tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post3737086523443099165..comments2023-10-31T06:15:38.224-07:00Comments on Videre Spectare: The Beginning of WritingJtrileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-63670404800654254002012-05-13T23:51:06.112-07:002012-05-13T23:51:06.112-07:00In order to write vividly and to draw on real life...In order to write vividly and to draw on real life examples, one has already jumped the gun. In other words every approach to reality, in which one draws analogies from, relies upon a certain epochal disclosure of being. <br /><br />I think 'writing' functions in a similar way to how OOO employs the term 'forging relations' in order to make a point that everything has a genesis. I think where 'writing' makes an advance over 'forging relations' is the synchronic axis of language, that is, the materiality of language itself to make connections independent of ones intent. Which I think gels nicely with your comments... <br /><br />“As someone who has studied literature, it is not the outside of the text that is the most interesting, but rather, how the text resists me as a reader – oh wait, I’ve fallen back into correlationism – it’s what it is “for me” again.”<br /><br />I personally would not frame it in terms of interest, as to do so is to be anthropomorphic. However, I would make a stronger statement regarding the impossibility of 'direct access' (as in full contact) to the outside of the text. Your closing quote from Nancy, again, gels with what I am trying to articulate.<br /><br />“Every discourse on the sense and significance of the world can be suspended, tipping over in insignificance...delivering my discourse up to the derision of ‘all talk, no action. But this in itself bears witness to sense” <br /><br /> Translation: “Oi idealist! You can assume direct access to the world all you like, that doesn't efface the materiality of language. Further, the condition of possibility for you to make your stoopid idealist criticisms of my style is grounded in the very thing you rescind. Fool! <br /><br />Will.Willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02173165132769577686noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-68398273887220262182012-05-11T13:58:52.005-07:002012-05-11T13:58:52.005-07:00In my estimation, you've said a very truthful ...In my estimation, you've said a very truthful thing here: "I find myself part of an academic machine that draws on these thinkers like sources rather than suffering them in the desert." I myself wonder about this: why the signifying appropriation? Why the placement, posturing, and positioning? Why the operation of appropriation, as such? It is not only a function of capitalist competition; or rather, the latter must be a function of a greater misapprehension of existence. A whole knot of references comes up here, especially Marx's admonition against taking humanity as a "means" and instead insisting we must take ourselves and our activity as both means and as an "end-in-itself." I think also of Bataille, his notion of "useless expenditure", and his lifelong resistance to the putting-to-use and the signifying appropriations that "go to work" in theoretical and philosophical texts (especially in his proclamation that <i>inner experience, existence, is not a project!</i>). I think of Blanchot, his omnipresent "theme" of <i>désœuvrement</i>, variously translated as "inoperation," "undoing," "unworking," etc. For Blanchot, we should add, this "unworking" is the most intimate (non-)operation of the work itself. It is death itself set free in life (not unlike the exposure or disruption emphasized in my previous comments). And then, of course, I think of Nancy's absolutely singular thinking on "community" as such, the community that resists all substance and meaning, which refuses to be "put to work," the community of existences without final accomplishment and without any constituted Meaning. And how does one not think of mysticism or spirituality in general, whose basic matrix means the "rejection" of worldly significance, "rejection" of self-appropriation, the "giving freely" of oneself, etc.<br /><br />I always say, it is not the system that is the problem, it's how we use it. We are far too often creatures of habit, and worse, creatures that mimic other creatures, creatures that seek recognition from other creatures, creatures who modify their behavior according to the "law of agreement" (Nietzsche). How do we make of ourselves, within the system, an unwilling participant-- manifestly "going with it" and "rejecting it" all at once? I believe there is only one answer: "write" texts that foil every expectation, follow the path that blazes for you to such heights of intensity that even if onlookers do not understand it they will recognize its "worth." This is no easy task, and all along the way the temptation of "citing your sources" will try and lead you astray. But clearly, we have examples of those who were able to navigate the system outside of it; they should be our standard bearers, and let the babbling crowds in the merchant halls of academia squawk away with their feigned sense of earnestness and "academic standards." I think that already, even as you are able to read these words, this is the case for you-- although, again, how easy it is to be led astray. At any rate, I am not discouraged by your obvious requirement to make claims and "impose" yourself; I am much more encouraged by your recognition of what is so limiting of these requirements. Because in the course of our writing, what we know cannot hide itself, our attitude toward sense and signification cannot hide itself. And we ourselves cannot hide ourselves. Imposition/exposition is not a duality, not a choice to be made. The choice to be made is between feigning and holding-true. At that point, I think, no height can be kept from us, because "height" itself means: holding to the true-- holding to the hiccup, suspension, drop, intimation-- of sense.<br /><br />Tim.fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-80833194734655815492012-05-11T07:14:33.923-07:002012-05-11T07:14:33.923-07:00Tim,
