antagonist

Zombyland

Zombies, memories made of decaying flesh. Their hauntic presence a material realism. Sarah Lauro writes a Zombie Manifesto in which “The zombie exists somewhere between the ontic and the hauntic”. She describes an evolution of the undead in terms of the living, Hence an ‘evolution from the Haitian zombi to the Hollywood zombie. 

She proposes the zombii: a conflation of David Chalmer’s p-zed with a Benjamian/Derridian zombie. An über-zombie. Zombii: ‘a zombie that does not yet exist’. 

From this we learn that zombies do in fact exist. She identifies some for us: we have capitalist zombies (Dawn of the Dead), communist zombies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), viral zombies (28 Days)  and we might add vampiric zombies (I am Legend) or more recently auto-zombified legends of pop (MJ, as per Ian Penman).

The zombii Lauro proposes will canabalize the future. This Über-Zombie, a u-zed, is a spectral post-human swarm organism. Its lack of consciousness is what instills horror. Its Achilles heal is its brain, the cognitive center of our humanity and the zombii’s un- or a-humanity. 

The zombii, neither living nor dead, neither subject nor object, is an in-between creature of negativity. It is suspended in a negative dialectical tension without the possibility of release. The zombii cannot be sublimated, it is the undead aporetic appearance of horror in human form.

But we can take Lauro’s evolution one step further. A zomby is the material realization of the perpetual postponement of humanity. Its not post-human like Lauro’s zombii modeled after Haraway’s cyborg. It has no use for humanity except for nourishment. It’s neither conscious nor unconscious, it has no need for consciousness. It is a thing among things. To some that's the most horrifying prospect possible.

Objects are Subjects

The rule I have adhered to, that I hold my students to, and that has been the most productive constraint I have experienced in my own practice, is to never just theorize but always to allow the object 'to speak back.' Making sweeping statements about objects, or citing them as examples, renders them dumb. Detailed analysis – where no quotation can serve as an illustration but where it will aways be scrutinized in depth and detail, with a suspension of certainties – resist reduction. Even though, obviously, objects cannot speak, they can be treated with enough respect for their irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness – but not mystery – to allow them to check the thrust of an interpretation, and to divert and complicate it. This holds for objects of culture in the broadest sense, not just for objects we call art. Thus, the objects we analyze enrich both interpretation and theory. This is how theory can change from a rigid master discourse into a live cultural object in its own right. This how we can learn from the objects that constitute our area of study. And this is why I consider them subjects.

Mieke Bal in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (p. 47)

Anonymity

I was completely unknown for thirty years, my books did not sell at all. I was comfortable with that situation which worked well with my view on things. The only important years are the years of anonymity. To be unknown is a voluptuousness which has its bitter sides sometimes, but it is an extraordinary state.

Emil Cioran in conversation with Michael Jakob, 1988

I Want To Ask Jacques Derrida A Question

(Alan Sondheim posted this on nettime. Reproduced here with his kind permission.)

I want to ask Jacques Derrida a question.

It is question about death, not in particular his death.

But a question concerned with the aporia of death, not necessarily his own.

Such a question, which would have been possible several years ago,

is no longer possible.

We are thrown back on the words of Jacques Derrida

We are immured there.

It would have been simple: Jacques, here is what I want to know.

Do you have a minute of your time.

The body of Jacques Derrida still exists.

His body, phoric, carries the aporia.

The aporia is not his own, nor can he speak and return an unraveling.

Today, words are never set in stone, and questions go unanswered.

Today, questions disappear, and their occasion disappears.

The occasion of a question: a gap, as in a detective story.

As if the question were sutured by an answered,

when in fact it is sutured by any reply at all.

An answer responds to a question; a reply responds to the occasion of a question.

I remember Jacques Derrida, and would have tapped him on the shoulder,

saying, excuse me, but ...

There is an image I have of this tapping: the softness of his jacket, 

the slight giving away of the flesh beneath, and he turns towards me.

When I move my hands, everything is empty.

Jacques Derrida is a remnant of matter.

... "If death" ... "names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity (no one can die in my place or in the place of the other), then all the _examples_ in the world can precisely illustrate this singularity. Everyone's death, the death of all those who can say 'my death,' is irreplaceable." ... (Derrida, Aporias)

When I move my hands: when my hands are moved for me,

are only moved for me:  mise en scene, a scenario or occurrence, chora.

I do not collapse time, Jacques, in order to speak to you: I speak to you.

