Open Texture

Year That Was, 2008

2009-01-01T22:45:00.003-05:00

My year end list is somewhat hampered; my old laptop was stolen back in June, and so half a year's worth of new music and movies disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind.

As usual, this is a list of things I encountered for the first time in 2008, not necessarily material produced in 2008.

Movies

The Dark Knight - A completely obvious choice for best movie of the year. I know there was something of a backlash, and it has always had its haterz, but these people are wrong. This movie showcased Oscar worthy performances and the final action scene with the Joker is the most perfectly crafted superhero action scene ever. Perhaps not as spectacular as X-Men 2's opening White House scene, but far more intelligent.

There Will Be Blood - A 2007 movie that I saw perhaps a week after writing my 2007 best-of list. This movie is an absolute tour-de-force. Every last second was engaging; I was either staring in awe or laughing and clapping, overcome by movie's sheer power. Good stuff.

That's all for movies, I guess. I just can't think of any others I really liked. Death Race?

TV Series

The Wire - If I had to find a comparison for this series, it would be The Lord of the Rings. Vast, epic, sprawling. This is the finest series ever to appear on television, and I have a difficult time believing it will be topped anytime soon - at least, in terms of the series as a whole. The finest single episode ever is from...

The Shield - Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare have been compared to one another by saying that if Shakespeare is the high-minded, carefully crafted Beatles, then Marlowe is the gritty, working class rock of The Rolling Stones. This works for the Wire and the Shield - the Wire might have Shakespearan perfection, but the Shield brings the badass ownage at every turn. The final three hours of the series are the best 3 hours of television ever, topping any single episodes of the Wire. It is absolutely necessary to protect yourself from spoilers.

30 Rock - Tina Fey stars as a non-threatening nerdy sex symbol. All sorts of liberal anxiety surrounding race. My praise for this show: at least once an episode, every episode, I laugh out loud, while alone, while sober.

Mad Men - The early 60's period piece about ad execs. Part of the appeal is certainly the feeling of cultural superiority we get from watching clips like the ones I linked to, but these screwy moments are surrounding by fantastic acting, writing and visuals. Highly enjoyable.

Books

Non-Fiction

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux. Deleuze claims that real thought only takes place in response to a shock; this book delievers a few hundred volts. Usually when I come across something I disagree with, I have one of two responses: I can dismiss it as stupid and wrong, or I can search for a way to make peace with the idea. Incorporate it into my standing opinions, re-interpretting the idea. It is very rare that I come across something that resists both of those options; Meillassoux is telling me that I am wrong, completely wrong (and on fundamental issues to boot) and I suspect he might be right. I still don't know what to do with this book.

Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. I'm starting to think of this book as a guide to intellectual anarchy. His smackdown of common sense is refreshing. Good fun.

Fiction

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I'll simply link to my review of the book.

I'm going to take more time and do more reading this year. This past year was a clusterfuck for me, in a lot of ways.

Music

Half a year's worth of new music disappeared back in June, so this is a truncated list.

Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal. The over-the-top-band that has replaced The Flaming Lips in my crazy catagory. I liked their previous album more, but this one has plenty of fun to be had.

Gogol Bordello. No particular album. Just watch this, and imagine them on a stage twice the size, singing and dancing insanely like that for two hours. Best concert I've ever seen. I can only imagine the horrible damage the lead singing is wreaking on this vocal cords, but you know what? Good on 'em (and admit it, those two girls are hot).

Podcasts

New category. Find all of these on Itunes.

The History of Rome - A witty, charming recap of Roman history from the beginning to the end. On-going. This is my favorite podcast.

BBC's Ideas - Informative discussions on everything ranging from Spinoza to the Romantic Poets to the Great London Fire to late 19th century British/German relations.

CBC Radio 3 - An hour of fantastic Canadian music. Now is a good time to jump in, given that their best-of-the-year stuff is now out.

Comics

Another new category.

Guardians of the Galaxy by Dan Abnett. High flying cosmic adventures starring characters rehabilitated in the amazing Annihilation and Annihilation: Conquest. Funny dialogue and great art.

Homunculus by Hideo Yamamoto. The follow-up manga from the creator of my favorite comic, Ichi the Killer. A man gains the supernatural ability to see the physical manifestations of people's personalities. Insanity ensues.

There you have it.

2005
2006
2007

The Ultimates, Vol. 1 & 2

2008-12-07T15:52:00.000-05:00

Top Ten Comic Series.

Playing with alternate versions of established characters is a common past time for comic writers. Marvel has What If?, DC has Elseworlds and various other ways for a particular writer to put his own stamp on a character.

Marvel's Ultimate line is probably the most successful re-imagining of an entire world I've ever come across (The MAX line might be better, but it does not re-create the whole Marvel world). The Ultimate line has done its best to place Marvel's primary characters into a realistic world. I think they've largely succeeded in this, with a list of caveats I won't bother to discuss.

Among the Ultimate line, the best was (emphasis past tense) The Ultimates, the new version of the Avengers. I think the redesign here is a brilliant triumph, and while the plotting and art in general are great, I`m going to focus here on the redesign itself.

The Ultimates are a military unit, the member's own claims occasionally to the contrary. They were developed by the U.S. government, for the sake of the U.S. government. And really, who else would have the funds or the ability to put together a real-life superhero group?

It is this intimate connection to the powers that be that provides a great foil for the re-creation of Thor. I've never really enjoyed the character of Thor; his speech has always annoyed me. Ultimate Thor is an entirely new beast - probably the character with the most radical changes. No longer does he speak in ye olde english; it's contemporary English for him now. No longer is he high and mighty; he's leftist activist, and for this reason, has no interest in joining a group of U.S. military lackeys.

Thor has a great story line early on in the series concerning his godhood. The Ultimate world, being a place that is only just now being introduced to superheroes and mutants, has no more experience with genuine magic than our world does. So, Thor's allies are rightfully skeptical about his claims to godhood.

This really highlights a difference between the Ultimate and the old school Marvel worlds. If a character shows up in the old school marvel world and claims to be a god, well, maybe he is; there are certainly enough of them around. In the Ultimate world, however, the government agency SHIELD has a file on Thor. It appears his real name is Thorlief Golmen, and that he was a nurse who suffered a complete mental breakdown and finally managed to steal super-soldier equipment. Liar, lunatic or lord?

Another character to recieve a great revamp was the Hulk. He's a one-note character in any universe, the the Ultimate line finally took what is in my opinion the obvious route and made him all about sexual frustration. Bruce Banner is a nice guy, in the worst possible way. He elicits the worst kind of hateful pity from both characters and readers. He knows this, too, but he's too pathetic to actually express any anger about it. And so the Hulk comes out, and suddenly Hulk goes from a one-note character (smashing) to a two-note character (raping and eating). Some great humour is pulled out of the Hulk's preference for cannibalism.

Captain America, another character I've always had a distaste for, receives only a minimal revamp. He's the same old highly competent, patrotic military officer. His highlights in this series are all the times he is obviously willing to fight dirty; if kicking a guy in the balls is the way to bring him down, then Cap will do it. His hard, violent pragmatism is a nice outgrowth of his nationalism. I think the main change with Cap is character design. Gone is that ridiculous chain mail and those retarded Robin Hood boots.

Iron Man's redesign is particularly fantastic. Even as a kid, I hated designs of Iron Man that actually displayed muscles like his abs and biceps. The guy wears a suit of armor, not tights. Ultimate Tony Stark himself is still identical to the core of the pre-fascist Marvel Tony Stark (Orson Scott Card`s prattling aside), but the armor is very, very different. Now he looks like a robot, or a jet that requires a great deal of time for pre-flight preparation. The armor isn`t quite as invincible as the classic armor, either. Visually, this is certainly my favorite character. Alas, in volume three, the armor is much closer in appearance to the classic armor.

Finally, we have a pair of characters that are, classically, a complete waste of panel space. Quicksilver has always been a transparent Flash rip-off, and the Scarlett Witch`s powers are nothing other than deus ex machina waiting to happen. The Ultimates, though, pull these characters off wonderfully. How? With strong suggestions of old-blood, Imperial Family Style incest. A pair of useless characters has been transformed into a creepy, hilariously obnoxious favorite duo.

As I`ve suggested, Volume Three of the Ultimates is excreble. A shame.

How long will it be before I get to number eight on the list...

Lest We Forget

2008-11-11T08:37:00.001-05:00

Congratulations, Americans

2008-11-05T07:03:00.003-05:00

In which I hope that every last shred of right-wing mudslinging at Obama turns out to be true.

Let's hope he is just as buddy buddy with Weathermen, fierce critics of Israel and outright big-C Communists as the popular right insists he is.

To the extent that the wingnuts were right, is the extent to which Obama might actually live up to the hype.

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

2008-10-22T10:42:00.002-05:00

Or, An Introduction

Back when I was first beginning to read Martin Heidegger, my first question was about the world before Dasein, or human existence. A badly formulated question, of course, and it was treated as such; I was simply told, and I quote, "You can't ask Heidegger that question."

At the time, it seemed like a complete cop-out of an answer to me. However, I did eventually come to see that the question was a bad one, and I dropped it. To ask on what day, in what year, did Dasein first "appear" makes no sense; it forces the ecstatic clearing into a vulgar conception of time. The "world," defined as the totality of that which appears, has no "origin" as such. If we are speaking about the date of the origin of matter, the proper answer is "The origin of matter can be placed at 14 Billion years ago, for humans."

I learned to re-forumulate or set aside other standard philosophical questions, such as causation. Hume's problem - that we cannot observe causation - is dissolved. If causation is not itself a phenomena, then it is a secondary issue for philosophy.

Now along comes Quentin Meillasoux, for whom none of this is satisfactory. His target is the old, pre-Kantian question of "things in themselves," apart from any appearance to humans. A startling project, one usually only attended to by people who are, not surprisingly, pre-Kantian dogmatists in their philosophy. Kant, of course, set up the dogmatic-skeptical-critical distinction. A dogmatist sees the world as a whole, without any antinomies or paradoxes. A skeptic simply claims that all stability and knowledge are fleeting. The critical stance, which is what all post-Kantians aspire for, is the attempt to declare which sorts of things can be properly known (the phenomena) and which can't be (the noumena).

Meillassoux is actually searching for a way to leave behind these distinctions; he wants the things-in-themselves without the dogmatic world that goes with them, and the critical stance without its kernal of skepticism. An ambitious fellow.

Meillassoux's style is very much argumentative, which means it is possible to engage with his concepts and movements in a way that it is very difficult to do with many other writers (Martin, I'm looking in your direction). So, that's what I'll do. It's a fun book, even if he calls me a creationist.

Quentin Meillassoux: After Finitude

2008-10-21T08:38:00.003-05:00

"But then it is as if the distinction between transcendental idealism - the idealism that is (so to speak) urbane, civilized, and reasonable - and speculative or even subjective idealism - the idealism that is wild, uncouth and rather extravagant - it is as if this distinction which we had been taught to draw - and which separates Kant from Berkeley - became blurred and dissolved in light of the fossil-matter. Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary - every variety of correlationism is exposed as extreme idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that what science tells us about these occurrences of matter independent of humanity effectively occurred as described by science. And our correlationist then finds himself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a `literal`reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and who, when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science, reply unperturbed that God also created at the same time as the earth 6000 years ago those radioactive compounds that seem to indicate that the earth is much older than it is - in order to test the physicist`s faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher`s faith in correlation, even when confronted with data which seem to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears?"

Well fuck you too, Quentin.

Obama, the Weathermen, and the American Left

2008-10-16T09:21:00.003-05:00

Once again, I'm out of the country during a Federal election. This is starting to become a habit.

Much more interesting is the current American campaign. It has become increasingly nasty these last few weeks; google around for some of the videos taken outside McCain campaign events. The American popular right is slipping into insanity, and it is a great deal of fun to watch.

However, that is not the most fascinating issue. One of the common McCain campaign attacks against Barack Obama is his association with William Ayers, a former member of the Weathermen Underground. The Weathermen, these days, are simply called "terrorists" and as such lumped in with al Queda and other such criminals. Barack served on a board together with Ayers, and so the attempt has been made to tarnish him as a friend of terrorists.

The response by the American left has been to downplay the association; they point out that the link is tenuous, and that Obama himself has condemned Ayers' old radicalism.

In terms of calculating and promoting Obama's electability, this is the politically "necessary" response. The actions of the Weathermen are simply too far outside the realm of public acceptability for any association with them to be politically viable.

Even more than this, it shows just how far behind we have left the glory days of the left. The Weathermen were certainly extremists and radicals in their day, but they were a part of the discussion. The left's strategy of defending Obama by attempting to erase the Weathermen is an indication that any concept of radical leftism is now excluded from the discussion, by both left and right. What we are left with is the fashionable liberal humanism, whose only resource is to shriek about "choice."

So who were the Weathermen? Old school revolutionary bomb throwers. They were the extreme end of the upheavels of the 1960s; dedicated to the violent overthrow of the United States Government, they bombed banks and police stations. They organized riots (in rich neighborhoods) and even a few jailbreaks. They engaged in armed robberies. They fought for civil rights, allying themselves with the Black Panthers and worked against the war in Vietnam. In short, they represented one of the few points in American political history when a handful of people stood up and refused to play by the rules.

In the early 1960s, a grouped called the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded, based upon the non-violent model of the civil rights movement. Near the end of the '60s, internal disputes (whose dynamics very much mirred religious schisms; every community of believers faces this pitfall) tore the group apart. The Weathermen kind of staged a coup; they took over the SDS apparatus and went national. A very messy period that produced all sorts of acrimony and resentment.

From there, they took off. They attempted to form essentially military communities, disciplined and regimented. This in itself is fairly fascinating; rarely do North Americans attempt any sort of true discipline (outside the actual military, of course).

The left was always ambivilant about them. Even the Black Panthers eventually disowned them. They found themselves alone and in crisis; after several years on the run, living in ramshackle conditions, the group fell apart.

Their main insistence was that any passivity at all was itself a violence; all the failings and violence of capitalism could only exist when the people participated in it, actively or passively.

They had all sorts of failings. Their attempts at sexual liberation seemed to mostly fail in misery and tears. They considered monogamy to a primary building block of the social order. In this, they agree with current conservatives arguing against gay marriage. Whoever is correct, the Weathermen met many problems surrounding their sexual project. Another failing is the occasional element of misplaced rhetoric; at least one member publically called the U.S. the "most violence nation in history."

So I really just want to say two things in this post: first, the left needs to remember the Weathermen. Their utter willingness to sacrifice everything for an Idea is all but absent these days. Secondly, it is an utter shame that the link between Obama and Ayers isn't stronger.

Watch the Weather Underground documentary at Google Video.

The More Things Change: The New Philosophical Stylistics

2008-10-06T21:41:00.008-05:00

Once upon a time, Rene Descartes insisted that truth consisted in clear and distinct ideas. This is pretty intuitive; a true statement is a true statement. It corresponds with some state of affairs in the world.

Then the 19th century happened. Herr Hegel found isolated concepts to be useless; Herr Nietzsche began to speak of mobile armies of metaphors and a multiple subject. Ideas were no longer so clear and distinct. The critique of identity was underway; Hegel found negativity to be the engine of change, while Nietzsche insisted that only becoming had being, and being was becoming.

Ok, let's make this clear and distinct. Take your average logical syllogism:

A = B
B = C
A = C

See all those cute little signs of equality in there? Step three of a syllogism confirms the identity of all three elements. That's pretty useful in daily life. Except what does it tell you? Nothing new. A = C. Whoopy. Dialectics offers a way of introducing something new; B negates A, producing C (technically, C is the truth of A). As I said above, negativity is the engine that produces something new, allowing us to move beyond the logical syllogism. Just... take my word for it.

The twentieth century ran with that. And this is the important thing: when you leave behind identity and the syllogism, how do you write? In dense, complicated prose that attempts to allow pure difference, or negativity, or multiplicity (take your pick of terms) to diffuse into your writing. This makes for some wildly difficult texts. This attempt at having one's writing style actually enact one's ontological concepts is the reason lurking behind the reputation of "postmodern" philosophy's total impenetrability. Let's take Richard Dawkins' own example of "postmodern nonsense," a quote from Felix Guattari:

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously."

It is fairly rare to find "clear" arguments or statements in a lot of contemporary philosophy, because most ontology since Hegel (or historically since Kant's critiques of finite reason) simply does not allow for logical statements which depend upon unthought-out conceptions of identity.

But the times, they are a-changing. We are just now beginning to see what appears to be a return to the old school style of arguments and logic. The two most notable examples are Alain Badiou and his former student, Quentin Meillassoux. Their writing certainly resembles old-school philosophy - the synthesis of emperical facts and syllogisms.

Does this mean that the byzantine writings of the 20th century are now being repudiated? That we need to return to the classical argumentation style of everyone from Aristotle to Hume? Let's not be so hasty.

To rephrase what I've already said, the texts of the 20th century were so difficult because they were trying to present that which is by defition is un-presented - pure difference or multiplicity. Alain Badiou has by no means given up on this project; he has simply shifted the focus. It is Badiou's startling (and frustrating and scary) thesis that true ontology is performed only with math.

It's scary, because he is basically telling philosophy departments around the world, "you know that project you've been devoting your life to? Forget it... it's the guys in the math department that are doing the serious ontological work."

He is a philosopher himself, of course. Exactly what role he offers philosophy is unconnected to my point here. What I want to say is that because Badiou places pure multiplicity in the realm of mathematics, it is now possible to use identity in meta-ontological works once again. Reading Badiou's work is like reading a text from the 18th century; he offers clear axioms, then logically works out their implications.

I think such a shift was inevitable. The Marxist streak of much the the philosophical world has always required serious philosophical thought to support it, and Deconstruction and Schizoanalysis have not necessarily proven themselves as adequate tools of emancipation. Which is of course not a criticism of either; I am merely locating an empirical impetus for the shift in writing styles.

Clear writing is back... now we all just have to learn trans-finite set theory in order to actually do ontology. Yeah, right, that'll happen.

I Blame the Patriarchy

2008-10-05T01:05:00.005-05:00

I'm going to start doing a series of blog commentaries, as well has spring cleaning of my blog roll. I think blogs are fairly valuable things for offering insight into the popular versions of left and right ideas out there today; sure, Slavoj Zizek might be the cutting edge; but Amanda Marcotte is closer to the ground.

The commentaries will run in alphabetical order, so the first on the list is I Blame the Patriarchy (IPB). This is one of two feminist blogs on my list; I actually read others, such as Feministe, but Feministe is part of a trio of big feminist blogs along with Pandagon and Feministing. The three of them have many of the same concerns and many of the same perspectives. I'm not looking for a bloated blog roll, so I've simply linked to Pandagon, it being my favourite of the three.

IBP, on the other hand, has a flavour all its own. Inspired by the classic American feminist polemic The Dialectic of Sex (which strangely enough contains no dialectics), writer Twisty Faster persistently makes a case that world culture - not just western culture, or American culture, but world culture, is based on the oppression of women as a group. One of her mottos is "men hate you."

Most feminist blogs are based on the insistence that the task of feminism is incomplete, that all the of the implications have yet to be drawn out. They are concerned with shifting the status quo, or defending the parts of it that have been affected by feminism (ie Roe). IBP, however, goes much farther; Twisty wants to change everything. This, in itself, is fairly interesting. It sets her apart from a huge proportion of the feminist blogosphere, as well. Other feminist blogs spend a lot of time debating whether porn and blow jobs can be feminist activities; Twisty insists they are just variations on sexual oppression.

This post is fairly typical. The argument is that women are set up as non-human, and that femininity is about accepting this inhumanity in order to appease males. It is arguments like this that I tend to think of as "good enough for practice, but not good enough in theory." Specifics aside, this leaves me sympathetic to her project, but in disagreement on issues I consider fundamental.

I certainly don't have a problem with insisting there is an antagonism at the root of human life. Twisty insists that the root antagonism is that of sexual oppression; I'm convinced that it revolves around class. This, along with my admittedly slowly eroding suspicion of gendered concepts, is why I cannot call myself a feminist in any meaningful sense. Though maybe what Zizek has said about Marxism and Christianity is true of myself and radical feminism - we're on the same side of the barricades.

Blood Meridian

2008-10-05T00:11:00.003-05:00

I had to admit something about fiction: I'm not a very rigorous reader. I'll sit down and hash out a philosophy book closely and carefully, working as hard as I can at it, but not so with fiction. So while I love reading something monstrous by Heidegger, I'm not sure I'll ever get around to reading Beckett.

Part of this must have something to do with a lack of experience. After having read a half dozen or so of the major works of philosophy, I now have a feel for structure, for the movement of text. I see Nietzsche in a whole new light these days; when I first began reading, all I saw was the polemical fireworks.

Maybe all I've ever needed with fiction was someone to introduce me to the more serious stuff, to give me a running start at it. Cormac McCarthy has certainly built himself a reputation, garnering high praise from the likes of the canon's most fearsome defender, Harold Bloom. Maybe McCarthy's vaguely Nietzschean fireworks will be a path into "literature" for me.

So, Blood Meridian. The tale tracks a group of roughnecks along the Texas/Mexico border as they gather and sell Indian scalps. Make no mistake, this books reputation for violence is well earned; the posse rampages across the landscape, slaughtering even those they are working for.

The ostensible protagonist is simply known as the kid. The story begins with him, but soon enough he fades into the background, largely being replaced by the judge. If you've read the book or seen the movie No Country, then you have a small hint of who the judge is in Anton Chigurh - a force of nature. The characters do not repeat each other, however; Chigurh is more of an unthinking force of nature, while the judge outright revels in evil.

My praise for the book: there are several passages that were so extraordinarily fine, so evocative, that I couldn't help but compare them to some passages in Lord of the Rings. These passages appeared on a fairly regular basis, as well. Instead of blathering on, I'll offer a few of them up.

Here, the group is camped in a rocky desert area. The judge, who is all things to all men, has been examining some of the rocks in the area. Punctuation is intact, just so's you know. McCarthy has his own way of ordering the world.

"In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of cooper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth's origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.

Books lie, he said.

God don't lie.

No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.

He held up a chunk of rock.

He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The squatters in their rags nodded amount themselves and where soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right new proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools."

The bones of things? Ordering up of eons? So, so good. This is the judge at work: he nothing is true unless he says it is, nothing is allowed to exist without his permission.

My other favourite passage takes place as the group is hunted by a band of Indians. The group here is out of ammunition and food; they are chased like dogs. They encounter the judge, and he offers them salvation by showing them how to make explosive powder. Just before this, the group marches across particularily rugged ground.

"The malpais. It was a maze. Ye'd run out upon a little promontory and ye'd be balked by the steep crevasses, you wouldnt dare to jump them. Sharp black glass the edges and sharp the flinty rocks below. We led the horses with ever care and still they were bleedin about their hooves. Our boots was cut to pieces. Clamberin over those old caved and rimpled plates you could see well enough how things had gone in that place, rocks melted and set up all wrinkled like a pudding, the earth stove through to the molten core of her. Where for aught any man knows the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there's no up nor down to it and there's men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what little doe ever trod molten rock? I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It's a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things of things this world must touch the other. And something put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself."

No sics there, you understand. It is passages like these where the utter uncanniness of McCarthy's world shines through. I must admit, I shivered when I read this; this single paragraph matches anything I've read elsewhere for horror.

It is a terribly rich book. Ultra violence mixed with uncanny magical realism mixed with wonderful turns of phrase. What with the The Road move coming out, this one will probably be next. We'll see.

That Future Just Keeps Coming

2008-08-31T21:08:00.002-05:00

So I'm off to Asia again. I haven't been blogging for various reasons, but hopefully those will go away now.

I've decided to see if I can build a readership. As an experiment. I'm going to sell out and do a few things I swore I'd never do - for example, criticize people. That's how the blogosphere goes 'round and 'round, right? That's how you get the trackbacks.

Two other plans. I *will* finish off that comic series. I'm also going to blog about Alain Badiou's Being and Event, when I get around to reading it. Perhaps one chapter ("meditations," scream the purists!) a week, skipping the math chapters, 'cause transfinite set theory hurts.

For cute stories and updates on Korea, see Facebook.

Correction

2008-08-04T16:11:00.002-05:00

Back in October of 2005, I posted a quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Inexplicably, I said "rest in peace." I don't know why I thought he was dead. I was wrong. But now I'm right. Nowadays, I might have endless problems with his perspective, but it still must be said: rest in peace.

Thieves! Thieving thieves!

2008-06-15T09:56:00.002-05:00

My laptop has been stolen. I'm online now changing passwords, even though I know they'll have formatted the computer first chance.

I'm A Barbie Girl, In A Barbie World

2008-04-09T13:15:00.002-05:00

"Let us note in passing that in none of these discourses we are analyzing here does the moment of death give room for one to take into account sexual difference; as if, as it would be tempting to imagine, sexual difference does not count in the face of death. Sexual difference would be a being-up-until-death."

- The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida

This quote was brought up near the end of a recent class, and we ended up discussing what was going on here. The general consensus seemed to be that Derrida was basically saying "In all these ways of talking about death, we're not bringing up gender - but we could."

Well, ok... I guess. Once that discussion wound down, I said that every time gendered language comes up, I am hopelessly confused. I simply don't see how a concept could be gendered. As if there was a male temporality, and then a female temporality. A male finitude, and a female finitude.

My confusion basically comes down to this. I understand that various contingent factors affect the possibilities that are closest to me as a man. A women will have other possibilities lying closest to her. But this is all contingent; aside from anatomy, there is nothing about me as me that is essentially "masculine." Sure, there are situations in which I have to take up a masculine position - a certain amount of aggression and confidence is required to get a woman to look twice at you - but this is all contingent, unessential. It does not touch on my own, personal existence.

And I think most of my comrades would agree with me. I have a few friends that are very concerned with gender and whatnot; they've done Women's Studies, they march in Pride Parades, etc. They'll be the first to insist on the contingency of gender. At least, I think they would.

If gender is entirely contingent, then it seems to me that concepts - specifically structures of existence - must be gender neutral. I would insist that my own ecstatic temporalizing is no different from a woman's.

So this is what I said in class. Unfortunately, the discussion was derailed a bit. It was pointed out that that exact words I used were "How can temporality be gendered? What would a female temporality look like?" My friend then correctly pointed out that I was using "male" as a default baseline; it was the unspoken assumption. When I wanted to ask about a different temporality, I immediately jumped to the feminine.

Well, ok, but so what? That still doesn't mean that temporality is gendered. A little bit of reflexivity on my part will excise that sort of prejudice for the next time.

I just don't understand how a concept can be gendered, without relying on some sort of essential gender. As if there was an essential masculinity, and so things could be essentially masculine, rather than just being viewed as masculine by a culture. It just strikes me as a bullshit idea. Concepts are gender neutral.

I suppose this might come back to my own antipathy to gender discourses in general. First, because I think gender is so contingent that it is beneath serious thought. Secondly, I don't understand the value of a political project based around gender. Feminism, for one. Maybe I'm too much of an economic reductionist, but I see the suffering of women as almost always being based in material circumstances - circumstances that the men around them fundamentally share. And no, I'm not saying "what about the men??"

As an example of my apathy, last year the UWO student newspaper published a April 1st spoof issue that became notorious. In one article, a satire of the Vagina Monologues, a group of walking, talking vaginas were protesting something or another. A police officer, "polishing his night stick," took one into an alley to "teach her a lesson."

Ok, rape jokes suck. But this became an epic struggle on campus.

I don't know. The 20th century saw striking miners face down military units. Civil rights workers faced down Jim Crow's fire hoses and attack dogs, and cut his head off. Mid 20th feminism finally forced Liberal Democracy to honour its promises to women. Are we really so comfortable that our greatest enemy is now that trivial little rag The Gazette? It seems to me this is what gender based politics in our time and place has been reduced to.

Ethical Disruptions, Part 1: The Issue at Hand

2008-03-26T12:20:00.004-05:00

There tend to be two elements of the common sense idea of ethics and morality. The first boils down to "what must I do, and what do I deserve to expect from other people?" In other words, the question of morality is about choosing between possibilities. Doing X is good, while doing Y is bad.

The second element is that of justification. There is a persistent search for some way to justify moral judgments and acts. Probably the most common justification has been the afterlife; be "good" or you'll suffer punishment after death. Other common justifications involve human solidarity, or God's holiness and authority.

So the standard moral discourse asks, what should we do, and why should we do it?

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, these questions ceased to be serious philosophical themes. The first question is dismissed as instrumental thought - ie, the insistence on making pure thought "practical" and "useful," as if thinking were nothing other than a factory for producing goods and services. The second question - why should we act in such and such a way? - is dismissed as slavish and repetitive. Acting because of another being's power is the very definition of passivity.

The old categories of ethics and morality have fallen into disrepute. Yet, the 20th century demanded a response from those that lived it, and the 21st century demands a response from us. Viciousness and exploitation were, and are, rampant. If the shining beacon of morality is discarded, than do all conceptions of justice, courage, wisdom and truth follow closely behind?

We must hope not. Alain Badiou, writing decades after the "death" of philosophy was declared, has said that the world (not God, not philosophers - the world) is telling philosophy to get up and walk. We must say the same to ethics.

And yet, we cannot pretend that Nietzsche did not write. We can't go back to the old way of doing things. New concepts must be created. I think the thinkers of the 20th century - and now those of the 21st - have had a common ethical project, and I think this project can be summed up in terms of the disruption of the totality. The disruption - and remaking - of the world. From Heidegger's call of conscience, to Levinas's encounter with the Other, to Lacan's traumatic encounter with the real, to Badiou's fidelity to the event - the common thread is the traumatic disruption of everyday life.

Ethics is coming back, and it will have no truck with humanism (reach your inner potential!) or liberalism (choose what you like, just don't hurt anyone else!) or theology (bow!).

