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:

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.

Meet the rest of the “post-structuralist” mining team.

Foucault, of course, is the great master of archaeology and rare artifacts. If you find any gems or fossils, be sure to send them his way. Derrida, by contrast, is without question in charge of quality-control, checking the ore that has already been mined, pointing us to the best chambers in the labyrinth for future discovery, and so forth. He’s also a bit paranoid about roaming myths of haunted crypts, and ghost-like specters, but let’s put that quirky attribute aside. Otherwise, he too is a nice guy to work alongside.

Deleuze and Guattari, the hybrid metallurgist (D&G in the singular), knows much about the process of mining itself and even writes in A Thousand Plateaus that “Every mine is a line of flight”, informing us further that:

Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs. The “Northern, or Gothic, line” is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it. [...]

AXIOM III. The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content. [...]

Perhaps they are expert smiths, and the oeuvres of D&G are themselves “a [mixed] weapon, a tool-maker” (415). After all, they do suggest that nothing is, in itself, revolutionary or reactionary. They might as well be in charge of operations, over-seeing the process of becoming to its completion — not knowing the consequences of the project itself. They do their best, though, to manage despite the difficulty of surviving in this industry. In their words, ”There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant, itinerant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which smiths live: their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad” (413).

So too there is a “phenomenological”, a “hermeneutic”, a “structuralist”, and an “existentialist” mining squad in this mountain, among many others not too far from here.

Let us recount just an instance, for old times’ sake:

Sartre took two weeks off from his conversations with Gerassi in December 1970 to go to the city of Lens and preside as judge in an extra-legal, nongovernmental “people’s” trial in which the GP had begun to play a major role. Six miners had died in a mine accident and, rather than investigating the mine owners, the government had arrested and charged four of their coworkers with manslaughter, provoking large demonstrations. In the people’s trial, the owners themselves were tried for dangerous and unhealthy safety conditions and engineers, doctors, other experts were brought in to testify.

“The court—and me in my summation—demanded that the miners who had been careless and were accused of manslaughter be freed and that the owners be arrested,” Sartre recounts. “The miners were indeed freed…a decision on new safety regulations was made and the owners put them into effect…they had to pay sums to the victims…none of which was ordered by a state court—just a vote by the people of that community.”

In the world of theory, however, if we are to take this analogy to the mine shaft seriously, it is precisely this danger we are forgetting — no matter our squad. Meanwhile, Harman has been making a fuss about “undermining and overmining”.

Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, each one works well at certain rocks, in certain conditions, but which condition is ours, uniquely ours? Which one is human, all too human? Which one is beyond? Which mine are we to take up ultimately, which line of flight comes first-in-the-last-instance? Which of the many accelerationisms hits just the right spot? (see here)

These questions can only be answered through a certain space of dialogue, where we are, in the immanence, called upon from without to remember the danger of the mine.

Acid Rain in the Philosophy of the Black Forest

I believe, or in any event I am led to believe, that this forgetful confusion came by way of and not necessarily because of Martin Heidegger, who originally set the scene through the question of the “storage of energy”. There is after all the question of potentialities that will arise as the discussion carries onward.

He writes as follows: “…a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (14). To enframe the entire earth as a coal mine, as a territorial scene for our drilling and mining desires — well, this is grounds for some serious ecological problems. Indeed, Heidegger recognized this: ”Enframing [Ge-stell] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. (20) and “…where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense.” (28)

There are many such enframings, which one, if any, can we say is a “first-order” framing? Which enfolds all the possible others?

If anything, “post-modernity” has shown us affirmatively that Philosophy in and of itself has proven to only be able to enframe insufficiently — it forgets danger, it fails to think violence, it cannot understand trauma and dissociation, it freezes in Crisis, and so forth. Post-modernism in theory is a testimony to the danger that is present, an awareness that there is danger. Yet, it lacks the means to speak of it, as if petrified by the sight of a dead body at the scene of an accident.

If the “good news” of Laruelle’s non-philosophy is that not everything is philosophizable, then the “bad news” is the same: that not everything is philosophizable. It is not so easy as this, we cannot philosophize our problems away. We need to get rough-and-dirty in service of “the Real” in order to address these Crises as we experience them, both inwardly and outwardly.

We need to set aside our anger and turn to compassion, in humble recognition of the danger of the mine shaft. To be prepared, to the greatest extent possible, for the onset of tragedy.

That is not to say that the “post-modern” is to be discarded or dismissed or scolded as such, for that human feeling is always there. Simply, if we go through the “post-modern phase”, if we swallow our pride, our disgust, and our fear, we may become or in any case we have become able to see things anew. We may begin to move again, our hands and feet, to intervene where there is pain. To ameliorate, to heal where there is suffering. The “post-modern” is necessary in this limited sense, but we should not be content with becoming sensitized to the sight of the traumatic such that we forget the facts that cause it. The post-modern feeling of nausea or vertigo must not become a neutralized business-as-usual, lest we risk becoming in our practice a fraudulent for-profit hospital with outrageous medical billing codes.

Paul Virilio is an especially important figure in this regard, not so much for his dromology, but for his unique sort of  ”endotic” vision. That is, he can see well in the darkness of the mine where others cannot: “Seeing that which had previously been invisible becomes an activity that renews the exoticism of territorial conquests of the past. But seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception.” He, like many others, successfully keeps this danger in mind, having himself experienced War first-hand.

How could anyone forget the bombs, the sound of an explosion, the sound of metal crushing in a car-wreck, the silent hum of medical equipment, the sound of a shriek and a gunshot in the night? How could you forget? In the same way, Deleuze and Guattari are thus right to relate the form of content of metallurgy with the form of expression of the nomad war-machine. On a very basic level, they are right to speak of the nomad and the war-machine in the same chapter as they speak of metallurgy.

We are given to consider an obvious question: If both share similarly in the danger, why do we choose to enter in the salt mine now instead of a in the coal mine? Why this as opposed to that?

Alchemical Seasoning: The Salt of the Earth

If we are led in the “wrong” mine, if we are of the “wrong” mind by way of Heidegger, then our mythic suggestion is because he himself had in mind a coal mine rather than a salt mine.

The city of Bremen, in December 1949, hosted Heidegger in a lecture series called “Insight into what is” (Einblick in das, was ist). Here, he offered up fundamental theorems of thinking in which he introduced his grand idea of a “fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals”. This event was also Heidegger’s first public appearance after his removal from his university place at Freiburg im Breisgau following the whole “Denazification” effort. He therefore carried on his work from Freiburg, from his Black Forest hut (“die Hütte”), to the grand lecture series in Bremen, later to be called the The Question Concerning Technology.

The Black Forest region of Southern Germany has been one of the most important mining regions of Europe circa 1100. In the 14th century, Frieburg was one of the richest cities in Europe for its production of silver from the mines. Presently, air pollution and acid rain plagues the region, as trees are increasingly losing both their color and their pines.

Heidegger thus for better or worse begins – honestly – with what is closest to his heart, the trees of the Black Forest:

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. [...] And certainly a sawmill in a secluded valley of the Black Forest is a primitive means compared with the hydroelectric plant in the Rhine River. But this much remains correct: modern technology too is a means to an end. That is why the instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We Will, as we say, get technology “spiritually in hand.” We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.

At such levels of abstraction, the answer is plainly that salt has a certain “bitter” taste to it that coal does not.

The very bitterness in question is the same as that which can be gleaned from Kierkegaard’s famous string of questions:

“I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?”

Put otherwise, undeniably in Heidegger there are seasons, but there is no seasoning.

“Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal… The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether” (351).

At heart, it may be that the idea of salt is ever-present, and indeed global (as in “salt of the earth”) if not cosmic in allegorical scope, while coal remains intertwined “fossilization” revealed in his thematic notion of Finitude. In salt there is Life, in coal there are only traces of its once being-there. Heidegger’s thought, in the abstract, is in this sense covered with a certain “soot” to which we object in the name of an immanent Life.

This bitterness stings like salt-water in your eyes, like he sweaty residue on your skin, or better yet, it stings like your tears. Blood, sweat, and tears. You need only to clean up your thought or rinse your mind with flows of water in order to re-think the “fundamental theorems of thinking”. In the end, this maneuver translates to a certain bitterness towards the very Form of War itself, and to the practices of death-dealing in all of their instantiations. It calls for a non-linear kind of preparedness, in direct violation of Hilt’s law, the “geological term that states that, in a small area, the deeper the coal, the higher its rank (grade)”.

Nay, this is not to say salt is “quadratic”, but instead a more constant zero-point of thought in accordance with a certain fundamental Form. A crystalline structure, condensed in a point. While we may accept Deleuze’s rendering of Jung in that earlier passage, this is not to discount either alchemy or Jung.

The role of “salt” in alchemical studies must be understood as related intimately to questions of Form (see here), of the markedly non-philosophical conditions of thought itself:

Salt is the third element in the trinity of the alchemical substances in the Great Work. As mercury is the water aspect, sulfur is the fiery aspect, so is salt the form aspect (salt is a crystalline form, or crystallized energy). So it is also a name for the ‘prima materia’, for the stone of the philosophers. The alchemists say that in its lower aspect salt is ‘bitter’. Here salt is symbol for knowledge and wisdom. Self-knowledge is bitter, painful. Sometimes they speak of the bitter ‘sea water’. As water or the sea stands for the soul, it is a reference to the same self-knowledge.

Salt is also seen as a symbol for the second phase of the Great Work, albedo, or whiteness, because here light breaks through, and thus also wisdom. Christ is called ‘Sal sapientiae’, the Salt of Wisdom’.

In the beginning of the Great Work, the salt is called impure. Here it equals the earth, the body, our every day consciousness or being. The impure salt has to be dissolved (‘solutio’) into the divine water (quicksilver, or ‘prima materia’), by which it is purified. In albedo salt arises as a pure form and fixated, that is crystallized into a pure salt.

As symbol for wisdom, salt is the breath of the divine energy. This wisdom vivifies the invisible fire that energizes entire Nature. This fire controls life, movement, energy, the heavens, the planets. Paracelsus called this fire ‘the light of Nature’ a reference to the ‘anima mundi’, the soul of the world.

Thus, we recognize Heidegger’s coal-covered “impurity” for what it’s worth: As the beginning of a Great Work. The beginning of Wisdom is the Fear of the Lord, and only God can save us now. In Search of the Philosopher’s stone, whether it exists or not, to say “Wanderer” is of course to say the name of a generic term for our identity in the salt mine.

In both Laruelle and Badiou there is thus a concern for a certain type of “generic” kept in focus, in the tradition of Heidegger’s Dasein. But our generic is at once focused upon the unique Self as a Union of Opposites. We must therefore take fault not only with the luxury Badiou awards himself, but with the direction of Laruelle’s work as well. They are, in some capacity or another, in the salt mine, but they do not see the mine for what it is, they do not see it for a place of extreme danger. In brief, they have not learned the lesson of “post-modernity”, despite striving so fervently to move past it, and despite their salty bitterness towards it.

For Laruelle, there is still a sense in which “that’s just the way it is”, as he works diligently to provide, to perform his job as a miner.

We are surely “closer” to Laruelle than to Badiou, who is likened by Laruelle to a “Goliath” (meaning “foreigner”, Anti-Badiou, xxxii) of the mine. And of course David ultimately triumphs over the Philistine, but he triumphs only by maiming, only by killing in the name of Israel. A non-standard violence, death by a unilateral stone and a dualysing sling. Could he have possibly triumphed otherwise? Yes — if only he had realized sooner what the post-structuralists did from Rimbaud that “Je est un autre“. Kristeva spells it out explicitly: “I am the foreigner” – as David slowly awakes and says to himself ever so suddenly – “I am Goliath”.

For all the time, then, that Laruelle spends trying to escape the “theology of Deconstruction” of Derrida and Levinas, he still reveals even in his (somehow sufficient, properly principled) secularism a certain Jewish/Christian vein through this dramatic image. The opening of Islam into the scene is to mis-read (see here) “the battle” from the perspective of David-as-Goliath, to see the David’s objet petit a in Goliath’s floating head as in the painting above by Caravaggio. Humilitas occidit superbiam. Humanity kills pride. Far from the victorious narrative of the triumphant David of Team Humanity killing the Prideful Goliath, is it not David’s Pride which is killed by “seeing” in the Last Instance the Humanity of the foreign decapitated Goliath?

As a miner, surely Laruelle knows the danger of the salt mine — he lives it through his writing and feels it through his mining. Yet, at the same time, Badiou is in this sense more deserving to hear story, as it is he who is placed in the position of Goliath. It is “giants like him” who must hear our testimony the most, because Badiou contains something which both Heidegger and Laruelle notice: The will to mastery. Yes, Laruelle, in focusing on the Last Instance, is himself focused on a certain mastery too. To this extent, he should lend his curious ear as well. Yet, in Badiou, we find the most deified form of Pauline mastery which could only have come from the aches and pains of the “machinic” operations of post-structuralism.

If “post-structuralism” is revealed to be a function of dealing with a certain “mastery” over the (traumatic) Event, then it is Badiou who is – ironically – the last true post-structuralist. With Laruelle, with the non-philosophical resurgence of the democracy of thought, we begin to at last break free from such mastery only to return to the days of Heidegger, so that we may locate the ashy problem all over again in re-thinking the “fundamental theorems of thought”. We, however, non-Laruelleans, are neither simply miners nor simply surveyors; for the moment we are Wanderers.

And we are bitter, oh how we are so stubborn!

KETHER: The Crown of Truth

The question, at last, is of KETHER (the Crown).

Who, or what, shall we crown as being in charge of providing the new “fundamental theorems of thought”? Where shall we even begin?

Our explorations in the salt mine started with Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, in the wake of the Berlin lectures as received by the likes of Kierkegaard and Engels. It seems only appropriate that, now after viewing Heidegger’s lectures, we end the formal series of chained posts where we commenced. For once they are set in stone or set in salt as the case may be, then the ultimatum is given unto us in Truth.

What is this crown? Is it, as in the Christian myth, the crown of thorns? Is it, as Hegel and Engels would lead one to believe, a crown of freedom? Nay – it is neither. In his reaction to the late Schelling’s Berlin lectures, the 21-year old Engels writes in “Schelling and Revelation”, writes in Anti-Schelling (see here), the following:

Now they can no longer say: Where is your God? What does He do? Where does He roam? Why does He no longer work wonders? For here He is, His arm strikes down like lightning in their own flock and makes fire out of water, white out of black, just out of unjust. Who can still deny that this is God’s hand?

But that is not all. By calling Schelling, the Lord has prepared for us another triumph over the ungodly and blasphemous. He has elected none other than Schelling since he, being familiar with the wisdom of this world, was best suited to refute the proud and haughty philosophers, and in His immeasurable grace and love He has opened a way for them by which they can come to Him again. Can one ask more from Him? To those who curse Him, who rage against His existence, who are His most furious, most raving, most impenitent enemies, instead of rooting them out from the earth and casting them into the deepest abyss of hell, He offers again and again a rescuing hand to draw them up to the light out of the abyss of corruption wherein they lie; nay, the grace of God is as wide as the heaven from sunrise to sunset, and there is no end to His mercy.

Who could resist such forbearance and love?

The phrase “the wisdom of this world” appears also in Heidegger’s text Existence and Being too (see here), in the same kind of polemical barrage of questions as found in Engels:

It was this unconcealedness of beings that provided the possibility for Christian theology to take possession of Greek philosophy- whether for better or for worse may be decided by the theologians, on the basis of their experience of what is Christian; only they should keep in mind what is written in the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians: “ouhi emoranen o theos tin sopsian tou kosmou; Has not God let the wisdom of this world become foolishness?” (I Cor. 1:20) The sposia tou kosmou [wisdom of this world], however, is that which, according to 1: 22, the Ellines zitousin, the Greeks seek. Aristotle even calls the proti psilosopsia (philosophy proper) quite specifically zitoumeni - what is sought. Will Christian theology make up its mind one day to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?

Indeed, if there is any lingering sign of “progressive sublation” in Philosophy, it is that at one time Engels rails away against the late Schelling but at a later date Heidegger knows well to remain silent on this matter. The stakes have been high, on this question of the crown, but have we with the dawn of non-philosophy learned to take seriously the word of the apostle, and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness? Do we see now how the one follows or flows as it were from the other?

Engels continues, now quoting at length:

And man, the dearest child of nature, a free man after the long battles of youth, returning to his mother after the long estrangement, protecting her against all the phantoms of enemies slain in battle, has overcome also the separation from himself, the division in his own breast. After an inconceivably long age of wrestling and striving, the bright day of self-consciousness has risen for him. Free and strong he stands there, confident in himself and proud, for he has fought the battle of battles, he has overcome himself and pressed the crown of freedom on his head.

Everything has become revealed to him and nothing had the strength to shut itself up against him. Only now does true life open to him. What formerly he strove towards in obscure presentiment, he now attains with complete, free will. What seemed to lie outside him, in the hazy distance, he now finds in himself as his own flesh and blood. He does not care that he has bought it dearly, with his heart’s best blood, for the crown was worth the blood; the long time of wooing is not lost to him, for the noble, splendid bride whom he leads into the chamber has only become the clearer to him for it; the jewel, the holy thing he has found after long searching was worth many a fruitless quest.

And this crown, this bride, this holy thing is the self-consciousness of mankind, the new Grail round whose throne the nations gather in exultation and which makes kings of all who submit to it, so that all splendour and might, all dominion and power, all the beauty and fullness of this world lie at their feet and must yield themselves up for their glorification. This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom. And such is the power of the Idea that he who has recognised it cannot cease to speak of its splendour or to proclaim its all-conquering might, that in gaiety and good heart he gives up all else at its bidding, that he sacrifices body and soul, life and property in order that it and it alone shall triumph.

He who has once beheld it, to whom in the nightly stillness of his little room it has once appeared in all its brightness, can never abandon it, he must follow where it leads, even to death. For he knows that it is stronger than everything in heaven and on earth, that it fights its way through against all enemies. And this belief in the all-conquering might of the Idea, in the victory of eternal truth, this firm confidence that it can never waver or yield, even if the whole world were to rise against it, that is the true religion of every genuine philosopher, that is the basis of the true positive philosophy, the philosophy of world history. This is the supreme revelation, that of man to man, in which all negation of criticism is positive. This press and storm of nations and heroes over which the Idea hovers in eternal peace and at last comes down into the midst of the turmoil and becomes its inmost, most living, self-conscious soul, that is the source of all salvation and all deliverance; that is the realm in which each one of us in his place has to work and act. The Idea, the self-consciousness of mankind, is that wonderful phoenix who builds for himself a funeral pyre out of all that is most precious in the world and rises rejuvenated from the flames which destroy an old time.

So let us carry to this phoenix on the funeral pyre all that is most dear to us and most beloved, all that was sacred and great for us before we were free! Let us not think any love, any gain, any riches too great to sacrifice gladly to the Idea — it will repay us everything a thousandfold! Let us fight and bleed, look undismayed into the grim eye of the enemy and hold out to the end! Do you see our flags wave from the mountain peaks? Do you see the swords of our comrades glinting, the plumes on the helmets fluttering? They are coming, they are coming, from all valleys, from all heights they are streaming towards us with song and the call of trumpets; the day of the great decision, of the battle of the nations, is approaching, and victory must be ours!