I do not collapse space, in order to speak: I touch you lightly on your shoulder, 

I wait until you turn around, your glance moves in my direction, 

momentarily you are caught up in my gaze,

you hesitate whether or not to return your own,

your reply to my question, you return such, as if such is returned, 

an exchange of gifts or misrecognition.

Of the good, there is the edge of a knife, and the fall which surrounds it; 

of the spoken, there is a comprehension, empathetic alignment, then nothing.

Of the spoken, the knife edge separates the question I give to Jacques as a gift, 

an awakening, and the reply which shatters after a particular time,

calculable, unattainable.

Of the question:

all questions are a permanence: It is impossible to answer a question.

Jacques turns;

I look at his shoes. Thinking of Van Gogh, of Heidegger, of Jacques Derrida,

I take several photographs. They are remnants, indices with lost referents;

they are abject.

I am silent; I say nothing to him, to Van Gogh, to Heidegger.

Repeatedly I raise the camera; eye-level, I aim downward,

towards an incalculable earth. The images, lost, are digital; 

they never were. Between one pixel and another,

a hole, precisely the width of death.

By Alain Sondheim

Elite Racism

Dutch lawyer and practicing Muslim Mohammed Enait refused to stand up and remove his taqiyah for a Dutch court because according to his religion all people are equal. He was reprimanded by the bar disciplinary board consequently. Last week, the Disciplinary Appeals Tribunal threw out the ruling in Enait’s favor on the grounds that the Netherlands is a society in constant flux, that this country is now a multicultural society and that based on that the court and the institution of law must change accordingly.

Enait also refuses to shake hands with women because of these same religious beliefs, another incident that got him national media coverage. So, when the Appeals Tribunal decided in his favor regarding his refusal to rise, another media hype was born. In the influential Dutch talk-show Pauw & Witteman Enait was, let’s say, ‘interviewed’ regarding his beliefs. What ensued was neither an interview nor a civil dialogical exchange. It was however an interesting deconstruction of the media’s involvement and responsibility in Dutch politics.

Enait was asked as to why he wears the taqiyah and why he refuses to remove it in front of a judge.  Pauw repeatedly referred to Enait’s ‘religious headware’ as a ‘muts’  (cap) and in one instance as a headscarf - even after Enait on numerous occasions in the interview corrected him politely. In Dutch the term ‘muts’ , as Pauw used it in a derogatory way, which judging from the audience’s and other guests’ laughter is apparently quite funny, is not something anyone and in particular a journalist would or should use to refer to the Muslim taqiday. Pauw also ironically feigned ignorance regarding the Muslim and thus Enait’s custom to speak a salawat when using the name of their profet Muhammed (i.e. ‘Praise be upon Him’). 

All in all, it was clear that Pauw’s single purpose was to harass his guest, a strategy that was not lost on Enait, a law  graduate from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Enait retorted by deconstructing the interview in situ. He finds it rather curious as to why Pauw is asking these questions about his religious custom to wear the taqiyah. ‘It is the same as when women wear a headscarf’, he says and adds that he doesn’t understand the purpose of these questions. Now it gets interesting. Enait turns the interview by questioning Pauw’s own motives for conducting the interview as he does. He remarks that his position is obvious as was clarified to the editorial team of Pauw & Witteman before the show as well as stipulated in no uncertain terms in the judge’s ruling which was, as he recalls, based on the idea that the Netherlands is a multicultural society and as such should respect the customs of non-Judeo-Christian traditions.

 ‘There is no black box here’, he says to Pauw. Instead he reasons there is something else going entirely in this ‘debate’, something which he calls out as elite racism. He recounts Pauw’s remarks to him prior to the shoot in which Pauw said that he does not believe in the multicultural society. When confronted Pauw does not deny this but tries to make his personal beliefs irrelevant to the issue at hand. But of course, that’s not possible and Enait rightly brings this out. Pauw loses his journalistic perspective when Enait pushes on and accuses Pauw of a monocultural approach. A last attempt by Pauw to re-gain his ground is by constantly interrupting Enait with more derogatory remarks and finally calling him a ‘provocateur’, someone who’s out to simply provoke hyperbolic response. That was a mistake.

Enait points out that he is no such thing. Rather, he is someone who asserted his fundamental rights as a religious person and who did so entirely with in the ‘iron cage of the judicial system’, as he calls it, and prevailed. This was not an act of religio-fundamentalism or orthodox muslim terror. This was justice. At least as defined by Western standards.