Infinity Gauntlet

2008-03-14T13:55:00.015-05:00

Back in 1991, I was fairly new to comics. I was dabbling in the X-Men, especially the Jim Lee series that began later the same year. I basically just like awesome fights and Rob Liefield's giant boobs were as yet uninteresting to me.

So one day, on the strength of the awesome cover, I bought #3 of 6. I put together the basic story line: The villain Thanos had pieced together all six infinity gems, which granted him unlimited power. Thanos was all but God. The point of all this was for Thanos to win the love of embodied Death. In #2, he snapped his fingers and killed exactly half of the life in the universe as an offering to his love. That was unbearably dramatic for my 11 year old mind.

The real action didn't really begin until #4, though. The most powerful of the heroes - roughly 30 of them - that weren't raptured in #2 descended upon Thanos en masse. What resulted was a vicious slaughter, a level of violence I had never come across in comics before. Because I didn't realize that comics basically cheat concerning death, and so none of the deaths would be permanent, this also was unbearably dramatic.

At the time, the art hit the spot for me. I would have been too young to appreciate any fancy. Everything was crisp, clean and bright. Some characters, such as the Silver Surfer, have been through several artistic iterations; the two most common begin the Greek godlike, perfectly sculpted body, the other being a thinner, slightly more melancholic version. IG wisely used the much flasher Greek god version.

So anyways, the heros and Thanos get down to business. He handily wipes out most of the heroes, but has a little bit of help from his girlfriend that he created ex-nihilo.

Let's look at some of the best images. As I said, I had been reading the X-Men, and Cyclops was my favourite character. I identified with him for whatever nerdy reason. Cyclops was one of the few heroes to get one over on Thanos; Cyclops poured his force beams onto Thanos, then switched them off at an opportune time; Thanos lost his balance and fell flat on his face. Ha!

Thanos's retaliation:

Yeah, that's right, he suffocates Cyclops to death. Christ, that scared me. Seeing my favourite character choke to death like that trigged two of my old phobias - claustrophobia and lack of oxygen. I was really hoping Captain America would succeed in his rescue attempt, but I still felt the terrible inevitability of it all.

There was one other X-Man involved in this attack. Back in the day, when Wolverine wasn't everywhere and thus still had a little mystique, this page was a truly fist pumping affair:

He stabs Thanos right in the chest, and the bastard smiles. Come on, try to imagine seeing this as an 11 year old. Anyways, I was always a little bit disappointed with Wolverine's death: his bones turned to rubber.

So I mentioned Thanos's ex nihilo girlfriend. Meet her hand:

All that red stuff on the end of the rock? That's what's left of Spider-Man's face.

Also, she collected an official Ironman souvenir:
That would be his head. Which she tore off. I'll bet that won't happen to Robert Downey Jr.

So all the heroes fall, save Captain America. I have no great love for this character. I think his costume is stupid. I also think jingoism is stupid. But clearly, this is regular universe Cap's greatest moment:

The silent walk up. The square jaw. The smoking body of Quasar providing some much needed colour to the scene.

Ah, the lost cause. It doesn't get much more romantic than this. Cap is the perfect character to deliver this line.

All through this series, a character named Adam Warlock has been in the background, leading the war against Thanos. Warlock is a brilliant schemer, an old nemesis of Thanos. He's willing the role the dice and play for the whole pot; this entire battle has been nothing other than a lead up to this moment:

The Silver Surfer swoops in and attempts to steal the gauntlet from Thanos. He fails.

See what I said about the Surfer's Greek god body? It's visually pleasing, but these days strikes me as a bit generic. I've actually come to prefer the more streamlined version.

So what happens to Cap? He's the last one left alive. He stands definately in front of a virtual God. What grand martyr's death awaits him?

NO LOOK BITCH SLAP. Presumably this shatter Cap's skull.

Anyways, plot stuff happens and Thanos loses the gauntlet. The scene I'm going to point out here beccomes a pivotal point for Thanos's character. He remains a complete jerk, but he becomes something of an anti-hero. Only in Annihilation does he truly return to his villainous ways, and even then he has a limit.

Hmm... the text is a bit too small. This is Warlock pointing out to Thanos that in the end, he constantly sabotages himself. It's a nice little nod the Thanos's unconscious. With this knowledge in hand, Thanos helps Warlock return all things to the status quo.

Fun stuff. The sequels, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade, weren't quite as cool but I still really enjoyed them.

Up next: The Ultimates!

Top 10 Comic Series

2008-03-11T10:25:00.007-05:00

So not long after discovering bit torrents, I discovered that one could download comics this way. I hadn't read comics for several years, but having any number of free comics right at my finger tips was just too much temptation. I had read in various sources about comics like The Invisibles and Preacher, and maybe a year before the Constantine movie came out, so I had read the Hellblazer TP Son of Man, which was ace.

I downloaded a ton of comics while I was in Korea from the amazing site Demonoid.com. Alas, the copyright monkeys (may their souls rot in hell) have shut Demonoid down, and comics are now far less accessible on the web. So I've actually resorted to *gasp* buying some comics. Which kinda sucks, since the comic store I live next to never orders enough copies of anything.

I recently had the idea to do reviews of my ten favourite comic series. I mean this to be quite broad; you'll see what I mean below.

This is my basic list, which is subject to change. Over the next few weeks I'll write out proper reviews, complete with images.

10. Infinity Gauntlet - I think this was the first truly great in-continuity crossover. I was too young to understand how comics worked at the time, so the slaughter of the heroes in #4 was pretty traumatic to me.

9. The Ultimates, Vol. 1 & 2 - The Avengers re-interpreted as a paramilitary unit. Thor is a leftist hippie, and the Hulk is STRAIGHT. Volume 3 seems to be intentionally destroying any coolness the Ultimates once had, but the first two Volumes are easily the second best non-regular Marvel universe stories I've ever read. The best is #7 on this list.

8. Scott Pilgrim - "See, I've grazed you!" "How appropriate, you fight like a cow!" I've only read the first two volumes, but I will definately track down the rest. Draw in a vaguely manga style by a London, Ontario native, Scott Pilgrim is hilarious and cool, and his life is precious. Status: awesome.

7. Garth Ennis' run on The Punisher. From the hilarious Welcome Back Frank in which Frank drop kicks an armless, legless old woman* into a burning house to the infuriatingly brutal darkness of The Slavers, Ennis has a serious triumph on his hands.

6. Annihilation - The finest mainstream, in-continuity comic story, ever. Hands down. Not even the sequel Conquest has topped it so far. Annihilation gathered up obscure, second rate characters from the wider Marvel universe and dropped them into a hopeless battle against a seemingly infinitely large military force. The broad collection of genres and themes all mixed into this series make it a truly excellent work.

5. Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits - Another Garth Ennis story. Is there a pattern here? John Constantine finds himself dying of cancer, visits old friends, makes new ones, drinks great beer, and scams the lords of hell. Good times.

4. Preacher - Jessie Custard used to be the Lord's servant -now he's the Lord's worst enemy. A 66 issue run of booze, sex and violence. A wicked sense of humour. Probably the funniest R-rated comic you'll ever read.

3. Naussica of the Valley of Wind - A sprawling, epic story from Hayao Miyazaki, the anime genius. I have to admit that Naussica is probably the most magnetic comic character I've ever come across. Charismatic and invincible. In the hands of any other writer, such a perfect character would be facile; Miyazaki manages to create a wonderful hero. If the conclusion of this series doesn't make you want to dance, you have no soul.

2. The Invisibles - Grant Morrison's 5 year long sigil. An impossibly cool collection of ontological terrorists, trannie witches, and kung-fu fighters. The Matrix stole all its best ideas from this series.

1. Ichi The Killer - A spot of the 'ol ultra violence. A sadomasochistic Yakuza rampages through the city looking for his missing boss, a boss that has already been sliced up the the masochistic Ichi. Brilliant art, and a great meditation on love and hope. The best comic series I've ever read. There is love in this violence.

*Don't worry, she totally deserved it.

Certainty: Like the Welfare State

2008-03-01T13:45:00.001-05:00

My argument here is that there are going to be 2 kinds of certainty. The first is the banal kind, the sort that we move in every day. Things like the immediate presence of physical objects, or a certainty about a social rule - I am certain I can exchange the appropriate amount of money for the goods I want. In other words, the kind of certainty that no one philosophizes about (except as part of a larger hypothetical) because it is so banal and obvious.

It is the kind of certainty that the world demands from us. Even the most ardent skeptic is certain he has to jump out of the way of the oncoming truck. The world demands that we believe particular things, or we will suffer death, humiliation, or foolishly wasted time.

The idea that the world demands this certainty from us is key to my argument here. We can't question these basic certainties; the problem of whether or not to accept them is taken out of our hands. Individual desires have nothing to do with them.

The problem comes when one wants everything in life to be certain in this way. There are some things that we must make decisions to believe, some things that we must take responsibility for. In other words, there are matters that we must judge rather than discover.

Isn't this precisely what most moral or apologetic reasoning is about? The attempt to find in the world something that will take the judgments out of our hands?

Take moral reasoning. I think the vast majority of ethical thought is about wanting the world to be a place that makes our moral judgments for us. Every time a moral situation comes up, we'd like the situation to tell us what we must do. We want our world to be like a platoon Sergeant barking out orders at us.

So, we find positive laws from theological sources, or from evolutionary psychology, or from "objective self interest."

The point of all that is to avoid making a moral judgment and to do something much simpler: make a moral discovery.

And apologetic reasoning? It's the same thing, isn't it? Rather than making a judgment about God, or a making a wager, one hunts for "reasons," "justifications," and "warrants" that will make the judgment for us. We want to discover that, goodness me, we must believe in God! We have no choice! "Reason" demands it! Or, we must follow this law! "Morality" demands it!

So how is this like the welfare state? It's an abdication of responsibility. Rather than standing behind one's moral judgments or theological wagers, we expect the world to do it for us. We expect the world to give us what we "need" rather than throwing the dice and making a choice. The state gives us the goods we "need" rather than us achieving them for ourselves.

It is those choices that create the second kind of certainty. It is a retroactive certainty; you can't see how the dice will fall until you throw them. Once you make the choice, you walk down the path, and the second kind of certainty will come of its own accord.

I'm not saying that we should believe or do things without reasons; I'm saying that we can't pretend that we can live lives devoid of significant choice because all the answers are ready made for us. Plenty of people do pretend this, especially in politics - what else is the meaning of "Let's not challenge liberal democracy and capitalism, because every attempt to do so has ended in tears"?

I want to make it clear that nothing in this post is about making deductions from these certainties; I'm not Descartes talking about his cogito.

Gayzing Into My Crystal Ball...

2008-02-28T15:05:00.004-05:00

In this recent post, I argued that Christians were no longer capable of making direct moral judgments about homosexuals. In a follow up post, I said that the emerging orthodox position of not demanding immediate change was a concealed demand for absolute change, which would be a symptom of the inability to make direct judgments.

In the comment thread from the first post, Dan presented an alternate reading of the verses that are usually used to show homosexuality is a sin. He suggests that these verses need to be read in particular cultural contexts, and shows that the condemnations contained therein are not condemnations of homosexuality as such but rather a very specific expression of homosexuality. This reading allows for practicing Christians to engage in monogamous homosexual relationships.

I find Dan's reading to be convincing, and what's more, I expect it will eventually be the standard reading through every denomination (including Pentecostals and Calvinists). Christians no longer make direct judgments about gays, and sooner or later, they will latch onto the fact that there are good, solid, scholarly, biblical reasons why they don't need to. Such a shift seems inevitable to me, even if it takes a whole generation.

It's not about losing theological ground to culture, or getting caught up in postmodern relativism. It's about recognizing that the verses about homosexuality can be read in a variety of ways, and the time for reading them in one way has past. The time for reading in a new way has come.

50 Years from now, people will look back at the fight against gay marriage with the same bemused sense of superiority that we have when we look back at every struggle of the 20th century.

A Failure to Think Abortion

2008-02-20T14:04:00.002-05:00

I find myself increasingly frustrating with my own opinion on abortion. I just can't seem to develop a robust, directly stated opinion on the matter. The only way I can think about the subject is basically an equivocation; both/and. I consider that a pretty major failing.

First, I guess, the pro-choice side of my both/and problem. It has become an increasingly common pro-choice argument that pro-lifers are not so much concerned with the issue of homicide and the life of the fetus as they are with controlling sexuality, specifically women's sexuality.

I find this to be a fairly compelling argument. Pro-lifers will insist they believe that the fetus is a person, and that abortion is murder. The problem is, pro-lifers simply don't act as if they live under a regime with a higher civilian body count then Stalinist Russia. Stalin was responsible for 40 million dead Russians; the U.S. alone has had 48 million abortions over a slightly longer time period. There should be constant horror and outrage; how can daily life continue as usual for someone that believes they live in the bloodiest society in history?

But there isn't. The outrage over abortion is no greater than the usual moral outrage over, say, homosexuality.

The other piece of the argument is all the empirical data that feminist blogs collect concerning the activities of pro-life groups; persistent interference with contraception, persistent moral condemnations of (usually female) sexual activity, etc. Or the constant insistence on "responsibility," which is just an extension of the double standard and whore/madonna split women have always had to deal with. If you'd like to see these discussions, visit Pandagon - there's a link on the side of the page.

So anyways, I'm convinced that concern over women's sexuality is the excessive real of the pro-life movement. By excessive real, I mean the ideas and concepts that show through the cracks in the surface (in a previous post, when I say that "hate the sin..." is really "just following orders," I'm pointing out another example of the excessive real).

Because of this, I think pro-choicers are correct when they say the pro-lifers don't so much care about the life of the fetus, but when and for whom a woman opens her legs. And so I consider the pro-life groups to be basically insidious. The forces of domination, as it were.

It needs to be stressed that that this excessive real, this obscene, disavowed underside, is built into the pro-life position. It can't be chased away by logical syllogisms and a body of correct facts. The explicit pro-life position, that of the rejection of murdering babies, is sustained by and dependant upon this underside. It is this underside that allows pro-lifers to go about their day without being overwhelmed by the horror of living in a Stalinist regime; the underside is what provides the distance from horror so one's life can function.

Of course, that isn't the end of the issue. Just because the pro-life position carries with it an obscene underside, doesn't mean pro-choicers are let off the hook when it comes to thinking the homicide issue. Just because your opponent is incapable of being completely forthright doesn't mean you can ignore his explicit position.

In our culture, in our particular place and time, any claim that abortion is murder will carry with it the obscene underside of the domination of women. I know this won't seem like a satisfying statement, but I think it is true. All the valid logic and correct facts in the world won't change it. But for the sake of completeness...

Empirical data will never be able to settle the issue of the fetus' legal status. There is no scientific test for personhood. No body of data can tell you when the fetus becomes a person, and so is entitled to protection under the law.

Any time chosen, from conception to the third trimester to birth, is going to be arbitrary. Sure, empirical data can be interpreted to support some of these positions over others, but empirical data will always leave room for dissent among reasonable people.

The cautious position, which I favor but can't argue forcefully for, would be that conception confers legal personhood. The problem is, "cautious" is not a serious endorsement of a political or ethical position. And "cautious" does not mean "less arbitrary."

None of that erases the importance of grappling with the question, "is abortion murder?" It is the great failing of the pro-choice side that they refuse to do so. They've found out the obscene underside of the pro-life movement, and they think this makes their argument for them. It doesn't.

In the end, my pro-life sympathies are based on something I find compelling, but intellectually weak. I think there could come a day in which a pro-life position can be directly articulated, without the obscene underside. If that day comes, then the primary pro-choice arguments will dissolve (not proven illogical or incorrect, but will simply dissolve into the winds of history) and the abortion issue will be settled. On that day, we'll all wake up, and our hands will be covered in blood, and that blood will never wash off.

The problem is, I refuse to submit the present to the judgment of history. The preceding paragraph, while compelling, is simply unacceptable by any rigid intellectual standard. We live and move and have our being in the present; some pseudo-messianic future cannot help us in the present.

So this is my problem. I have both pro-choice and pro-life sympathies. That isn't acceptable; sitting on the fence is a cop out. I just have no idea how to resolve this. Sometimes I think that learning to do a proper dialectical analysis would solve this problem for me, but dialectics is a game for the big boys. It is hard to do without just being facile, or just making a more sophisticated equivocation.

House, MD and Risk

2008-02-19T14:53:00.001-05:00

My favourite show on network tv is House. It’s a popular enough show that I assume anyone reading this already knows the premise: Greg House is the head of a medical team that deals with the cases that baffle everyone else. He’s a medical Sherlock Holmes – almost literally; references to the Sherlock Holmes stories abound in the series.

The series is remarkable in a particular way – it illustrates one of the big debates in social theory today. The first side of this debate is represented by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. His position is basically in support of the standard liberal democratic attitude: 2 opposing sides in an argument sit down and have a rational discussion. Person A presents his case, and person B presents his. Either A or B is expected to present a more rational, fact based case, and so their position is selected to act upon.

The other side of this social theory debate is represented by folks like Zizek and Alain Badiou. In a nut shell, their position is that rational, fact based thought does not always lead to a clear course of action. Whether through insufficient data or through some constitutive limitation of the situation, there must come a point at which the rational discussion ends and a decision is made. A risk must be taken, perhaps in defiance of the standard democratic expectation of majority rule or individual choice.

House consistently finds himself between these two positions. In every episode, he and his team write down a list of the patient’s symptoms. Often, the team is split as to what the diagnosis should be. The doctors on his team are obviously intelligent, and at least one of them is every bit as excellent a doctor as House himself is. That’d be Foreman, for those who watch the show. The other two members of the team are Cameron (who just happens to be played by the hottest woman on tv) and Chase.

The patient is always, of course, in imminent peril. They’ll die in 24 hours if House’s team doesn’t come up with the answer. Often the symptoms conflict with one another; symptoms 1 & 2 suggest diagnoses X, but symptom 3 seems to rule out X and suggests diagnoses Y.

House stands by and occasionally interjects while Foreman, Cameron and Chase debate the possibilities. Foreman insists the diagnosis is X, while Cameron and Chase insist on Y. Eventually House stops the discussion and orders them to treat the patient for a wholly other diagnosis, Z. What follows is a replay of a famous anecdote from one of GWF Hegel’s lectures: Foreman (standing in for one of Hegel’s students) says the facts don’t fit Z, and House basically says “So much the worse for the facts.”

So they treat for Z. Sometimes House is right, and the patient is cured. Sometimes House is wrong, and the patient develops a whole new problem.

Sometimes the doctors find themselves in a situation where diagnosis X seems correct, but the lab test to confirm it will take 48 hours, whereas the patient only has 24 hours to live. If X is the wrong diagnosis, the treatment will kill the patient almost immediately. I think part of the reason House is such an admired character (despite his abrasive personality) is that he is capable of making a firm decision to treat. He says to forget the test and just administer the treatment; how many of the rest of us would hem and haw and fritter away the patient’s life trying to discover new and more reassuring facts?

So my suggestion is that decisions always come down to something like this. Take any ethical dilemma you please; you’ll often find yourself in a situation in which the facts don’t produce a clear answer. It is the same with politics; the situation rarely tells you what must be done. Sooner or later, an authoritative decision must be made. The rational, democratic discussion must end, and action must take place.

Being & Time II, Part 4: Being Towards Death and Vulgar Time

2008-02-19T14:48:00.002-05:00

Part 3

When Da-sein is being ahead of itself in such a way that it is being towards its ownmost possibility - which is death - the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities is opened up. The anticipation of death provides a resoluteness that drives off every trivial possibility; this resoluteness that exists in the moment – rather than some kind of isolated present – is Da-sein’s ability to be free for authentic existentiell possibilities, as opposed to the possibilities that Da-sein just finds lying around in the public realm.

Attunement and falling prey, as temporal, correspond to having-been and making-present. Attunement can either be retrieve, or forgotteness, which is the vulgar past. Falling prey temporalizes as making-present or the Moment, and understanding temporalizes as awaiting or anticipation, corresponding to the vulgar future. The three are a unity; they interpenetrate each other as an ecstatic unity. For example, attunement temporalizes as the “past,” but still temporalizes itself as a future that makes present.

The anticipation of death and the resolute projection upon authentic existentiell possibilities is known as anticipatory resoluteness. This is how Heidegger brings together the ontic and the ontological, the existential and the existentiell, authentic temporality meeting authentic possibilities. I’ve heard it argued that this is analogous to Kant’s schematism, in which Kant brings together intuition and the categories.

Since the possibility of Da-sein’s being-a-whole lies in anticipatory resoluteness, this resoluteness must have a temporal structure. It is being towards Da-sein’s ownmost possibility. This is a coming-toward-itself which is the “primordial phenomena of the future.” This is not a point that could be described as somehow spatially distant, or a potential that is “not yet” actual, but rather Da-sein’s ability to come towards itself. (BT 299)

Anticipatory resoluteness also understands Da-sein as guilty, as being thrown and not mastering its ground. This is what will be known vulgarly as the past. Da-sein, understanding itself as thrown, is how Da-sein can be “in the way that it already always was.” This is Da-sein’s “having been.” There is a unity here with coming-towards; only because Da-sein has been can it come towards itself futurally – “authentically futural, Da-sein is authentically having-been.” (BT 299) By anticipating death, we see ourselves as already having been and able to act in the moment.

I’m going to go over one more topic and make 2 points about it – vulgar time, which is basically the linear time of common sense that we all know and love. The origin of vulgar time lies in Da-sein’s average, everyday inauthenticity. The common concepts of future, present and past represent genuine phenomena, but it is a derivative one. Because temporality is not an aggregate of nows, these nows cannot be said to stretch into infinity. If time is finite, then what do we do with the time that apparently continues? Heidegger is not denying that “time goes on,” he is saying that the belief in a time that moves out of the indefinite past and into the indefinite future is the result of a vulgar notion of time. Commonly, time is seen as infinite, but this conception is really only possible on the basis of temporalizing finitude. (BT 304)

In section 66, Heidegger lays the ground of what will become the datability of time. In an average, everyday way, care is about taking care of things. When using things, Da-sein uses time. In other to use time, it must be datable and calculable. (BT 306) In this way, innerworldly beings are encountered in time; their temporal quality is “within-timeness.” There is a critique of Bergson here that I’ll just mention – this within-timeness is an actual phenomena, not an externalization of a qualitative time into space. I have nothing to say about that, but someone else might.

For Heidegger, all datable time is public time and lies on top of primordial temporality. The public “orients” itself towards this time, “so that it must somehow be available for everyone.” (BT 378) Time can be taken care of in terms of events and innworldly beings, but this occurs in a horizon of “time-reckoning,” which always involves astronomical and calendrical time. The essence of taking care of time is not about measuring quantities or assigning numbers to periods of time. Measured time arises because of thrownness; primordially, temporality is Da-sein reckoning with time. (BT 378)

Public time always presupposes the structure of “then” and “when.” When the term ends, it is time to hand in essays. This public “then” is the structure of significance, which is part of understanding and interpretation, so “it constitutes the worldliness of the world.” (BT 380) This “time for” is what Heidegger will call world time. World time is not an inner worldly being, of course, but rather the condition of such. World time is presupposed when we use clocks, when we calculate and measure time. By saying what I’ve said, I’ve tried to point out how there is an authentic temporality that underlies our common notions of time, and all our calculation of it.

By way of conclusion, I’ve tried to summarize how both Da-sein’s a priori, existential structures and datable public time become meaningful and intelligible only on the basis of an underlying, unifying temporality.

Being & Time II, Part 3: Enter The (Temporal) Dragon

2008-02-16T13:56:00.002-05:00

Part 2

In the third chapter of Division II, Heidegger will reach the idea that temporality, as the ontological meaning of care, is the unifying element of Da-sein. Everything I’ve just said has a temporal meaning; consider the projecting forward of understanding. “Meaning” is the horizon upon which something is intelligible as the thing that it is. Temporality is the horizon upon which care becomes intelligible. (BT 298) So what I’ll do now is bring out the temporality of what I’ve just spoken about.

With temporality, Heidegger describes the totality of Da-sein: “ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as together-with (beings encountered within the world.” (BT 300) None of this is about being earlier or later; all three work together to reveal themselves as the “ekstaticon par excellence” an ecstatic unity of temporality. (BT 302) It is not a sequence moving from now to another now, not an aggregate of the ecstasies. While the future is the primary ecstasy, all three move within one another. This “unified phenomena of the future that makes present in the process of having-been” is temporality. It is a unified structure that cannot be divided into a series of moments. It also cannot be seen as a path upon which historical events trod.

Heidegger will present the ecstasies as authentic or inauthentic. The structural elements of being-in-the-world are understanding, attunement and falling prey. Each of these elements temporalizes as a different ecstasy. Understanding is the projection towards a possibility; it discloses potentiality so that Da-sein knows what is going on.

We are always, in fact, projecting into possibilities. Da-sein always understands itself in terms of projects that it projects into. Because Da-sein projects forward, it is always ahead of itself. Ontologically speaking, Da-sein is always not yet. Primordially, Da-sein exists from the future. There is always something outstanding. What is outstanding is death. Death is Da-sein’s ownmost, not to be bypassed possibility, and it is unrelated to anything in the referential totality. It is not a logical possibility in the world. It is what is always outstanding for Da-sein. The anticipation of death is the authentic future, while the understanding that comes towards itself only in terms of the world taken care of is an awaiting that makes present. (BT 310)

Rather than an awaiting that makes present, authentic anticipation discloses a present that is held in authentic temporality called the moment. The moment is not another “now” that appears in a series of nows, but rather it is a part of the ecstatic unity of temporality. The moment temporalizes itself out of an authentic future, which is part of the “ecstatic unity [to which] a corresponding having-been must belong.” (BT 311) In this authentic moment, Da-sein brings itself forth to its ownmost potentiality, and this is called retrieve.

Head Scarves: Damned if They Do, Damned if They Don't

2008-02-15T17:41:00.002-05:00

A while back, the French government wandered into a minefield when it tried to ban Islamic headscarves. Now, a Turkish lawyer is fighting a similar ban: she wants the right to choose whether or not to wear the scarf.

I'm not really interested in writing about the awesomeness of liberal choice ideology, or multiculturalism. I insist that the Islamic head scarf is a symbol of oppression; it falls under the category of "Islamic douchebaggery." One can't "choose" to accept a symbol of oppression; in the 1960s, some southern blacks actually resisted desegregation. It would be easy to say "it's their choice!" but it isn't possible to make a "choice" to tear up one's ethical dignity.

So I disagree with the women that fight to keep wearing their headscarves. But I can't agree with the ban on them, either. When you say to someone "Do X and liberate yourself," they are perfectly justified in responding "Don't tell me what to do, you crusading liberal white male!"

These women are trapped between a rock and a hard place. If they wear the scarves, they are playing into the vile patriarchal structures of their culture. If they remove the hard scarves, then they are submitting themselves to a wholly other patriarchal structure, the one that wants to save them from themselves.

The only thing to do is to completely drop the head scarf issue. Ignore it. What needs to be attacked is the underlying problem, that of the oppression of women in Islamic countries. And on this, I am on the same page as Fatma Benli, the lawyer fighting the scarf ban. She says,

“I could tell you about domestic violence, about honor killings, about the parts of the criminal code that discriminate against women,” she said, ticking off her areas of expertise in rapid-fire sentences. “But we can’t move on to those issues.

“The head scarf is where we are stuck.”

So the head scarf bans need to go, but so do the repeated refrains of "choice!"

Being & Time II, Part 2: The They's Understanding and Care

2008-02-15T16:16:00.001-05:00

Da-sein is dispersed into the they and thrown into possibilities. The they has its own modes of understanding and interpretation. These are idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity.

Discourse shares what is disclosed - but the mark of idle talk is that it does not go back to the original disclosure. It is discourse that only offers the most average, leveled down understanding. It’s almost like speaking for the sake of speaking; it has no relation to the being being spoken of. Because idle talk offers a leveled down understanding, it can understand everything.

Curiosity corresponds to sight as a mode of disclosing. Just like idle talk understands everything, curiosity sees everything. Ambiguity has the same sort of thing going on. Ambiguity is what “everyone knows.” It knows what everyone else thinks and feels. These three elements sound very much like common sense.

Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity constitute the entanglement of Da-sein. This is how Da-sein is in the world, initially and for the most part. Da-sein is fallen prey into the world. It’s an absorption in the they. This entanglement is the inauthenticity of Da-sein. This entanglement is Da-sein not being itself. Heidegger says Da-sein is “tempted” into falling prey; it confuses Da-sein into thinking all of its possibilities are open to it, when in fact they are leveled.

It is important to note that Da-sein be falling prey only because it is concerned, understanding, attuned being in the world.

Now, Being in the world is a structure that is primordial and constantly whole. Until now, the structure’s moments have all been discussed individually. Understanding, attunement, disclosure, etc. But how is the totality of the structural whole to be described? What unites everything that’s been said so far?

Care. Care is the unity of the structural totality of Da-sein BitW. Care is actually BitW as such. This isn’t the same as wishing, urging, watching, etc; these things are founded on care. But what discloses care as fundamental? What is Da-sein’s fundamental attunement?

Angst. Angst is what provides the basis for grasping the totality of Da-sein. Remember the description of fear? Fear is fear of something. One can find this desk fearsome. It’s something present, something in the world. What distinguishes Angst from fear is that angst does not have an object. Angst is anxious over nothing. Literally, the nothing. Nothing definite, nothing present. Angst is anxious about being in the world as such. It is in fact angst that individualizes Da-sein; it does not create an isolated subject, it merely brings Da-sein back before itself out of the they. The world loses its significance, and Da-sein is brought back before itself out of dispersion in the they.