You say that you have not addressed my text ...Tim,<br /><br />You say that you have not addressed my text "directly" but if the text made you re-spond then this was the goal. As you say, we are always missing the mark, in a sense, and, even though oblique answers risks talking past one another, this is only to say that sense opens itself up to a mis(communication) which is also a communication, but a communication of sense rather than signification-- a Saying without a said, to use Levinas' language. <br /><br />I regret to say that most of my blogs here will deal with claims rather than an exposing of myself, due to the fact that, alas, I am a nascent academic in rhetoric and composition trying to do almost the opposite of the type of praxis-writing that exposes rather than imposes myself -- at once an impersonal and deeply personal writing, but not in the sense of Flaubert where the author withdraws from the scene--quite the opposite--where, as you say, the author "risks" himself as well as his ideas, where the author gives way to the writer as a body in-common, and where the writer is less worried about making claims and open to being claimed by existence in order to then write a living, breathing text. Not in a naïve sense of making the words as “alive” as speech, but rather, as you put it in your essay on poetry, that it is recited “by heart,” in-corporating and inscribing into our being—in the way that you said Nancy’s body becomes part of your body (the writer says: this is my body, given up for you—an infinite gift of the text. Do this (im)memory of me). <br /><br />That said, Nancy’s (body) of language and your (body) of language is seeping into my own text and my own way of writing, just as one might catch a flavor of Blanchot, Levinas, or Derrida in my discourse, all writers who expose themselves in an (im)personal text, taking risks, making new gestures of style—writing poetry in the sense that you give it in your essay. Poetry is not about making claims in order to solve problems; if you read Levi’s post on philosophical style, he begins with an anecdote about how he felt at home with the analytic folks since they are talking about issues and problems and forwarding positions rather than “figures.” From what I grasp from your text, you would say that this is a false set of decisions --- that talking “about” figures does little to incorporate their bodies of discourse—neither touches poetry in the sense that it gives access to sense/making. Poetry’s resistance to solving problems: an apo(et)ria. <br /><br />As an academic, but not as an academic philosopher, I get a bit more freedom with how I deploy “theory,” but due to my own beginning position as a beginning scholar, I do have a duty to a kind of clarity and position/argument writing. This is what was so refreshing about a course I took where we just read Blanchot, Derrida, and Barthes; I used that class to simply undergo (‘go under’ –Nietzsche) these texts, to suffer them in my being. Nancy shifts from Derrida’s use of the word “passion,” which is maybe too Christian, to suffering, but a suffering “without remission” and in this sense “without passion.” <br /><br />I find myself part of an academic machine that draws on these thinkers like sources rather than suffering them in the desert. As Nancy says, “the end of sources, the beginning of the dry excess of sense.” I myself do the same thing—I cannot help it. <br />Let me end by just saying that I thank you for your response to my text. I look forward to reading your blog for writing that takes writing as “more than a metaphor,” writing that pushes thought beyond itself and touches the infinite in the finite. It’s good to see someone still taking the time and the risk.Jtrileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-72336000579987634722012-05-11T07:12:54.557-07:002012-05-11T07:12:54.557-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Jtrileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05982512687346949724noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-24617436240123186522012-05-10T21:06:07.159-07:002012-05-10T21:06:07.159-07:00Let me close with what sparked off the need to wri...Let me close with what sparked off the need to write this post-script, a quote of Hegel’s from an early text of his, which resonates with Kierkegaard’s above: "Nowhere more than in the communication of the divine is it necessary for recipients to grasp the communication with the depths of their own spirit... This always objective language therefore attains sense and weight only in the spirit of readers and to an extent that depends on the degree to which the relationships of life and the opposition of life and death have come into their consciousness."<br /><br />Who is able to read this? Some have an aversion to the "divine": this word conjures up certain things, it represents or signifies certain things, etc., and what it supposedly signifies is increasingly rejected in our age (I imagine by OOO, as well). But keeping all I've said in mind, isn't there a different way to read? Isn't there a way to read such that my heart and mind absorb the word "divine" in an unknown way, without immediately knowing what it means or is meant to indicate? And can't I read all these words that way -- "life," "death," "consciousness," etc.? I think what scares me, saddens me, is that we read Hegel or others and think we've understood something. We treat language in this “signifier” way that OOO rejects and yet remains caught in (in my opinion). Again, it isn’t as easy as explicitly saying one is going beyond the signifying appropriation. It can only mean total transformation in what it means to be a “speaking being.”