It is a shame Pauw’s own ego got the better of him. He could have asked important questions such as why Enait equates monoculturalism with racism and whether Enait thinks multiculturalism is compatible with his orthodox beliefs. And how can Enait justify his multiculturalism with his persistence to adhere to his own values with little regard for values not his own?

On all of these questions my hunch is that Enait would be severely lacking an appropriate response because he is not a multiculturalist at all. Enait would like us to believe, rather opportunistically, that he is a multiculturalist, as per the Tribunal’s ruling. We could classify his multiculturalism as that what legal theorist  Stanley Fish calls a ‘strong multiculturalism’; that is to say that Enait takes universal cultural difference so seriously he cannot think through any particular difference, for if he did so, he would paradoxically undermine the general politics of difference he wants us to believe he so strongly believes in. In fact Enait displays the text book example of the only way - according to Fish - that a strong multiculturalist can maintain his position: by privileging a particular difference which necessarily represses any other differences. The particularity of the Muslim to cover his head can now be seen as fetishization. As a commodification of one’s religious beliefs, it becomes the body of difference through which Enait’s ‘multiculturalism’ is mediated. Fish concludes that there is no such thing as multiculturalism, rather there is what we can call a multicultural fallacy: multiculturalism is logically impossible. Instead there is only uni- or monoculturalism and differing shades of tolerance for cultural habits other than one’s own. Exactly the kind of culturalism Enait finds at fault in Pauw’s thinking.

What Enait’s usage of the term elite racism however does bring out is the dismal state of the left elite in the Netherlands and perhaps elsewhere. The term itself is not new. It is the object of research by Teun van Dijk at the University of Amsterdam (Discourse Studies). As Van Dijk writes ‘elite racism is seldom overt and blatant’ and - because it is practiced by a group of people (with easy access to mass media for instance) who are generally regarded as tolerant - their racism is ‘typically denied and hard to oppose’. To me, this is the upshot of Enait’s ‘performance’ on Pauw and Witteman. According to Van Dijk the general assumption is that "popular" racism and populist politics are the major reproductive forces behind racism. Instead, what Van Dijk shows is that there is a far more cunning and dangerous kind of racism found within the ranks of the elite which shape our minds through mass media on a daily and constant basis.

It has been a long suspicion of mine that both left as well as right politics fail to engage the so-called ‘muslim threat’, what is sometimes called the ‘Islamization’ of Western society, because both left as well as right fail to come to terms with their own primordial, xenophobic reflex, their xenophobic unreason.  ‘It’s about the way you act’, Enait answers to Pauw’s question as to whether Enait believes he is furthering his cause when referring to the media elite in Hilversum as racist. Enait need not answer this pseudo-question. Enait, who at least for now, comes across as a misguided multiculturalist or at least someone who has succesfully laid claim to multiculturalist values has exposed the left’s failure to think their own primordial premisses which are quite simply: racist.

Readings from The Communist Postscript II

(introduction continued)

By Boris Groys.

It is only when destiny is no longer mute and no longer ruling on a purely economic level, but from the start formulated within language and determined in a political way (as it was in communism) that man can become a being determined in and through language. At that point, man is given the opportunity to argue, to protest or agitate against decisions that would have otherwise been tragic. Such arguments are of course not always effective. They are often ignored or even repressed. But still, they are not without meaning. In any case, it is meaningful and justified to turn oneself against a political decision through language as a medium because these decisions themselves are captured in that same medium. Under the conditions of capitalism however, every criticism or protest is de facto meaningless. Because within capitalism language itself is a commodity, that is to say, language is essentially mute. Critical statements and protests are successful when they sell well and they are bad when they don’t. These statements do not in any way differentiate themselves from any other commodity in as far as they can be sold.

Capitalism does not operate within the same medium as its critique. Because capitalism and its discursive critique are incommensurable qua medium the two will never meet. For them to meet one must change society. One must make society a linguistic construct in order to change society in a meaningful way. Marx’s thesis that philosophy’s task is not to interpret society but to change it, can thus be formulated as follows: to change society it must first become communist. This explains the affection the critical mind has for communism. Only the communist total linguistic revolution of the human condition allows for the possibility of a fundamental critique.

