well known, is May 68 and its continuation. The other, less known, more secret and so even more active. In 1960 there was a general strike in Belgium. I will not give the details. I was sent to cover this strike as a journalist – I was often a journalist, I have written, it seems to me, hundreds of articles, maybe thousands. I met mine workers on strike. They have reorganized the entire social life of the country, by constructing a sort of new popular legitimacy. They have even edited a new money. I assisted at their assemblies, I spoke with them. And I was from then on convinced, up till this day I am speaking to you, that philosophy is on that side. “On that side” is not a social determination. It means: on the side of what is spoken or pronounced there, on the side of this obscure part of common humanity. On the side of equality.

The abstract maxim of philosophy is necessarily absolute equality. After my experience of mine workers strike in Belgium, I have give a philosophical order to myself : “transform the notion of truth in such a way that it obeys the equalitarian maxim, this is why I gave the truth three attributes:

1) It depends on an irruption, and not on a structure. Any truth is new, this will be the doctrine of the event.
2) All truth is universal, in a radical sense, the anonymous equalitarian for-all, the pure for-all, constitutes it in its being, this will be its genericity.
3) A truth constitutes its subject, and not the inverse, this will be its militant dimension.

All that, in a still total obscurity, is at work when I meet in 1960 the Belgium mine Workers.

Yes, all that in a still total obscurity indeed. Badiou’s philosophy began as it were with a simple DIALOGUE with mine workers, but he has since eliminated that which sparked his genius. Laruelle, too, tirades at length against this critical dialogical element, as well as against the mathematical Master. It is this element of dialogue which I seek to re-open in the unfolding of non-violence. We’ve met many people here, and we too have interviewed them closely through our extensive reading. Let us see , briefly,what they have to say.

Of course, we first pick up the trope from Novalis. Consider the excerpt from The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 5, Romanticism, page 132:

NovalisMine

There’s that inheritance by Freud, Jung, and psychoanalysis generally, carried on through to Lacan. He himself might be considered a guard, a gate-keeper watching over the unconscious. “The Name-of-the-Father” of course still reads the dusty, mostly unreadable sign above the entrance to this particular mine shaft — clearly nobody has bothered to replace it for years. Just give him a wave as you enter each morning; he is a peculiar fellow.

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Accel-erationisms: Afterthinking Fast and Slow

To #Accelerate or not to #Accelerate?

Our desired unfolding of non-violence in action and thought operates, of course, with a certain rotational velocity. The wheel turns, the dancer twirls, the moon orbits, all at a constant pace en pointe with the sonority of such spatial silence.

It is not unlike thinking on your feet, or thinking with your feet as the case may be in the 1930 Salt March, and the many other “movements” of history. How are we given to think when an otherwise unknown possibility or proposition presents itself to us? How are we given to think when we encounter a potential mise en scene of violent entanglement, a moment of trauma or an accident, or face an emergency Crisis situation? We will not be able to arrive here in this post, for I wish to crawl at first before we walk, and walk at first before we run.

Sometimes, it is indeed important to accelerate or decelerate yourself accordingly — your mind, your voice, your physical movements — in order to meet that point of nearly friction-less resonance once more. For this point may itself  be in motion outside of us, and as such it is our job to orient ourselves accordingly, and always approximately so. I think it important to not keep ourselves drifting on “automatic” at all times, and instead opt for a “stick-shift” or otherwise “make-shift” kind of thought/action which moves blissfully against the cutting, against the churning gears of an otherwise “automatic” systematic or machinic desire.

In a conflict, oftentimes the standard Hegelian grid-lock frame-work is set up as follows: Not only do you merely disagree with your beloved Other, but you and the Other disagree on the very nature of your disagreements. If we were talking about an instance of game theory, it would be akin to both players defecting, both players failing to cooperate.

This dead-end is almost always a Lose-Lose for both parties engaged, as well as for other non-parties who might have been dragged around in the dust too. How does one escape, how does one find an outside as it were to such a concrete tension? It is like a finger-trap toy, both ends pulling in opposite directions. Even if one end stops pulling they are still locked in place so long as the other keeps pulling back.

My recent proposal of crisis intervention and non-violent resistance, as in my post “Securing Wisdom” (see here), may be thus put both simply and roughly as follows: Finding a point of resonance may allow for a safe exit. 