There is that word “splendor” again, the same word Hegel used in dismissing Islam as the “religion of splendor”, crowning Christianity once more. Where Engels could not see past the coronation ceremony of Schelling, Heidegger at once began to realize in Wisdom “the splendor of the simple”.

Non-violence: Gandhi’s Ultimatum

Kether (the Crown) is “…identified by Kaballah as ‘the Sephirah Kether’, this Sphere of Aura-energy encompasses the top of the head, dome of the skull, upper brain-tissues and metabolic glands; any or all of which can become ‘sore’ or traumatized by a crisis of OVERVIEW, PERSPECTIVE and OUTLOOK.” (see here). The prefix coro-, meaning head, is at once the place of trauma and the place of thinking.

To re-crown the late Schelling in this moment is to become re-acquainted with simplicity of thought, and to re-learn the meaning of splendor in a way which is ever-conscious of the phenomena of “religion”. It is to emphasize the role of thinking calmly to avoid acting foolishly.

It is an ultimatum that is neither simply offensive (Grelet, Déclarer la gnose) nor simply defensive (Laruelle, Anti-Badiou), but is instead crowned in its own mindful ability to enfold. It cannot simply be as Laruelle writes “a wager of a simultaneous discovery and invention” (xxxvii, Anti-Badiou). It is not a wager, but a non-wager, a wager on Life, the unconditioned ground of any and all possible wagers. It is not a myth, but a non-myth, a Living myth, the maker of any and all possible myths.

It must therefore be, in the positive, something which we have known all along, and yet something which still needs continual re-inventing. This rhythmic history sounds off again and again in the cyclical bend of Time. It is something found, found somewhere the The Ages of the World so to speak, it must be a truth “as old as the hills”. Therefore, it must take up the FORM OF DIALOGUE, infused with WISDOM at every step of the way.

It arrives not merely in recognition of the Pauline invocation:

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6), but also in such a way that the divide of the ultimatum is made securely in Wisdom (see here) “It is He Who has let free the two bodies of flowing water: one palatable and sweet and the other salt and bitter; yet has He made a barrier between them, a partition that is forbidden to be passed.” (Sura 25 – Al-Furqan [MAKKA]: Verse 53).

It is decidedly trans- or post-religious in a way that escapes the young Engels’ deepest worries, as informed by experience.

A careful line is drawn, as the enframing of enframings is taken up which remembers at all times the space of potential danger, which remembers our vulnerability, and remains sensitive to it in its enfolding of Wisdom (see here).

Here we are again, just as we began, in the space of Schelling’s Potenzen. 

T

his time, however, we have learned to see in the dark.

While it seems as though the complexity builds though the simple operations of thought, it is on the whole it is no more difficult than counting from low to high. What could possibly fit in this space, what is this Schelling point of resonance when there is conflict? What is our precommitment, our tacit axiology?

We hear it in the song of silence, in the complete absence of noise and communication, as

suddenly Schelling’s call for a “new mythology” is answered. We hear it in our spiritual retreat [ashram], in our place of safety.

Not simply a myth, but a living myth, the myth of all myths, the only myth which captures the Truth-force underlying Schelling’s philosophy.

Satyagraha Ashram,
Sabarmati,
March 2, 1930.

Dear Friend [Lord Irwin]:

Before embarking on Civil Disobedience and taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I would fain approach you and find a way out.

My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold the British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he may have in India.

I must not be misunderstood. Though I hold the British rule in India to be a curse, I do not therefore consider Englishmen in general to be worse than any other people on earth. I have the privilege of claiming many Englishmen among my dearest friends. Indeed, much that I have learnt of the evil of British rule is due to the writings of frank and courageous Englishmen who have not hesitated to tell the unpalatable truth about that rule…

…This letter is not in any way intended as a threat, but is a simple and sacred duty peremptory on a civil resister. Therefore I am having it specially delivered by a young English friend [Reginald Reynolds], who believes in the Indian cause and is a full believer in non-violence and whom Providence seems to have sent to me as it were for the very purpose.

I remain
Your sincere friend
M. K. GANDHI

Satyagraha, the “Gandhi-myth” of the soul-force, emerges like the phoenix (see here):

For Halide Edip, the existence of Gandhi is essential for he is the crucial agent who harmonizes “the spiritual” with “the material”.

When considered in a wider picture, her contention can be interpreted as the reconciliation of the Orient and the Occident in Saidian terminology. On the other hand in Schelling’s terms, Gandhi is the harbinger of a universal unity which humanity needs to achieve in order to reproduce a modern mythology; since “myth” for Schlegel points back to what poetry seemed to be in the primal beginnings of the human race, a unity of thought, art and belief which can be realized in the future.  The artist, for Halide Edip, of this modern myth is Mahatma Gandhi. What’s more, that myth is a “living” one, and progressing day to day. It is a living myth.  It continually looks to the future. The livingness of the myth is revealed by Halide Edip in the beginning of “Inside India”: “India is no longer ‘was’: it is very much ‘is’.”

Furthermore, this living myth around the personality of Gandhi is narrated in Inside India as follows:

“… At the moment it was the atmosphere rather than the motionless figure of Mahatma Gandhi that took hold of the crowd. He was only a unit. Yet I watched him. By some freak of light, or rather because of the thinnes of his shoulders, his draperies stood out both sides in sharp angles. Everything about him seemed to have fallen into a geometrical shape. Wrapt in that white mantle, his shoulders two sharp edges, his face immobile, he looked like Buddha.”

The post Coro-nations: The Crowning Ultimatum of Truth appeared first on inthesaltmine.

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.

One must think to come together, to stand in the middle in order to reduce the tension. Non-violence is fundamentally about stepping in-between when there is a disagreement – or a potential conflict – in such a way that diffuses tension without a show of force. Archetypally speaking, think for instance of a possible drunken bar fight. This synchronous “enfolding” of Wisdom (see here) is thus composed minimally of a balancing of at least two opposed forces in an antimony. When we think in this way, balancing the dialectical and dialogical elements, the composition best plays out its unique harmony.

When approaching a single party from without, it may be done again minimally by way of  ”Internal” critique as well as an “External” critique, although these two categories may, should, and do fail often. Also, the extent to which these may be called “critiques” is also dubious, for they may also be an enumerated list of “reasons” or other markers. I myself have preferred the term “fragments” (see here).

Moreover, other categories are also available as the need presents itself. That is, we have already seen possibilities of three-fold, four-fold, ten-fold, twenty-one fold … potentially n-fold. The bio-cosmist approach, as I understand it (see here), falls just shy of the infinite poetics of acrobatic intoxication, all the while keeping its eyes fixed on “the outside”, the “final frontier” as it were. Like any other scope, it has therefore its strengths and weaknesses. One such strength to note, I hope, is that of peaceful mediation across the globe. So, not exactly “to infinity and beyond”, but close nonetheless – At what cost?

When faced with a strange, new proposal or decision to make, such as “taking a stance” on the Accelerationist declaration (see here), one wonders immediately how to find this point of resonance. Where do we locate it? I should like to demonstrate the best I can what sort of process occurs to me, dare I ever become experienced enough so as to call my approach “Gandhian”.

This allows me to first (1) contribute constructively to discussion, to engage my speculative friends, and to provide feedback in our common struggle. Secondly, I am permitted again (2) to insist upon the veracity of non-violent resistance, to recall and bring to the surface the timeless movements of the life-force in a new context. Yet, more than these two, the opportunity provides me finally (3) with a relatively fresh look at what happens in this place, in the deepest chamber of Hell (see here), in these silent workings of my thought/action. Thus, I wish to use this demonstration not as a step-by-step how-to manual for non-violence, but for purposes of thinking on stage.

I am writing now about a phenomenon called “Accelerationism” as understood in their manifesto with brand new eyes. I have not read any alternative analyses of it, I have not read any reviews or criticisms, and so on. I am more or less familiar with the dark trajectories of their individual work, however. I should hope my position allows me to see things differently than most, and to provide new openings to their project.

Consider the following passage, in this brand new encounter:

We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital. This mastery must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original Enlightenment. This mastery must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily mastered given sufficient information, is long gone from the agenda of serious scientific understanding.

But this is not to align ourselves with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-fascistic or authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose that the problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of geosocial artistry and cunning rationality. A form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.

First, how am I given to think on this subject?

This is a matter, as I have said, of purposefully “Misreading Wisdom” (see here), of deliberately highlighting “critical sites” with certain tacitly assumed values already in mind.

An External Epimetheus:

As we are given to think, this is how we begin doing.

This “given” of thought is to be associated intimately with what is otherwise “taken” from the picture. For Gandhi, though not without falter (see here), this was the question of locating “critical sites” of violence. I will attempt to locate three from this passage.

1. What of Prometheus’ “dull-witted” brother, Epimetheus?
2. What do we do with this bit on “post-modernism”?
3. Why must we return to the trope of “mastery” once more?

I am first given to think: Yes, the one called “Forethinking” (Prometheus) is surely important, but what of the one called “Afterthinking”as well? I have time and time again stressed the need for an “afterthinking” which comes before the fact in the ideas of entensionality (see here) and pre-adumbration (see here). Here, I should like to add the positive influence of Bernard Stiegler, whose work features and gives place to Epimetheus where others would have reserved it for Prometheus.

Will the accelerationists give “people like him” ample room, too? Or, is he going to be condemned and castigated for opening Pandora’s Box?

Opening Pandora’s box a bit more, I am then given to think: Shall we attempt to erase post-modernity from our memories altogether as if it did not happen and try again from scratch, or do we take something positive, some truths, from the fragment we do still have? Do we work through it, and then turn around and work otherwise, do we forget it happened?

Did we learn anything at all, or were we simply running in circles in the late 20th century? Will this new 21st century mastery truly be different, or will this “post-modern residue” catch up with us once more? What about the developments of post-postmodernism generally, has it been ignored here? Have these new thinkers properly understood the significance of post-modernism?

Finally, I am given to think at last: Why this mastery this time around?  Haven’t we had enough? Why parse it in terms of mastery? Should we have abandoned the need for mastery altogether? Ought we renew it or let it perish? What are we doing when we call for a renewed mastery? Is this yet another instance of a predominately white, Western male mastery? If this mastery is about “mission control”, is it too much to ask for “experts” from all angles of development? The perspectives of post-colonialism, feminism, and so forth must be present loud and clear if I am going to proceed an inch with even the smallest of simulation processes.

All else considered, it makes “perfect” sense to pull from the Russian biocosmists, to pull from the desire to return to space exploration (not too unlike a Wandering in the Wilderness, see here); yet, we must recognize the stakes are raised in this demand. If we err, and we will err, what are the consequences this time? Does the shuttle explode with our human, all too human, miscalculation of mastery? What does mastery give us that simplicity of non-violence does not?

With these three general categories left unanswered, I fear simply that it is yet another mechanism of “cutting”, yet another work of genius rather than one of wisdom.

Studying the cosmists ideas personally, having created the Reddit community (see here) a month or two before the manifesto was published, how can I be surprised by what has been published here today? How can I be shocked at all, as a “Leftist” that this would emerge? I will not go so far as to say I anticipated it (see here) qua concept, but yes: It is indeed a natural outgrowth of Speculative Realism and the OOO “aura”, with all of its emphasis placed on darkness, night, nihilism, and most recently the notion of Black-in-Black.

On the Black Universe in the Human Foundations of Color from Aaron Metté.

In short, does it carry with it the many problems of SR/OOO as well? (see here).

However poorly asked, these and related questions allow us to get quickly at the crux of the matter from the outside, externally.

Thinking, fast and slow. System 1 and System 2. Diachronic and synchronic. Thinking, in the span of the Sheaf itself (see here), oscillating as it were between the two ends available. Why not decelerate instead? Why the third derivative, instead of the second, or when some of us like being jerks instead? Notice how the creative influx of questioning more or less flows, how the problems are unfolded loosely as it were from the language of the manifesto itself.

The external critique is clearly going to be one of our perceived, dangerous emphasis on speeding-up; it is a spectator’s caution of moving-too-fast which would be derided by the inside as being among other things “crypto-conservative”. Or, is it actually moving-too-fast, the wheels slipping on the ground as they would from an all too quick start in Mario Kart?

An Internal Individuation:

In a dispute between two individuals, both sides may believe they have reached “the facts” themselves.

The so-called external critique, operating alone, therefore says little more than “I have the facts”. With the internal critique operating in conjunction, however, the two together break the system of thought and demand an elevation or in any event a movement of sorts. That is to say, if our theory is one of sheaves, then our practice is one of everything around the Sheaf itself, around the Thing itself in all of its manifestations of the Real-One.

It consists of being there, insisting on feeding the hungry before the crops are even planted, resisting where possible the influence of corporations like Monsanto on our food, and generally being ready to repeat it again after the harvest. A naive question might be: Why not focus on food instead, rather than going to outer space? Are the writers of the manifesto prepared to address this misreading?

That is, it is not usually a practice of “harvesting” or “mining” as such, but of finding the gravity of healing in and around the site of conflict itself which happens to be the harvest season or the mine shaft as such. It is there not only through the process of production, but just as much if not more so when gleaning after-the-fact. Where to begin?

Perhaps right here, with the documentary Les glaneurs et la glaneuse by the feminist director Agnès Varda.

Did anybody see this coming? Again: How much of post-colonial and feminist theory are the “accelerationists” bringing along in flight?

The external critique merely suggests: There is as I see it a possible danger ahead, a danger with the way the situation has been framed, the manner in which it is being discussed, or something otherwise seen from without.

It is an identification of “the facts” and what one thinks them to be. The internal critique, by contrast, deals with the “clean-up” or “mitigation” of the the harm after it has taken place. Trauma, after all, comes always after the fact. To be concerned with the “inside” is to be concerned with trauma, or in any case the potential thereof. To be concerned with “the outside”, rather, must be marked by a concern with “the facts”, is to be concerned with the perceived violence itself. Is there no violence in outer space? Is that perhaps why it is so desired? Do we risk leaving planet Earth, leaving our global home behind?

In continuation with our Afterthinking, the truth of the internal critique is seen in the answer to the question: what effect may or will this new Accelerationism have? Have we in the process of this darkness paused to do any shadow work, any integration of what lies in below the sea into our personal unconscious? Are we aware of how the manifesto might be received generally, if at all? As indicated by the external critique, questions clearly will abound, such as first and foremost why ought one valorize space exploration in this way? Or, does this doing-away with Laplace mean that we do now have need for the God-hypothesis to return again, as Heidegger said “…only God can save us now”?

“J’ai besoin de cette hypothèse accélérationniste.” — Mais, pourquoi mes amis?

Is this new God sought an alien from outer-space or beyond it so to speak? Does this new Wise Old Man have a name? Is it Fedorov, Solovyov, Chizhevsky, Vernadsky, Bulgakov, or Tsiolkovsky by chance? Is it perhaps the “controversial” work of  the “philosopher” Nick Land, such as the manifesto may imply?

Note that this is all a pastiche “misreading” or “gloss” with fundamental questions of non-violence, non-harm, safety, and security duly in mind as the unconditioned ground of possibilities. With the question of space exploration, if anything else, we are reminded of the many failures and deaths which have occurred …. the Columbia and the Challenger among several others. Can the accelerationists embrace non-violence and all that it entails?

If there is a time to hear the call of non-violence, it is here and it is now. Can they come to understand what it entails with their NASA computers? Nay – It is at once a matter of the heart.

Afterthinking Fast and Slow:

I work here with two categories, “internal” and “external”, but we may add complexity to the situation as nuance is needed or otherwise demanded by my new friends the accelerationists.

It is easy to think in terms of “before” and “after” the harvest or the publication because the point at which we are to meet the Other is relatively fixed. When the Other is in motion just as we are, however, the variables increase and one must try harder. Clearly, such a critique of the manifesto will not fly on 2-variables alone, when complex systems typically have several more. Clearly, the dichotomy I set forward does not hold, and I do not wish for them to accept this as sufficient. I am however paying attention to the count, I am pointing to a manner of thinking through the situation.

One, two, three…

Who counts? What counts? It is precisely here where Badiou’s count-as-one fails, for it is the pseudo-Maoist machine which does the counting. Why ought I replace my trust-worthy Deleuzian 1000-Plateaued Deluxe super-computer with a fancy Accelerationist one? Is it faster, smaller, sleeker, or even simpler to use despite its complexity? New apps? More importantly: Have you counted at all the exploited workers? How does it count by comparison to what already does the counting? Who counts? What counts? Can it think through all of this and address the various violences appropriately?

Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine…

If non-violence is to “amount” to anything at all in practice, it is to be thought as simple as counting — and I mean nothing more than this! Yes, even in the most complex situations of conflict. Count the bodies, count the victims, count the survivors, count the hospital beds, count the medical equipment, count the food, count on your family and friends. If the thinking of the accelerationists is necessarily more complex than this, then kindly count-me-out. Yes, sometimes one loses count. Admittedly, counting is sometimes hard to handle when the numbers get too big. This does not mean we do not know how to continue sans violence.

Afterthinking fast and slow means here, in the darkness of SR/OOO, remembering to do your shadow-work even when you cannot easily see your shadow.

One small step…

I have opened many lines of thought here, each one to be taken up on its own merits.

There is a lot of thinking to do, and a single manifesto itself will not satisfy. But it is a start. I am deliberately avoiding the “I strongly agree/disagree with the Manifesto” remarks that have been made by many others, leaving this aside and trying to work with the fragments themselves, as if jury-rigging together a way to return to Earth on the Apollo 13.

That said, I will limit my concluding remarks to the following:

I value the perspectives and dedication of all those involved, I admire their courage and intelligence in the midst of uncertain experimentation, and I do look forward to co-operating with them in some capacity or another in the future. I will, however, stubbornly and increasingly become “that guy” who insists upon satyagraha as the G-forces begin to accumulate in the course of our training. It is a thankless position to hold, but I believe it will come to more or less determine in-the-last-instance (if you will) the relative success or failure of this otherwise bold endeavor.

The post Accel-erationisms: Afterthinking Fast and Slow appeared first on inthesaltmine.

“…[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.

Consequently, with our latest installments of Wisdom we have freed ourselves from the “conscience of sin” through recognition and rejection. As such, we have reached the zero-level of Dante’s journey. From the cutting-edge of Wisdom, we  move down into the center, into the ice-cold center of the salt mine. Appropriately, then, it is here where we are to encounter Satan himself, the Highest Crown itself. All is suspended — nay, all is frozen at this level of Hell. But still there is Life.

Dante writes upon seeing the fallen Angel:

…he had three faces: one in front bloodred; and then another two that, just above the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first; and at the crown, all three were reattached; the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white; the left in its appearance was like those who come from where the Nile, descending, flows…

At this point, I have never in my Life been further away from the flows of the Divine, and therefore never have I been closer to it. My own traces may now testify to this fact.

It is as though we proceeded carefully with at least some degree of  ”self-actualization” already in place, with some “foundation” (Iesod) in the tradition of Abraham as it were. We were given as it were this sense of abundance which, mythically speaking, came “from the Kingdom” of God, from the illuminating excess of the Hegelian Absolute Idea — falling upon us like the Covenant.