One can think of the communist society as a society where power and the critique of power operate within the same medium.When you now ask whether the regime in the former Soviet-Union must be thought of as communist - and this question seems virtually unavoidable when speaking of communism - then the answer in light of the above given definition is affirmative. From a historical point of view, the Soviet Union has pushed the realization of communism further than any other society before it. In the thirties every kind of private property was abolished. This gave the political leadership the possibility to take decisions independent from private economic concerns. It was not the case that the private concerns where repressed. They simply didn’t exist anymore. Every citizen was a servant of the Soviet State, lived in a State house, shopped at a State shop and travelled through State territory using public transport which was State owned. What economic concerns could a man possibly have? His only concern was the welfare of the State, so that every citizen, regardless whether this happened in a legal or illegal way, which is to say through labour or corruption, could enjoy maximum benefit from the State. Thus, in the Soviet Union there existed a fundamental identity between private and public concerns. The only outward concern was of a military nature: the Soviet Union had to defend itself against foreign enemies. Already in the sixties it became clear that the military potential of the Soviet Union was such that a foreign threat no longer realistically existed. “Objectively” speaking then, the Soviet Union no longer had any conflicts. There was no internal opposition and an external threat was highly improbable. This is why it could permit itself to rely on its own political considerations and internal convictions for practical decisions. This political reasoning, because of its own dialectical nature, persuaded the Soviet leadership autonomously to abandon communism. This decision however does not change the fact that communism had been realized in the Soviet Union. As will be shown in what follows, it was this decision that completed the embodiment, the incarnation of communism.

Kafka's Burrow and the Sonorous Body

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.  John Cage

She is in an unspeakable mood. I try to circumvent her, but her foulness is everywhere. When she moves, space reorients itself around her. I get a sense of vertigo when this happens. I feel sick.

She sighs and some air escapes the pressure between us. She sips her tea, her downcast eyes protecting me unwillingly from what will remain unuttered between us.

I am unable to speak, but still, words wring themselves from me. The silence she returns resounds of me, echoing inside me. It leaves me breathless. Hollow.

It’s not a matter of when a person listens but of where he listens. He listens to the resounding of something within himself caused by something outside himself. Some exteriority is inscribed in his interiority.

Nancy writes that his is a ‘sonorous body’, a body which is ‘always at once the body that resounds and [a] body as a listener where that resounds, or that resounds with it’ (8, my emphasis) . 

We're both listening then, at the same time, but more importantly in the same shared place or rather our listening creates our co-presence in sound. I've never listened this intently to her silence before. I must have never listened to hear before. Something crucial is approaching. Some secret is at stake.

Nancy is in search of an ontological tonality and asks: What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening , listening with all his being? (4)

What does it mean indeed? I don’t know, but I know this. I am hollow, her silent exteriority reverberates my interiority, the outside is enveloped by the inside. She is Echo, but I am no Narcissus. 

What reaches me, what extends from me to her and thus vice versa, what travels in res between us, is an echo, a renvoi, something that returns to itself, in itself, by itself. We are rebounding/resounding of each other. When we are ready to return to ourselves we have departed already, again, over and over.

At this point I recall Kafka's Burrow, a parable on the exteriority of the interiority or the interiority as exteriority, a tale of folding/unfolding, of invagination. The burrower obsesses with silence, his burrow must be silent. (There’s a thread in here of the relation between silence, safety and topology)

He is continuously haunted by the omnipresence of rhythmic sounds punctuated by a noise-like hissing which seem to be always arriving in an ever-increasing crescendo without ever reaching its destination.

As he sets out to investigate he is acutely aware of the burrow as a listening body but fails to identify himself as such a sonorous body. His burrow has become an anechoic chamber. He is reverberating with himself.

(What happens to his plan to transform his beloved Castle’s Keep into a hollow separating it from the walls surrounding it, creating an island within his burrow which is already an island?)

He longs to be in his Keep with nothing but the rushing of silence to accompany him. Poor thing. He fails to realize he is not listening i.e. ‘straining toward a possible meaning’ (6) at all. ‘Sense opens up in silence’, writes Nancy, our task, and the burrower’s, is to listen to the ‘silence of meaning’ (26).

‘Silence is an arrangement of resonance’, it is ‘exactly as when in a perfect condition of silence your own body resonate[s], your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave’ (21).  

The animal deep inside its burrow is experiencing the absolute non-phenomenality of sound, its lack of intentionality. His fear of alterity and exteriority is evoked from his interiority. This animal's haunto-topological predicament consists of ‘acoustic oto-emissions’ (16).

Her silence mingles with these auto-produced sounds of my inner ear. What starts as an itch, excavates me while it burrows deeper into me. It sits in my stomach now, a dense mass of emptiness stretching me from the outside in. 