The basis of the structural totality of Da-sein, care lies “before” every attitude and position of Da-sein. Care is the a-priori condition of both theory and praxis. Political and social action are only possible for a being that is unified by care.

So the unity of Da-sein lies in the fact that it is concerned in its being about that being. BitW itself is care. Being with things is taking care of them and being with the Mitda-sein of others is concern. Being concerned about its being, Da-sein is always being ahead of itself, projecting forward into possibilities.

Implicit Demands

2008-02-14T13:45:00.004-05:00

Or, "Another Criticism of a Christian stance on Sin."

In Slavoj Zizek's narcissistic adventure of a documentary Zizek!, there is a clip of him on the American talkshow Nightline. He's plugging his new book, and offers a glimpse into the spirit of the book.

He brings up two versions of the standard situation of a father telling his son that since it is Sunday, they are going to visit grandmother, a ritual the son finds painfully boring. In the first story, the father is a Stalinist. He is direct and insistent; "you are coming to visit your grandmother; you have no choice." In the second story, the father is more "loving" and "permissive." He says, "Listen, you don't have to visit your grandmother. But she loves you very much, and I know you love her."

So what's the difference? The first father is telling his son what he has to do. The second father is also telling the son what he has to do, but he is tacking on an implicit demand: "you have to enjoy doing this." Surely that is the far more insidious demand; the first father demands an action, the second father demands submission.

I'd wonder if something similar is going on with well meaning Christians and homosexuals. When a Christian tells a homosexual that they may first recieve God's love, and alter their behavior "when the time comes," it's basically saying "change, and enjoy changing."

There's an idea that I think is fairly common in our society: that one's own individual conscience is where one finds their freedom. That in order to be free, you must be able to follow your conscience and do what you believe is right. External rule systems are crushing and totalitarian. I think this maps onto a common articulation of grace and law; grace opens up room for all those things that are "permissible, but not necessarily beneficial" while the law brings impossible demands and so death.

But what if it is the other way around? What if it is individual conscience, and that common articulation of grace, that is in fact the most crushing and totalitarian?

(As an aside, I wouldn't say the type of grace I'm speaking of is the only kind)

What if the infinite demand for perfection does not come from the external law, but is something we internalize, basically saying that we must enjoy trying to fulfill that infinite demand? "God's grace will forgive you. . . (you're a jerk for taking advantage of it, though)" The seemingly gentle and loving offer of permanant support and forgiveness is a sneaky attempt to get someone to enjoy being under the law, or in other words, to get them to internalize the law that brings death.

So when one says to a sinner "recieve God's love and grace, and change when the time is right," doesn't the sentence continue silently, ". . . but if you love God, the change will come quickly"? This a far cry from "Go now, and sin no more" which silently continues ". . . because if you do, I'll kick your ass."

Slouching Towards Division II: Recapitulating Being-In

2008-02-13T13:37:00.002-05:00

I've already presented a summary of the first half of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time; you can see a link to it on the side bar. Last semester I had to present on Division II to a class that I was certain hadn't read B&T, so I tried to set up Division II with some discussion of Division I. This next series is, you guessed it, that presentation. I'll just include it under the Being and Time label.

What I’ll do with this presentation is go over some material from Division I, setting up terms, and then move to Division II, re-reading those terms temporally.

So last week we already discussed how Da-sein is the entity that we must inquire into in order to ask after the meaning of being. This is because it already has something like an understanding of being, a pre-ontological understanding of being. This understanding is a way of being; this isn’t a question of epistemology. We understand the “is” without being able to conceptually define it. This is what makes Da-sein different from other beings - we are concerned in our being about being. Da-sein is related to existence understandingly; the structures by which we do this are existential structures. You might hear echos of Kant’s a-priori transcendental structures here.

Da-sein understands itself in terms of existence, as well. It understands itself through possibilities that come to it through various means; these are existentiell possibilities. These are the possibilities we understand ourselves through; it is an existentiell possibility to be a student.

Rephrased, existentiells are our projects. The stuff we do. They are ontic characteristics specific to Da-sein. Existentials, on the other hand, are what you might think of as our ontological side; the way(s) in which we exist understandingly. One example is mood, attunement.

Da-sein’s relation to itself is mediated by its relation to the world, but this is not to suggest that being-in stands between a present world and a present subject. Being-in is a unified phenomena. It is disclosure; a clearing, an illumination. There are three aspects to being-in as such: attunement, understanding and discourse. These are not three aspects that are separate things; they are equiprimordial. There are the interiority of each other.

Now, Attunement is Heidegger’s ontological term for what would ontically be “mood.” It’s how you’re doing. Attunement is what makes things matter. It discloses things in a particular way. In being in a mood, Da-sein is disclosed as that being which it is.

The primary discovery of the world is also through attunement — not the senses. It is because the senses belong ontologically to an attuned being that they can be “touched.” Heidegger himself will suggest a comparison with Kant’s intuitions; we do not have spacial or temporal intuitions because we have the five sense. Kant’s intuitions are, if this can be said, a non-sensual form of sensibility.

Heidegger’s big example of attunement is fear. There are three aspects to fear. The first is “what” one is afraid of - it is a thing of whatever sort. A spider, a disease, a ghost. A fearsome thing. The second aspect is “fearing” itself; this clarifies what is fearsome. And why are we afraid? Because we are concerned in our being for our being. Only a being concerned with its own being can be afraid. What about animals? I have no clue. What marks fear as attunement is that it discloses things in their ability to threaten.

The second element of being in is understanding. Like I’ve already said, Da-sein exists understandingly. Understanding is what discloses our possibilities as possibilities. This is not a cognitive process of making choices; it isn’t choosing between being a lawyer or doctor when you grow up. It discloses those possibilities in the first place. It’s also not an empty set of logical possibilities; we are always already in a possibility. We are always, in fact, projecting into possibilities.

Now, understanding always has its own possibilities. Understanding has the possibility of understanding itself - this is interpretation. Interpretation is understanding’s self-understanding.

Interpretation is also the actualization of possibilities that understanding discloses. Da-sein projects onto possibilities, then interprets itself as these possibilities. What is interpreted, what has been explicitly understood, always has the structure of something as something. A table is explicitly understood as a table.

Interpretation has a threefold structure: fore-having, fore-seeing and fore-conception. These, again, are all bound up with each other.

The fore-having is the referential totality; it is the interpretation operating within that totality of reference which itself has already been understood. When something is understood but still veiled, still unclear, still implicit, it becomes explicit through an act of appropriation - the fore-seeing. The fore-having reveals what is to be understood, the fore-seeing works specifically upon what is to be understood. This interpretation is already decided upon by a definite conceptuality - this is the fore-conception.

The interpretation of something as something is grounded in fore-having, fore-seeing and fore-conception. This is a circle, but it is not a vicious circle to be avoided; the trick is to enter the circle in the right way; this is why Heidegger had that whole discussion of the structure of the question at the beginning of the book.

The final aspect of being in is discourse. This isn’t language - it is the ontological condition of language. That which is disclosed by attunement and understanding is articulated by discourse. Discourse is a shared event; the listener understands the speaker because they are articulating meaning that is already there. Spoken disclosure is to share what is disclosed.

Excessive Religion, Part 10: Conclusion

2008-02-12T18:10:00.001-05:00

Part 9

Fidelity, by traversing fantasy, places no expectations on the fulfillment of desire; it is a purely libidinal drive that pushes one ceaselessly and without concern for project. The movement to inner experience is not to “emerge from project through project” but rather to emerge from individual libidinal economy to the global, general economy. Such a movement is akin to a series of streams flowing into a raging river, than breaking off again into tributaries. The moment of the festival is not a matter for repetition in memory; it is only ever a future possibility that drives one forward. Bataille gives the reason for this when he says that The translation of an experience into a communicable form does not betray the experience, and is in fact necessary - but it changes the experience from the peak of a libidinal flow to a matter of discourse. As a “past event,” inner experience is irreducibly different. One is part of a libidinal movement, the other is discourse. Inner experience, in terms of festival and sacrifice, require the discourse of a community to be enacted, but discourse is only ever the tool of libido.

Memory and discourse are also vital for any attempt to transmit inner experience, however both of these are dependant on time. In common conditions, the metonymic movement of desire pushes one into the future; however, according to Bataille, inner experience is “time unhinged.” An experience in which time is unhinged denies the temporal cause/effect relationship, and so does not produce knowledge. Inner experiences from the “past” produce nothing and affect nothing, because of this denial of cause and effect. These experiences rely on the discourse of a community and the desire of the subject to lay the ground, but discourse and desire can only ever move into the future and allow the summit to appear of its own accord. We reach out to the future through desire, touch upon a singularly excessive experience, than immediately move on to reach out for another future, another singular experience.

Religion is not only the search for a lost intimacy, it is the experience of desire. It is not merely a matter of unfulfilled desire, but rather of striving forward, and in doing so, experiencing joy and the glow of the object of desire. One strives forward to touch this object; what Bataille calls “common time” or “secular time” is a period of anticipation, promise, and action. The sacred appears as moment, and then the anticipation begins anew. From this anticipation flows affirmation and joy, whether the anticipation has the character of faith or fidelity.

Edit: Double post corrected!

Irony

2008-02-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

Part of my thesis research has come around to the concept of irony, or cynicism. Irony is something that I've flirted with or outright wallowed in for a few years now, but I've come to see it as something of a hypocritical or empty pursuit.

So what is irony in a nutshell? It is a stance one takes towards themselves, their beliefs, and the world. Rather than allowing one's self to be encompassed by a particular description or particular roles, one insists on setting up a distance between themselves and these roles. It could be in the name of some persistent inner core, as in "The real Mike isn't a student or an atheist; the real Mike is a hard kernel of individualistic subjectivity that stands against the world." Or, one could say "the real Mike is a persistent flux, a framework of constant change. Being a student is just a suit to wear or shed at will."

There was a time when I was attracted to both of these kinds of irony. However, I've become convinced that such a stance is always supported by a totally non-ironic element.

Let's make that more clear. Take a liberal Christian, and for my specific example I'll say Paul Tillich. He'll argue that religion is about one's ultimate concern, but that exactly what that ultimate concern is is just a placeholder. While he'll say that Christianity provides the best articulation of God as the ultimate concern, over and above other religions, he'll still say that others hold true religion, and that's fine for them. He is unwilling to say to a Muslim "what you believe is false, and we are at odds with one another."

So I'd argue that Tillich takes up an ironic distance from orthodox Christianity. Why is this shallow or hypocritical? Because (as Slavoj Zizek as convinced me) this distance in fact depends on the existence of an other who really believes. Tillich cannot maintain his stance without a secret reference to the Muslim, a Muslim that is entirely interpolated into Islam and that has no distance from it.

Other forms of irony or cynicism have the same issue. Take your standard pragmatic hardboiled liberal individualist. They'll say that there are no more standards, only pragmatic exigencies. They'll say that they have no problem taking advantage of the system or of other people. "Do what thou wilt, with due regard for the policeman around the corner." They may in fact behave this way - but their statements actually concern the fact that they really do believe. When you're speaking to someone that claims only to make pragmatic calculations, then you're actually speaking to someone that, deep down, really does care. They just can't admit it to themselves or others.

The reason this has become an issue for me is the the writer I study, Martin Heidegger, is very easily interpreted as an ironist. To put it briefly, human existence is always embedded within a particular horizon of meaning. There is no particular human nature; rather, what humans do is project themselves into particular projects. We do things in order to be things, based on a prior pre-ontological understanding of existence.

All the projects and possibilities we take up come not from ourselves, because that would require a human nature; rather, our possibilities come from the world around us. We find them in our culture, in the objects we use, in the people we meet.

Most of our lives are spent just taking up the possibilities that the "they" of "they say" we should take up. We wander through our lives fulfilling all the obligations and expectations that the world places upon us, never catching a glimpse of anything that is proper to me, something that has nothing to do with you or any sort of we.

Heidegger will say there is only one possibility proper to you as you - your death. Death is the one single possibility that we do not take from the world. It is our ownmost possibility; it is the possibility that sets us apart from the "they" and individuates us.

The resolute anticipation of death is what allows one to take up projects in the world as if these projects were, like death, proper to one's self.

It's that "as if" that is the problem. You see how it sounds exactly like the irony described above, right? I behave "as if" I were a student, but I'm really not, I'm a being-for-death.

The student example is a bit facile. I guess you can already see how this would play out in other cases; "I'm not really a political activist," "I'm not really a husband and a father," "I'm not really a Christian."

Part of my thesis will involve trying to argue that one does not need to read anticipatory resoluteness as ironic. Explaining how I intend to do that is probably best left for another post.

Hating the (Gay) Sin, Loving the (Gay) Sinner

2008-01-25T14:45:00.001-05:00

The Christian opposition to homosexuality is one of the primary elements of the "culture war," yes? Christians are often accused of being hateful and bigoted, and the Christian response is to say "We can hate the sin of homosexuality, but love the sinner."

A lot of gays and gay allies refuse to take this statement at face value. They'll insist that this is an obfuscation or an excuse, that all it does is conceal a deep seated prejudice.

I disagree with them. I am perfectly happy to accept that many Christians do not hate gays. My problem is that the reason Christians offer is undergirded by something much more sinister that garden variety political incorrectness.

I would argue that when a Christian says "I hate the sin, but love the sinner," there is an unspoken supplement. I think that what this statement conceals, or perhaps really means, is the statement "I am just following orders."

I think the common Christian position on homosexuality is, in fact, "I don't hate gays. God says the act is evil, and I have to agree with him. I am just following orders." What the Christian does is push off responsibility for a moral judgment to another.

There are no other sins for which Christians constantly use that statement. It may occasionally appear when a family member is an alcoholic, for example. "I love my dad, but I hate his sin." I believe this statement is different in kind, however.

The Christian recourse to the Nuremberg defense has appeared because the place of homosexuality has changed in our culture, and this change has affected Christians as well. Christians recognize that a direct and outright condemnation of homosexuality is no longer possible -- even for Christians -- so they have to punt the condemnation to God. Christians don't make the same deferral in the case of child molesters, because it is socially possible to condemn child molesters in one's own name.

(I know Christians will read that last sentence and insist that they can only condemn child molesters in the name of God's law; such an argument is tangential to my own. It is simply not the social reality that Christians explicitly defer to God in the case of pedophilia, while they do make such an explicit deferral in the case of homosexuality.)

I think there are two consequences here. First, it says something about the nature of morality. Moral statements are constricted by social conditions. If this were not true, than Christians would not speak about homosexuality the way they do. Secondly, this shows that the gay culture's suspicion of church culture is justified, to an extent. No one likes to be on the receiving end of actions justified by the Nuremberg defense.

Year That Was, 2007

2008-01-05T13:47:00.000-05:00

Like last year, this isn't a best-of 2007 list, but rather a list of the best things I first encountered in 2007.

Movies

Ten Nights of Dreams -- The best movie of the year, easily. I had the pleasure of watching this at a Montreal film festival. 10 short segments of various styles. Some hilarious, some sad, some horrifying, all utterly beautiful. Highly recommended.

No Country for Old Men -- I'll discuss my feelings on the book a little later, because my thoughts about the two are increasingly different. Which is odd, since this is one of the most faithful book to movie adaptations I've ever seen.

"No Country" is an exsquisite mix of chaos and stillness. There's no soundtrack, and the landscape is always still and quiet. The characters speak in hushed tones with a stoic ethos; and yet the hurricane winds of evil are all about.

The story telling structure is ballsy. Things happen off screen that any other story teller would have had front and centre. The ending doesn't really wrap up the plot, but if you have to be shackled to the plot, then you're missing something about how stories work.

I'll come out and say it. "No Country" separates people that have taste from people without taste. If "No Country" isn't in the top third of your own top ten of 2007 list, then you have bad taste. It's that simple.

I didn't feel this way after first seeing the movie. I thought it was amazing, but I've since read an incredibly insightful and persuasive review at this blog, which I recommend in general for strong truth. There's a quote from Jean-Luc Godard there:

"To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."

Can the Coens top "No Country"? We'll all be better off if they do.

Inland Empire -- David Lynch's latest act of insanity. The question I always come away with from his movies is about the position of the irrationality. Is the insanity accounted for within the world of the movie, i.e. one of the characters is crazy? Or is the insanity an excess, something that has no real place within the movie? Is David Lynch just crazy? I dunno, but I enjoy trying to find out.

The Bourne Ultimatum -- Once again, the character of Bourne is the smartest, most capable fellow around. That's a repetition of the first two movies, of course. There's basically one reason this movie is on this list: the rooftop chase in the middle east. It reminded me of this article, which reveals that the Isreali Defense Force is making certain philosophy books required reading for the brass. The idea is to fashion a new form of urban warfare, in which inside is the outside. The chase scene in this movie seemed to fit that model perfectly. Who says philosophy isn't useful?

Paprika -- Some well badass anime. A great soundtrack, and a dose of Lynchian insanity. Highly recommended.

Honourable Mention: 28 Weeks Later, 300

Yeah, slim pickings this year. It's strange. Why did I see so few good movies?

Music

The Boxer by The National -- Nice mellow rock. A friend with a better ear for music than I tells me that the drummer is a genius.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal -- I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate Georges Bataille. That's right, its an album by a bunch of theory geeks, so hey. Plus the music is awesome.

Books

The Ticklish Subject by Slavoj Zizek -- Universal subjectivity is back, and it exhorts you to dare. The chapter on Alain Badiou alone is excellent, and the chapter on Heidegger's reading of Kant is required.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie -- I'm actually not yet finished this book, but so far it is a serious work of art. The density is incredible; there is more meat on a page of this book than in entire chapters of, say, Orson Scott Card. This might be a test case for taste in books, like "No Country" is a test case for taste in movies.

Ethics: An Essay On The Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou -- A highly readable book on why the standard blathering about morality and human rights is really just a cover for a lack of adventurousness in life.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche -- Does reading this book accord with good sleep? Thankfully no.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy -- Sparse prose and the ballsy structure that inspired the Coen Brothers movie. An amazing book, but I think it actually translated into a better movie.

Excessive Religion, Part 9: The Temporal Structure

2008-01-04T14:18:00.000-05:00

Part 8

Recap of Part 8: What is the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge, sacred time and secular time?

Part of the answer involves the difference between Lacanian jouissance and the Bataillian accursed share. Jouissance is rooted in the interplay of the registers of the subject. It is an aspect of the libidinal economy of the subject. The accursed share, however, is not limited to the economy of the subject. The accursed share is a movement in the general economy of the entire globe. The movement to non-knowledge, to the experience of radical excess, is to have access to that economy. Jouissance is a local phenomena; the forms of excess like the festival and war are global phenomena, and the moment of non-knowledge is an attempt to tap into the global economy rather than to enjoy a experience of the subject.

So the temporal structure is thus. Non-knowledge cannot be produced by knowledge; discursive reason and projects will never themselves produce excess. It is the subject’s experience of metonymic desire that pushes them into the future, chasing after object a. The moment of non-knowledge, unlike jouissance, is not a direct effect of a certain moment in the libidinal economy. What a relationship to one’s desire offers is fertile ground for such a moment to appear.

Bataille says that “in common conditions, time is annulled.” However, if we emphasize the “metonymic” time of desire? Projects and discursive reason put off life until “later,” which is an empty future in which one will only find more projects and more reason. Striving for an object cause, however, requires one to live their life in a current state, anticipating and working for a particular, contingent future. Life is not dramatized by the endless calculating of projects and discursive reason. Rather, it is dramatized by the grasping, charging, abandoned movement of desire. Bataille says that only reason can tear down what reason has built up - but the movement of desire which is active in “common conditions” underlies projects. Desire itself is neither a project nor reason, and thus it is desire that offers the ability to undo what reason has built up.

This is not entirely true for faith, however. The pleasure and enjoyment experienced by the faithful is rooted in the fantasmic belief that desire will be fulfilled in the future; the enjoyment received in dancing before one’s God is that of arousing the enjoyment of the barred Other. God must have several confusing characteristics for this fantasy to function. He must be a present to hand being, one among others. He must also occupy both a position in the imaginary register as object a and a position in the symbolic as Autre. The relationship to this object relies on a rejection of lack in the Other. Faith relies on a symbolic realm without lack. Faith has a powerful object cause and thus offer a powerful way to dramatize, but it relies on the impossible expectation of fulfilled desire.

Excessive Religion, Part 8: Dramatization and Mysticism

2007-12-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Part 7

In Inner Experience, Bataille describes inner experience as being like mysticism, but without any particular confession. Confession implies knowledge, and it must cling to this knowledge in a limiting way. Because Bataille is striving for a moment of non-knowledge, an unrepeatable experience, knowledge only limits horizons.

Knowledge seems, in fact, to have no temporal or cause and effect relationship with inner experience at all. Bataille says that, in terms of knowledge, inner experience “reveals nothing and cannot found nor sets out from it.” Knowledge, beliefs and propositions are unconnected to the experience of non-knowledge. Inner experience is only the unknown, not a variation on the known.

This prohibition on the value of knowledge seems to bring into question the value of both faith and fidelity. Faith seems to be especially susceptible here; is it not synonymous with the idea of the “particular confession” Bataille has already derided? This would be a hasty conclusion; faith does not so much concern encyclopedic knowledge about an object as it does the place of the object within a particular symbolic position. Neither is fidelity concerned with a body of knowledge; it is a relationship to one’s own desire. Both faith and fidelity are defined by their relationships to object a, not the body of knowledge that arises around this.

It is dramatization in which faith and fidelity can be seen as analogous. Bataille offers the opportunity for such a suggestion when he says “one reaches the states of ecstasy or of rapture only be dramatizing existence in general.” This is the mechanism that pushes one forward: the surge of libidinal energy that pushes to useless expenditure and excess begins with dramatization. Dramatization rallies energies around a particular object; it “necessarily has a key, in the form of an uncontested (deciding) element, of a value such that without it there can exist no drama, but indifference.” What other object could this key be than object a? Dramatization is a surge of desire, encourage and provoked by an external object. If one is dominated by indifference or a neurotic continual questioning, inner experience will forever remain beyond one’s life.

Dramatization and the either/or pair of faith and fidelity do not map perfectly onto each other, however. Faith, in particular, will suffer at the hands of Bataille. Drama needs a key, certainly, but this key must “exist in us.” Desire is always desire for the desire of the other; sublimation and fantasy are always a relationship with this other. The dramatization of faith is always external. This is where Bataille finds the limit of traditional religion; the focus on finding one’s desire outside of one’s self is limits even while it pushes forward.

Dramatization is also the will to not be satisfied with discourse; it adds itself to discourse and goes beyond what is stated. The will to move beyond what is stated is a major incompatibility with faith. Because faith involves sublimation - which sets an object into a particular position in the symbolic and therefore in a particular linguistic position - faith is necessarily tied to discourse. The libidinal investment of faith finds part of its limit at the edge of the symbolic position of God, as both object a and barred Other. Faith is the dramatization with only a sickly (if partially effective) will to move beyond what is stated.

Fidelity, however, is capable of willing to move beyond what is stated in the traversal of fantasy. The spirit of wo es war, soll ich werden is that of becoming one’s own cause. A constitutive element of this is the recognition that one says more than one means. The slips and bursts are the elements of the real that appear in language. Language exists because of a lack; the simply surface meaning lacks the recognition of the excess of meaning. What is said is not all there is.

It is that recognition of such a lack and the implied relationship of the unconscious that helps eliminate the cause and effect problem surrounding the limit experience. This problem is that of the principle “of inner experience: to emerge through project from the realm of project.” Projects are the praxis of calculative reason, and have the temporal nature of always putting off life until “later.” Reason and project, Bataille says, are essential; “without the support of reason we don’t reach dark ‘dark incandescence.’” It is this shift from project to non-project, knowledge to non-knowledge that is the fundamental problem. How can one lead to the other? How can knowledge condition non-knowledge? Is there a temporal cause and effect relationship?

Excessive Religion, Part 7: Antigone and Dramatization

2007-12-16T17:05:00.000-05:00

Part 6

Recap of Part 6: Both faith and fidelity push one into the future, and without either, one dies.

To clarify this, I will briefly discuss Antigone in the spirit of Lacan’s seventh seminar. What better image of the obsessional neurotic is there than Antigone’s sister Ismene? When Antigone announces her plan to bury Polynieces against Creon’s orders, Ismene equivocates. Consider Ismene’s response to Antigone:

Oh no! Think carefully, my sister.
[. . . .]
And we must obey this order, even if it hurts us more.
As for me, I will say to those beneath the earth
This prayer: “Forgive me, I am held back by force.”
And I’ll obey the men in charge. My mind
Will never aim too high, too far.”

Ismene does not even say no. She has nothing to act upon, nothing that she can affirm or negate. All she is capable of doing is calculating out a series of goods and harms. She says “think carefully,” which is in this context is only an attempt to defer action. Ismene denies her ability to act and to choose on the basis of being “held back by force.” She also denies the value of any high aim that requires a view to the future.

Contrast Ismene with Antigone, who in Lacan’s reading, is an agent of fidelity. She maintains her desire in the face of the Other of the city in the form of Creon. Antigone is able to make choices that will lead to her own death because she is so invested in one particular object: her brother. Her actions led to excess and death; she participated in the accursed share. Ismene can even be contrasted with Creon. Creon was clearly invested in the city; not only to the maintenance of the city’s current status, but also to the city’s future well being. Because Creon had faith in the value of the city, he was able to make choices that also led to death and excess. Both Antigone and Creon, because of their respective fidelity and faith, were able to make choices and invest in a path that led to excess. Ismene, on the other hand, languished in a life of calculation, deferral and regret. Both faith and fidelity push one towards the future and towards excess. Without either of these things, one lives in a grey world of things to be calculated, stored and shifted around. No quantity of pleasure, security or material goods will ever admit the slightest glimmer of the splendorous excess that awaits one in sacred time.

Here we have the necessity of re-reading Bataille. Bataille has two problems. The first is that much of the problem concerning transgression. Bataille implicitly acknowledges a difficulty here when he disavowed the sexual revolution. Transgression is only possible if rules exist; the sexual revolution indicates the possibility that any one system of rules is capable of dissolving. When one recognizes that rules can dissolve, the next step is to begin understanding all laws and morality as purely self-imposed. How is transgression against such self imposition possible?

The second problem is Bataille’s lack of interest in knowledge, of the common time, the average everydayness of life. Daily life to Bataille is merely a period of cold calculation; projects and reason dominate common time. The question becomes, if daily life is so drab, where are the flowing energies that produce the accursed share? How can life that exists only in a series of calculations of things ever have but the most superficial contact with non-knowledge and the general economy?

What a re-reading offers is the fact that the solutions to these problems are already in Bataille’s work; they are simply covered over and neglected. The solution comes from the linking of a driven, directed secular time to the non-discursive, sacred time. This can be accomplished by using the preceding Lacanian concepts to flesh out and supplement Bataille’s own “dramatization.” What I hope to do is magnify the role that dramatization plays in inner experience, emphasizing its necessity more than Bataille himself does. Along this path, the limitations of faith will become clear.

Excessive Religion, Part 6: The Death of God and Fidelity

2007-12-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

Part 5

Recap of Part 5: In faith, the promise of the future works upon the present.

What does one do with the death of God, then? God is dead, and as Lacan would said, the Other is barred. Yet, as Jean-Luc Marion shows, any insistence on the non-existence of God must offer a conceptual and therefore limited definition of the God it wishes to dismiss. Such a limited view of God can only ever be an idol, and so any atheism is only worth as much as its concept of God. A true, rigorous atheism, then, does not like in rejecting the existence of a being called God, whatever ontic or ontological characteristics one wishes to ascribe to this God. The existence and ontological status of God is not the primary issue; the issue is God’s status as the Autre, the Other that fulfills desire. Atheism is nothing other than the rejection of such a status. In other words, atheism is the rejection of faith in God. It is the rejection of God as sublime object and of the fantasies that establish the supposed relationship to God. The atheist simply does not have faith in God, “God” or the crossed God.

If faith corresponds to fantasy, than atheism corresponds to the traversal of fantasy and the refusal of God as the signifier of object a. Rejecting God as the object of desire allows the opportunity for a new relationship to one’s desire; to own one’s desire as if it were not a part of the other. Instead of encountering my desire and unconscious as an other, I can claim it and take responsibility for it. Where it was, there I will come into being.

The imperatives of faith are well known; the subject must act in the name of the desire of the other. The atheist faces a no less stringent imperative. In the final chapter of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan outlines a conception of ethics revolving around the concept of not giving ground on one’s desire. A direction relationship to desire - in which one says “I” where the other’s desire used to be - is one that sets the subject in a place of radical responsibility. Desire, because it must be fulfilled, cannot but demand action. The difference between faith and atheist desire is that an atheist act’s in the name of their own desire, while the faithful subject acts for God’s desire. The atheist holds a fidelity to their own desire, hence another term for the atheist is the subject of fidelity. The subject of fidelity necessarily acts towards a point that lies in the future; endlessly deferred, perhaps, but the action is necessary none the less.

Both the subjects of faith and fidelity are active in pursuit of a goal that is continuously deferred into the future. Both are active within an economy of libidinal flows in contradistinction to those without faith or fidelity. It is possible to live without either faith or fidelity, without any pursued desire at all. Lacan would term such a figure the obsessional neurotic, the person that is only ever capable of questioning and hedging. The obsessional neurotic is only capable of questioning; this cripples action and makes a movement to a future goal impossible.

Excessive Religion, Part 5: Faith and Time

2007-12-14T12:58:00.000-05:00

Part 4

Recap of Part 4: The faithful relationship to God is the fantasy that takes God as the ultimate object of desire.