A Brief Story in the Salt Mine:

The story of the salt mine can of course be conveyed as a highly archetypal tale which goes roughly as follows:

Before me there lies the entrance to the salt mine, shall I enter it or not? Dim lanterns line the walls like fragile ornaments, and mine cart-tracks carpet the dusty floors (see here). I am driven inside by a stirring without, by a Crisis within which tells me to go. I carried the living ghost of Novalis in me like Dante’s Virgil, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, like Jung’s Philemon (see here). I wore the shield of the blue flower like a coat of arms as I proceeded into my personal unconscious, encountering first the Aufhebung, the upheaval (see here) of all I had once held dear.

The “I”, which is to say my “I”, truly began with its foundation in Fichte’s “transcendental ego” (see here) weak like a promise, it began with the completion of Kantian thought, and I have Wandered very long and far since that time. The nets of our conversations together have not been cast out so straight-forwardly, but were instead entangled in ways which at first could not so easily seen so visually in Nature (see here). Every so often, the cavern would shake us with a great force, and as the ground beneath our feet began its quake and the Absolute fell below us (see here). But still I moved forward, for it was too late to leave the way I had entered.

I had to adapt to the environment of the mine shaft, adopting a learned logic of its uncanny twists and turns (see here), gaining a new, silently operative value system to ensure my survival in the mountain-side (see here), living minimally and ascetically in thought and in motion (see here). For a while, all here seemed hopeless, all here appeared lost.

I learned from this entire process of becoming and entering inthesaltmine to see not through my eyes, but through those perhaps of the Sphinx (see here). Put otherwise, at first we were like Schopenhauer terrified by our own “will”, with a fear of God. We first entered the darkness and though we were afraid, but we soon learned to adjust our eyes to that dreaded “night in which all cows were black”. An anchor of Hope was placed, as slowly our vision recovered (see here). When it returned, however, it was much different than before. In this newly-found Wilderness (see here), we began to Wander.

Along the way, we saw fragments, we experienced fragmentation (see here) and brokenness, we began to see the fragmented bodies (see here) and skeletons of those who came before us. We gathered loose pieces and resources from around us, mined a bit for some ore, and as we integrated these parts into as close to a Whole as possible (see here). The salt mine slowly became for me a new home, a new sanctuary for those who were weary like me. It was time again to Wander, just as the Crisis had commanded.

We pushed forward deeper into the caverns, getting lost many times along the way. The multiplicity of tunnels opened wide, fanning out in many directions, and did not know which one to take (see here) for our safety, let alone for escape. Time and time again, we hit a dead end (see here). That is, until at one corner we decided to … look up. With this new awareness of the mine’s very design, we began to climb up to another, higher plateau in the mine-shaft leaving the ground floor behind us (see here). One hand above the other, we moved up on the rocks ever so technically. We ascended for the moment to an entirely new plane.

Here, we encountered others who had perhaps entered just as we had, who had found the same route but who spoke another language (see here). We learned to communicate with each other, and shared our stories together. We even laughed with each other, extending also mercy and hospitality in the salt mine. We shared also our food and sustenance, we gathered resources again and continued forward (see here). We acquired a surplus through our mutual and communal efforts, and began to plan for the future accordingly (see here).

An echo could be heard faintly coming from the distance, and sometimes a shadow would be cast on the wall and quickly disappear (see here). Perhaps it was a hallucination from being in this labyrinth for so long, but we followed the clues nonetheless. We encountered a great cliff, with another standing across it many feet away. A large gap stood in-between the two. Instead of taking the tight-rope across, we cast our rope down into the abyss itself , descending back again to the ground floor (see here). Luckily, it was smart move, and nobody was hurt in the act (see here). The ground was firm beneath the Crisis.

We were lead through one last tunnel, one last channel, one last line of flight, to a gilded door which might as well have read:

Whither Wisdom? 

Altar-ations, the canary of silence:

If you hear a caged canary in a mine shaft begin to sing, it is understood by the miners as an early indicator of danger, specifically poisonous gas (methane, carbon monoxide, etc.). In this particular mine, however, it ha been a canary of a different feather sort which sings — a canary of silence. The Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Unto Him) reportedly heard this mystic sound first in the cave of Ghar-e-Hira. The Arabic term is sawt-e-sarmad, and Sufi mystics suggest that “all space is filled with it”. It is a sound which pervades all and stands before all.

Hearing the latest rhythms of Wisdom in my stillness and meditations, I must make clear at this point that I’m didn’t simply pull out an old-copy of Abraham Maslow‘s hierarchy of needs, as if asserting a priori that one must be in the business of “enfolding, misreading, and securing” Wisdom (see here, here, and here respectively), as many pacifists may. The journey began upward, upward from the peak.

This “epic adventure” or “invisible adventure” (Cahun) has furthermore been an exposition in which questions of violence and trauma have been in view at all times during my exploration. This focus came due in part to the vulnerability of my peculiar Crisis situation of Wandering inthesaltmine, like the danger that Novalis himself would have seen while working there. I am still, as we have seen, wrestling with a certain Abraham.

Final round, winner takes the Crown.

Where ever there is actually existing violence or even the mere possibility of such violence, there non-violence can be unfolded. In the story Abraham there is the immediate possibility of killing Isaac as a sacrifice, and thus there is to be found in this example a prime notice of how to unfold non-violence. For a while, yes, we have been sensu stricto ”non-Abrahamic”, or with-and-beyond Abraham, or in any case under-standing of Abraham’s Decision — however one wishes to put it.

But it was only with our meditation of entensionality which moves beyond the intentionality to kill and sacrifice that articulates this Beyond… of a “religious” orientation. Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence has everything to do not merely with questions of “sovereignty”, but by extension with the phenomena we call “religion”.

Slavoj Zizek writes:

“And what if divine violence is the wild intervention of this angel? Seeing the pile of debris which grows skyward, this wreckage of injustices, from time to time he strikes back to restore the balance, to enact a revenge for the destructive impact of ‘progress’. Couldn’t the entire history of humanity be seen as a growing normalisation of injustice, entailing the nameless and faceless suffering of millions? Somewhere, in the sphere of the ‘divine’, perhaps these injustices are not forgotten. They are accumulated, the wrongs are registered, the tension grows more and more unbearable, till divine violence explodes in a retaliatory destructive rage” (p. 152).

With the critique of “religion” and its “retributive” character, even the seemingly inescapable divine and categorical violences may be resisted. There is then a possible opening of non-violence, if only we learn to unfold it appropriately. While Zizek rightly outlines invisible violences, can he ever move beyond any scheme of “divine categorization”?

Of course there are violences we see, we don’t see, we see that we don’t see, we don’t see that we don’t see — Is this not obvious to so many of us by now? I do not wish anymore to say so typically that “…it is not that these thinkers go wrong, it is that they don’t go far enough” because what if non-violence was about something simple? If it is “a truth as old as the hills” as Gandhi says, then the problem and thus the solution come even before this post-modern realization, in the very given state of equity in the phrase “there is/there are…” [Es gibt] which we often fail to analyze due to our “religious” orientation.

We need to turn around, we’ve gone too far. Too much cutting.

It is therefore not wholly a matter of identifying and dia-gnosing (“passing through” gnosis) the problem. More importantly, it is about the possibility and actuality of healing and amelioration in the midst of it, and intervening in the Crisis after it. Through the careful enfolding of Wisdom, I have found that one must get your hands dirty, and offer a pro-gnostic outlook. That is, time and time again, the soul-force simply subsists as one might say in an emergency situation: Keep going, do not quit here, do not die on us, keep breathing, hold on, you can do it, live!

It compels us to go down to the frozen heart of Truth, to the “facts” of Life itself. At this level, non-violence as such may emerge.

Zizek and thinkers like him are capable, in one fell swoop, of disrespecting entire traditions at whim — dismissing the Gnostics, misrepresenting the Buddhists, marginalizing the Muslims, ignoring the Hindus, etc. These thinkers are generally bulldozing the vast terrain of history due to a kind of misdiagnosis (a Type I false negative/ity) that the Christian tradition provides via the pervasive concepts of “sin” and “Evil”.

Moreover, it is precisely those most concerned with healing efforts that are cast aside. The result is much “collateral damage” in his wake, itself yet another problematic concept. Because he keeps in tact and indeed re-enforces this deeply problematic retributive trait, Zizek simply cannot break the cycle because he cannot see it as such.

One must listen to it instead. Let it enfold you.

Following the gnostic awakening of the feminine Sophia, does the dignity of the feminine (see here) in the Islamic tradition point to a Real exit to the death drive?

Do these predominately white, male, and Christological thinkers (…my god, myself included!) have difficulty with questions of Islam and women because it resists in so many ways European philosophy at large? Is it because an Islamic psychoanalysis — one which doesn’t immediately focus in on “veiling”, and sticks instead with the Muslim purification of desire —  is so difficult to conceive as a Westerner (see here)? Is it because we have been privileging the visible and what is seen, and not hearing the invisible mystic song?

Dance! Twirl about your axis with me!

As a proponent of restorative justice, it appears that a certain purification of desire and re-direction of Will is in order. The result of such mindful labor may be called satya-agraha.

It is here where Islam presents a significant challenge and an invitation to us Western, European, and otherwise Christological philosophers. When the familiar faces of Freud, Hegel (“religion of sublimity/fanaticism”), Schopenhauer, Jung, Zizek, Lacan, Sloterdijk, Baudrillard, etc. meet Islam, they misstep and retreat into Islamophobia knowingly or otherwise due to their still-too-”Christian” sensibilities. I believe a particular strength of non-religious gnosis contra Laruelle’s Future Christ is found precisely in this generative encounter with Islam.

Consider the link  through Christian Jambet‘s influence on the oscillatory Spirit in Grelet’s text (see here):

“Truth is thus not the adequate of the representation to the thing but the inadequation of man as prophet to the language of the divine speaker, the absolute subject supposed to speak – an inadequation experienced in anguish (Muhammad seized with terror after the visitation of the angel), an inadequation struggled against but never vanquished, in the infinite exegesis of the letter” (21).

“The site of the beautiful, the good, and the true is not the abstract knowledge of innocuous transcendentals but the immediate grasp of the beauty, truth, and goodness of being in the eternal center of every concrete existent, at the point where its victorious reality shines forth in its proper light” (84).

Sloterdijk in an especially revealing quote writes “The tables at which we eat are called dining tables; those at which we are eaten are called altars.” But inside Wisdom, if the chamber room behind the door is so empty, why then do we desperately search for an altar nonetheless? Speaking loosely, is that not such a “Christian” thing to do?

I came across a beautiful interview with Sheikh Nur (see here), an Islamic meditation leader, on the question of Islam and altars:

The preliminary for meditation is this: to establish a beautiful atmosphere. In Islam, there is no altar. We are the altar. There are no images of Divinity. We are the divine image. Human beings were created in the divine image. So now we are offering tea to this perfect image. We are seeing each other in a perfect light.

It is in this chamber, at the heart of inthesaltmine, that we encounter a beautiful atmosphere without a “religious” altar.  The challenge of Islam points us to be conscious of “religion” as such, ever-aware as it were of our use of “religious” language in connection with our desire.

The altar-ations of sound fill the room, if we are still enough so as to hear them booming from in the salt mine…!

The post Altar-ations: A Brief Story in the Salt Mine (Part I) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

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?

One may say that “The Ding is the true secret”, as Duane Rousselle writes in a very concise article (see here).

It is, or so we are told, a secret like all secrets, a secret that must be told eventually, a letter that must be stolen … you know the standard drilling sequence. After all, it is ultimately a matter of drilling inasmuch as it is a matter of cutting. More importantly to me is stopping the drilling itself, stopping the cutting itself. Perhaps you will join me in considering new ameliorative maxim, which is if only temporarily in order given our Woundedness:

“Say (the) nothing as long as it stops (the) cutting, as long as it stops (the) drilling” …

Speaking truly, the “nothingness” in Lacan’s text is in fact his own psychosis which we have determined to be manifest in his entire project of knotting (see here). I have intentionally maneuvered myself into this tricky place, this Wounded place, and the waters have picked up as anticipated. We are left, just as we are leftists, with this (non-)concept of “the One-Real”, but we momentarily know not what to do with it now that we are without Lacan-our-Master.

“Hallowed” be thy name indeed.

In tandem with the music of my previous posts, I have willingly auto-positioned myself as somewhat of a rebellious and in any event stubborn “anchorite” character.

That is, as a sailor seeking to anchor - wisely as it were – in this difficult cove-like “portal of discovery” of which Joyce wrote that becomes the archetypal genius. This give-and-take relationship or overlap between “wisdom” and “genius” will, or so I believe, be key to settling upon the kind of desired resonance with the Real, as I ended in my previous (mis)reading of wisdom.

Theological hills and non-standard thought

In the domain of philo-sophy there is quite literally no wisdom, there is only the love of wisdom.

In other words, there can only at most be genius as such. There is only the active knowing of an ever-present love, a love which consists of both knowledge and cutting (that is redundant). It is thus from without of “philosophy”, perhaps even from without of Laruelle’s “non-standard” philosophy, that we begin to “get” Wisdom as such. From “God” or from “the Heavenlies”, maybe. From a place I know not where, nor am I even able to know where. We are just supposed to simply “get” it.

Psalm 121: A song of ascents. 1 “I lift up my eyes to the hills– where does my help come from? 2 My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

That I am not allowed “to know” from where does my help come: Is this not precisely the point of theology? Who is this Anonymous organ donor, anyways? Help simply comes when there is pain, it is simply given in Crisis, from a place I know not where. It just comes, comes from this non-place as if from above. We “get” a non-answer, but nonetheless it – as though miraculously – helps us as we look towards the hills in the midst of our pain. Never-minding here the powerful Nietzschean reading that could be given from the phrase  ”A song of ascents”.

Rather than philosophizing it into existence, the beginning of Wisdom we come to understand without questioning, is quite simply this: Get Wisdom. It is already there, standing before and from the without of “philosophy”.

At what point does the love of knowledge become too intense? At what point does an innocently-minded love cut both ways so deeply? At what point does the passion of the lover (often unknowingly) harm the lovee? If something must give here, then it is not the lover but the lovee, the levee which gives way under the pressure of the drilling. The lover never knows if the love is returned in spirit, or if the love is actually crushing the Other silently.

Consequently, it is revealed to us that the stability and the security of this ship named Sophia (write: Σοφíα) is now at stake in these post-Lacanian waters.

I sense initially that there is a fundamental fault of even the most advanced stages of non-standard philosophy, that non-philosophical clone-maker of the One-Real. It fails to take into account the safety and security of the One-Real before effectuating it. You cannot “clone” that which is already under attack, that which is under siege, that which is suffering, that which is being-drilled, that which is in Crisis, that which is being-cut, that which is in pain, that which is in exile or on the run, that which feels hurt or is being-hunted, that which is being carpet-bombed or sanctioned away…

Cloning takes place in a pacified lab, in a sanitized hospital, under monitored conditions which are not the conditions of the World. The World is, on the contrary, revealed to us as a place of Crisis. One, the One, our One, cannot sail its ship when it has a big hole inside of it and water rushes in, or when the hospital is flooded. One must become … ◔ne, ◑ne, ◕ne … until it becomes increasingly Whole again like the Moon, until the Wound is healed. Then, and only then, may such a process of cloning take place.

For if it does not secure Wisdom then the clone is still effectuating the Lacanian nothingness, but this is still the same nothingness which may not stop the blows, or worse, which may even increase their frequency like a virus or parasite spreading. The second part, the condition of speaking, is always forgotten “…as long as it stops (the) cutting, stops (the) drilling”. Clone, yes, but only under safe and clean conditions else there may arise infection and illness. I think Ben Woodard generally has the right idea (see here).

To his credit, Laruelle is hyper-aware of his position when speaking. He knows how to speak truly, but does he know when to begin, what to say, or when to shut up? He is like a genius aware of the performative form we should take in an intervention of Crisis, but then the moment of effectuating Wisdom comes: Does he know what to say — substantively — when, for instance, somebody has passed away?

Sometimes I miss Derrida because of his kind eulogies and absolutely nothing more.

From where does my help come? I would almost rather Wittgenstein be my nurse than a clone-man. Sometimes having the sensitivity to remain silent is in fact preferable than saying too much. Where there is a suffering, there is always a looking-to-the-hills, and the truth of non-violence is always found there…

Let us not forget that non-violence, Gandhi writes, is a truth which is “…as old as the hills”.

Non-religion and “the Riding Sail”:

Note for a moment the recently recurring tropes of (sound-)waves, of psycho-acoustics, of vibration, of frequency, of intensity, of song, and of resonance among many others.

We have moved here precisely to over-come what is perceived to be the overwhelmingly dominant visual missteps in the Lacanian tradition with non-visual or “non-standard” performative and aesthetic counterparts, as found also in projects like non-musicology (see here).

Consider the following, from Julia Kristeva: psychoanalysis and modernity by Sara Beardsworth, as she writes on page 58:

In other words, we have only determined so much as to say that the Lacanian-Joycean “stroke of genius” needs to be supplemented by the careful enfolding of Wisdom, whose key inspiration I find in Kristeva’s Bakhtinian-inspired work on the semiotic, on chora, on the grotesque, on heteroglossia, on metonymy, and on the “shitty” side of life in general.

This is not only because the matter is explicitly related to instances of suffering, trauma, and dissociation; but also, it is because there is in the traditional (sorry, I meant “dynamic” as Bryant prefers) Lacanian position a lack of vigilance due to the aforementioned psychosis revealed in the inheritance itself. Specifically, there is a lack of a Vision-beyond-vision in the process of unfolding which ultimately does little to eliminate violence and may indeed as we have seen intensify it.

As an aside, Lacan’s seminars here share with Badiou’s oeuvre a certain lack of construct awareness (see here). Construct awareness can simply be restated as an awareness of the facts. Suffice it to say: Concerns of violence I have come to hold firmly at the zero-level of “the facts”, but even then there is still a problem of having the ears to see them at work as manifest in their affects on the Body.

In addition to those preliminary remarks, and perhaps more importantly than inter-traditional bickering, I asked to what extent, for instance, is the “revelatory anchor” (see here) still dragging behind us. I also made it clear that, when sailing for example, sometimes the anchor should or in any case will be dropped, and in other cases it should or in any case will be raised once more as we “gloss” over the waters.

There is again a certain flexibility or endurance that we must have in response to any given “force (of) thought”. For “sailing at anchor” as you know can be an incredibly violent and not to mention sickening motion at times. This “sickening” feeling is one I have begun feeling quite often when engaging with texts.

Looking for an escape, looking to the hills as it were, it is as though I find myself in such a shaky oscillation in-between the positions of Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy and Gilles Grelet’s non-religious gnosis with regard to the Real. That is, I try to move between the twin perspectives offered by both philosophy and theology (see here).

I am in search therefore for the equivalent of a “riding sail” (see here and below) so as to hopefully stabilize my navigation in the wind and waves, preventing an otherwise habitual relapse into the post-modern prison once more.

In the account of Laruelle, the nothing does not leave a mark but is instead cleanly cloned. In the latter, as with all things “religious” or “traditional”, there is a certain mark which is left behind.