(Numbers refer to Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007))

Readings from The Communist Postscript I

From the Introduction

By Boris Groys

This book is about communism. How one speaks of communism depends on what one considers as communism. In what follows I I understand communism as the project to submit economics to politics, that is to say, to allow politics to works in a free and sovereign manner. Economics works in the medium of money. It operates with numbers. Politics works in the medium of language. It operates with words , not just arguments, agendas and resolutions, but also with commands, injunctions, decisions and decrees. The communist revolution is the transformation of society from the monetary medium to the linguistic medium. It is a linguistic turn on the plane of social praxis. For it does not suffice to define man as a speaking entity as is the dominant view in recent philosophy regardless of all nuances and internal differences between independent philosophical positions. As long as man lives under the conditions of capitalist economy, man will remain mute since his destiny does not speak to him. When man is not addressed by his destiny he cannot respond.The economical praxis is anonymous and defies articulation. You cannot enter into a debate with it. You cannot make it change its mind, convince or persuade it with words to side with you. The only thing you can do is to adjust your attitude towards the economical praxis. There’s no arguing with economic failure just as there’s no discursive foundation for economic success. Eventually, in capitalism, the affirmation or denial of human praxis is not linguistic but economic. It is not expressed in words but numbers. This is what puts language as such out of play.

(Translating bits and pieces as I go through this little book )

The Horror-furnishings of Incipient High Capitalism

Empty, brightly lit streets as we enter cities at night. They surround us in fan-shaped formation, travel out and away from us like rays of mandorla. And the glance into a room will always find a family at a meal or else occupied with some obscure niggling thing at a table under a hanging lamp, its white glass globe set into a metal frame. Such eidola are the germ cells of Kafka's work. And this experience remains an inalienable possession of his generation, his only - and therefore our, because only for it do the horror-furnishings of incipient high capitalism fill the screens of its most luminous childhood experience. -Unexpectly, the street emerges here such as we never otherwise experience it, as was, a built-up thoroughfare.

Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project

Kafka and De Sade II

'Can you achieve good through evil? The strength which sets itself against fate is in fact a weakness. Surrender and acceptance are much stronger. But the Marquis de Sade does not understand that.'

'The Marquis de Sade!' I exclaimed.

'Yes,' Franz Kafka nodded. 'The Marquis de Sade, whose biography you lent me, is the real patron of our era.'

'That isn't really true.'

'Yes. The Marquis de Sade can obtain pleasure only through the sufferings of others, just as the luxury of the rich is paid for by the misery of the poor.'

From Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch.

The Forgetting of Forgetting Itself

Whenever figures in the novels have anything to say to K., no matter how important or surprising it may be, they do so casually and with the implication that he must really have known it all along. It is a though nothing new was being imparted, as though the hero was just being subtly invited to recall to mind something that he had forgottten. This is how Willy Haas has interpreted the course of events in The Trial and rightly so. "The object of the trial", he writes, "indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself... Here it has actually become a mute figure in the shape of the accused man, a figure of the most striking intensity."

Walter Benjamin in Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death.

Kafka and De Sade

My admiration for Spurious is limitless. I noticed an intriguing question Spurious asks:

Who trusts Janouch's introduction to the second edition of his conversations with Kafka? Trustworthy or not, it's moving. In fact, I like the lies, which are so obviously lies (...)

Who indeed can trust Janouch' recollection of him lending Kafka his de Sade book? But also, who cares? An illusory connection between Kafka and de Sade is simply too interesting not to succumb to:

Gustav Janouch recalled in his memoir Kafka's remark that "[t]he Marquis de Sade, whose biography you lent to me, is the real patron of our era" (J, 131). The meaning of this pronouncement is obscure, but manifestly Kafka was aware of de Sade's work - or at least his reputation - and with Penal Colony Kafka crossed a thin but recognizable line, and entered the domain of the Marquis. This was a misstep [...]. (From Louis Begley The Tremendous World I have Inside My Head)

(Why does Begley think this is a misstep? Is he distrustful of Janouch as well?)

Against Sceptical Nihilism

Interviewer: What's the most widely held misconception about your work?

Derrida: That I'm a sceptical nihilist who doesn't believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That's stupid and utterly wrong and only the people who haven't read me say this... Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith and that I'm full of respect for the texts I read.