As a third-party intervening from without, you need to pull the two towards the center in cooperation by stepping-in between the tension. As a first-party engaged, as a transcendental ego, you will need to learn to dance yourself free just as one charms a snake. Continue reading →

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Altar-ations: A Brief Story in the Salt Mine (Part I)

“…[D]ream should be turned out [entäussert] through dialectical interpretation, and immanent consciousness itself understood as a constellation of the real. Just as if it were the astronomical phase in which hell moves among mankind. Only the star-chart of such wanderings, could, it seems to me, open a perspective on history as primal history.”  – Adorno

Preface to a Brief Story in the Salt Mine:

All that I have posted so far, this 9-link chain each consisting of parts I-II-III (see here), can be read altogether as a brief story from inthesaltmine.

I should like to tell that narrative of my experience as I experienced it first-hand.

Though I had neither image in mind at the time I began, two distinct pictures have now crystallized or fossilized before my mind: One may liken these 9 chains to Dante’s 9 circles of the Inferno; or, if you would prefer, one may liken them to the first 9 steps of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. I have labeled them accordingly in the table of contents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This journey (my journey) which continues today, after three or four years of relatively intense individuation and inner crisis of faith, has provided me with a compelling myth I can speak to others.

I can tell them the myth of my own Wandering that I have claimed as my own. There is no more truth to blaze or to otherwise set on fire, for all is already emanating here. This is my story, this is my Body broken, broken for you my readers. Do this in remembrance of “me”.

Whether you are prone to see my fragmentary work as being fundamentally of “life” or of “death” (…and how frequently they do collide!) it has in any case been the somewhat documented and de-organized course of my own unconscious Life as I have experienced it. Life as we know it is here doubled, containing elements we call life and those we call death. Each link in the sequence can now be recognized by and for a certain underlying “sin” or “self-discovery” which accompanies it. Again, however you choose to see it, we nonetheless have recognized it by the name Tree of Life.

It therefore comes after the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it is therefore the Tree of a Knowledge beyond “Good” and “Evil”. I file my experiences in these spheres.

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Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Securing Wisdom (Part III)

An-chora-ites:

In my last post, entitled Misreading Wisdom (see here), I will certainly confess that I have said or mis-said a lot of things in a deliberately sharp and especially quick-tongued manner.

That is because now we have made it to what I believe is the “cutting edge”, and we ought to seek to move beyond it into the realm of potentialities. Now, let us turn ourselves in and offer ourselves up for something more substantive. Or, as Sloterdijk writes in You Must Change Your Life, we must now “allow ourselves to be operated upon” from without. We are at this stage Wounded, incredibly Wounded by the cutting, and accordingly we are concerned quite fundamentally with matters of (non-)cutting.

Just as Gilles Grelet declares a war on war itself, I wish to effectively make a cut against cutting itself. Arriving at this point, what Laruelle refers to as “the Maxim of Saint Gilles” has been kept firmly in place: “Say anything as long as it cuts”. From here, however, what constitutes the content of “anything” in this gnostic controversy (see here) at present remains undecided.

In contrast to saying “anything”, Lacan through his notion of “full speech” famously aims to say the “nothing” itself in his discussions on Poe’s The Purloined Letter. I believe Lacan’s formulation, unlike J.L. Austin’s performative speech-acts (see here), steps beyond Derrida’s reduction of  ”full speech” to the prized “metaphysics of presence” in his text The Purveyor of Truth, by “truly” opening a Beyond… (see an interesting video here) of the text. He does so by traveling deep into questions of the Real, and by beginning to attend to questions of trauma as such.

However, he sees only the affects of the Real and that is all. Trauma lingers always after-the-fact. Ask instead: What are the facts themselves?

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Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Misreading Wisdom (Part II)

Why I Am Such A Genius:

Where are we now? For starters, we are now past the difficult question of enfolding wisdom (see here), thankfully!

Now comes the hard part, our response: We must now do some “heavy lifting” in remaining vigilant as to the ways in which we have enfolded it in the past, are enfolding it presently, and will enfold it in the future. This shouldn’t be so bad, where shall we begin…

Oh, right! Yes..

Well, you see, there are also these variable structures of the “always already enfolding” which often lie in our shadows as though working behind the scenes, which we are called to integrate into our personal unconscious accordingly along the way. The question of trauma also arrives, as someone like Malabou rightly argues in a distinctly Lacanian-Zizekian tone, in the sudden over-turning of the familiar always-already of the Symbolic.

Wait … No, just stop it! I’ve had it up to here! For those of you who by the grace of Althusser can now speak and read French: J’en ai ras le bol! Je m’en fiche! 

I SAID ENOUGH ALREADY! Stop the cutting!

Let us put these critical musings aside for a moment. That is, as we always-already-freaking-know well enough by now — for we have indeed internalized this process to such a high degree — that, for example, “the time is also out of joint” insofar as it is also in joint.