I believe by making this distinction, by highlighting the background or mise en scene, I have found this desired riding sail in a resolute emphasis on non-violence and non-harm. This allows us to mediate where possible between what is perhaps the Principle of Sufficient Religiosity and the Principle of Sufficient Specularity/Secularity [the "sufficance s(p)eculare", as Grelet notes contra Laruelle].

Effectively, this like a Principle of Principles and Principalities. It may well prove that, as far as such cutting is concerned, the issue is a lot more complex than an Either/Or, than either Laruelle or Grelet …

What qualifies as a cut, which cuts leave marks, etc. is all open here for discussion and requires much thought.

Boating Safety 101:

Though this discussion is to be had here on the [third] table (see here), if only we could determine its poly-valent existence for what it is. More important than tables, I think, there is the question of turning them. Therefore, I wish to follow the line of thought raised by Didier Moulinier, myself in accord with his reading (see here) of Grelet’s 2002 work Declaring Gnosis.

I have left the passage untranslated as follows:

Il serait intéressant de comparer en scrupuleusement cette théorie gnostique avec ce que François Laruelle a développé sous le chef de la Non-Religion, notamment autour du concept d’Hérésie, dans son livre Le Christ futur. Une leçon d’hérésie. Il est clair que les attendus de Grelet ne ressortissent pas stricto-sensu à la non-philosophie :  l’Autre-sans-Etre (le Réel, le divin, etc.) ne revient évidemment pas à l’Un laruellien (qui en aucune manière ne se divise, par exemple – “Un se divise en Deux” écrit Grelet p. 82, c’est le dualisme -, qui est radical et non absolu, etc.), d’autre part l’attitude insurrectionnelle est rigoureusement seconde chez Laruelle (même si elle existe), au regard de l’hérétique dont l’être-victime précède la condition de rebelle.

De ce côté ci la théorie de Laruelle - en l’état - paraît plus conséquente et plus puissante que celle de Grelet, auquel on peut justement reprocher d’être trop… gnostique au sens religieux du terme, ou bien à l’inverse trop… philosophique, trop proche par exemple de L’Ange, ou encore trop… anti-philosophique à l’enseigne d’un certain lacanisme). Mais d’un autre côté, il se pourrait bien que les imp(r)udences de Grelet ne finissent par faire ressortir les limites de Laruelle, et l’appartenance éventuelle de la non-philosophie au théoricisme… philosophique. Rien n’est joué ! Ce qui paraît indubitable, c’est que le concept de Non-Religion - au-delà des ambiguïtés néo-religieuses de Grelet et de l’usage finalement restreint qu’en fait Laruelle (puisqu’il l’englobe dans la non-philosophie) – me semble porteur d’une contestation inouïe, non seulement de l’ordre philosophique mais de l’ordre politique dans son ensemble, d’une guerre qui reviendra effectivement à la culture.

While Laruelle devotes much effort in Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy to critiquing Grelet’s stance, the value of the non-religious work must be highlighted and should not be understated. I wish to here demonstrate why this is the case.

My import to this continued discussion I wish to be recognized as a consideration, however poor, of  a fundamental, that is, pre-non-philosophical, question of safety, non-violence, and non-harm. Grelet, whose work has me utterly re-enchanted with the World, is himself a skilled sailor who surely knows the value of the anchor and possibly of riding sails when out at-sea. As such, there are several more or less basic safety guidelines to follow when anchoring (see here), such as:

• Look for sheltered, calm water where there is not much wind or current. Never anchor in a channel.
• Check the chart to make sure there will be enough water under your keel at low tide.
• Choose a spot with enough room to swing without hitting other anchored boats, obstructions such as submerged rocks and shallow areas, or swinging too close to shore.

The limits of non-religious gnosis and non-philosophy alike, or in any case of a “trans-”religious non-theological as opposed to a “post-”religious non-philosphical orientation alike, are to be understood analogously. With the “sea” or “ocean” understood obviously as the Jungian archetype of the collective unconscious (series here), and with questions of “depth” and “spatiality” now plainly in our view, it is clear that non-religious gnosis does indeed have a definite practical application.

And which one is this?

Grelet’s end, maybe against his protestations to the contrary, I see as embodying the possibility of Wisdom. I find there is at heart of his work a certain plea for a dialogical “openness”, for “saying anything”, as evident through our shared understanding of the oscillatory, ever-restless Spirit. On the other, that of Laruelle, instead embodying genius, I see that there is questions of dialectical “justice” at stake. With this riding sail I hope to be able to spin them together, just as one might spin together wisdom and genius to strike this resonance.

Catherine Keller, who is perhaps my favorite living theologian, leads into the passage below, from Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, with a similar critical appraisal (see here) of Hillman as I have made in the past (see here). She speaks boldly of the life-force on page 296:

That is, is there a certain closure due to “unilateralism” which kills this polyphonic conversation?

If Laruelle calls Gilles a “Saint”, let me suggest it may be only because Laruelle still sees himself as a “Sinner” by comparison. If the Future Christ still must come to forgive him for his sins, then I wonder who is really in fact pro-”religion” after all. Which of the two actually has the sinful conscience? Read Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth:

“I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin. Until I have attained that end, I shall be content to be restless.” 

Back on our shaky course, in some instances of Crisis, a strategic re-anchoring to the “non-religious gnostic” attitude may well [at least intermittently] save one’s life from dark nights and otherwise stormy waters.

It may prompt us to stop cutting or to stop drilling, to look up towards the hills in-the-last-instance, when non-standard thought otherwise keeps its eyes fixed forward on the goal. It is in this important sense that I am absolutely delighted to give a strongly “pro-gnosis” review of Grelet’s work. It is only with our shared love of the open water that I have come to this understanding, and I wonder now whether or not Laruelle is too much of a land-lover.

Or, if he is likewise a sailor in a sense, then I wonder how experienced he is when it comes to such fundamental matters of boating safety.

For full disclosure, a year or two ago I received my boater’s license, passing a mandatory boater’s safety course along the way. Perhaps I am wrongly stubborn and still follow too many rules at the expense of “having fun”, or perhaps I am just a good-for-nothing an-chora-ite at heart. This lesson nonetheless remains fresh in my mind as I try to understand with greater clarity the mysterious nature of the Qohelet, who ever more continues her unfolding of Wisdom.

Securing Wisdom, attending to a thoughtful enaction of non-violence, resisting even the most non-standard of violences, healing where there is both Trauma and Wounds. These tasks must be recognized as our first-order of business if we are to be able to do anything else — let alone cloning!

The post Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Securing Wisdom (Part III) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

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.

That is, knowledge in the form of “critique” always cuts both ways because that is what it does — it simply cuts, and cuts, and cuts, and cuts. We have a tendency to deal in concepts as one deals in a casino or as one deals on a street corner. I know those e-cigarettes can be annoying to re-charge, but can we learn to quit smoking that Habermas? We know not how much we have been “marked”, as though circumcised by Derrida himself (imagine that!)

We understand, on a more serious note, Bergson’s concept of “duration”, and as such we are pretty well in-tune to the entire dance of continental philosophy. Yes, we step confidently onto the ballroom floor of continental thought with its vast showcase of masks available, choosing carefully which we will wear when the clock strikes midnight. Zizek supposedly doesn’t wear a mask, Lacan wears his own, others infinitely change them as the evening wears on…

We have begun to deal more or less successfully with crises in our own understandings, in our own lives even, such that in our recurrent depressions we evoke the aphorisms, making an offering in front of the altar of Adorno to cure our inner melancholy:

The melancholy science, from which I make this offering to my friend, relates to a realm which has counted, since time immemorial, as the authentic one of philosophy, but which has, since its transformation into method, fallen prey to intellectual disrespect, sententious caprice and in the end forgetfulness: the teaching of the good life. What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses. To speak immediately of what is immediate, is to behave no differently from that novelist, who adorns their marionettes with the imitations of the passions of yesteryear like cheap jewelry, and who sets persons in motion, who are nothing other than inventory-pieces of machinery, as if they could still act as subjects, and as if something really depended on their actions. The gaze at life has passed over into ideology, which conceals the fact, that it no longer exists. (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life)

Tu quoque, my friend! Tu quoque indeed! How’s this for a reading of Adorno-against-himself! Ha-ha-ha!

We may live the good life at last … yes, thanks only to the “critique of ideology” and the plurality of “tools” provided to us by our favorite critical theorists and other fellow travellers. Nothing passes through the critical car wash with the Big Other still in place, if you know what I mean! I reflect momentarily upon the stack of books I’ve read — thousands upon thousands of pages — and I am in some sense proud of myself, and yet at the same time so ashamed as to what has been left behind me.

I can muster but one prayer: Thanks be to Christus Hegel our Absolute Lord and Ideal Savior! In Lordship and Bondage, Amen.

How many of us read now read The Collected Works of Michel Foucault more often than we do The King James Bible? If your hand isn’t raised, well, you know what Derrida (…that’s called a “re-doubling” if you didn’t catch it earlier…. Another Derrida? see here) says about Jean-Luc Nancy in On Touching… what? At least he’s not telling you to cut off the other one, too… am I right?

The sound of your own Vox[el] speaking:

Deconstruction at times shines like “cheap jewelry” hanging off our necks, Marxism ironically becomes its own “alienated form”, SR/OOO reads like “…inventory-pieces of machinery, as if they could still act as subjects, and as if something really depended on their actions” … is that too harsh a critique?

Our self-maintenance, self-control, self-awareness, and self-censorship — This whole “learning to live, finally” business (and it is indeed like a business) should start becoming second-nature to us as we come to know ourselves intimately both in and through our unintended acquisition of Wisdom, we have stumbled upon it as if by accident.

We know that we cannot “actually arrive”, that we can only ever “begin to begin”, that for precise psychoanalytic reasons there is not really such a thing as “accidents” or “coincidences”, that with a radical reversal “precisely the opposite is true”, … and must I continue on? We, the inheritors of the legacy of critical theory, we have become quite autonomous. We need not even think for ourselves anymore, cf. Benjamin in that one book he wrote. Haven’t we become now so machine-like? It is time, I think, to become human again.

I am obviously talking about we who have “mastered” reading some of the most ridiculous passages known to man — and the Germans, from Kant to Heidegger, that means you! We who can pick up the ideas of new thinker, pick up any given “line of flight”, and tear it to shreds with our critical knowledge if we will, if we feel so provoked.

We who can jump freely through all the hoops and knots alike are… are we? …  beginning to realize the fault of our critical ways, realizing this upon being repulsed perhaps by Badiou’s pompous style that “mastery” is itself a significant problem that we have left out of the equation. We are realizing, I hope, that our “auto-positionality” matters, at least just a little bit.

We have seen, along with a few others like Medhi Belhaj Kacem, the need to re-introduce a spirit of creative “free thought” into our lives again, along with the possibility — No, silly me, I forgot to remember, it’s a Freudian “necessity” — of “error” and “slipping up” and even maybe “being wrong”.

That is, can we learn to  think on-the-run, with fast-and-loose demarcations that perhaps fizzle out after their limited use, without such fossilization? A make-shift, rough-and-dirty thought, whose form is perhaps constant only like a polygonal mesh-based voxel phantom, but whose content varies with the (medical) Crisis situation at hand. Transference, yes, albeit transference narrowed so as to reach all the “critical” areas. This is our “vision of the Body”, of the “flesh” in its vulnerability.

And, what’s more, as we begin to rise above ourselves, or rise below ourselves with the movement of the Under-man as the case may be (see here), with construct-awareness (see here) of course included in our midst, these “personal” issues we have will become minor as we open ourselves up to entend (see here) those of an Other.

Was Joyce speaking visibly what Freud thought to be invisible? What is therefore invisible in Joyce, if everything is on the table? Is it perhaps Wisdom’s working? Can we begin to hear the sound of our own Vox [voice] speaking? Can we hear the acoustic vibrations and the way they resonate inside the ear of an Other? Can we see its phantom, its specter, before it even comes to exist as such (see here)?

Ha! – I haven’t said anything new since my first post on Hegel (see here). Sign here, and here, and here! You did read the fine print when you signed up, didn’t you?

Wisdom in the porno-tropics

If philosophical problems arise when language “goes on holiday”, then welcome one and all to Wisdom in the porno-tropics!

Sometimes, it is wise to create a “problem” or to “make a fuss” where there is none, just to be safe. A lack of a (meta-)Crisis may at times be a great cause for concern.

This development of Wisdom thus arguably requires a tropological analysis, or a reading-in-the-tropical sense. It is perhaps more accurately called a “glossing” as one would hopefully cover oneself with sunscreen on a hot sunny day. In some ways a critique of “reading” or “consuming texts” as we do, it is instead related intimately with matters of health, safety, and healing.

If you do not apply it correctly, so to speak, you will be burned by the vision-in-Sun, with its Ultra-Vladimir rays.

Wisdom sits at such a base-level of intellect, a level we all may grasp as human beings. It is a level consisting of fundamental questions pertaining to “harm” and “violence”, and therefore also the possibility of amelioration and of an originary, thoughtful non-violence put into action.

We are met at this fundamental intersection by those whom we have so long critiqued (I mean the “moralists”, we know them all too well), finding a strange friend in those who are Wandering over slowly from the other direction, from their long winding (“idealist”) path of mysticisms and spiritualities, with its own New Age worries handled accordingly just as a skilled post-Marxist may handle neo-liberals.

It is at this cross-roads that I believe Wisdom sits, for her great critique — if she has one — is always an immanent one. Here, for us, she hands down the tomes entitled The Critique of Critical Reason or perhaps even The Critique of Pure Interest (see here). Wisdom is “rigorous” therefore in the sense that it covers thoroughly all the “critical” areas, and yet remains strangely informal insofar as it blends into your skin and often goes unnoticed.

Like, perhaps, mentioning Heidegger’s concept of techne ever so casually, while wearing a Hawaiian shirt, eating the latest seafood catch somewhere in a Tiki-bar restaurant. Or, maybe, like writing Saussure’s diagram on a napkin, applying just the right dose of “structuralism” or maybe of “enlightenment” at precisely the right time.

The answer to this peculiar question of enfolding Wisdom is in the last instance revealed to be a matter of style.

In building upon our prior tacit axiology (see here), we are reminded that this is a unique and personal question relating to individual values. In realizing the actuality of the “salvic archetype”, for instance, how are we as individuals to live out our “salvation”?

Anne McClintock famously writes in Imperial Leather that there is a phenomenon of European cartographies which serves as “…a porno-tropics for the European imagination- a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears”. It is here where we become wary of even the most well-thought out onto-cartographical or otherwise diagrammatic projects, whether in the Lacanian tradition such as with that of Levi Bryant, or with Felix Guattari’s recently published and quite important work Schizoanalytic Cartographies (see here).

That is, if it bears the mark of “Europe” and the West in general, it already warrants a certain amount of suspicion (My words included!).

Even the most frequently-used tropes in my own project, namely “Wilderness” and “Wanderer” (see here), have the potential to become loaded in such a way which is perhaps reminiscent of a terrible Manifest Destiny if we pay attention to the tropes. There is, let us not forget, Eros at work. There is the Apollonian working alongside – and not against – the esteemed Dionysian life-affirming spirit.

Wisdom demands: when enfolding, it is important to sometimes misread and attend primarily to well-being in its place. It may well be the “necessarily foolish” counter-point to the genius’ series of volitional errors.

Misreading wisdom is question of (re-)enchantment in the right way, that is, in a balanced way which enfolds the mise-en-scene non-violently .

Universal ability to enchant:

What have we gained as critical theorists, as “readers” of any “text” we can get our hands on? My argument is simple: We have gained the “universal ability to enchant”.

Do we, like Lacan and the Christians, affirm the R-S-I Borromean knot or the Trinity as kept together by the fourth, the sinthome which ought to be [but often is not] the feminine wisdom and general orientation of the Qohelet? Or, do we, like the Gnostics, like the occultists, like some Buddhists, and like many others affirm a four-quadrant structure of balance, placing her as though directly in our view (often in the Lower Left)?

Well, it depends. We must be flexible so as to be able to work with both or neither. A great paper by David Miller can be found here connecting J.L. Marion and questions of “saturation” to Jacques Lacan and “the Real” to Jean Gebser’s call for integralization, the latter not unlike my own calls for continuous integration (see here).

At its basic levels, it is a pragmatic and perhaps also aesthetic question of choosing between three or four. A three-legged stool is more stable than a four-legged one, but is it “stability” we have come to value? In some situations yes, but in others absolutely not.

Indeed, three must eventually become four as our under-standing increases. But to what extent do we value standing-under? At its more complex levels, however, it seems there are many more options: four must become … six, eight, ten, twelve, – more? It is related, at least initially, to a question of how much we wish to endure, how much we wish to cut, and at what point we will just let-go of our grip and let the Other breathe.

Let’s re-start, then, from the other extreme, from the other way around, coming back to where we began.

If we are to place this incomprehensible and paradoxical “actual infinite” at the ground of the Real so to speak (see here) as a condition of possibility of understanding, then the “proper” answer is: There is surely an infinite amount of “rings”, or “quadrants”, and so forth. But then our orientation becomes like that of the poet-philosopher Novalis, as if we were perpetually intoxicated or caught up in a wind of chaotic inspiration. This is, after all, what we do when we try to comprehend infinity — we spontaneously break out into song and dance!

To move with-and-beyond Novalis is therefore not a matter of surpassing or overcoming Novalis at what he does best (…for how could one do that outside of, say, a poetry-slam?), rather it is about letting him step into the limelight to shine given what he does best. It is as though we are overcoming the will-to-overcome. Then, anything less-than-infinite or less-than-nothing is a matter of instrumentality as related to our finite human understanding.

Novalis’ intensity may not at present be the wise thing to do. This heightened level of theo-poetical sensitivity is sometimes too overwhelming and harmful for many of us to handle, except in the rarest of occasions. Kristeva and Lacan are indeed sister and brother in this Freudian drama — And it is to be dramatic!

One (admittedly large) step below the actual infinite may be the “actual trans-finite”, or an expansive “bio-cosmic” perspective. Can we perhaps locate ourselves here? It is desirable, it seems, as it would allow for communication between all traditions — just as Latour seems to intend — while keeping ecological concerns fixed right at the center. Yet, to what extent can a single embodied individual really think so globally in an ameliorative way? Aren’t we instead “condemned” as it were to think and enact wisdom locally, under certain spatial and temporal conditions, in certain communities where the Other has a differing level of understanding? Where not all traditions are present, for instance?

Here, it seems as though we may articulate ourselves alright, but we will not be understood well except for a few exceptional Wanderers. This trans-finite, or otherwise “post-, or better yet non- religious/traditional” sentiment has its strengths and weaknesses as does every other level. Ideally though, I wish to sit just about here where possible. There is on one hand, I believe, a minimized violence and harm due to the “Angelic” mediation, presently with the cost of a greater alienation, with a greater chance of being misunderstood (…and therefore of causing conflict…), but also coming with the grand possibility of bringing-together in a unitive way traditions and individuals which otherwise seem radically divergent.

Resonating trans-sub-lation

Where the poetry becomes incomprehensible, by then “forgetting transcendental realism” (see here), I have gained the non-acrobatic advantage (see here) in being able to explain to others on the ground and despite their back-ground what it is a mad-man like Novalis is doing up there on the tight-rope. It is clear that he, like also Kierkegaard, is enduring so much more in way of despair than I am able or perhaps even willing to carry alone.