(From Dick & Kofman Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film)

Little Creatures Moving in the Distance

Kafka is terminally ill. He is in constant pain, he is plagued by horrible spells. He stays in bed and reads Either/Or. A couple of days before he pens down the final entry in his diary, which we'll soon read, he copies a passage from The Pilgrim Kamanita, a Buddhist tale by the Dane Gjellerup, a tale of reaching nirvana:

Such a one, so long as he dwells in the body, is seen by men and gods; but after his body is fallen to dust, neither men nor gods see him no more. And even nature, the all-seeing, sees him no more: he has blinded the eye of nature, he has vanished from the sight of the wicked.

If it is not nirvana Kafka is interested in, what then? The vanishing act of man in nature Gjellerup describes, reminds me of the opening of Nietzsche's Über Wahrheit und Lüge im Außermoralischen Sinn or Houellebecq's exasperation with man's insignificance in The Possibility of an Island:

Look at the little creatures moving in the distance, look. They are humans.

But there's a significant difference as well. While Nietzsche and Houellebecq emphasize man's nullity and nullability, Kafka might have been interested in man's invisibility in nature after death. Once the dust has settled man disappears. His final being is to be amongst the things, invisibly. Nietzsche also reminded us, 'antespectively', of man's complete disappearance from the earth: after nature has drawn a few breaths all men, however smart they are, must die.

Death is inevitable: it happens whether you like it or not (K, Diaries). Shortly after the Kamanita passage, Kafka writes his own 'eulogy':

It is incorrect to say of anyone: Things were easy for him, he suffered little; more correct: His nature was such that nothing could happen to him; most correct: He has suffered everything, but all in a single all-embracing moment. (K, Diaries 1910-1923)

He's in bed, he's reading Either/Or. The final leap is only a couple of months away. Is it surprising that Kafka's last entry conjures up a spirit? Kafka's writing, which has accompanied him many nights, finally turns on its author:

More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits - this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture - becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitium. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or not. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons. (K, Diaries).

After this, Kafka will write no more.

An Endless Space of Presence in Absence

Mirrors

When we touch a mirror’s surface and look closely we note the impassability from reflection to reflected. We are witnessing a sublime, unbridgeable rift, an aporia. Our touch never touches but asymptotically. Our reflection never reflects but hauntologically. Our bodies are there but not there, we are what Derrida calls ‘becoming-body’.

A reflection is a reflection of form; a mirror forms a reflection of us, but not us. Before a reflection can form, it is formless. This formlessness, this Bataillian l’informe regenerates forms infinitely, tirelessly, without exhaustion, without exhausting us (but supplementing us). The mirror is an endless space of presence in absence.

We touch it again and look closely, again.

Now we note the impassable is ‘pantaporos aporos'. A sublime multitude of bridges, a network of networks and routes, a pantaporia. Everything touches everything, but no shores, no ‘rims of the abyss to be crossed’ (Lyotard) are laid bare to discover. We are suspended over the abyss. Indefinitely.

(Aporos: unable to bridge, no route. Pantaporos, many ways to go through, to bridge, many routes. The phrase comes from Sophocles' Antigone.)

Nachträglichkeit

"A little boy who, as so often happens in families of the lower middle class, shared his parents' bedroom had ample and even regular, opportunity for observing sexual intercourse at an age before he was able to talk. He saw much and heard still more". (Freud in Moses and Monotheism)

Nachträglichkeit is intimately linked to différance:

“Différance, with an 'a', is after the event (Nachträglichkeit) and related to 'postponement'. Life must be conceived of a trace before determined as a presence. The essence of life (no thing) is a difference”.

She uses Alan Bass’s translation (‘after the event’) where Derrida writes retardement and Lacan après-coupe. Next,  (she doesn’t say so) she quotes Derrida almost verbatim: ‘Life must be thought of as a trace before Being may be determined by presence‘ (Derrida, W&D).

Next, she quotes Pessoa to illustrate what this difference or différance is (she leaves out that they are not the same) and as if by magic, différance should come into focus:

“To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel - it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost” (Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet)

(The text I’m reading quotes from the French edition which is then translated into English. If you like you can look up the translation but it’s not pretty, though not wrong. I have chosen to replace her translation with the most current one I could find. Having said that, I do like her translation of the second line: ‘To feel today the same as yesterday is not to feel, it is to recall today what we felt yesterday’).

I like this brave but defective attempt at explaining différance through Pessoa. It brings out several points worth considering:

1. She’s a psychoanalyst in training. To her différance is Nachträglichkeit. However, différance is a double edged deconstructive force, if you will allow me this shameless reduction for now, which finds its parallel as Derrida notes in Freud’s usage of the term (and the closely related but often forgotten Verspätung.) Différance is both perpetual postponement and differential delay. Deconstruction as the science of différance (another blatant reduction) is destructively constructive or constructively destructive.