Two elements of the above will bear on what follows. The first is obvious: faith as sublation requires a God that is an object. God is an object that is raised into the dignity of the Thing. However else this God is predicated, it must carry the status of a definite object. In a sense, God must be held to occupy both the position of object a and Autre. God is both a person and a structural position; faith offers the ultimate fantasy scenario of the satisfaction of desire through God as the sublime object.

The second element is that of deferral into the future. Ritual actions are carried out in order to secure God’s desire - a securing that is always deferred into the future. This deferral is how religion “respects” or “avoids” the void, the empty space. Religion avoids the fact that desire is always deferred by promising a future time in which desire will be fulfilled. This promise of eternal life is well known; heaven is nothing but a place in which one will perpetually enjoy the jouissance of the Other.

The present, however, is not neglected. The present is a time of looking to the future fulfillment, to the undoing of the fall, to the undoing of castration. The present is a time of anticipation, but not of inaction; the repetition, the striving for God’s desire, all demand a heavy load upon the faithful. One cannot make a libidinal investment in God without taking on both duties and joy. The present is a time of work, of watchfulness, of engaged repetition of acts that will usher in the future possibility of enjoyment. The present also enjoys the effects of the sublime. To those with faith that makes one object sublime, all other objects reflect the faint glow of the divine. In a capital driven, mechanistic world, only the elevation of one particular object offers the rest the ability to have value.

Faith can also be seen as an imaginary relationship - in other words, a fantasy. Faith is the construction of a fantasy in which God’s desire is aroused and offered. The praxis of faith such as rituals or charitable works of whatever content are the scenarios in which God’s desire is aroused and in which the subject is promised the enjoyment of God.

Both sublimation and fantasy offer promises for the future. The satisfaction of desire is promised, if only after death. Sublimation takes God’s satisfaction as its object and fantasy creates scenarios in which God’s desire is aroused. Faith is therefore oriented to a future time, an orientation that creates significances for the present. The fantasy scenarios must be acted out.

It is that “must” that needs to be considered more carefully. The promises of full satisfaction are conditional - the fantasy always involves the need for some sort of submission. Faith demands actions and commitments even from the most ardent Lutheran. For instance, rejection of the value of works by Luther was nonetheless accompanied by an absolute insistence on a particular social structure as exemplified by his reaction to the peasant revolts in northern Germany. As good Christians, the peasants were expected to cede some of their freedom to the princes in the name of a future satisfaction.

The fact that the promise of the future asserts demands upon the present is a necessary aspect of faith. Faith involves works in the present devoted to a future faith. Faith is a relationship to an object cause.

Excessive Religion, Part 4: Faith as Libidinal Investment

2007-12-13T11:51:00.000-05:00

Part 3

Recap of Part 3: Religion is the attempt to sublimate lack through respect, as opposed to art or science which deal with lack in their own way.

This description of religious sublimation is adequate so far as it goes, but it needs to be expanded in two ways.

Alenka Zupančič describes the two basic ways in which Lacan speaks of sublimation. The first kind of sublimation is the sublimation that operates on the level of the drive; it allows the drive to find a satisfaction in an object that is different from its aim. For example, the oral drive’s aim is food, but the pleasure of the mouth can be found in another object. The second kind of sublimation works on the level of desire. This sublimation appropriates a particular object and elevates it to the level of the Thing, that which will close the gap in the subject and satisfy desire. This kind of sublimation finds an object and attempts to use it to fill the gap in the subject. It is this second form of sublimation that religious experience relies upon. The object of sublated desire is God. God becomes a figure of libidinal investment, the entity whose own desire is seen as having the ability to satisfy the subject’s own desire.

The second necessary expansion upon Lacan’s 1960 view of religious sublimation is to be found in the eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here, Lacan describes part of the artist’s work as attempts to “arouse the desire of God.” Religious rituals, then, can be seen as attempts to earn the desire of the other. They are actions that are repeated, following upon one another in a linear, temporal series. Each one is an attempt to move forward along the chain of signifiers towards the master signifier, God, who will suture the gap in the subject and satisfy desire. These rituals stage jouissance - in other words, this is a fantasmic arrangement. A narrative and a structure is developed, with specific circumstances to be achieved; a relationship to desire is staged through repetition and metonymic movement along the signifying chain.

To tie the foregoing thoughts together: religion is a structure that is built around the empty space of the subject and the attempt to satisfy the desire this emptiness causes. One particular object - God - is taken as the object capable of filling this desire.

This description of sublimation is intended to replace the concept of faith as epistemological supplement. Faith is a libidinal investment in God as the object that will satisfy desire; it involves a metonymic movement into the future, the repetition of actions that will arouse God’s desire. Faith continuously moves forward in the belief that access to God’s jouissance is possible. This is a picture of the religious life in secular time, or as Bataille might have it, under “common conditions.” God operates in the position of the Autre, the subject supposed to know and that satisfies desire. The faithful relationship to God, then, is the ultimate fantasy. The movement of desire carries the subject into the future, into the repetition of acts designed to gain access to God’s jouissance. It is this God that one may dance before; under what other conditions can explosive joy be felt except in the presence of the (however fantasmic) jouissance of the Autre?

Excessive Religion, Part 3: The Empty Space

2007-12-12T13:52:00.000-05:00

Part 2

Recap of Part 2: Faith is always something that stands in excess of knowledge.

In both the Biblical text and Augustine’s confessions, there is always an element of excess that moves beyond mere knowledge. One does not merely hold beliefs about an object; one makes a libidinal investment in this object. Put another way, the object (God, here) is raised to the dignity of the thing. It is in the seventh year of his seminar, entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, that Jacques Lacan makes some very useful remarks regarding religion and sublimation, remarks that I will then bring to bear on aspects of Bataille’s thought. In this preliminary discussion, I am not trying to draw too many parallels between the thought of Lacan and Bataille; their views of the subject are irreducibly different.

In psychoanalytic thought, the subject lacks. The subject cannot but lack; this the cost of the entry into the symbolic. Because of this lack, the subject must continuously search for an object that will fill this lack. Particular objects are taken to be the thing that will fill this space; This empty space is the cause of desire, desire being the desire for the other’s desire. One believes that the other’s desire will be the Thing that fills this void. The metonymy of desire is a constant movement from object to object, always pushing forward. Each object is discovered to have some internal failing, an inadequacy that generates a dialectical movement to another object. It is this metonymic movement to close this empty space that drives human action.

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan describes three particular ways of dealing with this empty space, this Thing that cannot be whisked away. All three methods are modes of sublimation. He speaks of art, science, and religion. Art builds itself around the Thing, around the empty space. The Thing becomes a source of creativity; the Thing is dressed up but always reappears. Science is an attempt to “foreclose” or deny this empty space; any excess or break in reality is denied in favour of a full description of the chain of conditions. Religion, on the other hand, is an attempt to respect the emptiness. The emptiness is acknowledged and a structure is built up around it. The emptiness becomes the mystery that sustains the religion; perhaps elevated from being a structural element of the subject to an element of ontology as such.

The Conservatives Are Right

2007-12-11T17:40:00.000-05:00

As in correct.

So, the world is ruled by a combination of Empires and Corporations. As the world is, it is basically a Capitalist's wet dream. Why? Why do conservatives always win, aside from the initial stages of various communist revolutions?*

I've seen two examples recently that lead to me believe that conservatives are very often simply smarter than lefties.

First, 2 weeks ago I was invited by a friend to a UWO group called 'Theology on Tap." It was a short lecture held in the grad club. The speaker was talking about Neo-Con godfather Milton Friedman, leftie populist Naomi Klein, and Jesus.

He first discussed Friedman. Friedman was the ideological go-to guy for various U.S. administrations in the 20th century. Buddy buddy with Reagan and Thatcher. What he taught the cons boils down to this: "Only during a crisis can the impossible become the inevitable."

So, various crises around the world were used to shuffle in free market reforms, to crush trade unions, etc. Often violently and painfully -- see Chile and Pinochet, or Thatcher and northern England.

Naomi Klein calls this the "shock doctrine." She sees it as unforgivable manipulation, a brutal violence used against the people. Klein's solution for the world is a return to Keynesian economics, which in a nutshell means government spending in lean times, and financial reticence in times of plenty. This is meant to stave off the worst excesses of capitalism. The return to Keynesian economics, to Klein, is entirely possible and desirable.

For the Jesus bit, the speaker presented his own economics -- a return to the jubilee economics of the Old Testament, in which debts are forgiven at particular intervals. He claimed that while he was sympathetic to Klein and found Friedman reprehensible, Klein's liberal humanism was too "thin," or too insubstantial to really found any sort of serious politics. So a serious dose of Jesus is required to fix these problems.

Now, my response. I agree that Klein's ideas are entirely too thin. I saw it coming a mile off when the speaker finally said that Klein insists she is not a revolutionary. Well duh, obviously. here's the thing: any politics that is not too thin must accept that Friedman is right.

Serious change, the kind that sees the impossible become inevitable, only happens during a crisis. How often is a crisis part of a religious conversion story? What was the crucifixion but a crisis that made the twin impossibilities of the resurrection and founding of the church inevitable? And as for the speaker's jubilee economics, surely he'd be the first to admit the idea is totally impossible. But could it be made inevitable?

Klein's rejection of the impossible is exactly why leftist humanism so often ends up being so anemic, so whiny, so utterly fucking retarded. Lefties need to start thinking in terms of the impossible, just like cons.

The second anecdote is taken from here. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted a conversation between the article writer and an anonymous, highly ranked member of the Bush admin:

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

And that's kind of it, isn't it? The cons win on a strategic level because they act and change reality, while lefties can only claim tactical victories (ie, civil rights) because they insist on spending all their time coming up with good, correct propositions about reality. The conservatives learned Marx's maxim about changing the world, not studying it; the lefties didn't.

A leftist politics that is going to be able to compete with conservatives needs to be able to embrace the crisis, and the impossible, and it needs to be able to work upon the public imagination, the fantasies that bind us together. Conservatives have done this really well, and it's time to start learning from them.

*I'm fully aware that conservatives have plenty to complain about - gay marriage, etc. But the world is basically a place in which conservatives can be basically happy about the status quo, and all problems are merely hiccups that can be ironed out with enough prayer, guns or free enterprise. Unlike lefties, who think the status quo itself is rotten.

The Inverted World

2007-12-11T17:38:00.000-05:00

2 posts down, you'll see that the internets have declared my blog to be all but unreadable. This is fine. Still, I've decided to express an opinion on jargon.

The continental tradition has built up a reputation for impossible jargon and vulgar relativism. They're the postmodernists, and if you write something like they do, your blog's reading level will be College (Postgrad). Incomprehensible and completely impractical, it seems. Nothing about it accords with common sense. Another pretty common accusation is that the jargon is used just so that the author can fool the readers into thinking the author is smarter than he really is.

There are a few things here. First, the tyranny of common sense. The insistence that philosophical jargon is bizarre and counter-intuitive amounts to the insistence that all thinking be common thinking. In any other area, however, the common is the mediocre. Pennies are common. Michael Crichton novels are common. On the other side, the excellent is the uncommon. Common sense is always mediocre, while uncommon sense at least as the opportunity to become excellent, or path-breaking, or truly creative.

The second thing is the insistence that thinking be practical. That we must study reality in order to know how to interact with it in the best way - morality, knowledge, politics, etc. However, this subordinates all thinking to a factory-like process. Thought becomes a product that enters the market place, and is consumed like a bottle of coke. The problem is that the commodification or instrumentalization of any human effort - like thinking - immediately forces thinking to become a popular product. Any sort of individuality is stripped away from it. To insist that thinking be practical is to miss the basic nature of thinking, which, at its best, actually lies prior to the theory/praxis distinction. It's not a product, it's a way of being in the world. In the jargon, its an ethos, a particular way of "dwelling."

So thinking should neither be common nor "practical." I think this is partly why Hegel called philosophy "the inverted world" - everything appears upside down. And this, to me, is the great merit of the entire project - to be able to turn one's world on its head.

To turn one's world on its head, to create concepts or find distinctions, to think in an uncommon way, one needs tools adequate for the job. The tools are the words, and sometimes the words are difficult. It is entirely worth the effort, though. It's a strangely exhilarating experience to reflect on the temporal structure of the moment of decision, but such reflection can only take place when one has a particular vocabulary and is willing to leave behind common sense.

One should always be able to step back into the "real world," of course, and discuss matters with friends and family that have no particular interest in the jargon. At this point, if one wishes to avoid the inane repetition of common sense, all one can do is fall back on the ethos one has developed through thinking. It's a bit like having a new common sense, a new default way of looking at things. This can be expressed without the jargon, and hopefully some communication can take place.

Excessive Religion, Part 2: Faith

2007-12-11T11:08:00.000-05:00

Part 1

Recap of Part 1: How do the sacred and the secular interpenetrate one another?

In order to develop a concept of how the sacred can be expressed in our lives, it is necessary to outline one vital aspect of religious experience that is only minimally dealt with or accounted for by Lacan and Bataille.

There is a very common notion of “faith” that has given rise to endless nonsensical chatter about religion. The definition of faith as some kind of epistemological concept needs to be set aside. Faith is all too often seen as a supplement to knowledge; the claim that a particular proposition is believed because of “faith” immediately creates the age-old faith versus reason conflict.

I would argue that this concept of faith is wholly inadequate for explaining religious life. Even the faithful that speak of faith as a supplement to knowledge are unable to account for certain aspects of religious experience. The first aspect of religious experience that faith as epistemology cannot account for is the inability of belief in particular propositions to alter behavior. Sundered from any more fundamental role in the faithful subject’s life, the belief in any number of religious propositions will not produce anything that resembles devotion (or excess).

It cannot be denied that faith involves knowledge, but must be made clear is the excess involved. There is always something more to faith, something that carries it beyond mere knowledge. In terms of the Christian religion, faith as epistemological supplement is explicitly rejected in the Bible and implicitly by thinkers such as St. Augustine. Two particular Biblical texts offer support for rejection this version of faith. The first is Matthew 7:21-23:
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'"

This text is a clear image of people being judged and rejected by Christ not because they did not accept certain beliefs about Christ. They claimed to believe in Christ, and they even claim to have acted upon these beliefs. Christ does not dispute this point; he never says that their beliefs were false or that their actions did not take place. The charge that Christ levels against them is that he did not know them. There was something lacking about the religious stance of these people. If faith is only a supplement for knowledge, or even merely some kind of Archimedean point for knowledge, this story would be rendered absurd.

St. Augustine’s Confessions contains an implicit rejection of this propositional faith. It is his famous prayer, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” This is another point that would be rendered absurd if faith was reducible to knowledge (or a source of it). This prayer can be rephrased as “I believe that chastity and continence are demanded of me, but I will defer any attempt to fulfill these demands. Augustine could not pray this prayer without already believing in God; but he could also not pray this prayer if he had made what might be termed a libidinal investment in God. God remains one object among many to Augustine at this point, without any particular quality that demands Augustine’s attention. It is only later that he truly “converts,” and ceases to defer a true commitment to God and the Christian way of life. His previous acceptance of truths about God are shown to be meaningless.

Excessive Religion, Intro: Sacred/Secular Time

2007-12-10T17:50:00.000-05:00

It requires only the most passing knowledge of human life to know that religion is one of the most powerful and vital forces we experience. All too often, religion is dismissed as a speculative cosmology or fundamentalist ideology. Against these dismissals, one should insist that elements of the sacred are deeply ingrained in human life as such; the only question is how to articulate these elements.

Georges Bataille describes religion as a search for a lost intimacy. Achieving this intimacy involves intense personal experience in which the concerns of daily life are left behind. What this amounts to is a description of long periods of common time, otherwise known as secular time, punctuated by extraordinary flashes of immanence and intimacy that can be described as a sacred time. Reason and knowledge give way to an ecstatic non-knowledge. A question left open here is the relationship between sacred and secular time. If they operate as opposites, how can one be expressed in the other? How can there be any sort of cause and effect relationship between the two? I would argue that a certain common ground must be found between the sacred and the secular, a ground that exists prior to any particular dogma or practice.

It is Jacques Lacan that offers an opportunity to see how the sacred and the secular are expressed in one another. The psychoanalytic notion of desire and its metonymic movement through time provides an adequate explanation for both the intensity of religious experience that Bataille describes an for how reason can produce non-reason. The concept of desire also offers hints as to how the sacred can be expressed in our own lives. It also offers an alternate view of the subject’s relation to the general economy of Bataille. What I hope to find here is an experience that one may move towards in the future and experience, but that dissolves in the past, again leaving over the need for the metonymic movement of desire.

SMRT

2007-12-05T18:09:00.001-05:00

That's right, bitches.

Love and Law, Collected Posts

2007-10-29T10:23:00.000-05:00

Part 1: Elaborating on Love and Law
Part 2: The Law/Desire Connection
Part 3: Feminine Non-All
Part 4: Excess and Mortification
Part 5: Two Views on Redemption
Part 6: "As If"
Part 7: Parallax Gap and Conclusion

Love and Law, Part 7: A Shift in Perspective, and Conclusion

2007-10-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

Part 6

Summary of Part 6: When you are working within the confines of the pleasure principle, a life gripped by love and one crushed by law look about the same.

Žižek makes it quite clear that the perspectivism of the parallax gap is operative here. The life gripped by love and the life crushed by the insane superego appear identical from the outside. Both are lives that appear to be utterly without freedom; what separates them is not a change in content or actions but a shift in perspective. The way love appears as identical to Law can only be surmounted by a shift in the subject themselves - one must enter the life of the spirit for themselves.

The non-all logic of love is hinted at in the New Testament again in 1 Corinthians. This is the passage that speaks of love as being only for incomplete beings; it is only incomplete beings with incomplete knowledge that have access to knowledge. However, this passage also speaks of love as still existing even when knowledge is complete. This, again, must be read in terms of the non-all. Žižek says “love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but precisely that ‘nothing’ which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge.”

It is not difficult to see the application of this to the symbolic realm of the Law. One that lives the life of the spirit is submersed in the Law, living out the “as if” demands. The one that is living life instead of existing in a state of living death is encompassed by a rigid series of responsibilities and demands upon conduct; however, they are not totalized by the Law. The subject never becomes an automaton, engaged in compulsive repetition of acts, trying to answer the question of what the Other wants.

It is here that we may return to the Kantian relationship between morality and freedom cited above. Kant argues that the ability to legislate laws is the pre-condition of freedom, and vice verse. Freedom cannot exist without a certain relationship to the symbolic Law. Freedom without Law will never have access to jouissance. What is freedom but the ability to be thrown into one’s desire, which is held by the Law and guided by the nothing of love? Law, desire, love and freedom all presuppose one another, though, as Paul would say, “the greatest of these is love.”

By way of conclusion, it is clearly the way of love that steers a path through the dismal responses to the harsh dialectic of Law and desire. The path of the libertine attempts to deny Law itself, and discovers that pleasure descends into mechanistic repetition. It leads to a life incapable of investment in any particular object and the abandonment of desire. The alternate path of the ascetic finds the superego growing immeasurably, swallowing up any last hint of agency or life. One’s desire is constantly foreclosed, deferred, mutilated. Both of these paths lead to the Pauline existential positions of death. Love, however, leaves the subject under the Law, but the lack of totalization leads to the ability to make choices and decisions as a subject. Learning to love is, then, a vital part of fulfilling the psychoanalytic maxim of wo es wor, soll ich werden. Love is an element of that which allows me to appear where it was, for my desire to grow where it was once crushed by the desire of the other.

Love and Law, Part 6: "As If"

2007-10-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

Part 5

Summary of Part 5: In the participatory reading of Christ's death, the presence of the Law is in fact increased when under a regime of love. To see how this is possible, we must again look at the feminine "non-all" logic.

The critical passage to begin with in Paul is the “as if” passage from 1 Corinthians. Paul exhorts the Christians to live in a manner in which they have dealings with the world in a kind of suspended manner; the Christians are those who “rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as if they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as if they had no dealings with it.” One should live “as if” one were under the Law, “as if” one were subjected to a series of great demands, despite not being so. This living one’s life under a series of great demands shows that Pauline love cannot simply be reduced to a suspension of the Law. The Law remains active; the symbolic order is not somehow abolished. What is accomplished in this life of living “as if” is that the Law is no longer a totalizing force sustained by its own transgressions, its own constitutive exceptions. The Law otherwise achieves a totalizing dominance, complete with its own transgressions. It is the introduction of love that prevents this totalization, this bear subjection to the Law.

When one lives in “the way of the spirit,” the transgression of the Law ceases because the Law is suspended. In other words, one lives with sin. Here the issue of the constitutive exception becomes vital. Any structure is of course maintained by one; if sin disappears from the subject’s life, what place then does the Law have?

What this suspension of Law - to live “as if” one were not under the Law - amounts to is an engaged position, the (non-biological) life, a “fully subjectivized, positive yes!” to [one’s] own life.” It is this exuberant affirmation of life that throws one into the grip of the “as if” demands, the laws without their constitutive exceptions. Žižek says this best in his description of falling passionately in love:

“Love shatters our daily life as a heavy duty whose performance demands heavy sacrifices on the level of the ‘pleasure of principle’ - how many things must a man renounce? ‘Freedom,’ drinks with friends, card evenings.”

The duty of love - the fidelity to desire - will always be the harshest series of demands possible upon one’s life. St. Paul found himself condemned to death in a Roman prison, Antigone was buried alive in a tomb, and Slavoj Žižek does not play cards with friends. The Law does not disappear; what love does is “suspend the obscene libidinal investment on account of which the Law generates / solicits its own transgressions.” It is sin - transgression, resistance to the law - that makes the law appear to be a foreign power crushing the subject. So the problem is not that the law does not contain enough love - but rather that it contains too much love. I am unable to recognize myself in the Law insofar as I cling to the immediacy of a “love” that feels threatened by the rule of Law. The Christian suspension of the law remains is a love that remains tied to the Jewish law that creates a distance from the social order, while the pagan suspension of the law is only aimless transgression. Enjoy your not enjoying. Obey the law as if you were not obeying it - obey from love.

This setting of love against Law that Paul appears to be using to critique the older Jewish position is, however, exactly how the Jewish law already works. The Jewish law doesn’t have a superego backing it up; because it does not rely on an obscene underside, it is the excess of the law itself that address us, not the law.

This, as Zizek says, is the ultimate alternative. The opposition between law and love is internal to law itself - the gap between the specific, determinate, positive laws and the infinite superego. Love and the excessive superego appear identical from within the frame of the law. Put another way, when you’re working within the confines of the pleasure principle, a life gripped by love and one crushed by law look about the same.

Love and Law, Part 5: Two Views on Redemption

2007-10-25T12:08:00.000-05:00

Part 4

Summary of Part 4: The Jewish law is typically seen as harsh and repressive, while Christian love and grace are set against this. Is this an adequate reading of redemption?

There are two basic interpretations of how the redemption made possible by Christ’s death operates. The first interpretation is sacrificial, and the second is participatory. We are redeemed either because Christ pays out debt to God, or because we participate in his death - we “die to sin” in Christ.

The problem with the sacrificial reading is that it leads up right back to the dominance of the Law. Christ pays a debt for us, thus simply leading us into a gift economy. Christ gives us a gift, and we must pay him back with what Spinoza might have called "the basest servitude." With this debt simply transferred to the Crucified rather than God, we are placed in a position in which we must continuously ask of Christ “what do you want from me?” Christ takes the position of the infinite superego; the infinite debt of sin can never be paid. Christ’s love becomes a mask for this infinite debt, this hyperbolic Law. The sacrificial reading ends with the same impasse as the attempt to fully accede to the Law: domination and repression.

Žižek expands on the difficulties with the sacrificial reading with a second biblical passage, offering context for the first. The passage ends with a rhetorical question, “and why should we not say ‘Let us do evil so that good may come!’” The suggestion St. Paul is intending to refute here is that, because God’s grace and forgiveness is a good thing, we should engage in ever more and greater sins so that more forgiveness will take place. What this does, however, is place God into the position of the pervert: God’s desire to act as our saviour becomes an imperative to sin and transgress. God’s actions become the source of our pleasure. This still ties pleasure to transgression, however, and the morbid guilt that arises from this remains.

It is the participatory reading that offers a move away from the oppressive superego. According to Žižek, it is Paul’s “way of the Spirit” that offers a way out of the dialectic of Law and desire. It is a matter of rejecting the subjective position of “death” and choosing the alternate position of “life.” The key to this choice lies in another Biblical passage from 1 Corinthians: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial.” This is a surprising shift away from the usual moralistic tone of religion; the Law finds itself suspended - by what? - love. In the sacrificial reading of the crucifixion, love becomes a supplement for the Law in the form in the infinite superego. In the participatory reading, however, “the Law which regulates and prohibits certain acts is suspended.” The Christian ceases to be bound by the Law, and their affirmations and negations are guided by love, not Law. Put another way, the Christian undergoes the second death, entering the realm of ate. This love beyond Law is no longer the transgressive desire that is aroused by the Law, but rather itself a fidelity (which, as Alain Badiou points out, is itself a term of love) to desire. The superego ceases to shout “do your duty!” and das Ding ceases to drag us into doing what we hate. When one is guided by love, one’s duty is their desire.

The Law, being constituted by the symbolic realm, obviously does not somehow disappear. In fact, the Law’s presence may actually grow or intensify under this regime of love. To see how, we must return to The Puppet and the Dwarf and it’s exploitation of the feminine non-all logic.

Love and Law, Part 4: Excess and Mortification

2007-10-23T17:56:00.000-05:00

Part 3

Summary of Part 3: In order to escape the sin/desire deadlock, an element of excess needs to be found in life. Zizek looks to Christ as a figure of this excessive life.

In order to frame his argument, Žižek offers us a portrait of a confused world that, in attempting to deny the “Law,” merely finds itself denying excess. This is a world that is trapped on the safe side of the Law. In other words, it is a world immersed in the pleasure principle. A world that denies excess cannot help but exist in a kind of living death, the Pauline existential position of flesh. Žižek offers an example from physics called the Higgs field as an illustration. The Higgs field is a condition under which less energy is expended to exist as something rather than dissipate into nothing. This is a concept reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” The Higgs field is a fine metaphor for the difference between the death drive and the nirvana principle. The nirvana principle seeks the lowest tension; it is easier to live a sickly life than to burn out like Achilles on the battlefield. It is not life that is opposed by this nirvana principle, by this submission to the pleasure principle - such an opposition would require far too much effort. What is opposed by the man locked into the Law and governed by the pleasure principle is the excess of life.

It is a world that combines pleasure with constraint. Everything is permitted so long as its dangerous element is removed. Anything that would require risk or commitment is eliminated; hence we have the goal of revolution without revolution, coffee without caffeine, and the “libertine” insistence on the legalization of a weak drug like marijuana.

In this world, the only possible extreme is a negative one: absolute evil. This is the central place that the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags hold in the twentieth century; they stand as warnings for all those that would posit any sort of rigid goals. Any attempts to agree on a positive good are held in suspicion as attempts to wield “power” over others, like a variation on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s warning that revolution inevitably leads to the gulag. The “good,” then, can never be anything other than a defense against “evil.” Positive good can never be anything other than a position of moderation.

The (alleged) denial of law (which is only an affirmation of hedonistic pleasure) is bound up with the denial of love, jouissance and excess. A fine example of this can be found in Antigone: Antigone’s sister, Ismene. After Antigone informs her of Creon’s orders against burying Polyneices, and of her intent to violate this order,

Ismene exclaims:

"Oh no! Think carefully, my sister.
[. . . .]
And we must obey this order, even if it hurts us more.
As for me, I will say to those beneath the earth
This prayer: 'Forgive me, I am held back by force.'
And I’ll obey the men in charge. My mind
Will never aim too high, too far.”

Ismene’s advice contains four elements. The first is the demand to “think carefully.” This advice can obviously many different things, but it is all too easy for “careful thought” to simply emerge as the infinite deferral of action. Ismene, by opening her speech with this phrase, indicates her intent to calculate out the possible goods and harms that may result from action. Secondly, Ismene says that they must obey Creon, “even if it hurts.” What is this advice if not to choose a sickly, painful life over the even greater pain of rushing beyond the pleasure principle? Ismene would rather endure the constant, nagging, low level suffering and guilt of having betrayed her brother rather than face the potentially swift death of violating the law. Thirdly, Ismene claims that external forces are controlling or limiting her. She is “held back by force.” She is deferring to the Other, to the Law, in the attempt to avoid pain. Finally, she says that she will always limit her goals to the possible, later going on to say that “it’s the highest wrong to chase after what’s impossible.” A positive good, in a world that denies excess, is nothing other than the impossible or the insane.

Against this mortification of life, Žižek sets the figure of Christ on the cross. Christ’s death, of course, is an attempt to deal with the Law and sin (the Thing). The Jewish tradition of the law is typically seen as oppressive and legalistic, while Christian love and grace are set against this. The question remains as to whether or not this is an adequate reading of the mechanics of Christian redemption.

Love and Law, Part 3: Feminine Non-All

2007-10-15T11:05:00.000-05:00

Part 2

Summary of Part 2: The Law crushes life, and only something like madness can escape the law and affirm life.

A partial attempt to escape that Law/madness battle is something like libertinism, the “path of uninhibited jouissance.” This amounts to the denial of the Law, the move toward a life of pure pleasure without restraint. This collapses, however, when the necessity of the Law for pleasure is remember. Sin - or pleasure - needs the Law. If one denies the Law, one has no access to anything but the most banal enjoyment, like Zarathustra’s little pleasure of the day and the little pleasure of the night.

Another attempt to escape the cycle of guilt and pleasure is the full acceptance of the Law. In other words, this is the choice to live one’s life in a radically moral way. The fault here, as Lacan points out in his discussion of Freud, is that whoever “attempts to submit to the moral Law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel.” The Law, when one willingly enters into its economy, can only grow. The positive order of being attempts to overtake all excess, creating a world in which every action is carefully formed to continuously answer the question of what the Law wants. The life thrown into the Law is spent asking the Law, which is the Other, “what do you want from me?” Because there is no specific answer offered, the subject must search for more and more emphatic ways of answering this question for themselves.