This leads me to understand that I am still “marked” as it were by “tradition” (even if it is understood as a plurality) by my past and by those around me, and not necessarily a “religious” past. While we may praise rhizomatic rootlessness, we nonetheless are forced at this stage to recognize the roots — here, I mean the “critical” roots — that are in our very call for rootlessness already, and especially those which condition our thought. To what extent can we lift the revelatory anchor, to what extend is it dragging behind us? (see here)

So, with the critique of critiques, we fall away from this “intellectual capitalism” with its bourgeois-sounding ballroom dances. We realize suddenly that our place of speaking is in the porno-tropics, that we have had the privilege of reading (no matter if it is European philosophy or sacred religious texts) where others cannot, and that it is not enough to disseminate copies of Sartre for all to read so that they may be freed as it were from their ideological chains.

Now, instrumentally speaking, ends and means are to be spun together at this base-level so as to enfold the wisdom, which is a wisdom of non-cutting and non-violence as opposed to such cutting knowledge.

Misreading wisdom means among other things enfolding wisdom in such a way that a 3 or 4-fold re-enchantment takes place that is at once the Good, the Beautiful, and the True woven together with considerations of the Just. Here, we seek not as much “portals of discovery”, but more so “portals of healing” where there is the presence of pain and suffering. We seek “portals of non-violence” where there is a great violence.

We seek to bring Synchronicity out of the noise of our Crisis, for this point of resonance is precisely the moment of non-violent resistance where the rigid structures of oppression give-way to the flux of Truth.

The post Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Misreading Wisdom (Part II) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

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.

Despite these and related efforts, Lacan and his “Dynamic Lacanian” friends (see here) have merely isolated and identified Wisdom as such: yet they do not yet have it, or embody it.

Therefore, I cannot at present “forgive” (to use his term) their infatuation as it were with knots and knotting, in lieu of Wisdom. Put quite straight-forwardly: Lacan does not, as of this twenty-third seminar, begin to acquire Wisdom. He has only just gotten over the post-modern anxiety of “beginning to begin”, and stands like us now at the start of the path. He only goes so far as to demonstrate, and quite conclusively, that Wisdom exists as a “phenomenal actualization” of Man.

He may have, for instance, the under-pinning of a personal philosophy, but he does not yet know how to “live in the world with others” so to speak — a task which seems to greatly surpass the former realization in terms of ordinarily pragmatic importance.

To draw a comparison, Lacan has realized no more than, say, the mid-19th century American theologian Horace Bushnell, who understood “that the Godhead is instrumentally three simply as related to our finite apprehension, and the communication of God’s incommunicable nature”.

Very well!

For these honest views, however, Rev. Bushnell was nearly brought to trial for heresy. For Lacan’s part, on the other hand, we do not yet know the consequences…

I am drawn to consider the possibility of Lacan’s own psychosis, upon encountering an interview with the practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst Elizabeth Lagache, whose project is to compare the discourses of Lacan and Artaud. On the question of Lacan’s immense admiration for the “psychotic” Joyce, Lagache hints the following (see here):

So I don’t know if you’re familiar with L’s whole take on Joyce, but it would be worthwhile for you to have a look at it. Because at least in that case, there is something that is directly applied to somebody whom L admires enormously, admires and loves, Joyce. And this despite the fact that he’s psychotic, according to him. You know, L isn’t far off from suspecting himself of psychosis, at times [iv]. All those nosologies and structures, ‘who is normal’s and ‘who isn’t’s, the stuff we dwell in, in our solitary hours, and that emergence we make into some sort of daily routine with the appearance of psychic normalcy… Because A still had friends, successes, some kind of social link. He did things. He was appreciated and loved by people. His relationship with Rivière [...]

[footnote iv] Meta- thought: If Lacan hypothesizes that he is himself a psychotic, than how far off is he from suggesting that his work is his sinthome? And that psychoanalysis, as a process of symbolization (= “the act of writing down something that doesn’t exist”, as Lagache defines it several pages down”), is just that fourth knot, keep the borromean RSI (real, symbolic, imaginary) from becoming undone? And that is therefore always itself verging on the edge of psychosis? I.e., that the end of analysis could itself be an attempted reintegration of the womb, a nihilistic asceticism?

I agree with her until, well, the last three words.

In Bubbles, Peter Sloterdijk’s critique of the entire Lacanian tradition comes by way of an extended attempted reintegration of the womb, for instance.

But, the question is not of “a nihilistic asceticism”, for we have already dealt with that subject with Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (see here). Instead, the nihilism turns in on itself, an-nihilates itself, and is experienced instead as a joyous abundance which brings forth an affirmation of life in a “second life” (see here). These “fragments of the feminine sublime”Wi are found already in the work of Schlegel and Joyce, in a book of the same name (see here).

To rid oneself of this psychosis, it becomes evident that Lacan and Lacanians alike must begin together on the road of acquiring Wisdom.

The beginning of Wisdom:

Let us not dodge the question: How, then, does one acquire Wisdom?

Or, what is the beginning of Wisdom? How does Lacan’s idea of the “unitary trait” come to be in the first place? In Proverbs, there are several verses which set us off again on the road beyond Lacan. Luckily, we do also have some words of guidance from the integrated fragments of the Qohelet (“the Assembler”) among others.

Consider for a moment the following two verses from the Wisdom literature:

Proverbs 4:7 “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.”

Proverbs 9:10 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.“

From inside the “critical” perspective, to say the least, these passages do not seem very helpful.

Can we even understand them from the vantage of critique, without standing-under or otherwise standing-before the One, without the truly under-standing rhythm of the Under-man? (see here). In any case, why should we bother exploring the limits of critique so long as our RSI-machine is working? So long as the money is rolling in, so long as we are constantly booking conferences, so long as we are winning the admiration of our peers, so long as we are selling books… so long as the machine is cutting, then why bother?

In any case, I will gladly join James Hillman in saying: No cuts! (see here and here)

But let us bracket that question for a moment.

If we are concerned at all with construct awareness (see here), or with odd-sounding Jungian jobs like “shadow work”, or if we follow through with what I’ve called pre-adumbration (see here) which is like a “meta-shadow-work” … a work on shadows before there is even a shadow to be cast … then we may learn to listen so that we may “see” with a Vision-beyond-vision (see here) the limitations of “the machine” well in advance. That is, we may recognize as does everybody else that sometimes, the machine breaks from a Crisis within the system. Sometimes, a Crisis throws a wrench in the machine from without of it.

In any event, I believe – and it is important that the “I” believes this, in trusting his or her integrity — that the Crisis commands (see here).

If we listen carefully, this concern was similarly pointed out by Julia Kristeva, who writes the following, to be explicitly taken as a remark of caution: “Current attempts to put an end to human subjecthood (to the extent that it involves subjection to meaning) by proposing to replace it with space (Borromean knots, morphology of catastrophies), of which the speaker would be merely a phenomenal actualization, may seem appealing.” (see here). Of note, Sloterdijk pulls almost excessively from Kristeva’s critique of the Lacanian tradition, so there is a certain thread we are to follow here on our pursuit of Wisdom.

Is it perhaps Lacan’s sinthome, his work itself? Do they “seem appealing” because they (often quite visibly) stand-in the place of Wisdom, acting as a substitute for it? Or, as Terence Blake puts it clearly: IS ONTOLOGY MAKING US STUPID? (see here). The answer seems to be yes.

Non-machinic intentionality:

This debate has already played itself out, revealing its implications even in the given context of Joyce (i.e. Eco calls Finnigan’s Wake a “textual machine”), in the field of semiotic theory. The “machinic” question in semiotics is posed as follows, in Kathleen O’Grady’s essay in Feminist philosophy of religion: critical readings, beginning page 154 (see here):

For more in this direction, I highly recommend her other article “The Pun or the Eucharist?: Eco and Kristeva on the consummate model for the metaphoric process” in Literature and Theology (1997) 11(1): 93-115 (see abstract here).

Moving beyond Eco’s “metaphorical machines”, Kristeva brings out the non-machinic which enfolds Eco’s machines, just as Laruelle brings out the non-acrobatic (see here) which under-stands the acrobats. Kristeva’s theory, then, can include the speaking subject in any theory of language. A consequence of this is also that she does so without violence. Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology (MOO) arguably has the same kind of limitations as Umberto Eco’s metaphor-machines. As such, it still cuts the vulnerable who are without the intellectual tools to combat its topological space of Mastery. In a word, it strikes down — coup after coup — those who speak a language which is not understood by Lacanese.

With Bryant, however, the limitations of the machinic account are no longer strictly “semiotic”, but the movement instead pervades the very gesture of knotting in and of itself.

I believe, given my limited knowledge, that Levi’s tripartite Borromean Critical Theory will eventually be enfolded by a more “balanced” 4-quadrant approach, in the same way as the Christian Trinity was given a decidedly Gnostic-twist by Jung’s Quaternity in Answers to Job. That is, Levi, by comparison, still faces the looming “problem of evil” but — like the devout Christian — he does not recognize it as such because machines do not seem to produce this question. Nonetheless, the structural similarities with BCT and Christianity are striking.

In this way, I will echo recent concerns (most recently expressed here) of Bryant and his willful ignorance of the question of non-machinic intentionality. Adding the ‘h’ to Eco’s name in this way …is it a matter of what Massingnon calls “sacred hospitality”?

Back on the road to acquiring Wisdom, we find that we may articulate a fourth element already contained in the intentional performance of the three (rings):

“Jung over and over again in his writings returns to the alchemical question: “Three are here but where is the fourth?” (Edinger 189). The completion of the quaternity is seen frequently in alchemical works, even whimsically, “All things do live in the three/ But in the four they merry be” (quoted in CW 12 125) (see here).

Indeed, this feminine voice of Wisdom is also always already present in Ecclesiastes, as the Hebrew קהלת (Qohelet) is a feminine noun.

That is, already do we see several potential (notably, also more “feminine”) candidates for enfolding Bryant found in Ken Wilber’s AQAL model in Integral theory, who is currently in the process of ruthlessly critiquing Critical Realism (see here). To give one last example, Franz Bardon, a thinker of hermetic Magick known also for his resistance against Nazism, also understands a “tetrapolar magnetism”. The list, undoubtedly, may continue…

The lesson remains: I believe the “masculinity” of Bryant’s machines is overthrown by the (theo-)poetic, soft, but nonetheless radically subversive “feminine” voice of Wisdom.

Enfolding Bryant:

Wittgenstein wrote, that ‘Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking; hence its result must be simple, but philosophising has to be as complicated as the knots it unties’ (1967: Section 452).

Likewise, Kris Coffield of fractalpolitics (see here) argues that Bryant in his knotting has not accounted for the complexity of “differential becomings” of a non-systemic type – i.e. which escape the symbolic image of the Borromean knot – and as such his thought arguably remains entangled on a basic level.

Here is his short video entitled “Becoming, Object-Oriented”

We may say that Coffield here has — I think successfully — enfolded Bryant’s approach.

To enfold here means roughly: To transcend and include. Or, as my site’s tag-line reads, I prefer the phrase to move “with-and-beyond”.

Insightful and extensive discussion rages on the fruits, if any, that may turn up in the debris of SR/OOO (see here). The users there  are – I think rightfully – concluding in some capacity or another that Bryant’s model is far too simplistic, but that Lacan’s terms like sinthome and objet petit a nonetheless offer some useful “objects” for continuing movements of thought (…for “forget me knots” and “image stigmata” see here). In fact, with the work of Joseph Camosy, we already have talk of enfolding even Ken’s Wilber-5 model with a “Cube of Space” approach (see here).

Many possible questions arise: Do we designate “Wisdom” as the sinthome-to-enjoy which keeps the knots together, or do we rather give it a “quadrant” of its own. If so, then I might suggest Bryant does not seem to be dancing in Wisdom as perhaps Novalis or Nietzsche may — quite the contrary, with his “materialist” and “machinic” and “systematic” attitude.

In a Christological or otherwise theological context, the analogous question arises: How significant is this feminine Wisdom relative to the Trinity-as-construct? Ought one worship it as one would, say, the Holy Spirit? Is it a kindred spirit? Must Christians go as far as Jung’s 4-fold explicit gnosis? Is Wisdom more a matter of understanding of how to wield this tripartite ornament? Is it rather embodied, like a certain intentional stance or orientation? Do we “carry it in our hearts” so to speak? etc.

In any event, Camosy equates MOO and IT as follows:

The Real = the material.  Analogous to the UR and LR Quadrants. (it & its)

The Imaginary = images, phenomenology.  Analogous to the UL Quadrant. (I)

The Symbolic = critical theory, semiotics, Analogous to the LL Quadrant. (we)

Let it enfold you.

Lurking in the shadows of this entire post, however, is a question of vulnerability and the Vision-of-the-Body.

My friends at Archive Fire and attemptsatliving will rightly point this out, and I will conclude with some of their remarks (see here):

Where things get tricky in the translation between Levi’s model and my own distinctions here is where each of us might suggest phenomenal experience or ‘the Imaginal’  fits in. To do justice to this topic I would need a separate and much longer post, but in general I will suggest that ‘subjectivity’ or human experience is wholly Real: which is to say, material and therefore does not require ‘its’ own register. Our situated animal experience is generated from the sensual-material opening of our bodies among other bodies, and as an activity-in-the-world without ontological remainder.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, was rather clear about the fundamental corporeal nature of subjectivity. In The Phenomenology of Perception he wrote, “the body is our general medium for having a world” (p.169).  Worlds open up viz. bodies. And this sensual-tangible horizon is entirely of the material-energetic plane of existence. When we perceive and experience the world we do so as sensitive-coping bodies vulnerable to being affected and able to affect the Real precisely because we partake in the consistency of structure and force that is matter-energy. We are experientially open to the world as Real because we are of it:

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves” (p.153).

And, with that, I will re-iterate and insist again upon this call for a concern with Crisis intervention, with trauma theory, with restorative justice, and especially with active non-violent resistance in the Gandhian fashion of satyagraha.

Let us be aware of this vulnerability so that we may stop our cutting, so that we may attend (entend) to the wounds, in enacting a simple ameliorative truth which is “as old as the hills”. A theory of agency must therefore still be in the works, and which must come from without of both the critical and the Lacanian traditions…

If you permit Wisdom to enfold you, then your life will unfold Truth in the world. I send you my best wishes.

The post Lacan, Kristeva, Qohelet: Enfolding Wisdom (Part I) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

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.

Nietzsche “sees” it so clearly in his life, and yet it is so difficult to speak of “it” without a knack for poetry.

He has such a profound memory of it which is anchored (see here) as it were in his “inner” self . “It” (whatever “it” is) has marked him so deeply, and he knows his “true vital germ” better than anybody else ever could. Moreover, he has turned his response to this “it” into one of the most influential philosophies the world has ever known.

Peter Sloterdijk, a Nietzschean in his own regard, in his book You Must Change Your Life, at one memorable point notes that Emil Cioran‘s philosophy of suicide has itself been estimated to have saved the lives of countless thousands. This I do not doubt in the least, for I can even see it working even so close as in the lives of some of my dear friends (see here: ”I came to Cioran out of my own despair having come to a point in my own life when there was nothing left but suicide or the pen”).

How’s that for a testimony!

If Cioran’s existential therapy alone has saved thousands (Tell me: How many of you have even read Cioran? No — Have you even heard this name?), then Nietzsche has surely done the miraculous on a mass-scale. His miracle lies open in plain sight for all to see, and is still alive working to this day. He has, like Cioran, turned his personal loneliness and nihilistic experience of rejection into a body of text which has lived on, and quite literally it has lived on. It has truly ameliorated, helping others “live on” in their place of Crisis.

He even indicates this several times: “The idea of suicide has saved many lives,”….

What is the nature of this invisible adventure of Wandering commanded by Crisis? Does it ever have a common root?

Gestures of (Religious) Exclusion and (Traditioned) Embrace:

With the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s biography by Benoît Peeters (review here), it has increasingly come to light that “Acts of exclusion, it turns out, were central to Derrida’s perception of himself—the triggers, as he saw it, for his depression” (see here). Is anybody — anybody at all — surprised at this development after reading Derrida? Or, is anybody — anybody at all — surprised after seeing him speak so apprehensively and frightfully on camera, seeing him “live“?

You can see “it” even the in the very way he blinks and always looks away hesitantly, in his awareness of his own self-presence, filtered to us through the camera lens and the general mise-en-scene of an interview setting. It is such a painful sight for me to watch, to see him recalling at every instant his own suffering, to see him struggling with the innocent but nonetheless awfully violent questions of the American reporters, to see them asking him to dance like a monkey, to confess or avow as if he were still being interrogated and detained in Prague.

I honestly expected the fully grown French man to break down and cry like a child.

But instead, after about two minutes of squeamishness, he overcame it and landed in a rehearsed and otherwise mechanically-charged deconstructive answer that one could already find in his texts, if only one had looked. He retreated into his character, into the character he had constructed for himself. He put on his mask, put up his walls and facades, put up his defenses, ignored the camera, and he danced like a monkey just as they had demanded. In a word, he survived just as Derrida is known to do.

The camera pans out and you can see the back of the American woman’s heads, their hair tied up nicely in a bun, and one gets the impression that despite their poor French they were smiling the whole time as he spoke, barely understanding a single word — let alone the true significance it had to him. He had survived, and with this we too have arrived, therefore, to what we may call the level of gestures. Or, as the case may be, the lack thereof.

At the level of “gestures”, of “styles”, of “moods”, we realize and sensitize ourselves to these subtle gestures of exclusion or embrace, to this multiplicity of styles, and to the variety of moods ranging between passion and despair. We must now remain ever vigilant, keeping our close eye on the various triggers which unleash the “invisible adventure” of Wandering in the Wilderness, of depressions, dark nights, and Crises of all kinds into the arena of the future. In jest, let us not have to put Derrida through anything like this ever again, for both his sake and for our own!

I pull the term “invisible adventure” from the surrealist avant-gardienne Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob, niece of the famous writer Marcel Schwob), whose work Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), which turns out to be an unbelievable performance of freedom. Therein she writes:

“I had spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. Its masks were so perfect that when their paths crossed in the grand square of my consciousness they didn’t recognize each other. But the facepaints that I’d used seemed indelible. To clean them off, I rubbed so hard that I took off the skin. And my soul, like a face galled to the quick, no longer resembled human form.” (see here)

If no longer resembling human form, then what form did it take?

I suspect there is something that Cahun was able to do far more consistently that both Nietzsche and Derrida in their own ways had thought to do but had repeatedly failed to implement. That is, she spoke directly to the violence, to the harm, to the trauma, and to the suffering and found a way in her invisible adventure to bring to the forefront these gestures. That is, she did more than merely survive and carry on, she also resisted both passively and actively and most importantly non-violently the mise-en-scene that was given.

She too retreated inward, but only to make her outward reflection infinitely large so as to cause a crisis in the Crisis. For many but not all, the Crisis is encountered as an originary “crisis of faith” and meaning, and is therefore tied in inextricably to the phenomena of religion and in particular to religious Traditions as such. To wit, at the heart of each of these thinkers lies a particular wrestling with “religion”.