2. Différance is not life when life is derivative of some ousia or essence. To live then is not to defer or differ, it might always already be to learn to live. Though Pessoa writes that to live is to be other, this otherness is not différance as Gampel would like us to concur. Life is a ‘magisterial locution’ (D, Specters). It is not something one can learn or teach, while at the same time, it is the most important thing to master. Therefor it happens between life and death which is to say that it most be done in the spectral i.e what one learns is ‘to live with ghosts’. ‘To live is to be other’ is to ‘To live otherwise and ... more justly’ (D, Specters).

3. Memory mediates melancholia. Every memory is invested with its own disinvestment of loss. Memory works through loss. Memory always already is something lost which we are reminded of when we remember. Or in other words, memory mourns its own remembrance. (When Derrida writes his memoirs of Paul de Man he claims memory is in fact a form of mourning).

4. ‘To live is to be other’. What is other is expressly excluded by Pessoa from the interior. One does not feel anything when one feels what one felt before. Remembering is the zombification of life .Through our memories we become vessels for the transportation of previously felt feelings that keep us from feeling something at all. Pessoa realizes the intimate link between memory and loss: to be today’s living corpse of what lived and lost.

5. Through memory we lose an affective affiliation to ourselves. To Freud mourning is the work one does to synchronize ourselves with the loss of someone to which we cathexed. The inability to sever the cathexis is what creates melancholia.


('She' is Yolanda Gampel in 'Language, Symbolization, and Psychosis')

Love in the Virtual Democracy

(From Fabien Tarby – Démocratie Virtuelle, L'Harmattan, 2009, extrait, ps 195- 224. This was very hard to translate, so consider this preliminary. It gets tricky in the last paragraph.)

Love

Designates one of the four conditions of the subject.

That for which the subject under the form of the Two - possibly at the same time or when returning - is subjected to the tension between desire and the mysticism of the other. That tension constitutes true love, like working under the between-two of the extremes (pornography or the theology of the other). Love is an available Truth but infinite for the singular Two, her and me, him and me. That truth assumes the form of a purely sexual character in relation to the Other without denying its existence as a material. She does not otherwise channel in mysticism the Other, but by illusion or hallucination.

Love is not political. Every condition is specific. Of the conditions, love is the most singular, despite that its universal singularity is to be a fact (at the same time revealed by Art). Thus, no political prescription (which is totalitarian after all) under its debt and its non-debt, legitimate or illegitimate, can not be formulated. However, there is a certain fabrication of love as there is a fabrication of (authentic) politics and a possible relation between the two. There is conventional love and revolutionary love.

In the virtual democracy, love is exposed by the schism of being, appearing, in the first place between extremes, between pornography and mysticism - a reduction to desire and a pure sublimation - and a highly naive romanticism. The schism is evidently the loss of its specificity, the between-two. Within the artistic mediatism of the corporeal reduction, or the beauty of the good and the eternal sentiments, which are opposing products, but compossibles of the Manufacturer of dreams.

The law assures that the more love has its social place the more love is becoming, according to the two extremes, the possibility of the free drive to unwind individuals and the Eldorado of a belief in the Idea that it thus favors (or a tricky combination of two, pornography and mysticism). It is that which separates the subjects from the other conditions, in particularly the political condition. Its extreme nature, and the care one gives to proving it by the juridically affirmation of its reality (the right to porno in the same way as the right to believes, on the one hand the unstable synthesis within the Family, while on the other hand the individual liberties) are symptoms of the incertitude regarding the existence of Truths for our world, the same bosom of the condition that most naturally announces its revelation.

Preconscious Deformities

Recalling a visit with Kafka to an exhibition of French painting, Janousch reports that, in answer to a comment he made on on Picasso's "rose coloured women with gigantic feet" which was to effect that Picasso was a "wilfull distortionist" Kafka replied: "I do not think so... He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes 'fast', like a watch - sometimes".

(from The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head by Louis Begley)

Mathematica

The searing curve of beauty is a thought too bright to tell of
in fire and desire. Every meaning is a shell of polynomial perfection, never factored, not equated,
in fluctuating fancy for perfection uncreated.
Its crystalyzing concept, agonizing extrospection,
in perfect affirmation has denied its own perfection.
Its perfectness imperfectly fulfills its own condition.
Reality as realized refuses recognition.