We know that “the moment of decision is madness”, so much that our thought has been conditioned by the valences of dialectics, by looking for dichotomies, by deconstructing or otherwise psychoanalyzing them, by desiring-machines, by the Name-of-the-Father, and by otherwise specialized terms which belong to the obscure corpus of predominately European male thinkers.

May jouissance rain down on me! Or, like “they” always say, thank God I am not “mad” like Artaud was! But then again, Joyce the Irish-mad-man may have had a point himself:  “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” So, that is the man of genius, but what of Wisdom? To be a genius is surely to be a genius with the knife. In any case, our “knowledge” is in this way and in large part a traditioned knowledge.

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Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Enfolding Wisdom (Part I)

This post aims to make head-way on the question of Enfolding Wisdom.

We have surpassed the anxiety of beginning to begin, and now we may at last begin. Here, we are to begin to head down the Wilderness path known to us as Wisdom. We stand at the beginning of this path, daring to begin our first steps. It is as though immediately we face an obstacle of entanglement, the obstacle of the Borromean knot in all of its instantiations, like a prickly bush blocking our way. Or, we must stop to tie our shoes. But why not wear sandals instead? Let us proceed carefully, knowing that as Foucault writes: “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting”.

Following the realization of ordinary non-acrobatics, each of the many (see here) tags which pervade this post, as well as my many other posts, are now understood as reminders that we are not alone in this task.

Lacan’s psychosis:

Jacques Lacan, in Seminar XXIII on Le sinthome (see .pdf here), writes:

And what I am allowing myself, in short, to put forward, is that writing, on this occasion, changes the meaning, the mode of what is at stake, and what is at stake is this philia of Wisdom. What is Wisdom? This is what is not very easy to support otherwise than by writing, from the writing of the noeud bo itself. So that in short, pardon my infatuation, what I am doing, what I am trying to do with my noeud bo is nothing less than the first philosophy that it appears to me can be supported. [...]  So then, what does this give us if we refer to practice? The fact is that man, not God, is a trinitary compound; a trinitary compound of what we will call elements. What is an element? An element is what makes One. In other words, the unary trait. What makes One, on the one hand, and what, because of making One, initiates substitution. The characteristic of an element, is that one proceeds to a combinatorial of them. So then Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, is just as valid, after all, it seems to me, as the other triad of which, in listening to Aristotle, anyway, the gravy to compose man was made up of, namely, nous, psuche, soma. Or again: will, intelligence, affectivity.

I may agree with Lacan’s final statement of his account of the Borromean knot as being “just as valid” as Aristotle. And, in taking on the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, I myself have written on sentient intelligence (see here) and affective connaturality (see here) and briefly on “will” in my understanding of entensionality (see here) as a means of moving with-and-beyond it. In the same way, I cannot personally be satisfied with the Borromean knot, and must go further to find a way to enfold it.

Nor, therefore, can I be satisfied with Levi Bryant’s use of it in his Borromean Critical Theory (see recent video here) insofar as it remains marked as it were by the Lacanian tradition.

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Jung, Nietzsche, Sartre: Non-acrobatics (Part III)

AVEUX NON AVENUS

How ought we proceed following our realization of the Under-man and Over-man and the continual space between (see here)? Is Nietzsche the last true meta-physician of philosophy, as Heidegger fearfully indicates? Must we, under the hypnosis of Rilke, “change our lives” (see here) now, and do something profound with our thinking? Must we become sphereological acrobats, as Peter Sloterdijk insists (“Whoever goes in search of humanity will find acrobats”), ourselves striving toward the Ubermensch, constructing new spheres of co-immunity along the way?

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that:

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”

We have seen his aphoristic style dance in tune with that of the poet-philosophers Novalis and Schlegel. We have also examined Nietzsche’s own gestures found in the created character of Zarathustra. Nietzsche, it seems, provides us with a joyous answer of salvation (Zarathustra: “I teach you the Ubermensch…”), but where exactly do we locate the question? The ordinary villagers to which he returns, or perhaps the “humanity” that is not found in searching for humanity, have little need for the answer until they are convinced otherwise.

The question, therefore, is to be found somewhere in (his) immanent life.

It is perhaps that which prompted — with a sense of necessity or urgency — the (his) need to begin the journey of self-individuation. The question arises: What is Zarathustra’s shadow? What is the name of this dark and violent under-belly of Nietzsche’s lived-experience in his extreme isolation? What sort of Crisis came upon him, perhaps as early as his youth, that brought him to dance so beautifully?

We have only various fragments: in his biography, in his journals, in his family life, in his friendships, in his sicknesses, in his encounters with the Other in the World. Continue reading →