In any event, Sloterdijk, Sartre, Nietzsche, Cioran, and even Jung takes the critique of religion to be one of their most important tasks. Why?

Cahun is quick to provide an answer: Memories? Choice morsels. My soul is fragmentary. —from Disavowals. Fragmentation again (see here). These words bring to mind the wisdom of Proverbs 18:8, now turned against its Tradition: “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts.”

The phenomena of “religion”, then, must in some way be tied to a dehumanizing sort of “gossip” or (infinite) demand for such “gossip”. Specifically, it must historically be tied in to these gestures of exclusion overt or otherwise which lead to such instances of alienation and depression. Cahun again: “Impossible me. Am I not among all people alone, eternally alone?”

“Religion” itself is not an experience, as Sloterdijk (rightfully) argues.

It does not “exist” as something we can encounter in the world, but instead by this name and its associations it becomes so frequently weaponized, weaponized such that its real effects burn and scar “humanity” so that we, now known as the Excluded, can only find “humanity” among acrobats like Cahun. But does this mean we ourselves must become acrobats? Can we get by otherwise, without the risky tight-rope acts, among the ordinary villagers who are not yet ready to be taught the Ubermensch?

Do what Thou Wilt:

With the movements of both Under-man and Over-man, what I name here in contra-distinction with the inspiration of Sloterdijk and the influence of Laruelle as “Non-acrobatics” is also acceptable and becomes yet another option for us to take. And, what’s more, it is the option which seems many of the Victims do in fact take.

What is it, then, that happens here? How else can one “make oneself large” in the face of Crisis as did Cahun? How else can one re-enchant one’s life without becoming a surviving-spectacle for others to see on camera? Simply: How else can one take control of one’s “will” so as to overcome such violence? How does one overcome what turns into this pressing Nietzschean demand to self-overcome and become free even from his conditioning on our thought? How can we begin to dance our own dance, and not his?

By paying attention to Zarathustra’s own shadow, and by integrating it into our own personal and unique unconscious, the Magick expression of “Do what Thou Wilt” (originally from François Rabelais) comes into our purview. As in Sloterdijk’s Bubbles, we see:

If mysticism spoke with a moral voice, it (mysticism) would express itself through the demand: warm up your individual existence over the freezing point – and do what you will. When the soul thaws, who would doubt its inclination and suitability for celebrating and working with others? In order to gauge the significance of this insight, it will be advantageous for the free spirit to emancipate itself from the anti-Christian sentiment of recent centuries as from an inhibition that is no longer necessary.

You see, in the capacity of an allegory, the allegory of the tight-rope walker over the abyss is not a perfect one. There are still categorical demarcations made: here is an abyss, there is the tightrope, here is the self which walks, here is the Apollo-Dionysian pole that one carries for balance. Nietzsche’s thought is still organized, albeit organized in a very minimal way so as to allow a glimpse of vertical direction (…look! go that way! upwards! beyond!). If it were not simplified in this way, then Zarathustra could not be in a position to teach others and would sound instead like a fool.

Yet, when one takes that first step, that first courageous step over the abyss, the rules of the game change immediately and even these demarcations are overcome and de-organized (see here) as Chaos is unleashed.

Sloterdijk’s bubbles are shown often to pop in the same way (see here), and when they too are fleeting, and what does one do then? If one ventures out on the tight-rope alone – that is, all by your self – there is no guarantee you will make it as an acrobat. The greatest critique of Sloterdijk, then, seems to me that of Luca DiBlasi in the review “Beyond the Spheres” (see here).

The argument goes as follows:

Luca DiBlasi attributes certain oddities in Peter Sloterdijk (for which he suffered no small abuse at the hands of German reviewers) to the philosopher’s attempt to raise himself, “autopoietically,” to a point above the pluralistic perspectives that he wants to celebrate and participate in. The potential of constrained writing, for Harris, “is that it ends up an autopoietic textual machine,” that is, a machine that constructs itself and maintains its structure over time by both circling back on itself, and gathering in elements from the environment. Harris is referring here to the obsessed “journalist” in Harry Mathews’s novel of that name, who suddenly realizes that the goal of his journal-writing has been neither subjective nor objective, not self-expression and not world-description; instead, he has been writing for “it,” for the journal itself. In a sense each new ebr essay, in addition to its own concerns and organization and authorial autonomy, also contributes to the self-reproducing structure of “the journal itself,” an autopoietic writing machine.

This is a feature perhaps shared by popular names of today like Sloterdijk, including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and many others…

Yes, of course, one can conjure up new spheres of intimacy (recall how Lacan tried explicitly to do this with his own name) as perhaps another acrobat Aleister Crowley did with Thelema, in what was an adventurous attempt (successful or otherwise) to carve out some new occultist space in which one can breathe — if only momentarily.

A Heart of Gold:

However, with our motion/notion of Under-man revealed, even this much is not necessary as one can instead attend to the Crisis itself by moving within already existing and well-established spheres and attempting to, from within plurality of Crisis itself, perform collateral healing — mitigating the risk of harm, resolving conflicts, and so forth.That is, if the morale of the last post was “You need to find your own way”, the moral here is “You need not carry on alone”. Here we may also have gained new insight into what the “collective of Wanderers” (see here) may look like.

The Gnostic task of alchemy is not essentially different from the “Christian” experience: A heart of stone (miraculously) becomes a heart of gold.

At the heart of this endeavor, then, there must be found somewhere a positive “theory of agency” which has been so lacking in Euro-centric critical theories. Perhaps this is what comes by carrying with us the lessons of both Sartre’s existentialist atheism and Jung’s re-creation of religion, while triangulating this with the Nietzschean impulse for affirmations of Life.

This theory of agency, then, belongs not solely to acrobats, but to us ordinarily humble non-acrobats who also can entend (see here) [to] the Crises of the future while still remaining (or, because they must remain, are forced to remain) “on the ground”.  This agency does not necessarily belong to the individual self, but to the ensemble of non-acrobats taken as a whole (Sloterdijk: poetics of plurality, or “foam”), as if it maintained its own autonomous influence.

Historically, this act of “making oneself big” has been situated in the domain of Magick.

Photomontage, Aveux non avenus, 1929-30: Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore

If one encountered a bear or predator in the Wilderness, to give an example, a quick spell would be enough to give you the strength to act accordingly — and, more importantly, safely.

In many ancient cultures, magick was the tool you turned to when society didn’t allow you access to other kinds of institutional power, and for this reason (among others) it tended to be so feared by the bourgeoisie and dismissed by Christians. Greek and Roman “curse” tablets, for example, were employed by women and slaves often as a means of security. They used these on occasion to protect themselves the best they could from abuse and exploitation by both husbands and owners.

Or, if free men used magick, they were very often those who were “disadvantaged” in some way when compared to other men. In this way, consider the possibility you were a poor man in love with a woman who was being courted by a wealthy suitor, you could turn to a love spell. And, what’s more, one was pressed to admit it sometimes worked!

When there is no where left to turn, when we’ve passed through the “linguistic turn”, the “religious turn”, the “speculative turn”, the “hermetic turn”, the room begins spinning and it is as though the laws of nature are suspended in accordance with your will. The demarcations disappear, and one is found floating like in a lucid dream in the Chaos.

If you could achieve your goals by other means, by political, religious, or cultural means, then one wouldn’t need to turn to magic in the first place. De facto, magick operated as a “crisis cult” and due to its very nature it allowed for polytheism, for plurality, for multiplicity, and for a concern with non-violence, non-harm, healing, and re-enchantment of Life when there was no reason to “live on”.

From the vision-in-One, there is the Many, and as such many forms of mysticism took root with the same praxis in mind. Perhaps, in the end, it is these non-acrobats in their invisible adventures who allow the acrobats we love to soar as they do.

Here, at last, one moves from a global to a more “bio-cosmic” perspective, in a non-traditional embrace of All that is Good in Life.

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In the process of learning to read as a young kid, one of my favorite series quickly became Dan Greenberg’s The Zack Files. I can remember going through all kinds of imaginative tales, complete with wacky titles and even more adventurous ideas contained within. One of these incredible books, entitled I’m Out of My Body, Please Leave a Message (#7), begins as follows:

With its conversational style which reveals with utmost candor of Zack’s inner-most thoughts, thoughts which often resonated with my own curious questions, Greenberg’s writing without a doubt expands the mind and imagination of the young individual. In retrospect, I do not know where I would be today were it not for my encounter with The Zack Files. Without these short stories, would I have become as avid a reader as I am now? How might my life have been different? It is exceedingly hard to say.

To shift gears, a comment on one of Terence Blake’s recent posts (see here), pointed out the following:

I like the idea that thought is capable of thinking the absolute. I am just more of a Hillmanian who thinks that conceptualization is always secondary to a non-representational image. (Image not as representation but as experiential reality in its own right — image as presentation, nothing “re” about it). So I would almost put this absolute in the non-representational space of the Imaginal. The thing I can’t decide is whether to side with Jung or Hillman. Jung puts the non-imaginal archetype before the image, but Hillman thinks that this amounts to privileging some kind of abstract concept before the precision of the thing. Jung seemingly puts the concept first before the image, while Hillman does the opposite. It does seem that images are more precise than concepts. Maybe Hillman’s rejection of Jung putting the archetype before the archetype-image is kind of the same complaint one might have with Harman for privileging his unknowable, untouchable “objects” before their immanent expression? Or Badiou’s “matheme”? Lacan, too, derogated the Imaginary and privileged the Real as an unknowable gap or crack in the Symbolic order.

When I first read it, I found myself in this similarly awkward position. Which is the cart and which the horse? It is as though I want to believe Hillman’s imagination, and I think his take on Jung here is more or less appropriate, but nonetheless I still find something “unsettling” about his presentation…

Or, perhaps it is a matter of finding the proper style.

Watching several videos of Hillman, for instance, one is at once taken in by his evident wisdom and yet possibly repulsed slightly after a while by his … what? It is as though I call after a while and receive nothing but the answering machine: “Good day, I’m Dr. James Hillman, post-Jungian archetypal and renegade psychologist. I’m currently out of my body right now, please leave a message.”

The difficulty in answering this question seems to be one of the role of history. Does Hillman, for instance, know his place in history?

If Jung privileged the abstract concept before the precision of the thing, it is because he understood it to be a “psychological fact” that, upon encountering an archetypal situation (say, crossing a raging river in the jungle) we are already psychologically pre-conditioned by our ancestors in history. That is, we do actually respond accordingly to these archetypes and the abstract concept may be actual (indeed, more actual) in a way that the “precision of the thing” is not.

We must ask how much water these “myths” (…which myths?) hold after the dawn of post-modernism, after the collapse of the “mythic” as some suggest? Like the question Nietzsche could have posed to Jung: How fluid are these archetypes in history? As our everyday life has changed since the dawn of industrialization and global techno-capitalism, how strongly do the traces of these previous archetypes still impress on us? etc. Or, if the collective unconscious is like the sea at its darkest depths, what is the speed of the current down there?

Clearly, especially given our reading of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in my last post (see here), we need something more fluid than Jung’s own account to reflect today’s technological society. And yet, I feel likewise that Hillman’s highly imaginative account is perhaps too fluid. My fear is of course that the body is left behind, and as such I believe the choice between “non-imaginal archetype” and “image” needs to be more or less deconstructed. This leaves us with the uniquely individual and affective body front and center. Neither/nor, or, both/and. Yes this, but also that.

As with all things “Jungian”, we are to try to seek a balance, and here it is a certain balance. Where exactly this balance lies depends upon the weight of the ends of the antimony. If the weight is equal, then the balance is the center. Yet, if the weight is not equal, then the balance is surely somewhat off-center. Perhaps I lean more towards Hillman than Jung himself, but now is the scale tilted too much in his direction?

I wish to come back to the Zack Files as a means of elucidating Hillman’s approach. With the question of astral projection and bodies in place, Zack asks his good friend Spencer a series of seemingly logical questions, to which Spencer responds with his imagination. I believe the same kind of exchange was had between Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich, who is known for his critique of Archetypal Psychology at large.

A passing remark on Giegerich (see here) in an article by Michael Vannoy Adams reads:

Imagine my surprise when a few days later, as I was re-reading Wolfgang Giegerich’s criticism of Hillman’s imaginal psychology in The Soul’s Logical Life, I read this passage:

HILLMAN is probably the only one who was responsive to what was germinally inherent in the Jungian project. JUNG had said that he had been the only one who logically pursued the two problems that most interested FREUD. In the same way we can say that HILLMAN logically developed what JUNG had been most interested in. (1999: 104).

When I had first read The Soul’s Logical Life, I had marked this passage in pencil in the margin. There was, therefore, no doubt that the passage had previously impressed me. Was this a case of cryptomnesia? Or do Giegerich and I merely imagine Hillman in the same way? Does it matter? Does Hillman matter? If so, why? Giegerich does not say that what most interested Jung was the imagination and that it is Hillman alone who has logically pursued that interest. Perhaps because what most interests Giegerich and what he so logically pursues is the soul, he says that what Hillman pursues is also the soul. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman does say that what interests him is “a psychology of soul,” but he immediately also says that what he bases that project on is “a psychology of image” (1975: xi). The very basis of Hillmanian psychology is the imagination.

Yes, Hillman of course matters quite a bit!!

In theory, though, it seems I fall somewhere between the approaches of these two, just as I try to fall halfway between Kierkegaard and Hegel (see here) if weighted more or less equally. Do they actually have equal weight? Can they in principle be weighed equally? We would have to conduct an experiment to say, but how? Or, perhaps a kind of chemical titration between these two ends is necessary.

In a post aptly entitled Leaving for the Wilderness: The Soul’s Attraction for the Wild (see here), Dr. Brad Olson accounts as follows:

One of the important differences between Giegerich and Hillman is the notion of intent. Both insist on a leave-taking, but Giegerich seems to require that the leaving be much more conscious and intentional: “The first determination of the notion is: the resolved intentionality, the passionate desire to find the unknown Other (the quarry), to apprehend and comprehend it, the will to relentlessly aim and shoot, to hit and penetrate, to kill”. Hillman is less insistent upon the active pursuit. He seems to suggest that one may be captivated or seduced by the soul’s presentation, and then simply be drawn away: “What we are talking about ‘seems to recede from us’ and ‘draws us after it’ (Goethe) in the seductive manner of the anima.”

The imagery of “the quarry” here draws to mind the idea of entering-in-the-salt-mine which inspires and pervades throughout my project and development with-and-beyond Novalis.

Of note, Olson’s post captures much in way of the hypothesis I put forth called wilderness theology (see here). Moreover, his appeal to this “Goethean” science (see here), not ultimately unlike Feyerabend (who held Goethe in high esteem), resonates with thoughts here on fragmentation. In terms of substance, the idea of entensionality (see here), then hopes to rest in this very difficult in-between space of a “resolved intentionality” as Olson writes. It is quite nice to come across a post like this, as it reminds me that I am not (entirely) mad myself!

To carry on with the similarities, Hillman would likely be more receptive to the thought that “One does not enter the wilderness voluntarily”. Although, I diverge from Hillman as it is not by an account “creativity” or “imagination” that we are taken in, but rather by a more ruthless and immediate form of involuntariness, i.e. the Crisis commands. A “crisis of creativity” may well make up a significant part of this general Crisis, or maybe an outcome, but as the hypothesis goes … the category of Crisis nevertheless commands over and above much anything else.

In any case, here (not up there, but down here) I find myself closer to Giegerich’s Hegelianism (and the Logical movement of of the Soul) than Hillman’s more “Kierkegaardian” flavor of creativity. Bringing this back-and-forth back again to Jung, I have found here the work of Sartre’s existentialism to be helpful in counter-balancing what in the last post I called “Jung’s madness”. Insofar as Sartre and Nietzsche do share in an approach which may be deemed “existentialist”, I would like to see if I can bring them together in a more Unitive way as it concerns questions of this kind of “projection”.

Sierksmatic!

Luckily, I  have at my disposal the remains of the “Danish projection debate” which prove helpful in an attempt to work past the limitations of Jung with a new Nietzschean impulse.

An attempt to integrate these fragments, the work of Dutch theologian and psychologist of religion Fokke Sierksma comes into view. Sierksma, like myself, insists upon a more scientific approach to theology. And, like Sartre, he was active in war resistance. Operationally, his notion of “religious projection” seems to resonate well with entensionality.

In a series of posts entitled Jung of Sartre (see here, here, and here), a few shaky translation fragments read:

Rodenko recognized in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) a new orientation to life that are ethical and situational in nature. The man stood on the threshold of a new ethical era, now the value range of traditional Christianity had become an empty convention. But Sierksma did not believe. ”We have only psychology,” he wrote in Notes to Debrot Cola . ”Even more (worse) everything we touch turns to psychology. And Rodenko’s breakouts to a new country bring him only in a different area of psychology, it is not as strong as the grazed area that now commonly in use. ” [...]

Who in those years the religion of the demise wild preserve, clashed not only Freud, but also encountered the dilemma between Jung and Sartre, in other words, between the God of the psychological unconscious against a godless existentialism of self-contained self. Sierksma saw the impossible nature of this dilemma. Sartre had in him the ultimate consequence drawn from humanism and the psychology of the unconscious whole condensing into a en-soi . That man would be forever freed of religion, but it is also deprived of the dynamism and hope. Jung, however, gave one last hope that a synthesis could exist between the en-soi and pour-soi: ”…. a way, God knows where,” wrote Sierksma. [...]

Again, because after the death of God, the metaphysical system of guilt and punishment for good seemed settled. Existential responsibility also meant potential debt. And because no man is perfect, every man is essentially guilty. A real redemption is not possible, hell is always the other. Between these Sartrean vision of the destiny of man and the religious psychology of Jung was a wide gap, which Fokke Sierksma formed the starting point for the development of his thought. It was Jung or Sartre, a middle seemed not to exist. [...]

“At that crisis Jung had had itself also contributed by the religious consciousness disconnecting of theology and almost completely to anchor in psychology and anthropology.“

The resonances here with my posts on crisis, especially revelatory anchoring (see here), etc. are quite astonishing.

Moreover, the reference to F. Schleiermacher in the comments also marks a very welcome voice to the discussion which is shared in my articles on anchoring and revelation. If there is no escaping the Wilderness, if the self carries dark night with itself, then there is no dilemma of either Jung or Sartre. One cuts a level before the dilemma: The (“existential”) Crisis of choosing between them is itself what is to be carried by the self, as the self projects itself with this entensionality in mind.

Sierksma furthers this idea of “projection as a perceptual grid” (see here), on page 253 of Van A. Harvey’s Feuerbach and contemporary projection theories:

In the chapter entitled Religion and the need for transference, the author brings in two quotes by anthropologist Ernest Becker, suggesting on page 302-3:

“Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life” [...]  The issue for Becker, then, is not whether there will be a religious transference but “What is creative projection? What is life-enhancing illusion?” [...] “The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something — an object or ourselves — and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

While tentatively I may disagree with the author’s conclusions (i.e. questioning on Feuerbachian grounds that “religious” projection understood as such is necessary/healthy), these disagreements are (a) mostly a matter of our semantics, which are (b) likely born out of our respective personal experiences with and attitudes towards what we understand as “religion” — where I am like Becker more “sympathetic” than Feuerbach.