So here we have three separate yet related problems for the relationship between Law and desire. Under Law, desire can only be expressed in a hyperbolic way, in a rush into the repulsive real where morbid guilt awaits. The question for both Lacan and Žižek revolves around the possibility of moving beyond this impasse. Lacan asks if the ethics of psychoanalysis leaves “us clinging to that dialectic.” The search is for a relationship to desire beyond the Law, and Žižek locates this in a non-all logic of love.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek introduces his reading of non-all logic by dealing with a potential problem for Lacan’s formulations of sexuation. Žižek pits Bruce Fink’s and Suzanne Bernard’s reading of this against each other. In Zizek’s portrayal, Fink argues that feminine jouissance is both ineffable and inextricably bound up with speech. Fink appears willing to allow this sort of contradiction or incompletion in Lacan’s work. This seems like a reasonable enough position to take, considering Lacan’s general views on lack and knowledge. However, Žižek insists that this cannot be written off as an innocent contradiction, as this problem lays at the crux of sexual difference itself. To solve this problem, Žižek turns to the work of Suzanne Bernard in the same volume.

The logic of feminine non-all does not mean there is some mysterious part of a woman that remains outside the symbolic. Rather, there is a “simple” lack of totalization. All totalization takes place through its constitutive exception, in much the same way that the Law is sustained by transgression. Here, the argument is made that the woman is in the symbolic without exception. There is nothing in a woman that is not immersed in the phallus. So the woman is completely symbolized, but because there is no exception, she cannot be said to be totalized by the symbolic. There must be some excess here, a nothing that is a something. It will be by following up on this logic of non-all with a reading of Christianity universality that Žižek tackles the Law and desire problem.

Part of the solution involves the idea that something can be immersed by not totalized because there is an excess; in the case of the feminine non-all subjection to the Law, there is the jouissance of the other. Being in the symbolic without any sort of exception produces its own excess, formulated by Lacan as S(A). It is down the road of excess that we need to travel if this question of Law and desire is to be answered. Žižek will follow St. Paul in looking to Christian agape and Christ as a figure of excessive (eternal) life for clues to the solution.

Love and Law, Part 2: The Law/Desire Connection

2007-10-04T21:16:00.000-05:00

Part 1

Summary of Part 1: The Law creates/sustains Desire/sin.

There are three specific, related problems in this situation (of Law sustaining Desire/sin). The first problem is that the relationship of Law and desire means our desire only ever appears as a death drive, as a movement beyond the pleasure principle. As Lacan says, it is only because of the Law that “sin . . . takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character.” Law only ever allows enjoyment to take place as a transgression.

Lacan also traces the oppressiveness of the Law back to the logic of the murder of the great man. This mythic origin has the “all-powerful, half animal creature of the great horde” being killed by his sons. The sons kill the father in the attempt to achieve their desire; they find, however, that the guilt of this murder imposes profound guilt. Lacan says that “every act of jouissance gives rise to something that is inscribed in the book of debts of the Law.” The Law is an economy of debts and payments that can never be superceded; one is forever caught in a cycle of guilt and pleasure.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek offers a second problem for this intertwined relationship of Law and desire. He lays out St. Paul’s ideas of life and death as “existential positions,” that is, not as biological states but as ways of carrying out life. Žižek here equates the Law with the positive order of being; the mechanical, extant, non-excessive life. This is living one’s life in a type of living death. Life, on the other hand, exists under divine grace - a sort of universalism. Death is equated with Law, Life is equated with love. The existential position of Life is that which is excessive, capable of moving beyond the Law and the positive order of being.

The very introduction of the Law, then, creates the Life/Death dichotomy. In other words, the subject is torn between life and death, between mechanical, conscious subjection to the Law and an unconscious desire for transgression. The unconscious becomes the only affirmation of life; it might be the case that Bataille’s exuberant, repulsive festivities are the only expression of freedom in such a world.

Lurking Outside the Tomb With a Shotgun

2007-10-04T21:10:00.000-05:00

(Or, the Second Problem With the New Atheists)

I seek God, I seek God. Wither is God? I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now?. . . . Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. . . . .

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment.

I come too early. My time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering – it has not yet reached the ears of man. . . . This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.

What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?

- Nietzsche, rushing in where even Spinoza feared to tread.

If one has a look at Richard Dawkins’ homepage, he gleefully lists all the books written by Christians rising to challenge himself and the other New Atheists. The battle is joined, and he is confident in being on the winning side. He considers his arguments against the existence of God to be powerful ones. The Christians, for their part, have marshaled every ounce of reason and rhetoric at their disposal to oppose these atheists. Best sellers will be written, and millions of dollars will be earned on both sides.

The argument is an old one, of course. Cataloguing reasons to believe or disbelieve in God’s existence is probably the second oldest profession. It is a merry-go-round that will continue as long as the deed remains distant from us.

Part of the glory of 20th century philosophy was the attempt to think the unthought. Heidegger, Derrida and others tracked down the various merry-go-rounds that the west had been playing on for the last few millennia, and tried to smash them. The idea was to think without metaphysics, or, in this context, to think without God. This does not mean to think without truth, or conviction, or to think arbitrarily. Rather, the search was for a way to dwell in a world in which God is dead as opposed to non-existent.

As usual, Slavoj Zizek says it well:

“. . . we are never in a position directly to choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is already located in the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserable, pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant - this is the stance of a truly atheistic subject.”

(Am I suggesting a cheap psychoanalysis of Dawkins et al? Their daddies didn’t love them, so they’re searching for/rebelling against God? Absolutely not. The idea that our families – and our past as such – dominate what we are today is a cheap escape from anxiety. Yes, we have habits, and those habits started somewhere. That is not the same as creating what amounts to an idol of the past.)

What the New Atheists are doing is playing the same old game, the same old dogmatic metaphysical ramblings that Kant first struck a hammer blow against. It is time to move on, time to leave behind dogmatic metaphysics (in a nutshell, dogmatic metaphysics is the search for the unconditioned). "God is dead" is not equivalent to the statement "God does not exist." It is not so much a statement about whether or not God exists as a thing, but rather a statement about God's irrelevance. What Dawkins et al repeatedly show is that the death of God is an event still far from their ears. They are no more aware that God is dead than any Christian.

1st Excursus: What exactly is the death of God? This is not a question of statistics, of the empirical facts of Europe's atheism and North America's religiosity. Belief in God continues to exist, and will probably never go away. What the death of God means is the death of the possibility of any unquestionable highest value; all of us are caught up in an endless reflexivity. Everything is questionable, which is not to say everything is being questioned. Everything is a matter of calculation, of pragmatic value. Everything exists only to be used, to be placed in reserve.

2nd Excursus: Certainly one of the primary expressions of this nihilism is Christian apologetics. The Christian apologetic par excellence is presuppositionalism, in which the twin nihilist forces of calculation and (obscene, unacknowledged) doubt find expression. Only a closeted nihilist finds himself so utterly bankrupt that he must place all value, power and knowledge in an external object.

God and Jesus are dead. Dawkins doesn't know it, and will probably spend the rest of his life shadow boxing specters. Good for them. It's time to move on.

Elaborating on Love and Law

2007-10-03T10:45:00.000-05:00

In a culture in which love and sex have become synonymous, the need for questioning the concept of love becomes ever greater. To equate love with sex is to make love an act, something engaged in only under specific circumstances. However, a more traditional concept of love that centres on an emotional state is no more adequate; emotional states come and go. If love is to have some place in our lives, it must be at home in the subject as subject. Love must find a place in the subject that is not affect, emotion or action. If love is to be rooted in subjectivity, at least in Lacanian terms, it must have a relationship to the Borromean knot structure of the subject.

To describe love as an active force rather than a passive trait, we must have an idea of how love affects the tri-part structure. How does love interact with the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real? This is a broad question that one could say Lacan arguably struggled with his entire career. The question will have to be narrowed, then. What relationship does love have to desire, and that which institutes desire, the Law? This is one of Lacan’s questions in his seminar concerning ethics, and it is the driving question of Slavoj Zizek’s book The Puppet and the Dwarf. Love does not eliminate the Law, or mitigate the Law. Neither does it guide the Law. Love, here, suspends the Law. This suspension is not the Bataillan festival, the madness that overtakes a social group and sees social norms disintegrate. This suspension has a very specific meaning: love suspends the Law’s ability to produce transgression and morbid guilt. The subject of love continues to find themselves under the Law, but with a lurking nothing, an element that prevents the excess that does nothing but foul life.

As Kant opens his Critique of Practical Reason, a footnote appears tucked off onto the margin of the page. Here, Kant claims that freedom is the essence of morality, and that morality is the condition that makes us aware of freedom. This mutually conditional relation cannot help but bring to mind the relationship Lacan develops between the Law and the Thing; “I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.” This explicit use of St. Paul highlights the fact that the Law produces its own transgressions. Our desire is aroused by the Law; to understand how this works a brief description of the logic of castration is necessary. Žižek, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, offers a useful explanation of this idea. He begins by critiquing the usual interpretation of the fort/da story. The boy’s spool is not the compensation for the mother’s absence, but rather her presence. The boy is working out his anxiety over her overbearing, infinitely encroaching desire, her jouissance. The mother’s desire crowds out the boy’s own desire. The boy’s solution is, in effect, the acting out of his own castration. The insistence that he is incapable of fulfilling his mother’s desire is what provides the necessary space for his own desire. The boy’s desire, then, is only sustainable by means of the institution of the Law. The boy has to assert his own incompleteness, his own split subjectivity.

This version of the fort/da game is a picture of how the Law sustains desire. If the boy was not subject to the Law, he would be forever suffocated by his mother. This arousal of desire by the Law is specifically read into the Biblical text Romans 7:8-18 by both Lacan and Žižek. In this text, St. Paul argues that “sin, seizing and opportunity in the commandment, produces in me all kinds of covetousness.” In other words, the Law produces its own transgressions. The Law is an enticement, an enticement to an object that is always beyond it. The very fact that this object is forbidden only makes it more attractive.

The First Problem with the New Atheists

2007-09-21T18:44:00.000-05:00

Benedictus Spinoza can arguably be seen as one of the fore-runners of today's materialism. His mechanistic universe in which God is identifiable with all that is has proven to be something of a philosophical Rorschach test. He has worn the guise of a pantheist, an atheist, and a renegade Jew. Whichever of these interpretations is right, he wielded one of the most stubbornly powerful intellects the western world has ever seen. One cannot be a powerful thinker without being a powerful creator; he smashed accepted doctrines and created new ones with an almost unique intensity. Between his Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he ground traditional religious views beneath his heel. For all this, some French theologian or another called him the "most dangerous man of the century."

Without trying to be too romantic about this, those who can think new things and hold to truths are always foes of the status quo. The people that found new ways of thinking and create new concepts always, of course, stand in excess of the status quo. Atheism has commonly enough been the stance of these excessive figures. Atheism was a view that set one upon an outsider's life; a life that was not necessarily dangerous, but comforts of various kinds were sacrificed. See the almost-atheists like Hobbes and Kant, or the virulent atheists like Nietzsche and Russell.

Things are different now. We live in a Liberal! Tolerant! society. The status quo allows a great deal more latitude in terms of thought. This is not to say that atheism is now a garden-variety view; it is obviously still unpopular and held in suspicion - see the recent polls about Americans disliking atheists. But the world has changed enough that what was once only a position held by dedicated and serious thinkers is now a label worn by rebels without causes.

Vulgar Atheism is now the cheapest form of rebellion there is. All you have to do is say "I'm an atheist" and the eyes of everyone around you will go wide. It's the philosophical equivalent of wearing a leather jacket or getting nipple rings. And just like leather and oddly-placed metal, vulgar atheism is an adolescent trapping.

Adolescence is obviously a necessary stage, but it just as obviously needs to be superseded. Vulgar atheism should never be anything other than a cocoon stage. There's a huge intellectual world out there. It is one thing to sit on your ass well within the confines of the status quo (i.e., traditional religion) and ignore the call of thinking; it is another to set your hand to the plowshare of thought and not plow anything.

Dawkins et al write polemical screeds, assaulting religion. As such, I don't have a problem with this. I'm not knocking them for being atheists. My complaint is that they've picked a fight with a group of people that have traversed their own version of adolescent anxiety. Various religions traditions have their own brand of serious thought and conviction. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have all produced serious work.

Most of that serious work is in the past, of course. Since Luther, the only Christian to be a serious philosopher was Kierkegaard. This does not detract from the monumental achievements of Augustine, Aquinas and Eckhart. Christians are still perfectly capable of retrieving these past possibilities based upon their own resoluteness.

The New Atheists have no such past possibilities, and seem to be unaware of their own historicity. They can scrape at science to find philosophical, political and ethical convictions, but in the end, all the force of their conviction comes purely from negation - the negation of religion. The problem here is that any negation of a thing remains in that same game as the thing itself. Negating religion can never be anything other than a religious act. Dawkins is the flip side of Falwell.

In this interview with Alain Badiou, Badiou discusses the tendency of some Christian thinkers to appropriate his own resolutely atheistic notion of truth and change, and expresses what I think is an important idea for both atheists and Christians engaged in an emancipatory project.

I accept the discussion because I think that in the present world the great and fundamental problem is not between the religious way and the non-religious way. Certainly, it is, finally, very important, but it is not our principal problem. We know that today there is religious conviction that takes the way of sacrifice, religious conviction in the way of enjoyment, and religious conviction in a third way. So we can see that the distinction between religious conviction and non-religious conviction does not determine the topology of our world. We are not in the same position as in previous centuries. Today, religious conviction is important, but it is not the central problem. The world cannot be divided into the religious and the non-religious. So the discussion is, for me, a positive discussion.

What separates the New Atheists from both the properly atheistic subject and the Christian interpolated by love beyond law is the traversal of anxiety, of the dismissal of the need to negate and reject, in favour of the affirmation of both thought and deed.

Part 6: Love Beyond Law and Conclusion

2007-09-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

Part 6

What shakes out of Zizek’s critique of Agamben’s book on Paul The Time That Remains is that the idea of Pauline love as the founding suspension of the law. The critical passage in Paul is the “as if” passage - “buy as if you had no possessions, deal with the world as if you had no dealings with it. It’s not about staying what you are, accepting existing power relations, but rather the position of a thoroughly engaged fighter who ignores things not relavent to the struggle. It is an engaged position of struggle; on pg. 112 it’s described as “an uncanny interpellation beyond ideological interpolation.” It is a life seized by love. The gap between mere pleasure and jouissance is most obvious when a complacent life is shaken and seized by love; the perfomance of love demands sacrifice and duty on the level of the pleasure of principle. Enjoy your not enjoying. Obey the law as if you were not obeying it - obey from love. Thus what Paul attempts to suspend is not so much the law itself, but rather the constituative exceptions - the law’s obscene underside. As Zizek says, “we should suspend the obscene libidinal investment in the law, the investment on account of which the law generates / solicits its own transgressions.”

This uncanny interpellation that Paul is striving for and using to critique the older Jewish position is, however, exactly how the Jewish law already works. The Jewish law doesn’t have a superego backing it up; because it does not rely on an obscene underside, it is the excess of the law itself that address us, not the law.

This, as Zizek says, is the ultimate alternative. The opposition between law and love is internal to law itself - the gap between the specific, determinate, positive laws and the infinite superego. Love and the excessive superego appear identical from within the frame of the law. Put another way, when you’re working within the confines of the pleasure principle, a life gripped by love and one crushed by law look about the same.

Zizek goes on to talk about the famous love passage from Corinthians 13. There are two seemingly contradictory statements: the first is that even when one has all knowledge, there is love. The second is that love is only for incomplete beings.

The only way to resolve the deadlock is to fall back on Lacan’s feminine formula of sexuation. As Zizek says on page 115, “even when it is all (complete, with no exception) the field of knowledge remains, in a way, non-all, incomplete - love is not an exception to the all of knowledge, but precisely that nothing which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. Whether I am with or without knowledge, if I have love, I am a nothing that is aware of itself; made rich through the very awareness of its lack. So, as Zizek goes on to say, “only a lack, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higher than completion.”

Like the co-dependancy of incompleteness and love obeys the feminine formula, the co-dependancy of law and transgression obey the masculine logic. Transgression is the very constituative exception that sustains the law; in the end, this means that love is not just beyond the law, but actually articulates itself as, as Zizek says, “the stance of total immersion in the law. ‘Not all of the subject is within the figure of legal subjection’ equals “there is nothing in the subject which escapes its legal subjection.’” Nothing in the subject escapes the law, but the subject is not totalized by the law - in the same way that the woman is not totalized by the symbolic.

It is sin - transgression, resistance to the law - that makes the law appear to be a foreign power crushing the subject. So the problem is not that the law does not contain enough love - but rather that it contains too much love. I am unable to recognize myself in the law insofar as I cling to the immediacy of love that feels threatened by the rule of law.

So, what it comes down to, is finding a way to relate to the law that itself “unplugs” us from immediate social surroundings; one that acts as an ideological interpollation and gives desire the distance that it needs. The Christian suspension of the law remains is a love that remains tied to the Jewish law that creates a distance from the social order, while the pagan suspension of the law is only aimless transgression.

In conclusion and to sum up, Zizek's project is the search for a law without the obscene underside. The law's obscene underside works like this: think about what happens when you forbid a kid to do something. "Don't eat that cookie." Or, telling an adult "don't fornicate." The effect in both cases is the same: the person actually hears "don't. . . . FORNICATE! FORNICATE!" Forbidden fruit and all that.

Yet the answer is not to dispel all law and say "If you, as a responsible adult, wish to consent to having any form of sex in private, you may do so..." The destruction of the law is, in the end, the destruction of all enjoyment. When the law becomes "you may," life becomes deadened and pathetic.

Love is the force that suspends the "you may," and replaces it with a law that address us directly, without the the obscene underside. It unplugs us from our constructed social surroundings and builds us a new world, one with its own law and duty, the only kind of duty without the obscene underside: the duty that only says "your duty is. . . . DO YOUR DUTY!"

Puppet/Dwarf 5: Excessive Life and the Last Man

2007-09-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

Part 4

It is that image of Christ’s offer of eternal life, aka excessive life, being connected with law, love and suffering that Zizek takes up in the next chapter. He sets up a difference between the Freudian death drive and the nirvana principle by using an example from physics... the gist of which is, the nirvana principle seeks a state of the lowest tension; it requires less energy to be a sedentary something rather than an expended nothing. The nirvana principle is shackled to the pleasure principle; it is the attitude of the survivalist last man. The death drive is the tension that constantly pushes past the pleasure principle. The nirvana principle avoids extremes and risks; opposed to this is the excess of life. The mortification of life isn’t an opposition to life as such - that would take too much effort. What the mortified, survivalist last man opposes is the excess of life.

The problem is that life is inherently excessive. It either comes out in jouissance or in the revenge of sick passion. On page 95, Zizek describes it well; he says “the post metaphysical survivalist stance of the last man ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow.”

Basically, it is a world that combines pleasure with restraint. Everything is permitted so long as it is deprived of its dangerous element - or of anything that would require a commitment. So, we have “revolution without revolution” and decaffeinated coffee. Like we’ve said a few times in this class already, the superego injunction in our culture is to enjoy; the law is chased away.

Within this horizon, the only absolute possible is a negative one — absolute evil. Which I think is a pretty solid argument; it would be nigh on impossible to get a lot of agreement on a positive good, but it would be just as hard to find someone to disagree about the evil of the holocaust.

In this world that denies law, both love and jouissance are also denied. So what should we do? Perhaps only a god can save us now.

So lets look at how Jesus saves us! There are two interpretations of how Christ’s death deals with sin. The sacrificial concept, and the participatory concept. Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s actions, or because of our identification with him.

In the first approach, debts are canceled and paid - not by us, though, which leaves us in permanent debt. So how does the second way work? I think the best way to frame this answer is to contrast it with something on page 6. Zizek makes a few snide remarks about Levinisian/Derridian styles of religion. When asked about God, the intellectual diverts the question into a heavily theoretical answer - they set up a distance between themselves and their belief. The skeptical attitude of deconstruction always relies on an other who “really believes.”

So, how does that relate to participatory redemption? What Christianity does is that it sets up Christ as our subject supposed to believe. We ourselves don’t believe, but we identify with Christ, who does.... except Christ himself doubted on the cross. So, on a deeper level, Christ is maybe the subject supposed not to believe. Instead of doubting, and perpetually holding all things at a distance, we can transpose our doubt onto the other, thus regaining the ability to believe. The true identification with Christ, then, is to participate in disbelief.

I wonder if the postmoderns are Zizek’s subjects supposed not to believe?

In the calculative, sacrificial reading of the crucifixion, Christ’s death remains within the horizon of the law - the law becomes an unconditional, rampant superego. Love becomes the mask of an infinite law, a law that no longer imposes specific orders. The problem is how to pass from this hyperbolic law to actual love - ie a love beyond the law and the pleasure principle. If such a thing is even possible.

Puppet/Dwarf Part 4: The Singular Univeral and God's Self-Alienation

2007-09-19T11:17:00.000-05:00

Part 3

What is change for Zizek if not politics proper? Well, more specifically, the excess of the system. Zizek uses set theory language to describe this: there are people whose multiple presence is not properly presented in the one of the state. There are two themes connected to politics to bring out here. Violence, which will require a bit of a throwback to ch. 2, and universality, which will provide a segue into religion and love.

In ch. 2, Zizek contrasts Buddhist violence against Christian/revolutionary violence. Buddhist violence is totally de-subjectified; that is, the act and the actor are collapsed into each other. Inner peace is connected to violence; it is also the ultimate goal.

Christianity and revolutionary violence, on the other hand, is the empty set, the excessive element that violently causes change. Buddhist violence exists in a state of conservative, maintained, Buddha eye state, revolutionary violence is a traumatic eruption of the real. The other function of this revolutionary set is that of the singular universal. On pg. 65 this is described as “a singular that appears as the stand in for the universal, destabilizing the natural functional order of relations in the social body.”

The singular universal is, it seems, and I might be completely wrong on this, the appearance or specific form of the struggle for concrete universality. Abstract universality has to appear first - a notion that, like the name suggests, is totally without specific content. Concrete universality splits universality from within, just like the real, the excess, the swerve. Universality, through this split, is reduced to one of its particular elements - and stops being abstract. It enters its own frame. I almost want to guess that in Lacanian terms this would be the master signifier entering its own signifying chain.

Put another way, as Zizek does on pg. 108, “Universality in a political sense is the introduction of a social indivisible remainder that embodies concrete universality.”

Zizek finds both this idea of the split in the identical and the singular universal in the figure of Christ on the cross saying, “father, why have you forsaken me?” This question indicates a split in God himself.

In the sense that the real is both the thing and that which prevents access to the thing, but more precisely the shift from that first idea to the second, the Christian experience is, as Zizek says on pg. 78, “the very radical separation of man from God that unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly seperated from himself - thus the point is not to overcome the gap that seperates us from God, but to take not of how this gap is internal to God himself.”

Christ here has the position of “man without properties.” He isn’t a sublime object, an object raised to the dignity of the thing, but the thing itself; more precisely, the thing is the gap that makes him not fully human.

So Christ - with no distinctive features and therefore no place in society - is a singular universal. “And why should we not take the risk here of referring to Nietzsche”– well... unless just to contrast with the last man?

But Christ as this excess, this split - this is what sets him up as the dividing line between the old and the new testaments. Christ is the culmination of the logic of sacrifice; himself standing for the extreme sacrifice, for the self-relating exchange in which we no longer pay God, but God pays himself for us, thus involving us in infinite debt.

So here we have a link to Nietzsche that I do understand. Nietzsche connects the excess of life to suffering; Christ connects eternal life with the suffering of the cross. Christian redemption isn’t the undoing of the fall, but its repetition. Identifying with the doubt and split in Christ and God. It was the fall that instituted sin - but also the law - and also love. The fall wasn’t a simple contingent eruption; it was the forced choice of Adam. The fall brought in freedom, sin, law, and love.

Puppet/Dwarf Part 3: The Absolute Perspective

2007-09-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

Part 2

So reality has breaks in it; breaks produced by language; otherwise known as enigmas. Every signifying system recognizes these breaks in one way or another; enigmatic terms are used. Enigmatic terms are signifiers that indicate the excess in a purely formal, empty way. They are the stand-ins, the empty sets of an given system.

It is these breaks, these excesses, these swerves, that affect the normal functioning of perception. Zizek offers an example based on an anthropological study of a native tribe called Winnebago. The tribe is divided into two groups. One group describes the village buildings as being in two concentric circles; the other sees one circle, but a circle that is broken by a clear dividing line. The difference in their perceptions of the ground plan indicates a fundamental antagonism; the wealthier members see two continuous circles, while the poorer members see a clear split. This break in the community - the real - here is not the physical arrangement of the buildings, but the “traumatic core” of the social antagonism that distorts the tribe members view of the actual arrangement.” Put another way, the real is the swerve that distorts their perception.

The real here is doing double duty. It is not only the thing to which access is not possible, it is itself the obstacle that prevents the access. In other words, the breaks in the symbolic are not like Kantian antinomies - problems built into the structure of reason that cannot be resolved. Zizek's example is the tension between the individual and society; which comes first? Does the individual subject pre-exist, or does society? It is not that this is an unresolvable antinomy — this tension is itself one of the fundamental features of society.

This idea of the split, or the break, also informs a reading of Nietzsche’s ideas of truth. Borrowing from Zupancic, Zizek points out that in Beyond Good and Evil, there are two seemingly opposed views of truth. Truth is either a terrifying force, a blinding Platonic sun, or, truth is radically perspectival.

Is this a contradiction, or is there a third way? Well Zizek wouldn’t be a Hegelian if he couldn’t find one. Of course everything is not just the interplay of appearances; there is a real - this real, however, is not the inaccessible or horrible thing, but rather the gap that prevents our access to it, the rock of the antagonism that distorts our view of the perceived object through a partial perspective. So truth isn’t the “thing in itself,” but rather the gap itself - for example, the social antagonism of the village. Truth is the perspectival distortion.

When it comes to perspectival truth, Zizek wants to read Nietzsche avec Lenin. True knowledge is possible, but only from an interested standpoint. Truth, as Badiou would say, always involves a decision. One must always make a decision to approach the real.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a dig at Bataille, so we shouldn’t let that go. There are two ways to approach the real. One is the limit experience; if you get to closed, you’ll be burned. Again, this is the passion for the real; the violence that peels back the layers of everyday life.

But there is, also, the real that we actually have to pass through - and in a manner of speaking, always already have. The example of this approach that Zizek gives is the connection between the death drive and creative sublimation. The excess, the void, can be a source of change and creativity. Perhaps also known as an evental site.

So, if we are going to briefly characterize the real before seeing how Zizek and Zupancic search for it in politics, religion and love, we’d have a list like this: the split in the identical, the excess in the system, the object of desire, the obstacle that produces multiple perspectives, and the traumatic kernel that can produce change.

Puppet/Dwarf Part 2: Gaps in the Symbolic

2007-09-14T11:08:00.000-05:00

Part 1

We shouldn’t be looking for the real laying behind the appearance - because as Alenka Zupancic says, the idea that there is something behind the appearance is itself the deception of appearance. The real appears in the split of the minimal difference. And the real shouldn’t be seen as a horrible, unbearable thing laying behind the symbolic. Zizek suggests that maybe the “ultimate veil concealing the real is the very notion of the horrible thing” itself. The real doesn’t elude symbolization; it trips it up.

This idea of the real being behind the veil of the symbolic is a favourite target for critics of Lacan; the charge is that erecting of the barrier between the real and the symbolic is itself a symbolic act. Zizek says this criticism can be cleared up by a discussion of the feminine logic of non-all found in Lacan's 20th seminar (SXX). In the commentary “Reading SXX” Bruce Fink brings up a potential contradiction in SXX. Lacan sets up women’s jouissance as ineffable, as being beyond speech. However, he also apparently identifies women’s jouissance with the jouissance of speech, the enjoyment that is inherant to the act of speaking.

Fink is willing to write this off as a small problem; Zizek isn’t. He sees this as a potentially crippling problem for Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. Zizek finds the answer to this problem in an essay by Suzanne Barnard. She finds a way to sublate the two. The feminine non-all does not mean there is a mysterious part of a woman outside the symbolic, but a simple absence of totalization. All totalization takes place through its constitutive exception; in the feminine libidinal economy, there is no outside, no exception to the phallic function. The woman is in fact in the symbolic without exception; women’s jouissance has both speech and silence. It’s this idea that one can be immersed in something - ie, the law, but not be totalized by it, that will come back later. What all that means for the real, however, is that the real “is not external to the symbolic; the real is the symbolic itself in the modality of non-all, lacking an exception.”

So the real is an effect of language; what this means, according to Zizek, is that language isn’t referential, it doesn’t designate reality — it digs a whole in it. To look at the world with purely empirical eyes is actually something of an impoverishment. To look at an other in a purely empirical way is one thing; to name thing; to engage in language use with them, enables me to see an abyss beyond them, where object a lies.

Zizek really moves away from the real as a simple register of the subject; he uses it as a model for ontology as such. Kant is taken to task for discovering these gaps in reality, aka the gaps in the symbolic, and for trying to cover them over with an inaccessible noumenal world. Freud does the same; he discovers that something lies beyond the pleasure principle, and tries to cover over this by setting up Thanatos and Eros as cosmic principles, there-by reestablishing the harmonious order. What is beyond the pleasure principle becomes rational and explainable.

Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf: Intro

2007-09-01T14:43:00.000-05:00

This past semester, I studied a fair bit of psychoanalysis. One of the more fascinating things I came across in those readings was Jacques Lacan's and Slavoj Zizek's appropriation of religious ideas, especially the idea of the relationship between the law and sin. Zizek in particular is fascinated by Paul, and along with a few other contemporary theorists look to Paul for critical and revolutionary potential. The Puppet and the Dwarf is a key text for the current wave of "post secular" thinking, and it's a fine piece of philosophy.

This is another oral presentation, and I'm posting it without editing it. So yeah, it's sloppy, but I'm swamped with work at the moment.

Zizek describes the 20th century as a time of the passion for the real, one of Lacan's "registers of the subject." Georges Bataille is the paradigm example here; he describes sacrifice as an attempt to destroy the “thingness” in the victim; Zizek reads this as my attempt to destroy the other to get to their real kernel.

The attempt to destroy someone to get to their real kernel is the movement of jouissance. Through symbolic castration, the overwhelming jouissance of the other is sublated into phallic jouissance - which is jouissance under the condition of unfulfillable desire. It’s from this framework that Zizek (and Lacan in SX) re-read the fort-da story. Usually it is seen as the kid mastering the mother’s absence and presence; Zizek takes the toy, the spool the kid tosses and reels in, as object a - that which the mother sees in the kid and will destroy him to get to it. This seems to be suggesting that the boy is acting out his own symbolic castration.

In other for my desire to flourish, there needs to be a space between myself and the other. Desire cannot function without prohibition and distance, a gap between object and object cause. To move beyond this impasse, Zizek sets up an extended discussion or re-examination of the real.

So, again, the 20th century as a time of passion for the real. Shattering enjoyment opposed to everyday life; the two are incompatible. Bataille goes so far as to base his theory of religion upon this sacred/secular split; the passion for the real is about the violence and excess required to peel back - and purify - the layers of normal life.

Now, this route of purification is only one way to approach the real. There is also subtraction; that which is subtracted from the One of the state. Zizek says that “subtraction starts from the void, from the reduction of all determinate content, and then tries to establish a minimal difference between this void and an element that functions as its stand-in.” According to Zupancic, minimal difference is a split at the core of the same. The classic logical axiom “A is A” implies a minimal difference - A as subject is not quite the same as A as predicate.

So the subtractive approach to the real is to identify the element of the state that is minimally different from the void. It's Ranciere that Zizek cites, but we’ve of course already come across this idea in Badiou - that which falls outside the state of the situation is an eruption of the real. Or a potential eruption, anyways.

It is this concept of minimal different that Zizek says is the shift from Kant to Hegel. Kant takes the appearance and has something - the nounema - lay behind it. The non-conceptual escapes the conceptual. Hegel, on the other hand, sees non-conceptual reality emerge because notional development is caught in an inconsistency. Multiple perspectives don’t arise because of the transcendent thing behind them; the thing is nothing but an ontologization of the inconsistency between appearances.

In Lacanian terms, the real is the result of the gaps in the symbolic. It took me a while to realize that the gaps in the symbolic exist, then, because of the minimal difference within the identical.

B&T 10: Truth and the End of Division I

2007-08-28T13:23:00.000-05:00

Part 9

Remember the question of the meaning of being? Well, we’re back to it. That question is only possible if something like an understanding of being already is. An understanding of being belongs to Da-sein.

This section is about the source of a great many philosophical problems. The understanding of being - both ontically and ontologically - initially orients itself to innerworld beings. That’s how being as such is passed over for things that are objectively present. Being = reality. This section has some great stuff about the problems of reality, but I think it’s basically build up to Heidegger’s discussion of truth as aletheia.

The question is, what connection does truth have with being? Heidegger says three things about the traditional concept of truth. First, its traditional position is in the proposition. The judgement. Sentences are where truth “happens.” What truth is, is agreement of the judgment with its object. The correspondence theory of truth. And it was Aristotle that initiated both of these ideas when he created logic.

Heidegger begins his critique of the traditional idea of truth by saying that the concept of “agreement” is entirely general and empty. What exactly this “agreement” is is obscure. It is meant to be a formal relation of the ideal content of the mind to the real thing about which one judges. What corresponds is two ontic things. The content of a statement is related to an object; these are two things that can have a formal relation to one another. What Heidegger ends up saying is that correspondence isn’t so much wrong as it is insufficient. This is the best example of the movement I mentioned at the beginning; the common sense version of truth is taken, and deepened.

Rather than correspondence, truth is aletheia. Disclosure. Truth lets being appear in themselves; a true statement discovers a showing that already existed. Truth is both opening and closure - for example, when you see an apple as an apple, you close off seeing it as a pear.

It might be useful here to recall the three aspects of disclosure - understanding, interpretation and discourse. We exist understandingly; we exist in the truth.

Now, all three of these elements are, initially and for the most part, fallen. They are fallen into publicness. This means that Da-sein is usually disclosed to itself as something that it is not - this is inauthenticity. Because disclosure is fallen, Da-sein is also in untruth. Da-sein is both in truth and untruth.

Constituted by disclosedness, Da-sein is in the truth. There is truth only insofar as Da-sein is. This applies to everything, including something like scientific truths. To say there is eternal truth is not proven until one proves Da-sein is itself eternal.

That's the end of Division I. Eventually I'll do a single post on Division II, which is where the book gets really hard. The three ecstasies of temporality! Anticipatory resoluteness! All that good stuff.

B&T 9: Care and Angst

2007-08-27T10:57:00.000-05:00

Part 8

On the first page of chapter 6, Heidegger summarizes everything that has been said thus far. On the basis of attunement, Da-sein has a mode of being in which is brought before itself - it is disclosed to itself in attunement. It is disclosed to itself in its thrownness. Thrownness is a way of being of a being that is its possibilities; it understands itself from them, and in them. It projects itself upon its possibilities. Being in the world involves both taking care of things and being with others. The self is, initially and for the most part, dispersed in the they and entangled in the world. So, the average everydayness of Da-sein can be described as, and I quote from page 170, “entangled-disclosed, thrown projecting being in the world which is concerned with its ownmost potentiality in its being together with the world and in being-with the others.” Easy as pie.

So what is the point of this chapter? Being in the world is a structure that is primordial and constantly whole. Until now, the structure’s moments have all been discussed individually. Understanding, attunement, being with, etc. But how is the totality of the structural whole to be described? What unites everything that’s been said so far?

Care. Care is the unity of the structural totality of Da-sein BitW. Care is actually BitW as such. This isn’t the same as wishing, urging, watching, etc; these things are founded on care. But what discloses care as fundamental? What is Da-sein’s fundamental attunement?

Angst. Angst is what provides the basis for grasping the totality of Da-sein. Remember the description of fear? Fear is fear of something. One can find this desk fearsome. It’s something present, something in the world. What distinguishes Angst from fear is that angst does not have an object. Angst is anxious over nothing. Literally, the nothing. Nothing definite, nothing present.

Tranquilization makes one feel at home; angst interrupts this feeling. Angst makes one feel uncanny. Falling prey does not run from possibilities or things, but to them, in order to find tranquilization. Angst thwarts this; angst is anxious about being in the world as such. It is in fact angst that individualizes Da-sein; it does not create an isolated subject, it merely brings Da-sein back before itself out of the they. The world loses its significance, and Da-sein is brought back before itself out of dispersion in the they.

So the unity of Da-sein lies in the fact that it is concerned in its being about that being. BitW itself is care. Being with things is taking care of them and being with the Mitda-sein of others is concern. Being concerned about its being, Da-sein is always being ahead of itself, projecting forward into possibilities. When Da-sein is being ahead of itself in such a way that it is being towards its ownmost possibility - which is death - the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities is opened up.

In Division 2, this is what will come to be known as anticipatory resolutness - the being towards death that individuates one, allows one to pursue one’s own possibilities as opposed to the possibilities handed over to it by the they.

Because that possibility is determined by freedom, one is just as free to leave one’s possibilities entirely to the they. Do everything the way one does things.

Now, the basis of the structural totality of Da-sein, care lies “before” every attitude and position of Da-sein. Care is the a-priori condition of both theory and praxis. Political and social action are only possible for a being that is unified by care.

In section 42, which I looked at midnight last night, Heidegger relates a roman myth about care. If there’s one point in Being and Time that has no need to exist, this is it. Every time I look at that chapter I think Heidegger must have had Stephen King’s editor. Anyways, the point of the chapter is that care rules Da-sein’s “temporal sojourn in the world.”

The New Atheists

2007-08-14T15:06:00.000-05:00

Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc. The new atheists. Sooner or later, I'll read Dawkins and Hitchens' books. I've seen them in many interviews and I've read many of their shorter essays on religion. I don't know anything about Dawkins' actual body of scientific work, but I have read a lot of Hitchens' journalism. Hitchens is clearly a smart man and he is one of the best in his chosen profession.

This being said, the new atheists have waded into deep waters, and their water wings are leaky.

I've been meaning to write posts on this subject for sometime, but have had a hard time putting my thoughts together. So, I'll use Terry Eagleton to give me a running start.

In his review of The God Delusion entitled "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching", Eagleton properly puts Dawkins in his place. Rather than choosing and defending a side on the stupid old atheist/theist continuum, Eagleton simply cuts Dawkins off at the knees by pointing out that one can't set Dawkins' naive scientific matirealism against one of the most ubiquitous and productive forms of human life.

Check out the first three paragraphs, at least.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

B&T 8: Disclosure, Idle Talk, Ambiguity, Curiousity

2007-08-11T10:33:00.000-05:00

Part 7

The final aspect of being in is discourse. This isn’t language - it is the ontological condition of language. That which is disclosed by attunement and understanding is articulated by discourse. Discourse is a shared event; the listener understands the speaker because they are articulating meaning that is already there. Spoken disclosure is to share what is disclosed.

It’s already been said that Da-sein is dispersed into the they and thrown into possibilities. Da-sein is thrown into the they. The they has its own modes of understanding and interpretation. These are idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. All three of these sound derogatory, but Heidegger insists this isn’t cultural criticism.

Discourse shares what is disclosed - but the mark of idle talk is that it does not go back to the original disclosure. It is discourse that only offers the most average, levelled down understanding. It’s almost like speaking for the sake of speaking; it has no relation to the being being spoken of. It’s like gossip, or “passing the word alone.” Because idle talk offers a leveled down understanding, it can understand everything. Quantum physics? No problem. I watched What the bleep do we know. Chaos theory? No problem. I watched Jurassic Park. It’s not about deception... it’s just rootless talk.

Curiosity corresponds to sight as a mode of disclosing. Just like idle talk understands everything, curiosity sees everything. Remember, BitW is initially absorbed in taking care. We take care of the things around us. Curiosity only wants to see - not see and take care. It is restless; always seeking novelty. Jumping from new possibility to new possibility. The newest theory comes out of Europe... gotta jump on it! Curiosity sees everything and idle talk understands everything. This can be confused with a “lively life.” Being able to do 10 000 things in a piecemeal way rather than dwelling with one thing.

Ambiguity has the same sort of thing going on. Ambiguity is what “everyone knows.” It knows what everyone else thinks and feels. It also knows what is going to happen and what should be done. Political opinions are usually a pretty good example of this; everyone knows what the significance of the Iraq War is. When something actually does happen, we all knew it was going to happen that way, too.

Ambiguity dominates being-with, as well. The other is “there” in terms of what we have heard about them. Gossip, piecemeal opinions, these things all too often dominate our relations with others.

Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity constitute the entanglement of Da-sein. This is how Da-sein is in the world, initially and for the most part. Da-sein is fallen prey. It’s an absorption in the they. This entanglement is the inauthenticity of Da-sein. This entanglement is Da-sein not being itself. Heidegger says Da-sein is “tempted” into falling prey; it confuses Da-sein into thinking all of its possibilities are open to it, when in fact they are leveled. This is tranquillizing. Tranquilization is not stagnation, but busyness. Again, this is like the lively life. Always running to and fro, finding new things to distract one’s self. Being tranquilized makes feel at home.

Heidegger actually sets up an early critique of something like multi-culturalism here. This belief that all possibilities are open leads to the belief that understanding and synthesizing foreign cultures will lead to the “enlightenment” of Da-sein. Because Da-sein is tranquilized and entangled, it is alienated from its ownmost possibilities. This is inauthenticity; a loss of one’s own possibilities.

It is important to note that Da-sein be falling prey only because it is concerned, understanding, attuned being in the world.

B&T 7: Attunement, Understanding, Interpretation

2007-08-10T15:47:00.000-05:00

Part 6

Now we’re getting to chapter 5 - Being-in as such. Da-sein’s relation to itself is mediated by its relation to the world, but this is not to suggest that being-in stands between present world and a present subject. Being-in is a unified phenomena. It is disclosure; a clearing, an illumination. There are three aspects to being-in as such: attunement, understanding and discourse. These are not three aspects that are separate things; they are equiprimordial. There are the interiority of each other.

Because being-in is not about a subjects relationship to objects around it, disclosure is not some kind of individual perspective; it’s not a mental state. There is only one clearing. The “Da” of Da-sein is its “Da,” but there is also the Da. Being there and the there of being. In my self disclosure, I am part of the disclosure of being in general. In Da-sein’s self-disclosure, it is a part of the disclosure of being in general. Being can only be disclosed through entities. That jargony paragraph hopefully helps clarify why the question of the meaning of being must “pass through” Da-sein, so to speak. In disclosing the world, in disclosing itself, Da-sein is a part of the disclosure of being.

Anyways, let’s talk attunement. Attunement is Heidegger’s ontological term for what would ontically be “mood.” It’s how you’re doing. Attunement is what makes things matter. It discloses things in a particular way. If you’re happy, than the world is a happier place. The trick is to understand that this isn’t some kind of projective psychology - you’re feeling happy and then you project onto the world your happiness. That would be an ontic psychological process; ontological attunement is disclosure. Da-sein is always already in a mood; if when you’re just relaxing, letting the wheels go round and round. In being in a mood, Da-sein is disclosed as that being which it is.

Disclosure doesn’t mean “known” as such. Da-sein actually usually avoids what is disclosed. Da-sein in fact flees from what is disclosed; what is disclosed is that Da-sein is thrown into the world. We always find ourselves in a mood; this is not the result of a seeking but rather a fleeing. We don’t encounter ourselves through rational reflection, because rational reflection is always directed to towards objects - Da-sein is not an objectively present object.

The primary discovery of the world is also through attunement — not the senses. It is because the senses belong ontologically to an attuned being that they can be “touched.” Hardcore empiricism is not able to banish mood; all it can do is flatten everything down to objective presence.

Heidegger’s big example of attunement is fear. He choose this for a specific reason that we’ll come across later. There are three aspects to fear. The first is “what” one is afraid of - it is a thing of whatever sort. A spider, a disease, a ghost. A fearsome thing. The second aspect is “fearing” itself; this clarifies what is fearsome. And why are we afraid? Because we are concerned in our being for our being. Only a being concerned with its own being can be afraid. What about animals? I have no clue.

What marks fear as attunement is that it discloses things in their ability to threaten.

So that’s attunement. Attunement is known ontically as mood; it isn’t the relation of a psychological subject to its world but rather an ontological disclosure. It is what discloses the world and Da-sein to itself; as such it is a part of the disclosure of being. It is one of the three equiprimordial elements of being-in.

The second element of being in is understanding. Like I’ve already said, Da-sein exists understandingly. Understanding is what discloses our possibilities as possibilities. This is not a cognitive process of making choices; it isn’t choosing between being a lawyer or doctor when you grow up. It discloses those possibilities in the first place. It’s also not an empty set of logical possibilities; we are always already in a possibility. We are always, in fact, projecting into possibilities. Da-sein always understands itself in terms of projects that it projects into. Because Da-sein projects forward, it is always ahead of itself. Ontologically speaking, Da-sein is always not yet. Primordially, Da-sein exists from the future. There is always something outstanding. Da-sein is the possibility of being free for... death! Death is Da-sein’s ownmost, not to be bypassed possibility, and it is unrelated to anything in the referential totality. It is what is always outstanding for Da-sein. A fuller explanation of this will remain outstanding for the time being.

Now, understanding always has its own possibilities. Understanding has the possibility of understanding itself - this is interpretation. Interpretation is understanding’s self-understanding.

Interpretation is also the actualization of possibilities that understanding discloses. Da-sein projects onto possibilities, then interprets itself as these possibilities. We take up the project of being students, then interpret ourselves as students with all the attendant frills that go with that; books, alcohol, etc.

What is interpreted, what has been explicitly understood, always has the structure of something as something. A table is explicity understood as a table.

Interpretation has a threefold structure: fore-having, fore-seeing and fore-conception. These, again, are all bound up with each other. The fore-having is the referential totality; it is the interpretation operating within that totality of reference which itself has already been understood.

When something is understood but still veiled, still unclear, still implicit, it becomes explicit through an act of appropriation - the fore-seeing. The fore-having reveals what is to be understood, the fore-seeing works specifically upon what is to be understood. This interpretation is already decided upon by a definite conceptuality - this is the fore-conception.

The interpretation of something as something is grounded in fore-having, fore-seeing and fore-conception. This is a circle, but it is not a vicious circle to be avoided; the trick is to enter the circle in the right way; this is why Heidegger had that whole discussion of the structure of the question at the beginning of the book.

B&T 6: The They

2007-07-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

Part 5

I’ve already said that Da-sein is not a question of “human.” This leaves us with what is still basically a negative statement. Just who is this Da-sein? Chapter 4 of Division I answers this very question. The chapter is entitled The They.

Now, Da-sein is a being with I myself always am. Da-sein is always mine. This indicates an ontological constitution, but also an ontic one. “I am this Da-sein, not another one.” Here’s the problem: if Da-sein is not objectively present, then what could that ontological statement mean? Maybe in an average, everyday way, the who of Da-sein is not myself. Maybe the “I” isn’t an obvious given. It is one thing to make an ontic statement about the I... but ontologically speaking, the average everyday way of being of Da-sein is exactly the opposite? Maybe it is a way of being in which the I has lost itself. Perhaps are others are are not those that I am most clearly distinguished from - perhaps others are those that I mostly don’t distinguish myself from.

Da-sein has two equiprimordial structures that are relevant here. Being-With (BW) and mitda-sein.

Being-in-the-world (BitW) always has others. There are always other people assumed in work; the shoes referenced earlier are made for an other. The lecture I’ve written refers to the listeners. The parking lot refers to car owners. An isolated “I” - the good ‘ol cogito - is never given. Da-sein is always being-with, even on a desert island. Being-with, because it is an existential and not a Kantian catagory, has nothing to do with how many humans are standing next to you.

Now, handiness and objective presence are modes of being for beings unlike Da-sein, so others aren’t handy or present anymore than my own Da-sein is. The BW of others is mitda-sein.

A few times through this presentation it has been mentioned that Da-sein understands itself in terms of what it is not. Da-sein doesn’t first discover itself - an act of self-reflection, I think therefore I know I am - than the world. Da-sein actually first discovers itself by looking away from itself into taking care of the world. We take care of inner worldly beings around us.

BW is different. We don’t have care towards other Da-sein, but concern. There are many modes of concern - being against, not mattering to one another, being-for - these are all ways of concern.

There are two extreme possibilities of concern. One can leap in for another and take their care away; take care for them, Do their work. Make them dependant on you. This is a subtle form of domination. The other extreme is leaping ahead; this is giving care back to the other. Freeing them for their possibilities. Concern can be guided by considerateness and tolerance, or inconsiderateness and a tolerance that more resembles indifference.

Heidegger says that in a group of people all working on similar tasks, the BW is often founded on a mode of mistrust. Think competitive academics. I know I certainly don’t trust any of you. However, there is a different mode - that of an authentic alliance. Truly taking up a task in common first, as Heidegger says, “makes possible the kind of objectivity which frees the other for himself in his freedom.”

But this idea that the others are those that I mostly don’t distinguish myself from... this is still unclear. What might this mean? There is a certain distantiality here - I am so close to the others as to lose myself in them. Da-sein stands in subservience to the others; that is, all of Da-seins everyday possibilities are connected to others. Not any particular others, but rather the generalized mass - the They. A little bit like the They of “they say.” Heidegger describes the They as an “inconspicuous and unascertainable dictatorship” We do things the way “they” do. This is one of those points in B&T that I think most people can relate to, easily enough. We all tend to act according to the way One acts in a given situation. From gender roles to proper classroom conduct. I.e., I’m not sitting here shirtless. Or for a less disturbing example, when one goes to a funeral, one does not wear a t-shirt that says “Life is so rad.”

In addition to this distantiality, the They is concerned with averageness. A certain mediocrity, even. Why was The Departed such a great movie? Because they said so. It also seeks to level down all possible ways of being. Keeping a lid on things. These three things - distantiality, averageness and leveling - constitute publicness.

One of the best things about the They is that events happen in such a way that no particular person did them. No one did it. The They disburdens Da-sein of responsibility; accommodates Da-sein slacking off. Possibilities are closed off; Da-sein is told what it is. It does not have to interpret itself. One does what one does.

When Da-sein is dispersed in the They, when all its possibilities are dominated by the They, Da-sein is said to be inauthentic. When Da-sein has grasped itself, it is authentic. Now hearing this next bit for the first time might seem a bit strange, but authenticity is not somehow a more valuable or higher stage of development for Da-sein than inauthenticity is. It’s not a state of Da-sein that manages to detach itself from the They. This isn’t Sartre’s bad faith. Authenticity is in fact an existentiell modification of the They as an essential existential structure. One of the texts we’ve already read this year pretty clearly had an influence on Heidegger, at least in terms of vocabulary - Augustine’s Confessions. Book 8, I think.

So, re-capping. Just like there isn’t a world and a Da-sein that are somehow just added together like a sum, but rather being a unitary phenomena, there isn’t an isolated Da-sein that is surrounded by other Da-sein - sometimes one, sometimes 5, sometimes none; rather, BW is a fundamental constitution of Da-sein. Da-sein exists in a With-World - mit-velt, in the German. Da-sein is always mine, but as most of its possibilities come to it from the They, it is dominated by and dispersed into the They; Da-sein loses itself and its ownmost possibilities. Taking its possibilities from the They, Da-sein is in the mode of inauthenticity and must recover itself. It’s worth pointing out here that the phrase “ownmost possibility” is one of those points that projects forward into the book.

B&T 5: Tools

2007-07-19T11:37:00.000-05:00

Part 4

Useful things are the objects we encounter in the course of our projects; like my laptop. They are always nested in a referential totality; a little like those Russian nesting dolls. Your pen, the paper, this table, these are all inner worldly beings that refer to one another and the project of being a student. The totality is like an empty structure that our specific projects fill in. Every totality has a “for the sake of which, which signifies an in order to, the in order to signifies a what for, the what for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance.”

Tools are “together... with...” For example, the pen goes together with your paper. Or think of game pieces, like chess; the individual pieces all exist within a referential structure. The pawn is not a piece of carved wood; it is a position within a structure. The activity of work always involves a totality; Heidegger’s example is production. Making a shoe implies the existence of one who will wear it. The actual production uses leather, nails, etc; the leather and the nails each refer to their respective sources, etc. Each of these pieces are interconnected; a totality is discovered.

Useful things are either handy or objectively present. Think about your experience when working intently on something. Furiously typing away on your keyboard, are you thinking about typing? Are you thinking about your keyboard? No, you’re not. The tool that you’re using recedes; it becomes transparent. This is the mode of handiness. This isn’t a significance that we project onto the entity; it is a mode of being. This is the way things are, initially and for the most part; everything just recedes into the background; this is how things are “in themselves.”

There are three possible ways this can change. Tools can become damaged or unusable; in which case, they enter the mode of conspicuousness. If your pen breaks or my laptop suddenly shuts down, they cease to be handy. It becomes objectively present. When a tool is missing, not in its proper region, our awareness of its absence discovers the properly placed parts of the totality as present; everything becomes obtrusive. And finally when something is in the way, when it is in a place it shouldn’t be, or when we don’t have time for it, what is to be taken care of is obstinate.

Conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy bring to the fore the objective presence in the inner worldly beings at hand. This disrupts the chain of references; when your pen runs out of ink, the handy connection to the paper is disrupted. The referential structure of “for the sake of which, in order to,” etc, comes to the fore.

Part of the chapter on the worldliness of the world involves a discussion of Descartes’ notions of the world. Substance, and what not. I’m not going to pay much attention to this chapter except to point out something on page 89. I point this out because it relates back to Chris’s Nietzsche presentation. When Descartes describes the world in terms of substance, the sole access to this world is in terms of math and physics. What math makes accessible in a being constitutes its being. Remember the bridge example; Sturdy Gurdy holds up because the engineers used what amounts to brute force - an extremely solid structure. However, if the proper formulas were developed, than a bridge could be built that would “go with the flow.” Brute force would no longer be needed. In Descartes’ world, that formula would constitute the being of the bridge, rather than being an ontic description of it.

Ok, so I’ll toss in another brief recap here. Da-sein is being in the world. In this world, Da-sein enters into projects in order to understand itself; it encounters useful things that can either be disclosed as handy, or in breakdown conditions, objectively present. These inner worldly beings are always part of a referential totality; each thing refers to another thing.

B&T 4: Being-in-the-World

2007-07-14T12:07:00.000-05:00

Part 3

Now, since Da-sein is the being that must be interrogated in order to ask after the meaning of being, an analysis of Da-sein must be completed. It is the analysis of Da-sein that is meant to yield a horizon to investigate the meaning of being. This means going over several concepts. Da-sein and its possibilities, the world / referential totality, the average everyday “who” of Da-sein, and an introduction to care.

So Da-sein is not objectively present; it does not have a way of being in the way a “thing” does. Analyzing Da-sein’s existential structure is thus not a question of psychology, anthropology, biological, neurology, etc. These disciplines all taken humans as an objectively present object to be studied. Heidegger isn’t dismissing their activities; he merely wants to do what Kant might have called an “ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject.” I mention Kant because Heidegger’s project has a similar a-priori interest.

If you want to ask about what Da-sein is, the answer is that Da-sein is its possibilities. That is, Da-sein’s average understanding of itself is in terms of what it is not - the world. It takes up projects and roles and understands itself in terms of them. Heidegger characterizes the fundamental constitution of Da-sein as being-in-the-world.

That’s a loaded sentence. Being-in-the-world sounds as if Heidegger is saying Da-sein is inside a world - like we are inside this room. This obvious interpretation needs to be dispelled immediately. That kind of spatial idea - of things next to one another - is a category. Relationships in three dimensional space is a matter for objectively present entities.

Rather, being-in-the-world (BitW) is an existential. It’s not about the location of your body; it’s not something we have and could do with out. BitW is described as something like “dwelling” or a “familiarity” with the world. The world here is an ontological concept; just like “being-in” is not about being in this room, and just like Da-sein is not human, Heidegger’s “world” is not the Earth.

Rather, BitW is about being absorbed in the world; Heidegger will eventually refer to this as fallenness. The relationship between Da-sein and the world is not a subject/object relationship; Da-sein is not a subject that somehow needs to get out to the world. This is Heidegger’s major rebuke to the Cartesian view of things; a dualism between mind and extension has no place in B&T. We are absorbed in the projects and possibilities that we find in the world. We encounter useful things that exist as part of the referential totality of the world. The upshot of this is that our closest association with the world is not a perceptual cognition, but a taking care.

B&T 3: Questioning, Da-sein

2007-07-12T14:26:00.000-05:00

Part 1
Part 2

Heidegger begins the book with a discussion of exactly why this question of being has been covered over throughout the tradition. Part of the answer is that we always already understand being, as I’ve said. There are, however, prejudices that lie in the way of asking this question; being is seen as either being a universal concept, an indefinable concept, or the most self-evidence concept. Heidegger’s retort is that none of these prejudices actually take being as a problematic; they cover it over with the covert judgements of common sense.

Because we are concerned here with questioning, we must start with the structure of the question itself. You don’t ask questions about subjects of which you are 100% ignorant, and you don’t ask random sources. You look for a likely place to enquire. So there are 3 elements here. You need an idea of what you are asking after - being. An idea of what you are actually asking - the meaning of being. And who you are asking. The very structure of questioning answers the “who” – only one being actually asks anything.

The who is Da-sein. Literally in the German, there-being. Being there. Da-sein is the human way of being; thus it is not the same as human. Da-sein is not homo-sapien. Keep in mind the ontological difference here; ontically, homo sapien; ontologically, Da-sein. It’s very easy to slip into equating Da-sein and homo sapien, but to do so is to miss the whole point of the ontological difference; calling Da-sein human or vice versa is to equate an entity with its being.

Why is Da-sein the privileged entity? Because it already has something like an understanding of being. Da-sein has a pre-ontological understanding of being — this is strictly separate from knowledge. It’s not cognitive, either. Understanding is a way of being; this isn’t a question of epistemology. We understand the “is” without being able to conceptually define it. This is what makes Da-sein ontically different from other beings - we are concerned in our being about being. Da-sein related to existence understandingly; the structures by which we do this are existential structures. You might hear echos of Kant’s a-priori transcendental structures here.

Da-sein understands itself in terms of existence, as well. It understands itself through possibilities that come to it through various means; these are existentiell possibilities. These are the possibilities we understand ourselves through; it is an existentiell possibility to be a student.

Rephrased, existentiells are our projects. The stuff we do. They are ontic characteristics specific to Da-sein. Existentials, on the other hand, are what you might think of as our ontological side; the way(s) in which we exist understandingly. One example is mood, attunement.

So here we have Da-sein as the privileged entity that we can question. The problem is that Da-sein is entangled in a particular tradition - a philosophical tradition that covers over the ontological difference and the question of being. What Heidegger wants is a “productive appropriate” of the tradition - a destructuring. It’s worth emphasizing that Heidegger’s intended destructuring is a positive move; it does not “bury the past in nullity.” Heidegger is the hero of the tradition; he’s saving everyone from themselves. This discussion of destructuring and the tradition’s concern over presence appears on pages 20 to 22, for the Derrida fans here.