-Marilyn Hacker

(As printed in Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water)

The Listening Eye of Emily Richardson

Some thoughts after watching Cobra Mist, a short film by Emily Richardson.

Shown at the Impakt Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Cobra Mist is an spectro-poetic essay on landscape and the (de)militarization of space. Director Emily Richardson captures what is left of Orford Ness, Suffolk (UK) after it was used by an unsuccessful, secret Cold War era military ‘over-the-horizon’ radar project. If there is an adequate picture of a Cold War world, Richardson has convincingly recorded it.

 
A time-lapse - a technique deeply linked to showing the animate in what we otherwise would observe as inanimate - brings the terrain of this stretch of land near Suffolk to life. 360 degrees and panoramic scenes are alternated with claustrophobic, interior stills of ghostly structures seemingly held up by nothing but shadows and light. Still lifes composed of left behind objects and strangely amputated buildings on the omni-present horizon start to quiver with live as time is sped up. Richardson’s film shows us a world left behind after an event of apocalyptic proportions.

Similar to Richardson’s film ‘Petrolia’ Cobra Mist shows the effects of human intervention on nature. Martin Heidegger in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ calls Gestell the result of the human intervention which treats all of nature as a reserve i.e. a Bestand to be exploited. Heidegger does not necessarily condemn technological exploitation as such, - rather what is condemned is calculative reason - but instead points out another way of interacting with our environment through the concept of the fourfold or Geviert. By gathering earth, sky, mortals and divinities Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that such a Geviert is what creates a world in which the thing is able to ‘thing’.

Orford Ness was exploited by a secretive form of calculative reason: the military logic of intelligence acquisition and geo-surveillance through the use of radar. The film take its title from a Cold War era code-name of a project that set out to create and test a so-called ‘over-the-horizon’ radar installation to facilitate long-range surveillance. That is to say, what was exploited at this site was not a fossil resource but a natural resource nonetheless, namely acoustical space itself.

The soundtrack accompanying the film brings this out. Composed and constructed out of ‘found sounds’ at the site itself, by using high-sensitivity microphones left overnight, the soundtrack treats the acoustical space at the site as an archive of sonofacts, sonorous artifacts lingering in the airwaves at Orford Ness. The soundtrack or perhaps more to the point, the soundscape, feels like a sonological archeology. Sound composer Benedict Drew and sound recordist Chris Watson thus jointly unearth a sonic archive of Cold warfare.

Radio-static like noise washes in and out of audible range backed by a disturbing, highly resonant, bass-ic artery. The screeching of sea-gulls and other bird-like sounds seem to oscillate in such a way that they become indistinguishable from high pitched frequency modulation, a technique used in radar technology. And then there’s the rain hitting the camera creating an intimacy, visually enhanced by a hand quickly wiping the lens clean before the sun breaks through.

Cobra Mist joins the two orders of visibility as proposed by Jacques Derrida. First there is the ‘visible in-visible’. Anything we want to keep secret, hidden from sight such as ‘a nuclear arsenal in underground silos’ or in our case an over-the-horizon radar installation belongs to this order of the visible invisible. Secondly what Derrida calls absolute invisibility: ‘that [what] refers to whatever falls the register of sight, namely the sonorous […]’. Something is absolutely invisible when we cannot see it by looking at it. It can only come to us through sound, smell or touch.

Radar, a technology of calculative secrecy, is the sonic or electromagnetic detection of objects afar. Air or microwaves are excited, to carry to and from, to return, information regarding objects which are ‘absolutely invisible’. We cannot see these objects, we can only send signals to them. The signals sent, return, and as such they are revenant.

Radar then is an acoustical gaze and as such a hauntological mirror. Derrida: ‘[It] sees me without me seeing it looking at me’ . And since we cannot see it, it can only be heard. This is similar to what Swedenborg, who in a way haunted Kant, calls the ‘listening eye’ as cited by Lyotard: ‘To the inside of the Ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing’. That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.

Radar: the listening eye. Radar, in its very technicality, gathers earth, sky, mortal and divinities, a conclusion reminiscent of Don Ihde’s phenomenology of the Shoreham nuclear powerplant.

But to return to Richardson’s film: Cobra Mist does not show us a, to use a tired cliche, desolate landscape. On the contrary. As the ‘wholly other’ it renders us desolate or more precisely as Lyotard puts it in Scapeland (The Inhuman): 'landscape leaves the mind desolate'. We lose ourselves in this landscape, this ‘world of sound’ in which ‘hearing breaks down the defenses of the harmonic and melodic ear, and becomes aware of timbre alone’.