In absence of a life-long study of Buddhist practices (especially those of a more Tibetan style), which in the book I do not believe were given a fair treatment, I believe that Becker like Sierksma finds a fairly reasonable working balance on the question of projection.

The Under-man (?)

The existential and indeed Sartrean elements of Jung shine through, sometimes with the help of Paul Tillich, but I believe are best captured in a brief article by Dr. Walter A. Shelburne (see here):

Thus, to “occupy” the very place of Crisis in its situational context, i.e. to be able to effectively intervene in Crisis, one must be able to do r otherwise enact the “angelic” and “miraculous”: To medi(t)ate, to performatively deliver messages beyond and before any new “postality” enters the mise-en-scene, to immanently communicate (as in Michel Serres) between the various parties involved, translating bodily to and from the language-games that they understand.

Serres writes:

« Il ou elle n’a plus le même corps, la même espérance de vie, n’habite plus le même espace, ne communique plus de la même façon, ne perçoit plus le même monde extérieur, ne vit plus dans la même nature ; né sous péridurale et de naissance programmée, ne redoute plus la même mort, sous soins palliatifs. N’ayant plus la même tête que celle de ses parents, il ou elle connaît autrement. »

Some-times, this means to come down and intervene as if from above and without, as if the Crisis itself belongs to a lower state of consciousness which may soon be able to be placed below the state of the Other. This is the movement of the Under-man, the I who under-stands or otherwise stands under so as to support the Other who is outside the Self. Other-times, especially when the Crisis is personal and within you perhaps at your very limit (here, let me say the decision “Jung or Sartre”), this means to intervene as if from below, as if the Crisis itself belongs to a higher state of self-realization that will soon be integrated within your personal unconscious. To self-overcome: This is the movement of the Over-man, the I who over-stands the Other who is in this case inside the Self.

To be sure, the German word Über- seems to capture both the movements of the Over-man and Under-man (…in passing, I must note not to confuse this with Untermensch), only if understood as a function primarily of various intensity. I applaud Walter Kaufmann for largely keeping it untranslated. Both of these Over-and-Under movements allow us to “get over” Crisis in a certain lower-case “o” sense of “over”, but they are not always simple movements of the “Over-man” alone whose work is often highly visible and excessive — for there is also the rhythm of the Under-man who by contrast often acts invisibly and in great humility.

There are as it were a plurality of ways to “get over” your human, all too human self. You must find what works for you.

With this in mind, Jung’s “suspicion” remains but for reasons he did not suspect: Zarathustra’s failure, when he returned to the village from the mountaintop, was that he was speaking from his capacity and authority as Over-man. He could not variously play the role of Under-man as well. Can you teach Über, can you really teach a villager intensity so quickly? Or, must you teach with intensity at just the right level? I find Hillman’s intensity lacking on this level in particular. Now, Jung’s failure, by contrast and perhaps in jest, was that he was actually mad.

Indeed: Thank God I am a Jungian and not Jung! And, for that matter, thank God I am a Nietzschean and not Nietzsche! The Will to Power is a one, two, ten, fifty, hundred, thousand, million … n-way street of Multiplication, identified in the hierarchies which constitute society.

As such, we cannot be so fast to tie in the Will to Power to the world of the Over-man alone! His grandiosity risks merely covering up with a bandage what lies below. Let us attune our ear to the combinations of these quieter rhythms in Crisis. This “post-human” trans-valuation of all values therefore needs also include the Under-man and the whole sheaf-like (see here) continuum ranging from Over-and-Under. Sometimes, there is much Power in meeting the Other at their level, so that the collective may too rise above Crisis.

To attend (entend) the Other on their level, when I am the Other (Rimbaud). To attend (entend) the Other on their level, when I am not the Other. To attend (entend) the Other well before you must “encounter” the Other ethically (Levinas). To be able to attend (entend) to Crises in the psyche, point blank. To attend (entend) the Other on their level, where ever this level may be.

Please receive this post as my “offering to the life force”…

Works cited

Harvey, Van Austin. Feuerbach and the interpretation of religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Hillman, James. Re-visioning psychology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The will to power. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 19681967. Print.

Sartre, Jean. Being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Print.

Sierksma, Fokke. The gods as we shape them. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1960. Print.

The post Jung, Nietzsche, Sartre: The Under-man (Part II) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

I wanted to jump in on the many conversations that are being had now on the dark night of the soul, on the Death of God, on Atheism for Lent, on Gnosticism, and so forth but for the longest time I had not the proper angle of approach available to me. There was recently a beautiful exchange of posts between Peter Rollins, Micah Bales, and other friends (see here for the whole story) but I was unable, it seems, to properly approach these subjects without first being able to speak on the nature of “projection” which I believe lies at the heart of this issue.

For me, this required a long look at, among other things, questions of (inverted) teleology and intentionality. Now, with my recent post on what I am calling “entensionality” (see here), I feel more confident that I can appropriately provide to this ongoing discussion. As usual, I will be “filtering” my response through a meditation on three other thinkers, in creative ways where possible. The selection, this time, was more difficult than ever before. I have carefully chosen Nietzsche, Jung, and the late Sartre to guide me. This triangulation will first and foremost allow me to best work the issue from all angles, from several time periods, and so forth.

More importantly, however, it will allow me to confront my own shadow (see an introduction to Jung’s use of the term here and here), re-live my own crisis of faith of which leads me to the wilderness (see here for my “wilderness theology” hypothesis), my own encounter with the dark night of the soul, in a more stabilizing way than before. With these three in particular, I certainly feel I am in good company.

I would like to recall quickly my idea of entensionality as being more or less non-intentional, and focused instead on decidedly non-visual and non-visible cues. I have expressed my more “psychoacoustic” tendency before in my post on the fragmented body (see here), though a nice post from John Priestley’s blog Reading Sound (see here) tagged ADUMBRATION gives me a better feeling of this self-conscious construction, this enconstruction of entensionality, with recourse to Husserl:

46. [Regarding Robert Morris' Box:] Past and present, making and perceiving, thus become conflated in experience. This situation would seem to parallel Husserl’s notion of phenomenological “adumbration,” in which an object is perceived from multiple perspectives, yet understood ‐ precisely because of the constancy of certain features ‐ to be one and the same object with a set of essential qualities…. Morris discovers that sound recommends itself as an ideal medium for such temporal adumbration. Sound initiates its own nonintentional, perspective-neutral shifts in the relation of subject to object. Because sound is immersive, it inevitably creates an environment that is simultaneously and irredeemably a product of an interaction not just between spectator/auditor and object/sound source, but also includes a third component: situation. The situation is a product of time, context, expectation (protention), and memory (retention).  [Quoting Robert Morris:] [A]rt “is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness as art.”

It is this resource which gives me the name for this post, and as it proceeds through a helpful and otherwise fragmentary sketch the author is led to consider the meaning of John Cage:

259. Sound alone, signifies itself. This accepted, essentialist reading of the two great bestowals of Cage and Schaeffer — silence-as-sound and sound-in-itself — accepts sound as a kind of god, a unifying and unified sign. This amounts to the same unsustainable premise upon which the phenomenological construction is balanced. It maintains that self-presence takes place in the Augenblick, the blink of an eye. It happens so fast, it is so apparent, that it requires no sings, no representation. [...] 259. Lyotard’s reading realizes a Cage more radical than teh myth: “When Cage says: there is no silence, he says: no Other holds dominion over sound, there is no God, no Signifier as principle of unification or composition…. Neither is there a work anymore, no more limits…to determine musicality as a region.”

It is here where I would like to begin my conversation on the death of God, on the point of its “adumbration”.

adumbration (n.) 1530s, from Latin adumbrationem (nominative adumbratio) “a sketch in shadow, sketch, outline,” noun of action from pp. stem of adumbrare ”to cast a shadow, overshadow, represent (a thing) in outline,” from ad- ”to” (see ad-) + umbrare ”to cast in shadow,” from PIE *andho-”blind, dark” (see umbrage).

We must read Jung’s seminars on Nietzsche in the light of an awareness of this death, in an attempt to integrate this looming shadow in particular. It is this same approach which I would ultimately suggest marks the difficult center of gravity in this conversation between Pete and Micah (and the others). The difficult part, from here, is showing how this is done especially in terms of my use of entensionality.

To begin, I believe we must recognize the “problem” of Dionysus and take it as our starting point. From Paul Bishop’s The Dionysian Self, we find the following on page 17:

Or, for a greater re-articulation of this problem, consider Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche: A Roadmap for the Uninitiated by Dr. Ritske Rensma (see here):

A topic which still remains to be discussed, however, is in which way Nietzsche, and the concept of the Dionysian in particular, influenced Jung’s own conceptual framework. This is a topic all its own, and one which I do not have enough room for here to fully do justice. It is also a topic about which the scholars who have written about Jung’s reception of Nietzsche disagree somewhat. For myself, I have come to the conclusion that the concept from Jung’s own theoretical framework which was most explicitly influenced by Nietzsche is his concept of the shadow. Jung hypothesized that all the inferior (Jung’s term) parts of ourselves which we refuse presence in our lives — our wild and untamed instincts, as well as our unethical character traits and ideas — take on a subconscious life of their own, occasionally overtaking us when we least suspect it. According to Jung, the best way to deal with this shadow side of our personality is not to deny it, but to become conscious of it and work with it. The shadow, in other words, is not to be neglected — it is to be confronted. When this task is accomplished, the shadow stops being antagonistic, and can even become a source of great strength and creativity. The shadow, in other words, must be integrated into the conscious personality.

Though, the “answer” gets really thick, and I mean really quickly. I’m drawn to consider the final few chapters of Nietzsche and Jung: The Whole Self in the Union of Opposites by Lucy Huskinson as key stimuli for thought.

The layout of this book is quite extraordinary, and the back-and-forth chapters entitled “Nietzsche’s madness: A Jungian critique of Nietzsche’s model”, “Nietzsche’s absolution: a metacritique of Jung’s critique of Nietzsche’s model”, “Jung’s shadow: the ambiguities of Jung’s reception of Nietzsche resolved” and lastly ”Jung’s madness: a Nietzschean critique of Jung’s model” give us an immediate sense of the rhythm such an encounter should take, playing out like a kind of dance. It reads like a championship boxing match, where the two thinkers knock each other up until madness ensues in both.

All without knowing who will be standing in the last instance.

Do not be mistaken: Dead or alive, God’s blood is everywhere, splattered all over the arena in the midst of all of this violence. When immersed in the dark night of the soul, in its very monstrous immediacy whose sublimity rises well above your head, it overwhelms you that God is actually dying right before your eyes. There’s simply no disputing this visible spectacle, just no two ways about it. He’s attended to by a squadron of angels, wrapped in swaddling bandages, shivering and shaking along the way, placed in a stretcher with the whole world watching on national TV.

Then, he is still. His heart stops beating, there is no further movement. From one manger to another, from the middle of the ring to the ambulance, experiencing unhealthy blood loss and disfigurement, not even a twitch of “His mighty right hand” or a thumbs up from the Buddy Christ appears to show us he’s OK as he’s taken from the scene. “Multi-system injuries” reported. Sirens roar and trumpets sound as God Almighty is sped straight to the hospital bed. It is this sound which is key for the dark night.

The sound of the Crisis itself, the sound of Christ himself, these cries in the Wilderness, all full of sound and fury signifying nothing. The signified “nothing” that is the piercing sound of death itself. I know I must learn to hear this sound from a distance.

Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead:

This past week my mom (an ordained chaplain) met a young couple.

The man was diagnosed with liver cancer in mid-February, and was growing worse. His condition was deteriorating rapidly. From what I understand, it was as though he could see his death coming, and was holding-on-for-dear-life just to ask my mom to marry him with his girlfriend. This past weekend, on Friday, they swore their final vows. He couldn’t even leave his bed to go to the chapel. He died Sunday morning, two days after the event. Had my mom asked to wait for a week, the man would have been dead.

I am ever more convinced that the finality of death, of even the death of God, is central to the experience of the dark night. I do not think this can be understated, or brushed aside so easily. Put otherwise, I do not believe that there can be a dark night without a dead God, without a body cold as ice, without a burial or the spreading of ashes. It is finished, really. At its darkest, the humble nurse approaches you, personally, and says (perhaps in tears herself) that God is dead. Dead as a door-nail. Cause of death? Severe trauma to the God-head. Like the trauma triad of death, we hit ‘em right in the Trinity!

Thomas Altizer, in his recent piece called The Self-Saving of God, writes:

Let us first note that the symbol of the self-saving of God or Being is extraordinarily rare until the full advent of the modern world, perhaps it can be fully found in the ancient world only in Gnosticism, and Hans Jonas, a former student of Heidegger’s, and surely our greatest Gnostic scholar, could identify a uniquely Gnostic redemption as the “self-saving” of God.  This self-saving is necessitated by the fall of Godhead itself, wherein a “devolution” of deity occurs, and a devolution reversed by a redemption effecting the reintegration of the impaired Godhead.  Gnosticism, for Jonas, is the most radical movement in the ancient world, one that not only reversed classical culture, but shattered the pantheistic illusion of the ancient world. [...]

Today we can understand Gnosticism as being born in the very advent of Christianity,  and Gnosticism has ever accompanied the deeper expressions of Christianity, for even when these truly transcend Gnosticism, as occurred in both Augustine and Aquinas, it is Gnosticism which impels or makes possible such a transcendence, a Gnosticism which thereby can be understood to be essential to a uniquely Christian transcendence, and above all so if a uniquely Christian transcendence can be understood as a reflection or embodiment of the self-saving of God.  Gnosticism gives us the deepest and purest image of such self-saving in the ancient world, just as Gnosticism gives us the deepest and purest image of the darkness of God in that world, and if the darkness of God is inseparable from the self-saving of God, then the advent of the deepest darkness of God may well be the advent of a truly new self-saving of God, and one certainly known not only by Hegel and Heidegger, but by virtually all of our deepest modern visionaries.  Has the time now come for theology itself to incorporate such understanding?  Or is ours the time for a new silence of theology, one which virtually all of our contemporary theologians have seemingly chosen, and chosen perhaps because only thereby can theology now be preserved?

The phrase I wish to hone in on here is the “reintegration of the impaired Godhead”. If it is a matter of impairment, it is a matter of coping or otherwise dealing with the ultimate Impairment, i.e. of the Death of God.

“God is dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead” — dead as a door nail, my friends Brad and Jeremy (who speaks of the shadow) are correct here. They nailed it on the spot by asking: Which corpse(s) are we carrying with us in our atheism(s)? I wish to ask a few of my own, perhaps provocatively. Can we speak of “self-saving God” before an “other-saving God”? What is God trying to save, when he saves himself? Should we perhaps stop him? Should we help him? etc.

The problem of the “Dionysian shadow”, we shall see, is no different from the problem of learning to live finally in the wake of the death of God, all corpses included. It is a problem of corpses, both living and dead. Even if a corpse is still with us, despite that a corpse is still with us, because a corpse is still with us nonetheless. Emmanuel means “God with us”. Yes, of course dead, of course still with us, what does this even mean in our lives? After our mourning, how are we to live? How do we think? How do we speak? How do we act? How has the Death of God affected us? Do we sometimes carry the Dead-God around too much on our backs? Does it perhaps weigh us down? Does it help?

Can we leave it in the ground, and sometimes visit it in the cemetery with some flowers? Remember: There is no “shadow” underground, if God like anything else is interned as such. If God’s ashes are scattered, there is no shadow. Can we put down our Cross, stand out from beneath its Golgothaian-sized shadow, and leave behind the desire to crucify ourselves and others? Do we still perhaps mourn too much? Too little? Can we move on, finally? Should we? Do we really need God? Do we need the concept of “God”? Can we ever stop our crying so as to begin to help others? Does the God-concept get in the way? Does it liberate?

To ameliorate… I am in a position, as is anybody reading this blog, to ameliorate.

Let us begin to think of amelioration. When dealing with individuation, amelioration pertains to this “union of opposites”, a union which may or may not bury God in the end. To approach this question of “order” and “form”, we open chapter called Jung’s madness to page 153:

The union of opposites is not an a priori starting point, it is rather an (a posteriori) end-product of the opposites acting alone. The union of opposites is not prior to experience, because it is the opposites themselves that create the relevant experience. For Nietzsche, there can be no pre-designated teleological path of experience (WP, 1062, 1064, 1066; BGE, 13), only the ceaseless and random flux of becoming. While the Self is an inevitable goal of the healthy psyche, an intrapsychic pre-designated plan, the Übermensch is defined by the strength to endure the immediate chaos of existence. It is to create order and form, but in such a way that no shape can be recognized or fully established. As Nietzsche says, simply to ‘impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to power’ (WP, 617, italics mine; cf. GS, 109). To assemble a definite structure out of the chaos of opposites, as Jung has done, is to impose limitations on individual creativity. [...]

In his preoccupation with form, Jung cannot accommodate the freedom and creativity that chaos initiates and the Übermensch demands. Zarathustra teaches that ‘one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’ (TSZ, prologue, 5), but this is just what the Jungian model lacks. Certainly the Jungian model shares similarities with that of Nietzsche but, from a Nietzschean perspective, Jung’s model is concerned with Being over Becoming

So, which is it? The author concludes (quite convincingly) that Jung has misread Nietzsche in his seminars, and that this misreading of Nietzsche was also a self-diagnosis.

Though I haven’t gone back to the seminars myself to see if this is the case throughout the 1500 pages, I am not at all opposed to this reading given my own discernment. If it holds, we find ourselves at the threshold of a door which reads “NIETZSCHEAN/POST-JUNGIAN” thought (see here, then mix to an even blend with Zarathustra’s warnings). It is a door which lies at the very edge of my knowledge, a door which we have reached well before many others have in our Wandering. Do we choose to enter it? Do I?

Like any unknown, the possibility of danger seeps from beneath the cracks. The purple mist shrouds around my feet. Perhaps some may have entered before me, but what of their fate?

Admittedly, there is something really fishy about them, about Jung’s seminars, about own behavior and teaching, about the setting of the seminars, about who was selected to be present, about those elements of control, and so forth. I am given pause by the conditions of this seminar, of the very construct of this seminar. This is not too much unlike the point Lacan tried to make in his later seminars, speaking of his own performance in front of his audience. How well-received was this point, made by the “character of Lacan”? Do I listen to Jung, even if it turns out that I am completely making up this conveyed warning to us?

Jung suggests: Do not enter, at least not just yet, make sure you are prepared first, I myself was not prepared. Whereas Zarathustra provokes: Live more dangerously! You are ready, and if you are not, you will soon become ready! Am I prepared? Here, Jung is my Angel, Zarathustra my Devil. But what if the Angel is at once devilish, and if the Devil is a fallen angel? If Heaven and Hell are indiscernable, if they spin around each other, pulling each other close with their gravity, from their projected celestial or archetypal realms into the World, into my Self in the world?

Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped.

I cannot help but feel there is something slightly deceitful at work, but that this deceit has its properly cathartic purposes. If not deceitful, then at least dizzying.