I guess we all have a passing familiarity with the whole metaphysics of presence thing. Well this is where it appears. The tradition - beginning with Parmenides - takes the objective presence of beings as the guide for interpreting being. This is a rephrasing of what has already been said about onto-theology; the tradition takes a being, a being that is present - in both a spacial and temporal way - and uses this to discuss being as such. This is a “making present.” This table, here, now, is our guide to being. Really.

This presence is to Heidegger only one way of being. This German phrase Vorhandenheit is variously translated as present to hand or objective presence. Another way of being is Zuhandenheit - translated as ready to hand, or handiness. This refers to a particular usefulness of an entity, within a certain kind of context, which Heidegger calls the referential totality of the world. I’ll elaborate on both of this later, but for now I’ll just say that both objective presence and handiness are ways of being for entities that are unlike Da-sein. Da-sein cannot be made present and cannot become handy. This will all be elaborated later on; I just want the terms introduced here.

All right, I’ll pause here to summarize the terms and claims that will continue to be important.

The ontological difference is that difference between being as such and entities. Being is the background upon which something appears as the thing that it is. Entities are basically things - anything you care to name is an entity. All entities have being, but the being of an entity is not itself an entity. This difference has been ignored by the tradition since Plato; entities (usually one entity in particular) are always privileged over being. That entity is judged in terms of its objective presence; all that is real is seen as fully present. Heidegger wants to ask after the meaning of being; the entity that must be asked is the only entity that is concerned about being in its being - Da-sein. Da-sein relates to the world understandingly through ontological existential structures; it relates to itself through ontic existentiell projects.

Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics

2007-07-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Hey, look. I've finally gotten around to doing what I said I'd do all the way back in this post. All of these posts on ethical works are one part introduction and two parts subjective (but not arbitrary) reflection and interpretation.

Obviously, Aristotle's stuff is insanely rich. It has to be, or it wouldn't be some of the guiding source material for western civilization. So what I'm saying here isn't even the tip of an iceberg; it's a tiny chip from a tiny corner of the iceberg that is Aristotle. It's just what I was thinking about when I decided I needed to get cracking on an ethics series. This theme will re-appear when I write about other ethical works.

There's a common story floating around the philosophy orientated bits of the internet about the history of western philosophy. It's a standard view that Plato began a rational tradition, focussed on describing the world in terms of concepts and ideal forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, began an empirical tradition. As the story goes, he was focussed on observing the world and then commenting upon it. This story will also claim that Plato was a "collectivist," and Aristotle was an "individualist." Plato thought the person was subordinated to the state in all things, and Aristotle the opposite.

I'm not sure that I buy this story, partly for the same reason I don't buy the rationalist/empiricist distinction that supposedly ran through the modern period. This kind of reductionism, that lumps multiple thinkers together, is kind of lazy. It reduces all things to the same. If you ever do read Aristotle or Plato, or anyone else, try not to read them through someone elses' eyes. This being said, I do think Aristotle is worth reading in terms of a particular binary pair, but it isn't individualism vs. collectivism or rationalism vs. empiricism, but immanance vs. transcendance.

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle is concerned with ends and goods. Final Ends and supreme Goods, to be more exact. Immanance and transcendance are possible locations for these Ends and Goods: either they exist within human life (immanance), or human life must go beyond itself to find these things (transcendance). Aristotle seems to be very much concerned with immanance.

Every activity aims at a good; an ideal end is the good. Everything man does is an attempt to reach this end, this good. As such, our lives are determined by our activities. Our lives are a series of activities dedicated to ends, ends that are more or less related to finding happiness.

The supreme good, then, is happiness. As Aristotle defines it, happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul. Happiness is not simply a state of mind, but rather continuous activity - what I'd want to call a way of being. It is attained through effort, through training. Happiness is not something that falls into your lap - it is a result of activities and being a certain way.

As such, and this is my own take on it, happiness for Aristotle has nothing to do with conforming to an external image. It has nothing to do with following Natural Law or paying attention to a list of rules. What the Ethics does is describe a life that is happy; it says "if you want to be happy, you will be this kind of person." It does not say, "if you want to be moral, you will follow these rules." For myself, I'd take that as the basic distinction between an ethics and a morality.

Aristotle does speak of moral rules, of course. But it is never morality in a legal sense, which is what morality commonly is. Moral virtues are not inscribed by or against nature; they are more guides to a certain way of being, or a permanant disposition. Again, right conduct - which for Aristotle is avoiding both excess and deficiency - is how one becomes good and therefore happy. Right conduct is not something handed over by a rule giver or an outside source - it is something immanant to the human as such.

It is that avoidance of excess and deficiency - aka the golden mean - that one is to strive for. The idea is to feel fear, confidence, and all other feelings at the right time and in the right way. Because this is not a list of transcendant laws or rules, what the right times and ways are will differ for every individual. This isn't math, as Aristotle insists on at least twice. Expecting exact rules from ethics or politics is like expecting "mere plausibility" from math.

For example, the mean of fear and rashness is courage. Not taking unnecessary risks and not avoiding risks that are necessary is courage. Know when you have to risk your life, and know when you retreat. One of the oddities of the mean is that it often seems closer to one extreme - a brave man will appear rash next to a brave one. This means that the mean is not the "middle" - courage really is closer to rashness than to cowardice. It is one of Aristotle's practical rules that one should, when aiming for the mean, keep further from the extreme that seems further from the mean. In other words, it is better to be closer to rashness than to cowardice.

In Book IV, there is a passage that exemplifies what the Ethics is in my reading. It is a section called "A Portrait of the Magnanimous Man," and it is a description of a man that knows exactly what his own worth is, and acts accordingly. It is a description of what a person will be like if they have a certain disposition, a disposition that can be attained by anyone through the practice of ethics.

This is a portion of that passage:

He does not run into trifling dangers, nor is he fond of danger, because he honours few things; but he will face great dangers, and when he is in danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having. And he is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them; for the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior. And he is apt to confer greater benefits in return; for thus the original benefactor besides being paid will incur a debt to him, and will be the gainer by the transaction. They seem also to remember any service they have done, but not those they have received (for he who receives a service is inferior to him who has done it, but the proud man wishes to be superior), and to hear of the former with pleasure, of the latter with displeasure; this, it seems, is why Thetis did not mention to Zeus the services she had done him, and why the Spartans did not recount their services to the Athenians, but those they had received. It is a mark of the proud man also to ask for nothing or scarcely anything, but to give help readily, and to be dignified towards people who enjoy high position and good fortune, but unassuming towards those of the middle class; for it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so to the latter, and a lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill-breeding, but among humble people it is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak.

Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one's feelings, i.e. to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward's part), and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar.

He must be unable to make his life revolve round another, unless it be a friend; for this is slavish, and for this reason all flatterers are servile and people lacking in self-respect are flatterers. Nor is he given to admiration; for nothing to him is great. Nor is he mindful of wrongs; for it is not the part of a proud man to have a long memory, especially for wrongs, but rather to overlook them. Nor is he a gossip; for he will speak neither about himself nor about another, since he cares not to be praised nor for others to be blamed; nor again is he given to praise; and for the same reason he is not an evil-speaker, even about his enemies, except from haughtiness. With regard to necessary or small matters he is least of all me given to lamentation or the asking of favours; for it is the part of one who takes such matters seriously to behave so with respect to them. He is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones; for this is more proper to a character that suffices to itself.

The translation I have is more readable, but this is the best one I could find to copy from the 'net.

I don't have much to add to that passage. I was also going to copy in my other favourite passege, from Book VIII "The Kinds of Friendship," but the translations I can find on the internet are so dissappointing as to not make it worth it. Find the most modern translation you can if you care to read this great book.

B&T 2: The Question of Being

2007-07-11T12:58:00.000-05:00

Part 1

On roman numeral page 19, the page right before the introduction begins, Heidegger tells you everything that’s in Being and Time. This page is the little chestnut that the whole tree grows from. His quote from Plato. “For manifestly you have been long aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.”

Heidegger takes this statement very seriously. Do we have a serious, adequate answer as to what we meaning by being? No. No we don’t. So we need to ask this question again: what is the meaning of being?

But the questioning doesn’t begin there. Heidegger says we don’t even realize the question needs to be asked in the first place. So, we need to reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. Two things to say here. First, the word reawaken is pretty loaded. It is not offer an explanation for the understanding of the meaning of this question. It is not developing an argument in the sense of stringing together propositions. There’s a path and process here. Following the spiral is an attempt to have the question reawakened - not necessarily answered.

Secondly, it’s not just high minded intellectual obfuscation to point out we don’t even have an understanding of the question, never mind an answer to the question. For example, consider how often being is written with a capital B. In German, of course, all nouns are capitalized. But when it is translated into English and the capital B remains, all this does is suggest that being is somehow a first principle or a substance, - perhaps a euphemism for God. What lurks behind this is the idea that being is a thing, an entity - finally on the same plane as this table.

Explaining why that’s a bad thing offers an opportunity to give an introduction to the ontological difference. There is a difference between being and beings. Being is always the being of a being and the being of a being is not itself a being. Which is to say, being is always the being of a thing, an entity and the being of an entity is not itself an entity.

Being is that from which something is understandable as the thing that it is. Everything that is has being - this chair, the thoughts in your head, numbers these are things that have being. The ontological difference is between ontic things and their ontological being.

This is the tradition’s blind spot, as Heidegger sees it. Being is always taken as the universal, empty concept; an assumed category that is not thought about further. The tradition consistently takes an ontic entity, capitalizes the first letter, and says “viola, this is the thing that defines all reality!” A common version of this is to say everything relates back to God - hence a snappy name for the tradition is “onto-theological.” No matter how you predicate your ontic thing - no matter how powerful and super your posited God is - it is still a thing, and the matter of being remains unthought.

So the question needs to be reawakened. Like Plato said, we have been long aware of what we mean by “being.” The thing is, this is basically true. We are always already living in an understanding of being - it just happens to be a pre-ontological understanding. We’re all perfectly capable of using the verb “to be”; we just don’t have an ontological grasp on being.

So The aim of this book is to work out the question, to gain an ontological understanding of being; the provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being.

Notice the reticent language. It’s working out the question, not the answer. There is a “provisional aim,” not a final one. Time is a “possible horizon.” Heidegger is very much concerned with questioning - the question tends to have priority over the answer. The reticence is also interesting in light of the fact that B&T is an incomplete work. Whether for practical reasons - like the need to publish to get a job - or for philosophical reasons - ie the recognition that B&T is still a transcendental project or an alleged recoiling from the imagination - B&T is only a fraction of what is laid out in the introduction.

Martin Heidegger's Being and Time Intro

2007-07-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is one of the monsters of 20th century philosophy. Its influence ranges far and wide, and the extent of this influence is matched by the extent of its difficulty. It is an attempt to answer the stereotypical philosopher's question, "what is the meaning of being?"

This is the text of another assignment, just like the Theory of Religion posts. It was written for classmates who hadn't yet read Being and Time, so it shouldn't be too technical. This is only an introduction to roughly the first half of the book, since that was all that was assigned. Still, there's an awful lot of meat.

When I was thinking about how to begin this introduction, one particular difficulty kept coming back to me. Part of the reason this book is such a pleasure to read is the way the ideas move; the form and the content of Being and Time (B&T) reflect one another. We’ve seen this in other readings this year - for example, in the way Spinoza’s Ethics works in a geometrical fashion. Definitions followed by explanations followed by axioms followed by scholia; the form and the content work together. B&T has an entirely different set of internal movements. It is not a linear progression of arguments; individual chapters are not self-contained works that can be read on their own. My presentation won’t mimic that, of course. To try and compensate for this, I’m going to talk about three movements that take place in the text; I think being able to watch out for these movements will help you read it.

If one were going to spatially represent the overall movement of ideas in this book, it would have to be in the form of a spiral. Like I said, it’s not a linear movement, and absolutely nothing is self contained, like one might be able to say for Kant’s Critique. The part is the whole and the whole is in the part. If you only read the first half of a more typically structured book, then you’re just missing the end. You don’t know whodunnit, you don’t know why the cosmological argument for the existence of God doesn’t work, etc. etc. If you only read Division I of Being and Time, then what you’re doing is erasing half the spiral. There are all these little points that where its almost as if Heidegger stopped halfway through the sentence. I don’t say that to suggest a clumsiness or a fault, but to say that the book only works as a whole.

A second movement involves repeated demonstration of the ontological difference. I’ll explain that term below. Anyways, Heidegger very often takes a common concept; explains our usual notions of it, and then shows how that typical, common sense notion isn’t so much wrong as insufficient. For example, truth as correspondence; what exactly this “correspondence” is supposed to be is entirely obscure. So Heidegger moves underneath this to find the ontological basis. I’d suggest this offers a good way to read B&T for the first time; find the common sense notions that you already have, than follow Marty to their foundations. I’ll come to a few more examples later on.

Another movement in the text, the purpose of which I guess doesn’t become obvious until Division II, is the way the text is constantly reaching back and projecting forward. Heidegger is always either saying “remember when we said this? Now we’re going to retrieve this idea and modify it” or he’s dropping hints about the future of the book. It is worthwhile to watch out for this moments while you read, because they offer useful recaps of what has come before.

That’s my little preamble, and ever so subtle injunction to just read the whole freakin’
book.

ToR 7: Conclusion

2007-07-09T15:55:00.000-05:00

Part 6

Bataille references the idea of salvation by faith alone - attaining the sacred by destroying the value of these works. This is an improvement over the utilitarian mediation, but only a marginal one. Salvation by faith alone pushes off intimacy into the next world It is this deferral to the next world that the final separation between the divine world, the beyond, and the real world, the here below, occurs. The divine order can never be brought into a world that is entirely thing-ish, as it once was with festivals.

With the radical separation of the real world from the divine, the reign of autonomous things begins - industry. Non-productive destruction has long been subordinated to production by the military order, so production grows more and more - kind of a snowball effect. Everything is given over to production, including man. And, of course, large quantities of consumption.

The reduction of all things to thing hood actually allows intimacy to affirm itself in this vast expenditure; the macro development of the means of production reveals the meaning of production - that is, the non-productive consumption of wealth. That revelation is the fulfillment of self consciousness in outbursts of the intimate order. When consciousness reflects back on itself, reveals itself to itself in that self-consciousness and sees production as something to be consumed is the point at which the world of production no longer knows what to do with itself.

The condition for achieving this self consciousness - that is, consciousness that can reflect back on itself - is science - that is, a clear consciousness of the real world of objects. As science developed itself, it was turned onto the intimate order - but of course the sacred is unreal, and in order to translate it into scientifically understandable terms, it had to be calculated into the real.

If the intimate order is to be restored, it must be restored by clear consciousness; intimacy will appear to be given in that distinct knowledge discussed at the beginning of the book. The problem with the seeming appearance of the intimate in knowledge is that knowledge and intimacy have different temporal modes. As we said all the way back at the beginning, knowledge is always incomplete and differed into the future, while intimacy is immediate.

So, we may only speak of non-knowledge. If clear consciousness is going to be involved in this at all, there must be a recognition of the obscure nature of divine life. Intimacy is then the limit of clear consciousness; we cannot know anything distinct about intimacy except for the modifications of things that are linked to it. Intimacy is the shore we must stop at lest we drown in the ocean. And it is, of course, the weakness of traditional religion that it attempts to make intimacy a matter of knowledge.

Self consciousness doesn’t really need to destroy things; that would be futile anyways. Neither order can destroy the other. What consciousness can do is “reclaim its own operations,” placing them into reverse, cancelling out these operations and discursive thought with them; ultimately encountering intimacy in a kind of darkness.

The finale of the book proper is just such a reversal of operations. Clear consciousness of objects makes their destruction possible, and overflowing production makes that destruction necessary.

Bataille sits in his room, and looks around at the tools there which are a result of labor. Labor is an act that exists for the future; all work is done for a future goal. The tools Bataille has are used for his own labor. Labor produced his tools, and he will use the tools for further labor.

BUT! The booze, it ruins the productive value of the table/tool. It negates the productive value of the table *and* the labor that created the table. This negation is quite temporal, quite retro-active. All the work leading up to the moment is negated, in that brief moment.

This negation of past work and production offers a basis of self consciousness; it is a return to the state of the animal that eats another. Insofar as the productive tool is destroyed in consciousness, the tool and the profane world dissolves around me. The tool can’t be destroyed in consciousness unless there are consequences in the real order; the real reduction of the real order is a fundamental reversal of the economic order. There will always be a point in any economy when production will be negated, that is, it will flow outside. This could be done without any human thought at all, but then the expenditure turns to war; this is not inevitable. War is not the conscious, human form of expenditure.

*****

And there you have it, a seven part summary of Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion.

A General Reading List

2007-05-21T22:09:00.000-05:00

I was asked this past weekend about an introductory reading list for philosophy. I just decided to place my suggestions here. I'm hardly widely read, relatively speaking, but I have a fine handle on the broad movements of the tradition. This is meant to balance brevity, breadth, depth and readability. I'll move from the early aspects of the tradition right to the cutting edge of contemporary thought.

Ancient:

I'm skipping the Pre-socratics and Plato altogether, because I'm pretty hopeless in those areas.

1. Aristotle's Metaphysics. This is one of the books that the tradition keeps coming back to, over and over. Read the Metaphysics, and you'll see Aristotelian language everywhere. It's a roadmap for the next 2000 years of thought. Aristotle's Physics, Politics and Nichomachean Ethics are important as well, but the Metaphysics is where it all really begins.

From: The Basic Works of Aristotle

2. St. Augustine's Confessions. Specifically, chapters 8 - 11. The earlier chapters are kinda emo, but once Augustine gets his act together, he makes up for all the repentant whining that came before. His thinking of time, memory, literary interpretation, God and creation keeps the entire Western tradition coming back for more. Augustine's thinking has a pivotal influence on at least one author in this list.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

Modern:

I know I'm making a huge jump. I'm skipping over Stoics, Cynics, and Christians, traditional and mystical. Once again, I just don't know much about these guys.

3. Rene Descartes' Meditations on Method and Discourse on First Philosophy. Descartes' thought exploded in the western world like a philosophical Little Boy, and began a new era. That is the standard interpretation, anyways. It is facile to think Descartes was really an ahistorical clean slate for philosophy, but you cannot do reputable scholarship without knowing him.

4. Baruch Spinoza's Ethics. Spinoza has strong kung fu. Learn from him. The fact that traditional religion continued to exist after this man is a testament to the stubbornness of the human race. Be joyful, strong and creative.

5. GW Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. God's knight in shining armour, defending Christondom from Spinoza's otherwise crippling blows. If you do not think the monad is one of the coolest ideas anyone anywhere has ever come up with. . . maybe philosophy is not for you after all.

6. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This is one of the most brutally difficult books ever written. I have only a vague grasp on it. This being said, Kant's importance rivals Aristotle and Descartes.

7. GWF Hegel's Phenomonology of Spirit. 20th Century political thought lives and dies with Hegel. This is probably the most difficult book ever written, however.

3 - 7 Are all found in: The European Philosophers. That single book contains excerpts from all the books listed above, except the Hegel book. If you pick up the book I've linked to here, you'll have highlights from all the above thinkers in a single volume, plus several more. There are different selections from Hegel here, but they will perhaps act as a better introduction than the frankly insane Phenomonology. You can skip the Pascal, Rousseau, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Comte and Mach selections as they are less important. As for the Nietzsche bits...

8. Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. Every word that slipped from this man's pen was golden. Reading Nietzsche is like breathing fresh mountain air. These two books will work in tandem to tear down and rebuild much of what you believe. Nietzsche is a diagnostician. Where else to go? Nietzsche has the words of life.

Keep in mind the importance of reading Walter Kaufman's translations; other translations are notoriously bad.

Found in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche

20th Century:

9. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, What Is Metaphysics? and Letter on Humanism. Rather than read Being and Time, simply read the introduction. It is about thirty pages long, and defly summarizes the entire work. Being and Time is a terribly beautiful book, but it is also terribly difficult. There is no need to jump into it yet. What is Metaphysics and are both fine and short descriptions of Heidegger's thought. The anti-humanist philosophers of the 20th century fed on the Letter on Humanism for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Found in: Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings

10. Georges Bataille's Erotism. Influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, Bataille produced fascinating work on the links between sex, death and religion. Yes, such links exist. Bataille is certainly the most readable of 20th century continental philosophers, and one of the most widely read. Highly recommended.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality

11. Michel Foucault's The Subject and Power. How are identities formed? Put another way, how is the content of the word "I" formed? When you say "I," what exactly do you mean, and why? In Foucault speak, how are we subjectified, and what role does power play in this? Important thinking for the 20th and 21st centuries.

Found in: The Essential Foucault

21st Century:

12. Alain Badiou's Ethics and Infinite Thought. Badiou is a deeply multidisciplinary thinker; his ontology is rooted in mathematical set theory. Every generation or so, a thinker comes along to clean house, to break up the old patterns and remind us all that we always need to be exploring new territory. For the philosophers of the 21st century, Badiou is the trailblazer we all must reckon with.

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Infinite Thought

All right, there you go. If you read through all those, you'll know pretty much everything I know. Philosophy is an amazing adventure; it is extraordinary how different the world can look when seeing it through Nietzsche or Heidegger's eyes.

Good tidings.

ToR 6: Morality, Mediation, Untrammeled Divine Violence

2007-04-08T16:11:00.000-05:00

Part 5

In the world of spirits, the good elements were opposed to the bad elements; both groups were distant from the profane. But when the world becomes a rational, calculated place, and consciousness reflects upon this, the divine immanence that threatens the order becomes dangerous; the sacred becomes a fearful thing. Spirits, the remnants of the animated world, become mediators between the profane world and the fearful sacred world.

Another major change is at hand. Reflective thought articulates moral rules; like the law, these are obligatory relations. Whatever source is used, these moral rules are grounded in reason - reason dedicated to the duration of the profane world. Because these rules are dedicated to duration, they are necessarily opposed to the disruptive effects of expenditure or sacrifice. Because of the priority given to the real order, the divine is finally installed as protector of the real; in giving the divine “power” over the real, the divine is actually subordinated to the real’s interest. All the divine does is ratify the status quo.

The world of the spirits, now, is no longer simply the remnants of the animated world; the world of the spirits is the intelligible world, the world of the idea. The world of things becomes subordinated to the intelligible world, and so it becomes all the more divine. God becomes utterly transcendent.

Bataille argues against the possibility of intimacy with the transcendence; this would be a given intimacy, and to be “given” is to be subordinated to an end; it is already to be a thing whose intimacy is separated from it. Pure transcendence is, from the perspective of the sensuous world, total destruction, a destruction that is too complete (destroys the possibility of intimacy) and too impotent (in that given intimacy is not possible.)

Archaic violence - that is, violence pre-existed the rational military order - would have had a different problem - the destruction of the thing was totally impersonal.

In the transcendent’s movement of negation, it is no less opposed to violence than it is to the thing the violence destroys. This movement both lifts and preserves the order of things; it lifts the order by negating it’s effects of reason and morality, but condemns this lifting the very moment the real order is affected.

The real order condemns violence that may affect the order, so sacrifice’s subordination to utility becomes permanent. The anguished state of free violence then only ever has a negative place. Because sacrificial violence is roundly condemned in the dualistic world of good and evil, the search for intimacy is increasingly crippled - it goes to sleep.

And now for the chapter with the best subject headings ever.

The development of good and evil when the divine became the ratifier of the real was an awakening, but this awakening was followed by the sleep of the search for intimacy. In the dualistic world, there is no legitimate place for violence except in the rational exclusion of the sensuous world. The divine good excludes violence, and is so only available for intimacy to the degree that it has the old, repudiated violence lingering in it. To the extent that this violence is accepted, God is not good; the extent it is rejected, God is not open to intimacy.

There is an indirect route to violence and the resultant intimacy - a mediation, between the real and the sacred. Bataille offers two examples, one of which he says has always existed. An evil force kills my friend; I enter a state of openness, a mournful revelation of death, and I condemn the cruel act. In this state, I’m in accord with good. After evil has killed my friend, violence is required to restore the order of things; the problem is that it was the crime that opened up the world of intimacy to me. To the extent that the avenging violence is not an immediate extension of the criminal act, the intimacy is closed off. “For,” as Bataille says, “only vengeance that is commanded by passion and a taste for untrammeled violence is divine.”

The second form of mediation is violence coming to God from the outside. The violence must be directed towards the divinity itself, not towards my friend. The problem with this is that the sacrificed - God or my friend - can only be a mediator insofar as they renounce themselves, meaning if they didn’t die voluntarily - otherwise the violence has not come from the outside. The idea of a God sacrificing itself has several paradoxes first. First, what is sacrificed is what serves. If God was sacrificed, than God serves and is not sovereign. Another problem is that the sacrifice of the divinity involves violence that the divinity would condemn.

The morality of the real order is what governs any attempted return of the intimate order; all such attempts are ultimately subordinated to the need for duration and utility. Even Christian salvation is a utilitarian matter.

This mediation approach - the approach involving work - reduces divinity and the desire for divinity to a thing. It places both in the realm of utility.

Fidelity and the Word

2007-03-27T23:36:00.000-05:00

This is a response to a post on Jamie's blog, yonder. I wanted to offer a more detailed, and possibly more useful, response than the two brief comments I've already left.

I think the best way to frame these topics is in terms of a brief discussion of faith. In a spirit of gross simplification, I'm going to suggest that there are two basic ways of viewing faith.

The first involves a path to knowledge; it is an intellectual acceptance of a certain category of data, i.e. revelation. Or prophecy. One knows something to be true because they have faith. Belief in this piece of information brings salvation. To be wordy, this kind of faith is a question of epistemology. To be critical, it is a shortcut. This is the faith that fruitlessly opposes skepticism. This is the Josh McDowell vs. Richard Dawkins kind of faith.

The second involves holding a certain perspective. It is not the same thing as a simple acceptance of particular propositions. This second kind of faith is an evaluation -- certain propositions are not only held to be true, but they are held to be valuable. This form of faith has more to do with a way of being; it is a human possibility. Incidently, this faith is the true object of study for theology.

I do not intend to suggest that the second form of faith - the evaluative - includes the first, and adds something else. The first form is an epistemological shortcut; the second form has only a secondary concern with epistemology. The evaluative form of faith does not first accept the truth of a proposition, than add a value to it; it's not really the other way around either. It's something rooted in lived experience - which is not empiricism, by the way.

How is this related to Jamie's post, you might be asking?

20th/21st Century North American Evangelical Christians place a great deal of stock in the idea that God speaks to them (and make no mistake, this is a contemporary North American oddity). They believe God offers direction and gives commands, in any myriad of ways. I am not interested in passing judgement on the truth of all this; I just want to comment on this belief in light of the above discussion of faith.

There are two ways to problematize the idea that God has spoken to you.

One is to question the truth of it - to study the possibility of revelation as an object, the way an astronomer studies a star. To pass judgement on the truth of this possibility - did God speak or not? There are two problems that a Christian thinking this way has to deal with.
- The first is that of finding a criteria for judging the authenticity of a possible prophecy. Whatever criteria you wish to use - however strict or exact - it is still a question of finding a yardstick. Some kind of systematic way of judging. There are a myriad of problems with this problem of finding criteria, not the least of which is that this epistemological approach always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong.
- The second is a question of diffusion of responsibility. If you believe that God said something, commanded something, and your response is basically "I was given this piece of data, and now I must act on it," you are walking into "I was only following orders" territory.

So to take some information - revelation, prophecy, whatever - and approach it as a question of correct or incorrect knowledge is to invite a disaster. You're gambling on a possibility (as opposed to a Pascalian wager) and you're letting yourself be led around like a donkey.

The second way of problematizing the idea of God speaking to you is, obviously, rooted in the second kind of faith. It takes God's word and holds it for true. The epistemological question of whether or not God actually spoke is not ignored, it is simply a secondary matter. Yes, this involves an act on the part of a subject. The subject of faith holds the word of God as true, and is formed by this word.

This second way dodges both of the problems of the first way. It ceases to take the word of God as an object to be studied and judged. The question of whether or not you are wrong ceases to have the same sort of import, because it is the wrong question. The responsibility also entirely falls upon your own shoulders, because you are choosing to accept the word of God and you are the one holding it as true. None of this "God made me do it!" stuff, which is really no better than the devil making you do it.

If one chooses to be a subject of faith in this sort of way, they aquire a particular perspective. Because they are engaged in a particular way of being - a particular comportment to the world - the immediate circumstances surrounding them in the world do not have the same power over them.

God's word acts as a disruption in the status quo of their life, and they conform their perspective to these disruption. Their life revolves around living out the consequences of holding God's word to be true - not around taking care of the myriad possibilities that may befall them. Calculating possible harms and possible goods becomes a tertiary issue.

I do not say any of this to denegrate someone's faith, even if it comes down to being that epistemological version. I am trying to illustrate a perspective that does not revolve around harms and goods, a perspective that an orthodox Christian can accept. If the best part of one's self is given over to God's word, then harms and goods are distractions.

A disclaimer is almost certainly required. I absolutely insist that I am not suggesting that a Christian believe they exist in the best of all possible worlds. I am absolutely not saying "chin up! Jesus loves you!" or "things will get better!" I have already said this, but God is just as likely to kill your entire family as he is anything else. You are just as likely to end up homeless or an inmate in Auschwitz as you are rich or comfortable or secure. But remember, these things are goods and harms. They can be calculated out in a utilitarian way: "five units of possible good versus six units of possible harm... better not take that route!" If that is the route you want to take, gambling and calculating possibilities, than what do you do when your calculations fail and the "truths" you have had faith in turn out to be childish fairytales?

Blog Tag: The Hills Are Alive

2007-03-27T08:47:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been drafted in a game of blog tag by Titus, which means I actually have to write something, as opposed to just copying/pasting assignments. Sigh!

So what are the songs I'm loving right now?

1. Intervention by The Arcade Fire. An epic organ tune about working for the church while your family dies. This song is as least as fine as anything from their previous album, and the rest of the songs come through too.

2. There is No There by in The Books. I dunno who these guys are, but this album - and this song particular - is beautiful like a pacific sunset. There is No There is a ridiculously baroque tune that could have felt like a self-indulgent mash up... instead it's the song I'll be listening to once I step outside today, into the sun.

3. The Past Is A Grotesque Animal by Of Montreal. The first epic pop song of 2007, I tell you. I also would fall in love with the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate Georges Bataille. A song about the most violent, ecstatic kind of jouissane. Excellent music by fellow theory geeks.

4. The Universe! by Do Make Say Think. Fine instrumental work. Horns, strings, everything in there. I saw these guys in concert not too long ago, and it was a reallywonderful cacaphony. An enjoyable kind of night.

5. Imperial by Seefeel. Part of my ambient electronica kick. Seefeel is pretty versatile music - I can use it as background stuff for cleaning or work, or for walking at night, or just for listening on its own. It's not often I find music that I can listen to in so many different contexts.

6. Hey Jude by The Beatles. Pure awesomeness. I don't think I'll ever get tired of this song. I wish I could sing like these guys.

7. Heartbeats by The Knife. Weird, minimalist, dancy, electronica. The vocalist is arresting, and so is the synth. Highly recommended.

ToR 5: War and the Glorious Soldier

2007-03-17T22:14:00.000-05:00

Here's Part 4.

A good solid pillage has something in common with a festival; the obvious violence and destruction. The difference lies in what the pillage and the festival produces; the festival is subordinated to the duration of the group, while warfare produces the glorious soldier. The glorious soldier is not exactly an individual, but rather a divine-ish individual, through the wagering of their life; they prove they are capable of risking death, of risking that return to intimacy - and so they become associated with the spirit world, with the divine. The destruction in war is a negation of duration, but the glorious soldier makes this negation of duration durable; that movement is a futility, a naivete. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

A further problem for the solider is that his spirituality - that association with the divine - is never anything other than utility. The soldier makes people into slaves, into commodities to be bought and sold. Any notion of the sacred here is a false pretense.

So, the slave as object becomes a possible victim of sacrifice. These useful commodities, whose very existence is a degradation of the human order, are surrender to the “baleful intimacy of unfettered violence.” Human sacrifice is the greatest possible challenge to the real order of things and utility; it is also the greatest internal violence.

The development of human sacrifice could only happen hand in hand with the development of an excess of wealth, which needed to be spent in a spectacular way. The military order, once again, subordinates this excess of wealth to utility - that of ever increasing power. Rather than radical expenditure, wealth is used to project violence outside. Human sacrifice, Bataille said, has always been rejected by military kings.

Conquest, then, is contrary to sacrifice. It is a rational and methodical use of wealth to increase power. The group with Imperial ambitions submits to the real order from the beginning; the Empire subordinates itself to an end, and everything around the Empire is subordinated to the Empire. But it is in this way that it is not really true that the Empire is subordinated to the real order — the Empire becomes the real order.

In order to maintain the diversion of violence to the outside, the Empire must develop the law. The law lays out obligatory relations between different people and things. The law mirrors morality, and takes its obligatory force from it, but their connection lies really on the border between the outside and the inside of the Empire.

In this military, rational, calculated world, consciousness deals with, and is measured by, things. This results in a dualism.

ToR Part 4: Sacrifice and the Festival

2007-03-05T23:12:00.000-05:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The foregoing is was basically a description of the situation that forays into the sacred attempts to temper. The world has moved from total continuity to general discontinuity, and now we can begin speaking of attempts to return to continuity.

So, the sacrifice. The first fruits of any harvest or the best of the livestock are sacrificed in order to remove these objects — along with the producing humans — from the world of things.

The violence of sacrifice is not random, or complete; the aim of this violence is to destroy the thing in the victim. It destroys the utility of the livestock, and the stock raisers ceases to be just a stock raiser. The sacrificer in fact acts from sovereignty, the uncalculated, perhaps non-discursive world of the spirits; it is from this position that he calls the victim from out of the alienated world of utility.

That call is a monologue, of course, and this presents another tension. The victim neither understands nor replies; sacrifice has no real relations here. No reciprocity. If these relations were taken into account, it would destroy the nature of sacrifice, which is to disturb the world of things and therefore the relations; this is what makes sacrifice appear gratuitous. The sacrificer can’t both destroy value and utility while accepting their limits.

Sacrifice does not require killing per se, but the greatest overturning of the real, valued order is the one most favorable to the appearance of the mythical order.

In the immanent state introduced by the disruption of the real, life and death lose their common significance. In immanence, death is not a negation of life.

Why? Because the world of things has duration as its foundation. No thing has a separate existence unless it is in time. Death is a threat to this; but what the real order rejects is not so much a negation of life as the affirmation of intimate life, of the immanence found in death. This affirmation of intimate life is, of course, a threat to stability, a threat to production and utility.

Death and sacrifice are not synonymous. Sacrifice restores a lost value through a relinquishment of that value; it is not necessarily violent or destruction — it is a radical giving, which is why objects that have spirits are the primarily victims. It is the antithesis of production; the ideal of sacrifice is radically anti-utilitarian. Production is concerned with the future, with duration; sacrifice is something that happens only in the moment.

In sacrifice, the individual identifies with the victim; anguish is experienced. Anguish is the fear of the loss of individuality; work in the world of discontinuous objects and the fear of dying are interrelated. Anguish is the sign of individuality; a defensive reaction on its behalf.

Because the individual identifies with the victim, the individual is partly immersed in immanence - they experience the sacred, to whatever degree.

Now, the festival presents yet another tension. In the festival, with its crazy, insane overflowing of energy and drives, the real order is utterly threatened. Everything is drowned in immanence.

The real order, however, is impossible to destroy; humanity cannot stop being human. The sacrifice threatens it, but ultimately, the sacrifice finds itself put to useful ends. The community needs to endure; it exists in time. The sacrifice is placed in service of this, with the spirit world as a mediator. The sacrifice is said to be made to the spirits - for the sake of crops and whatnot. The sacrifice is a vital part of the creation of a community; it offers both the experience of the sacred and duration.

This is the tension: the festival is only possible for the community because it rejects what it is. The sacrifice and the return to immanence - the destruction of utility - can only be performed in a community if they themselves have a utility. This is because man is tied to clear consciousness - a consciousness that distinguishes between subjects and objects.

This is what Bataille diagnoses as the basic problem of religion — it fails to see that consciousness is searching for that intimacy; sacrifice is interpreted in other ways such as atonement. Religion, as a search for lost intimacy, is the effort of a clear subject/object consciousness wanting to be a complete self-consciousness; but this is futile because intimacy refuses the clarity of consciousness.

The festival is the internal sacrifice of a group. It is a violence that has utility at the margins; however, when utility moves to the focal point of a group, the violence must become external. Why blow your own stuff up when you can blow somebody elses’ up? Hence, the origin of war as externalized violence.

ToR Part 3: God, Alienation, Cannibalism

2007-02-18T08:52:00.000-05:00

Part 1
Part 2

This animated world inevitably has a divine flavor to it, but it is still immanence. There is still the indistinct flow of being into being, water in water. The animated, divine world, however, coupled with objects, results in a particular object being elevated over all others. This is the supreme being, distinct from the flow and limited like a thing; the attempt is to create value, but it is actually a loss of value. A particular thing - which is inevitably a finite thing - is intended to be the repository of all value.

Now, Bataille puts forth a theory about why the Abrahamic God has attained so much prestige in the world; other attempts at developing a personal God occurred in places and times in which the sense of continuity was still too strong. The fact that there are degrees of continuity remains important, though, since it is in contrast with the discontinuous world that the continuous world becomes the fascinating sacred. It is a world that is closed off to us, and this creates both fascination and horror. Horror, because it is a threat to the profane, utilitarian world of work and subjects.

The partly continuous, partly discontinuous world of animated objects becomes a hierarchy of spirits. This hierarchy is based on how much a given spirit depends on a body, in other words, how much it depends on an object. God, being pure spirit, is highest. The spirits of dead humans, animals, plants, etc, all find their places in such a hierarchy.

So, we have a hierarchy of spirits, and a world of objects. It is at this point that two things happen. First, the mind is recognized as being connected to spirits, and so the body is relegated to being an object. The mind/body split. With this new emphasis on mind, objects that were previously seen as animated subject-like things, are also quickly reduced to objects. The animated world begins to give way to a more mechanical view, a world of objects that can be controlled. This is the emergence of the real world, the final fall from a world filled with the continuous.

With the loss of this animated world, the animated objects, like animals, simply become objects. This view of animals as objects cannot be complete, of course, because they need to be domesticated or dead in order to be eaten — animals in fact only become objects to be eaten and negated when the are cooked, when humans have performed work upon them, fashioning them. To kill and alter is not to change from an animated object to a simple object, but rather to assume an animal is an object in the first place. To kill and cook is to implicitly affirm that the food was never anything but an object; hence our trouble with cannibalism. It needs to be remember this is a world with spirits, and that man is partly body, partly spirit. When a human dies, their spirit is more present than ever before. We can’t take humans to be objects that easily. After all, who does cannibalism hurt? If your soccer team crashes in the Andes, what on earth is the problem with using a permanant marker to divide up cuts of meat on your pudgy coach like fattened cattle?

An additional consequence of this fall is an alienation from this world of things created by humans. To subordinate nature into tools and utility is not only to alter the subordinated element, but to change oneself. Nature becomes subordinated to man, but man is tied to nature; it becomes property, but only on the condition that it is closed off; it ceases to have any immanence at all. It can only be utility; the river is not a river but a power source to be manipulated. But in order to this positing to take place, in order for the world to be in man’s power this way, man must forget that he is a part of this world.

Objects are compelled to have a utility, a purpose that is alien to it. The utility of a plow has nothing to do with its reality. In order to eat a cow, it has to stop being a cow; it can’t be the thing that it is. There is a chain here, of things being what they are not; the cow is not a cow, it is a head of livestock, and the human involved is a stock raiser. The head of livestock is a thing, but so is the stock raiser, during the time that they are working. A thing, a person; alienated from what they are.

ToR Part 2: Animality

2007-02-04T21:37:00.000-05:00

Bataille's Theory of Religion basically covers a series of themes in turn, so I'll divide up my presentation according to theme. The first is immanance and animality.

So, animality. This is the word for a state of pure immanence; no distinctions, no contrasts. It is the state of animals; they have no subject/object distinction. Because of this lack of distinction, animals are not capable of submission, domination, desire, recognition and hence not self consciousness. When two animals fight, one is killed and eaten. Neither the eater nor the eaten is recognized in this; there is no qualitative difference. Neither animal is a subject. Neither do animals exist in time; nothing is given in time for them. They only have duration; there is only the present. This will obviously be an important point in the book’s conclusion.

An apt metaphor for this state might be a single note continuously humming; no past notes, no future notes, no alternate notes to contrast with so that the constant note can find some kind of individual identity. Another apt metaphor, one you might have come across when you read the book, is “water in water.”

Now, the next development is the creation of the profane world, of the stirrings of consciousness and discontinuity. Remember, in the imminent animal world, there is total continuity; not contrast. A droning hum.

What initially disturbs this flow is the positing of the object. The developed tool is what is initially recognized as discontinuous. Unlike the eaten and eater, the tool is subordinate to the one who uses it.

Now, the end of the tool and the tool’s use are different things. The tool’s use is its “in order to” – the endless chain of references; if the tool’s use is confused with its end, this results in the idea of an end which itself could not serve another purpose. This “true end” would either reintroduce continuous being, or, if this true end was itself a distinct entity, this entity would have to be found in utility, and then would not be a true end anymore.

The tool’s end is for itself; this is why it breaks the flow. It is alien to the subject, even as the subject subordinates it. The tool is posited as a separate entity with its own way of being.

Because the object is external to the subject, the knowledge the subject has of the object is external. We have knowledge the objects characteristics, and can reproduce it; this reduces our distance from the object; these objects become what is nearest and most familiar to us, despite the irreducible difference.

So this object, known clearly from without, creates an entire world of objects and things; this also opens up the possibility of a type of being which cannot be known clearly from without. Here we have animals, plants, other humans, and the subject. We needed the alternate vantage point of the external world of externally known things in order to see ourselves as subjects.

Now, by putting onto the plane of things those beings that cannot be clearly and externally known - beings like the subject - is never complete. All of these beings, we perceive as both continuous with ourselves, and as objects - as appearance in consciousness, and as objects.

Language defines the category of subject/object; with language, the subject can be considered objectively, like something known from the outside, like a thing. But this kind of objectivity, that separates subject from object, remains inevitably confused. The object that is the tool is perceived as having an affinity with the subject The object can be perceived as something that acts and thinks; the world is an animated place. My pen falls not because of a mechanistic rule, but because of an action on the part of an object.

Ethics: Seriously, Who Cares?

2007-02-03T18:17:00.000-05:00

To the left you see (a link to) Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. I'm not ready to discuss that book just yet - I've only read about half of it - but between this and some other Badiou material I've read, I'm wondering if he's not going to become my philosophical nemesis. Even if I ultimately want to distance myself from his ideas, the general thrust of his book is quite thought provoking. He's setting up a view of ethics that is essentially creative - creating or maintaining a new kind of situation. His complaint about other views of ethics is that they are dedicated to simply protecting the status quo; making sure everyone is nice to one another; in a kind of waking ethical sleep. I'm fine with that, especially because of the parallels with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals.

For several years now, it's been one of my mantras that moral laws don't exist. It's always been something quite difficult to explain; often I'm accused of being one of those generic, yet mythical relativists that thinks morality is arbitrary.

After an extended and frustrated merry-go-round flame war on the blog Vox Popoli, I thought it was time to actually start writing about ethics rather than just bashing them. But it's hard, it is. So I've decided on a method. First, I'm going to put forward some themes, then spend a few posts speaking of other ethics. For example, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. Foucault's care of the self. Spinoza's Ethics. And yes, Badiou's Ethics. After that, I'll write a post or two with some positive thoughts. Good, yes? Yes.

The first idea that I want to critique is the idea of moral laws. In a nutshell, this is the idea that there is a metaphysical legal system. That particular actions have particular metaphysical moral qualities. I think this is the basic idea that a substantial majority of ethical thinking is reducible to; by whatever means and on whatever basis, either revelation or by reason, that we can grasp this metaphysical legal system.

I would say this is neither possible nor desirable. It isn't possible because actions are physical; to give them metaphysical importance is necassarily the work of a mind. If it is the work of a mind, it is necassarily perspectival and finite. Yes, even if a God declares the rules. To speak of a perspectival, finite metaphysical law is oxy-moronic; it can never be anything more than a redundant ratification of desire or power (redundant because desire and power ratify themselves).

It isn't desirable, either, since these laws would also necassarily be impersonal. They would never be anything other than excuses - making necessity out of contingency. For example, claiming that your lack of sexual activity has a moral justification, rather than your own simply inability to get some. Or, claiming that fighting an enemy has a similiar kind of moral justification, rather than an amoral exercise of desire or power.

The second important theme is the quesiton of whether or not there are circumstances under which human life is best lived. Is the good life based on external circumstances, or an internal disposition towards the world? Or a mix of the two? This theme I'll develop in later posts.

So, next time I'll write about the Nichomachean Ethics.

Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion Intro

2007-02-03T17:33:00.000-05:00

This past Friday, I had to deliver a lecture on Georges Bataille's book Theory of Religion. This was an utterly fantastic book, perhaps the best I've ever read on the subject. I'm going to simply repost my lecture notes wholesale. If you haven't actually read the book, it might all come off as a bit obscure. This was all written for people that have already read the book, and who have a bit of familiarity with a few other authors.

The book deserves a great deal more commentary than appears in my notes, but I can't say as I have time to do it. I have a half finished post on ethics that has been sitting in my drafts section for two weeks now.

I'm going to divide my notes into ten parts, of roughly one typed page length each. This first part is just my opening remarks, framing how I would speak of the book.

So with no further ado, here's part one.

Here we have a book called Theory of Religion. I think both the title and the book leave open a certain ambiguity - is this a theory of the genetic, historical origin of religion? Or is it an ontological account? Is it the story of the development of human consciousness through history, a la Hegel, or a sort of explanatory myth like Freud’s murdered father? The way this question is answered will affect the way you critique it. Not that I’m offering a critique, but I think this question places the first two sections, especially, in perspective.

The first section begins an important theme - there is a boundary to cohesive knowledge; one who “reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him.” The second section is also related to the finitude of thought. Thought remains finite; never complete. It is always differed into the future. This inevitable incompleteness is not an excuse to throw up one’s hands and say “Vanity, vanity, all thought is vanity;” it is simply a critique all reason must submit to.

Discursive thought, then, never concludes; it is always projecting into the future. However - and this is what makes this an ontological musing rather than an epistemological one, Bataille notes the simple fact that no one can “be” independent of an understanding of being. We always already exist understandingly; this is not discursive knowledge that can be differed. Any and all research or accumulated knowledge may alter this understanding, but it can never be pretended that the understanding is not prior. Our perspective is limited, and therefore necessarily mobile. Knowledge of course needs to be formulated, but an end state - a final, exhaustive interpretation of being into discursive thought, is not possible. Several times through the book, he repeats this point; intimacy can only be approached poetically. It cannot be articulated... but of course we’ll all try anyways.

So I answered my own question there. This is a book of ontological, not a history of religion. This point is important to keep in mind later in the book, when Bataille comments on animal behavior; to bring up observational data from the animal or human world would be to miss the point; these are ontological issues, issues of being as such, not Discovery channel style ontic observations. This also indicated by the pains Bataille takes to show that we cannot engage in anything other than idle speculation about a world without human consciousness. To whatever degree that this book can be mapped onto an actual past is a contingent matter. Bataille uses temporal language, of course, and so does my presentation, and this makes it seem like a historical progression, but I still think the best way look at all of this is as a series of structural moments.

I'll begin post my summary of the book itself tommorow, with one part following each day thereafter.

WotWH Chapter 2 - Eldredge and Oedipus

2007-01-03T16:35:00.000-05:00

I think most people know about Freud's use of the story Oedipus Rex, or at least some version of it. Here's one version. The child desires the mother; the father steps in and says "no." This "no" is the creation of the child's superego - their introduction into the social. Through the father's "no", aka the "law", the child takes up a position in the human world.

This narrative underlies ch. 2, which is called "True Son of a True Father" though it is never explicitly referred to. Eldredge begins with two charming little anecdotes (one unfortunately plucked from the wretched movie Kingdom of Heaven) that attempt to illustrate how a lack of fatherly approval in one's life is the basic source of a male's problems.

Yes, a male's problems. To hit on this again, Eldredge is working with the worst kind of gender essentialism; he's a step away from accusing women of penis envy. I could quickly kill this horse and continue to flog it, so I'll just start pretending it isn't there unless I need to comment upon it.

Anyways. the first basic point of the chapter is made on page 25. Eldredge recounts Jesus' questions about whether or not a father would give a child a stone when asked for bread. This question, Eldredge says, speaks "to our deepest doubts about the universe."

So Eldredge is placing a great deal of existential importance on the Oedipal story. Our father (Earthly or heavenly, father or Father) is apparently responsible for giving us our place in the universe. The law of the F/father gives us our structural position.

As Eldredge has it, the journey of Christianity only begins with forgiveness; the journey is about becoming a son. It is about taking up a particular position; if one stops with forgiveness, he "has not come into sonship." (30)

This new position involves a new family. So it is not just a new position in an old structure, but rather a new structure altogether. And this is what the new structure consists in: jettisoning the (Earthly) law of the (Earthly) father in favour of the (Heavenly) Law of the (Heavenly) Father. One Oedipal process superceding another.

The question is, is this alledged Heavenly Oedipal process any different from the Earthly one? The basic problem of all structures is their zero point, the ordering position that must be both within the structure and outside of it. The centre is, in fact, de-centred.

Eldredge says our "deepest questions" revolve around our Oedipal position. Whatever importance one places upon these questions, can they be satisfied by changing "Families"? Can any pre-existing structure satisfy our need to chase after an external image? I'd argue they can't. Whatever we do must be founded in creativity. Because all structures decentre themselves, these pre-set patterns of thinking and behaving will always give way to new and more personalized structures.

What Eldredge offers is exactly what Nietzsche says all religion offers; "if you do X, you will be happy." The problem is that X is a vapour, always fading away. The path of manhood, the "Way of the Wild Heart," will never be anything more than the "map" Eldredge admits it to be. What is need isn't a map; what one needs is a machete to cut new trails with.

Way of of the Wild Heart: Chapter 1 - Misdirection

2006-12-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

Eldredge kicks off chapter one with an anecdote. He tells us of the time he had to do some plumbing work, fixing his sprinklers. He fails. I certainly can't judge him here; I don't know anything about sprinklers myself. The interesting thing about this story is his reaction to his failure, and then his after-the-fact analysis of that reaction.

When he realized he couldn't fix the valve, he became angry. From his description, it's clear this is a bitter, resentful anger. He watches an instructional video and says he is feeling "about ten years old. [Watching] A cartoon for a man who is really a little boy." (p. 3) He discovers that he doesn't have a particular skill, and this indicates a certain immaturity. I give him credit for basically realizing that this isn't entirely rational, but he doesn't really work with that realization enough.

He offers three sources for his anger. First, he says he is angry because there is no one there to help him; he is always forced to figure these things out on his own. He also claims to be angry with God, "because why does it have to be so hard?" (3) Finally, he says he is angry with himself because he needs help.

These three reasons are really collapsable into a single cause. He has this external image of himself as an all-American male, the kind of guy that writes maps for the masculine journey. He comes across an instance in which he cannot fulfill this role. All three of the above reasons spring from his basic inability to be the person he wants to be. Becoming angry at other men, God, even himself are all just expressions of a deepseated alienation and resentment. His anger is a misdirection.

He goes on to speak of "Unfinished men," those men that have not completed their "masculine journey." For this journey, we need "initiation. And, we need a Guide." (4) This journey involves multiple stages. These stages do not belong to specific ages, through they concentrate in particular periods. There are elements of each stage in every other. In other words, they are just like Hegelian moments. Georg Hegel insisted that all of reality was a rational process, advancing towards the goal of the absolute; all elements in the process were particular moments, but each moment existed in all the others.

Anyways, the stages are Boyhood, Cowboy, Warrior, Lover, King, Sage. I won't bother describing them because they all seem pretty self-explanatory. An unfinished man is usually stuck in Boyhood or Cowboy mode.

So, Eldredge has issues with resentment and alienation. His chosen method of dealing with these problems is a standard one - create for yourself a code of behaviour and a priviledged community that will respect that code and by extension yourself. The community he creates here is a masculine one. Every community needs to exclude someone, and if by definition you are including all men, than you also must exclude all women. Hence his claim that this journey is a specifically masculine one.

Exclusion, per se, isn't necassarily bad. Like I said, all communities have to do it. The problem is that Eldredge is assigning qualities to men, thereby denying them to women. Eldredge's man is active and aggressive; this leaves women the role of passivity. I know the Eldreges wrote a book for women as well. Eldredges, plural; the wife didn't do it herself.

So chapter one is a good start. He finds his anger and directs it against others and an alienated part of himself. His cure for his anger is to create a code of behaviour and a community of men that he believes will allow him to take up the role he so wishes. I don't think this cure is bad; in a formal sense it's as good as anything else. The problem is that he misdiagnoses himself. He's trying to cure the wrong thing; the symptoms rather than the root.

It will be interesting to see where he goes from here.

Way of the Wild Heart Commentary Intro

2006-12-27T17:43:00.000-05:00

I was in Upper Room bookstore picking up a Christmas gift when I saw a new book by John Eldredge, the esteemed author of Wild at Heart. I always found that book vexing in its simple mindedness and rigid view of gender roles (and by extension, human life in general). If there was ever a book that exemplified the Nietzsche quote at the top of this blog, this was it. Wild at Heart is clearly a psychological biography of Eldredge, a portrait of himself dealing with his own unfulfilled desires, resentments and confusions. He dealt with these three things by projecting them onto all males in general; alas, his projection doesn't seem to have excised but only amplied them.

The new book is entitled The Way of the Wild Heart, and it's obviously a sequel to the first book. So what did I do? I used my grandma's christmas check to buy it.

Whatever else I think of Eldredge, I have some sympathy with the form of his project, if not the content. Wild at Heart was basically a book of therapeutic ethics disguised as a lame self help rag. He touches on themes and concerns that I'm very much interested in. He deals with religion, final causes, gender roles, external images and subjectivity. In different terms, of course. Because of these things, I thought it might be a useful exercise to read this book, than record my reactions, chapter by chapter.

So stay tuned for chapter one.

Free Will Debate

2006-12-27T17:39:00.000-05:00

I really was serious when I said the hiatus was over!

Some time ago, I said I was going to start writing about ethics. I even wrote what amounted to a preface, here. This post should be seen as part 2 of that preface.

Part and parcel of any discussion of ethics is the free will / determination debate. Are we simply incredibly complicated robots, or do we have freedom? In my readings this semester I've come across a handful of answers to that question. There's Spinoza, who believes our only freedom is the ability to assent to what is. There's Kant, who says that while all reality is chained to cause and effect, our choices can be thought of as atemporal and therefore outside that chain.

My own approach is to begin with a very practical reality. The answer to this question of free will has no practical value. This may seem counterintuitive; is it not a popular belief that "free will" is necassary for any sort of responsibility, and therefore morality? No morality, no law, no society: chaos would reign.

Here's the problem with that belief. A belief in determinism is no more a guide to behaviour than a belief in free will. Consider the legal system. If criminals begin making the philosophical claim that they have no free will (as opposed to psychiatric claims of insanity) and therefore cannot be held responsible for their crimes, judges can throw the claim right back at them. A judge is just as bound to toss them in jail.

A belief in determination doesn't remove the consequences from our actions; all it can do is facilitate a series of excuses for one's behaviour. However, the need for these excuses, and the creation and deploment of them, must both come from different places in a person's mind. The need for excuses for one's behaviour is a question of psychological insecurity; the creation of the excuses is a matter of philosophy. In order to deploy the excuses, one must already be willing to admit insecurity and weakness. That admition, however, would itself require a certain overcoming of that weakness and insecurity. Attempting to use the idea of determination as an excuse or justification for behaviour is a self-defeating and forced position; it can only be used coldly and cynically, and is therefore not legally or ethically important.

The free will debate, then, is an abstract, academic matter. However, a discussion of it remains bound to the discussion of ethics; in order that our behaviour not be arbitrary or futile, we need a knowledge of what we are capable and incapable of. We require a critique of will.

Cutting to the chase, I think the answer to the debate lies in its very undecidability.

Whenever someone claims a certain form of knowledge is limited, there are two possible meanings for this. First, it could simply refer to a lack of information. We lack the required quantity of data to form a conclusion. Only more research and thought is required. Perhaps the quantity of information required is so great that it is practically impossible to attain; it is still, in principle, a possibility for knowing. The second way knowledge can be limited is in quality. There may be information or beings that we are simply unequipped to explore or analyze. I would argue that there is an aspect of humans that is inadmissable to analysis or full knowing.

When I say it cannot be analyzed, I mean it is something we cannot directly access. It is not something that can be pointed to and described; it can only be posited as an explanatory device.

When people argue over free will, they are either claiming a certain creative spontaneity for humans, or for a rigid determination. I would argue this is an impossible question; it cannot be answered. When we ask what this spontaneity may be; a particular aspect of human nature is named. Spirit, reason, will, whatever. This aspect is then explained to be somehow independant of all immanant causes; nothing has shaped this one aspect. Family life, no matter how fine or horrible, has molded this aspect. Absolutely no combination of socio-economic-historical factors has affected this aspect, because if this aspect was capable of being affected, than it would be one more link in the cause and effect chain and therefore determined.

This aspect - will, spirit, reason - therefore only has a one way relationship with everything else. All else that might reside in a human subject and its environment can only be affected by this aspect; they themselves can only be altered; they can do no altering themselves.

The determination folks believe every last aspect of reality rests within a cause and effect structure. Nothing happens without an immediate cause; every human action has a cause, which itself has a caused, all the way down to the bottom turtle. The aspect the free willers believe in is itself determinted by something else. There is a two way relationship between the spirit/will/reason and the environment - they affect each other.

Now, why do I think this debate is unresolvable? Because neither position can truly support itself. Free will can never be proven, because it is a simple matter to posit that one is determined to believe in free will. However, determination cannot be proven either. The moment one posits a free will/spirit, an aspect of the self that stands unaffected by the environment, no philosophy of determination can track down and kill this aspect. If there is such a free aspect, it would be impossible to conclude exactly which environmental factors might affect this aspect. Every determination posited - ie, bad family life, can only explain a single piece of behaviour. Those who believe in free will can simply relocate the will to a position unaffected by the posited determination; this process can go on indefinately.

The claims of free will and determination cancel each other out. They negate each other. In negating each other, they create an unknowable aspect of human nature. A nothingness. Our knowledge of ourselves is essentially finite, and no quantity of information or observation can ever change that.

This nothingness itself is, in practice, identical to the posited free will. Because we can never know if or how anything determines it, it appears to us to be a responsible, spontaneous, creative, force. What it is on its own account is unknowable; all we can deal with is the appearance and the appearance is undetermined.