I confess here and now in this place that I am having a hard time imagining that Jung of all people would misread Nietzsche in that way — unless it were deliberate, in order to convey something to us. Yet, perhaps this too is a self-diagnosis of “me”, when dealing with the abstract ideas of others, can “I” avoid becoming a character “myself”? The late Nietzsche here comes across as more genuine to me, but do I think that only because he was “mad”? How do we compare them historically, the collective unconscious of their respective eras? Does Jung see something Nietzsche could not? Can he say what it is?

This is of course the question of Sartrean authenticity, perhaps put a little otherwise. Can we ever be fully individuated? If I recall properly, Jung ultimately believed he was, as of course did Nietzsche. But me, myself? I am young, the temptation is great, I have little choice but to enter the door. To put to rest, or rather, to heal, the unsettling thoughts of both my sick Fathers Jung and Nietzsche is surely the grand life-time task ahead of me. Where do I find my inspiration to break the chain of inheritance?

I lift my eyes up to the hills… (Psalm 121:1)…

It is not unlike that famous line from the 1921 Swedish silent film The Phantom Carriage (see here), the only prayer I can say here is: “Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped.”

We may agree, of course, that the Will to Power is not a metaphysical doctrine. There is no “metaphysical miracle” of synthesis of opposites present, and it is instead a matter of experience.

I am certainly lacking in this field compared to some of my friends. I have not had any extremely serious tragedies befall me so far, and for this I remain forever grateful. The question, then, seems to be one of what we mean by “chaos” particularly as it concerns our experience. To an extent, yes, it is about stochastic processes, of entropy theory, of probability, etc. It is, on a pragmatic level, about gambling, about wagering (I hear you well, Pascal), about experimenting, about bricolage (see here). It seems it must be done in a certain way, or in many certain ways. I still have much to learn in this art, but he next round is just about to begin, so be sure to place your bets!

In continental thought today, surely, there is a privileging of Becoming with the likes of Deleuze. We speak of dynamics, but how dynamic are things really? Do we balance this with the static? What, ultimately, do we make of the “metaphysics of presence”? What happens with the “synthesis of opposites” in our own lives? Here, the discussion gets very personal, very co-personal, very trans-personal — very mutual and intimate in any case. Each of these questions have been answered, in terms of my limited experience alone, in some form or another through my previous posts on continuous integration (see here).

If we are to be concerned with “radical immanence”, then it is certain that the synthesis of opposites, the integration of fragments, is never complete as we never have a “full transfer principle” — I don’t know if that means anything to you, but I’ve used the concept before and it helps me. There are, as it were, only approximations of the vision-in-One. We may see only from the plurality of positions available to us from around the ring of the O, but never from its interior.

And yet, all of this assumes certain categories. This assumes we draw the circle, that we make lines and quadrants and boundaries even as we avoid them. It assumes we carve out a conceptual space and give it a name. It assumes fragmentary pieces that can be transferred between individuals and integrated as such, brought together as a make-shift Whole. It assumes some minimal form of communicability, of intelligibility, of comprehensibility. And if there is none? Beyond Badiou’s set theory, beyond Deleuze’s differential geometry, beyond Laruelle’s topos theory, beyond even our quantum set theory (see here …is it too soon to speak of a Beyond?), it seems to be category theory which is the place of the final showdown, of dealing with finality of the Death of God.

Proposition: The categories we use remind us of the corpses we carry.

These categories cast a shadow, whether positive or negative or a mix thereof. It is not enough to speak of the “creation of concepts”, we must strive to speak of ameliorative ones. I give the name PRE-ADUMBRATION to the act of thinking in advance the shadow that will be cast by a category. Will the category of “Self-Saving God” better anything in the world? Will “death of God”? Will “Atheism for Lent”? Will “Gnosticism”? Some concepts we must bury, others we must carry.

At varying stages of my individuation, I could say yes to any of these. I could also ask: At which stage are certain concepts needed most? Instead, moving with-and-beyond from one stage to the next, I have been asking in each of my posts: On this stage, which concepts do I need to conjure? I have not much else I can say further on this subject right now, except to give my best wishes to all the other Wanderers I have encountered to date. Where ever they may be, I wish to reassure them all that the concepts they are dealing with have been ameliorative to me at some level or another. I wish to challenge each of them to move to the beyond of their concepts with pre-adumbration in mind.

As for myself, I turn the knob and open the door. Like any door, on the other side there lies a tightrope spanning the abyss. I do not have to enter. I could stay out of it if I wish to do so until Crisis comes again, until Christ comes again. To emerge from the dark night of the soul is to be forever vigilant of falling back into it. To rise out of the dark night of the soul is to aid others who are in it presently, yes, of course, but it is also to try to rise out of it for good, to overcome the darkness. To be a Lover of the Light, I must step on the thin line over its abyss.

I put one foot in front of the other…

Works Cited:

Altizer, Thomas J. J., and William Hamilton.Radical theology and the death of God. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Print.

Bishop, Paul. The Dionysian self: C.G. Jung’s reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1995. Print.

Huskinson, Lucy. Nietzsche and Jung the whole self in the union of opposites. New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. Print.

Jung, C. G., and James L. Jarrett. Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Abridged ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The will to power. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Print.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Thus spoke Zarathustra: a book for all and none. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Print.

The post Nietzsche, Jung, Sartre: Pre-adumbration (Part I) appeared first on inthesaltmine.

This post begins slow, but it will quickly become de-organized and possibly out-of-control. In my previous post (see here), I made the remark that perhaps Spinoza wasn’t so anti-teleology as many would like to think, after all.

My justification was that, in a way not too unlike Aquinas, he immanently smuggles in a “teleological” concern for Life through his concept of conatus. I should like to clarify this because I realized I was possibly (mis-)using the term “teleology” in a very peculiar way. A telos is of course a purpose, or an intentional end. Therefore, there is of course a sense in which Spinoza was indeed anti-teleology (i.e. when it is generated by, rather than generates, human beings), but if it is so it is only because he takes from the start the individual as a free absolute, a free radical, free to define his or her own intentional ends.

For Spinoza, the conatus or essence of being “is opposed to everything which can take its existence away” (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6, dem.). This is a more a “physical intentionality” of Nature, and not one of Man. The term “dispositions” may be better used here.

So, while he is (I think) right to oppose the life-denying aspects of human or divine teleology in Aquinas, to read Spinoza as providing a dismissal tout court of any use of what may fall under the term “teleology” in this general sense is misguided. The incoming critique (from the likes of Aquinas, let us suggest) would be simply that Spinoza’s Ethics doesn’t really do anything; it doesn’t really tell us anything about human teleology or “morality”. Indeed, for Spinoza, moral concepts are just like any other concepts, and have a basis only in human psychology.

Though this leveling may of course be a good thing in a world where people act too often on impulse, one is nonetheless left with a lingering quietism/nihilism which as of yet needs to be an-nihilated, or better yet, en-nihilated. This would amount to an an-nihilation by going deep into the brutal core of nihilism and emerging at least from the other side. By not intending to do anything, however, one still does (oftentimes oppressive) things nevertheless. This is the un-intentional doing of Spinoza (and to an extent Wittgenstein) that may prove to be vertically stunting.

I believe it flows more or less naturally from our Baroque Spinoza that some use of “teleology” is still salvageable; we must first simply learn to think it otherwise, and then balance ourselves accordingly. That is, instead of or in addition to an intentional end, can we think of extensional ones? This is not so much its opposite, but its turning inside-out (“-in” to “-ex”) and upside-down (“-tention” to “-tension”). Or, it marks a shift from “primitive” or “pre-” vertical (1. Aquinas marks its end: Anima mea non est ego) to the horizontal (2. Spinoza), and through the help of our “Baroque Spinoza” (let us indicate this at 2.5), back to consider “post-” or otherwise “trans-” vertical (3. starting with the Nietzschean overcoming/Jungian anima).

We should expect a striking similarity in the positions of Aquinas and Jung, avoiding the pre/trans fallacy (see here). Indeed we do, for it is most overtly a “Catholic” similarity given Jung’s idea of Quaternity. They are, however, false friends in the end as Jung is perhaps far more Gnostic. In any event, I think this is the fundamental move of Nietzsche’s physiological bend for self-overcoming (see here and here). It is he who ultimately sets us more or less upright again with a new kind of “inverted teleology”. Now, with Nietzsche, we are left with the “picking and choosing” (i.e. “trans-valuation”) of values from both the master and slave moralities which are “Life-affirming”.

It is always a bit unclear how exactly we are to begin doing this — especially with God “being dead” without any standard teleology. And it is precisely here where we begin to lose our bearings…

As such, I’d like to look into the concept of “inverted teleology” to try to get a better visualization of what in the world is going on. With our standard conception of teleology, the individual is situated in the present, she projects her will into the future, and strives to act in order to meet that pre-defined end. If Schopenhauer is on to something when he suggests the violence of the will, it is given this image in mind, whereby one seizes the world by force in order to achieve an end which proves no doubt to be some kind of “arbitrary”. Yet, it is only by way of this inverted teleology that Nietzsche recognizes not all will is essentially violent, or that not-all will has violence as its center (though it may lurk on the periphery).

With a picture of inverted teleology, by contrast, we find the being is situated in the present as an end, and she projects her entire self into the future in this extended way. This allows her present will become more fluid, molded easily in a way which diminishes this violence significantly. Or, according to Carl Jung, “Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open to those without intentions? [...] One must be able to psychically let things happen.”

The difference between teleology and its inverse is the difference between treating an individual as a means to an (often higher) end and an end-in-themselves, respectively. It is sometimes played out as the difference between the desire of “absolute freedom” and the desire to consider the individual as a “free absolute” or “free radical” (as in Proudhon).

The encounter between Jung and Nietzsche in his seminars, most assuredly, will become significant for us in the future.

Entensionality

In the first case, a mostly self-similar self returns, albeit with the possible achievement of the pre-defined end often at the expense of others. In the second, a future self returns, with a different will.

If there is still a “latent” self-harm in Nietzsche’s approach (as perhaps Jung suspects), it is because we have not as of yet properly learned how to account for the act of projection itself. In both instances there is a certain projection by the self at work, no doubt, due to our operational conception of linear temporality as ranging from present to future. Yet, if we can somehow incorporate the past and future “under-tow” into our thought, we can learn to project in just the right way so as to avoid this mistake.

This blend of action (from intentionality) and thought (from extensionality) merges together in the idea of entensionality, which is a fancy name for “How it could happen that an object is wholly located in each of many places.”. To be in many places at once at first seems to be the problem, but perhaps like all “problems” of this kind at second glance the question is itself the solution. Here, we take our object to be at once a subject: so we have a suobject, or sobject, or swboject, or nobject, or take your pick.

In a paper of the same name (see .pdf here), which bears an uncanny for-and-against “Spinozist” aesthetic closely resembling my own, Josh Parsons explains in plain English:

“Entension” is my name for the phenomenon of a material object being wholly located in multiple places. Normally this is not how we think material objects work. I, for example, am a material object that is located in multiple places: this place to my left where my left arm is, and this, distinct, place to my right, where my right arm is. But I am only partially located in each place. My left arm is a part of me that fills exactly the place to my left, and my right arm is a distinct part of me that fills exactly the place to my right. I am located in multiple places by virtue of having distinct parts in those places. So entension is not happening to me — I do not entend. When an object fills up space the way I do, by being partly located in multiple places, I say that it pertends. When an object is located in multiple places, whether wholly or partially, it extends.

He continues by looking through the finely-polished lens of Spinoza’s monism (as opposed to pluralism, rather than dualism) at physical phenomena, in what is a pretty tentative paper when taken as a whole. Though Josh here is speaking in the register of objects of quantum mechanical study, so too we may suggest it holds for our mind-body, our anima, our consciousness, or our Geist if you will. In this way, it is possible for the transcendental ego of Fichte to entend.

Note the functional similarity to the French verb entendre, i.e. to hear/to listen. This is the same psychoacoustics at work that I call for in terms of construct awareness when I say “seeing with our ears” (see here). And, what’s more, our multiplication of these Fichtean movements (see here) into the infinite allows for this de-centering so as to “be” in many places at once.  Another name we have for “being in many places at once” is ANTICIPATION.

Entensionality is thus intimately connected to the word-family containing concepts such as “anticipation”, “envision” “foresight”, “prognosis” (or: pro-”gnosis”), “preparedness”, “forecasting”, “precognition”, “care”, “amelioration”, “healing”, “discernment”, “resilience”, and we may possibly even say the word “HOPE”. Our task now is to explore these concepts both philosophically and non-philosophically: to think and act, to enact, an anticipatory philosophy. In this way, we must be forward-looking, though informed by the static results and sum-over-histories of our past and our careful calculations of the dynamic future space of possibilities.

Trialectics

It is a projection, yes, but it is revealed as a certain kind of projection, perhaps not too unlike the late Sartre’s progressive-regressive mechanism (see here) proposed at the end of Critique of Dialectical Reason, which does begin to account for this “under-tow”. This is shown in the diagram below, from Sartrean Dialectics by Roxanne Farrar, on page 28:

Following the method sometimes called “trialectical” (see here) of the Marxist anthropologist and renowned thinker of spatiality, Henri Lefebvre, the late J.P. Sartre’s model includes the following stages:

1. Phenomenological description
2. Analytic-regressive (analytico-regressive)
3. Progressive-synthesis

For reference, Lefebvre distinguished the three types of spaces within the trialectics of spatiality as follows:

1. Espace percu: objective space (spatial practices). This is the space that is taken for granted as it is given and it is neutral. This is the space where architects and spatial planners work in. Think of blueprints, plans, etc.
2. Espace concu: conceived space (representations of space). This is the space which is completely formed in the mind. It is an entirely mental space. This space is closely related to the utopian thinking and idealism is important. Think of artists who are totally free in ideas and not bounded by the physical/objective space. But also think of politicians and their ideology.
3. Espace vecu: lived space (space of representations). This is the space that is the result of the espace percu and the espace concu. The lived space takes place as a result of the objective and conceived space. Politics, for instance, happen in the gap between the spatial practices and the representations of space: this is how the world is (objective) and this is how we imagine how it should be (conceived). The espace vecu is thus the working out of the other two spaces.

I reference these two related thoughts not because they are “correct” or “right” or “true” or “good”, but because they are “useful” to begin introducing us to ways of addressing and correcting for the unexpected under-tow of our thought and action. In some ways, these models remain faithful to the French philosophical and Marxist traditions of critical theory, but in other respects they challenge these traditions by engaging with questions of gnosis and “spirituality” in general. At any rate, I think it to be highly important for those coming from the “radical” Left — Marxists and anarchists alike — to simultaneously maintain a refined notion of (esp. Eastern or Buddhist) “trans-” or “post-” religious spirituality.

Anticipating the accusations of “being liberal” incoming, one may respond in tune by suggesting it is rather a certain liberalization of liberalism; a pluralization of pluralism; a spiritualization of spiritualism; a radicalization of radicalism; a naturalization of naturalism; a realization of realism; a materialization of materialism; an idealization of idealism; a romanticization of romanticism; a democratization of democracy, and so on. Its fundamental gesture is to enliven, to enconstruct, to entertain, to enframe, to enfold, to enact.

Entensionality, then, gives way to a concern for self-reflexivity and meditation, a way to act while “watching over our movements of thought” as it were.

While evident to some degree in Leninism and especially Maoism by way of the stance of “self-criticism” and “critique of others”, this new and more positive anticipatory stance comes both before and after the likes of “criticism” and “creative destruction”. A certain onto-logical spinning is beginning to take shape (i.e. here we have trialectics spinning Hegelian dialectics) and “formalism” increasingly falls out of focus. Rather, the formal frame expands as more creative and complex structures take hold.

Despite the fact that on one level “there is no meta-language” (cf. Wittgenstein, Lacan) we have begun to imagine or create another level where what may be considered as meta-language (it seems the prefix “-en” helps) nonetheless informs our practice. We have begun to consider such meta-paradigmatic action, recognizing that we are acting insofar as we are thinking. That the language-games that we play do indeed differ in terms of their rules, complexity, co-evolution, variety, connectivity, entropy, iterability, affect, emergent outcomes, and so forth though once neglected may now be factored in accordingly.

The critical project slowly gives way to a creative one. And what better critique is there than creativity? To play this new game, like any game, one must entend to the rules. But what rules does it have? How do you play the game without knowing the rules? Have we now become against playing such games? Let us make them up as we go along, like a make-shift pastiche or rough-and-dirty collage of all that we have encountered thus far.

At the frontier of possibilities, when following Feyerabend we are against method, where a measured democratic pluralism much unlike the “liberal” pluralism arrives in our time, we have only to take to Wandering once more. In this endeavor, I am as lost and as found as anyone else, but I have recently discovered conversation with some Integral thinkers to also be very productive (see here, here, here, etc.) if for no other reason than the quantity of information being handled and processed. I would recommend likewise taking a look at the Magellan Courses tutorial videos (see here).

For somebody such as myself coming out of the “radical” tradition under the aegis of Deleuze, I’ll admit to some discomfort in these parts which may not come to pass. For someone used to such critical negativity, this seemingly broaden-and-build (see here) approach has a strange smell to it. I admit to holding my nose. Though I, blazing truth as I go for better or worse, proceed now with Novalis’ central concern for Bildung (see here) in mind. For Novalis, after all, means “clearer of new land”. He is also the one who enters into the darkness of the salt mine…and he beckons me to come…

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite. [...] We dream of a journey through the universe. But is the universe then not in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. Inward goes the secret path. Eternity with its worlds, the past and the future, is in us or nowhere.

Metaplasticity

A final word. Following Malabou, I am proposing in particular that we consider metaplasticity both philosophically and non-philosophically:

Metaplasticity is a term originally coined by W.C. Abraham and M.F. Bear to refer to the plasticity of synaptic plasticity. Until that time synaptic plasticity had referred to the plastic nature of individual synapses. However this new form referred to the plasticity of the plasticity itself, thus the term meta-plasticity. The idea is that the synapse’s previous history of activity determines its current plasticity. This may play a role in some of the underlying mechanisms thought to be important in memory and learning such as Long-term potentiation (LTP), Long-term Depression (LTD) and so forth. (Wikipedia, 2013)

Note immediately the concern for long-term, ameliorative practice informed by much reflexive thought. It is on these luminous grounds that one can enact non-violent resistance and non-harm in a Gandhian fashion. It has been there all along, a truth as old as the hills. We have done enough damage, we are all assassins; now is the time for collateral healing.

Here, myself curiously Wandering at last out of the SR/OOO crowd, I find few more relevant than Alexander Galloway. As such, I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude for his life and work. Today, you must keep your eyes open for many up-and-rising digital media and communication artists, as well as the loosely-connected “New Realists” (including Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle) in French thought.

Or, at least this is what I have come to anticipate. I’d like to conclude by offering a list of a few recent posts in this direction:

• “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism” by Alexander R. Galloway (see here)
• ABUNDANCE IS DIACHRONIC, “WITHDRAWAL” IS ITS SYNCHRONIC SHADOW by Terence Blake (March 2, 2013) (see here)
• “The New Realists by Alexander Galloway” at After Nature (March 2, 2013) (see here)
• Note on French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures by Sarah Resnick (see .pdf here)

One must also not forget to thank Badiou for being the perfect target, for being the “positive influence” or maybe even “role model” we have long needed so as to be able to escape this (often linguistic) negativity.

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