<br /><br />What I believe Nancy teaches us, or at least, what I think he has taught me more than any other person could, is how to suspend this “signifier” way of reading and thinking altogether. It can only transform ones life, ones practice of commenting on other's work, ones practice of thinking as such. How? Because then every signification, every sense, enters into suspension—including, above all, my sense of self. Every truth is disrupted; I am dead. Suddenly, everything is much less "constituted" than we once thought, the direction we are headed in more uncertain. There ends up being no sense to that endeavor that would go looking for "claims" or making them. I realize this takes me far afield of "theoretical analysis." But what matters is the mumbling eloquence of existence and what gets shared in it. What matters is this <i>auseinandergeschrieben</i>: this being-written-exposed of the one/another from out of the other/all the others/One. Vulnerability at its utmost: the skyline, courage.<br /><br />Tim.fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-12675782830347525632012-05-10T21:04:36.276-07:002012-05-10T21:04:36.276-07:00I'm writing this post-script to express my &qu...I'm writing this post-script to express my "regret" over the very fact that these duels between ideas get set up, because obviously these duels happen on the level of claims where we have forgotten that we share a common condition of “being human,” that is, being exposed, dissolved, lost, forgotten. In what I wrote above, I too made claims, opposed claims of others, etc. What madness, that we get caught up in the very games whose validity we deny, in the very course of our denunciation! But let me just admit that that type of writing is so unfavorable in my eyes, and as I mature, I hope to leave it all behind. I am already starting to temper my attention to blogs devoted to making theories and claims like Levi’s. I hate lecturing writing, I hate writing that tries to address academia or modify its standards. And yet, I am a philosopher, I care about truth, and “taking positions” is unavoidable. Feeling moved by profound disagreements is therefore also unavoidable (at that point, I can only hope no one takes it personal, because then, if we go down that road, I feel we are obligated to stay on the level of the abstract and impersonal). And yet, I know there is a higher road: recognizing, or embodying, the fact that every position is immediately overtaken in the material thrust of existence. I myself would like to be the loss of life as such in that thrust; and to make a “text” out of it. A text that would breath, that would be a body, a life. At that point, one stands alone, and there is no sense in worrying over the admonitions of the “theoreticists” (Laruelle again).<br /><br />We need to speak to each other, not to ideas; and when we speak, we have to do all we can to send ourselves far ahead of ourselves, or to keep in touch with "sense" by keeping in touch with what exceeds us in the instant. Obviously, to say so can only make sense insofar as my reader follows a direction of their own, divergent, not mine (since I am one arrow more lost!), realizing that it is impossible to follow a communal path, even if we go off on our own in-common, sharing a splintering affect.fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-65817067922500072532012-05-10T21:03:29.518-07:002012-05-10T21:03:29.518-07:00Let me append a post-script (in three parts, since...Let me append a post-script (in three parts, since there are these ridiculous character limits).<br /><br />On the surface I appear to be speaking "against" those who take a reductive view wherein texts are only about claims, representing, signifying things/ideas, etc., but it's important to acknowledge the flipside: that such a reduction cannot really take place. The text is always more to us than we can know or cognize. If it doesn’t do something to us, we’re just lying to ourselves. Now, just because I care about what a text does to us doesn’t mean I don’t care about claims; obviously, they are all tied up. But if the claims don’t make me bleed, if I can’t touch and be touched by the absent body of the text – what good is it? This is why I find it so difficult to write “about” another thinker, and why as a writer myself I simply pursue my own material-writing. I speak about Nancy because his body has become a part of mine, beyond everything the text might signify. In my post Common Ontology, I warned against ascribing to Nancy anything I might have said, not out of fear of responsibility for my words, but because at no point do I care about accurately representing Nancy’s thought. I simply think myself, make no citations unless they provoke me in my writing, and surrender my voice up to the public as my own. Because I don't think it's helpful to get in to a battle over claims. We shouldn’t always be so concerned with getting our appraisals of another thinker’s thoughts exactly right; or at least, if we really let their thoughts seep into ours, this should be freeing, not restricting. I read to be set free, not to be restricted.<br /><br />With much of OOO theory, all I can see are restrictions: terminologies, references here and there, “readings” of people and traditions, grafting from one theory to another, melding all sorts of ideas together, making demands left and right. They have yet to say one coherent thing about freedom, love, suffering, etc., at least as far as I can see. Now, will an OOOer say that I'm focused too much on human concerns when I care most about this element of "deep communication" of suffering, sadness, hope, etc.? Perhaps; but I would only say that suffering and hope are not strictly human phenomena. In my eyes, just as it's a mistake to think we know what 'writing' is, it's a mistake to think we know what 'human' means. 'Human' does not represent anything; if anything, it is simply a name for what is "in us more than ourselves," a name for this enigmatic being-in-common that we as speaking beings share. Because the human cannot be defined as rational or as animal (as Laruelle says); the human is without essence, without existence if you like, we are inconsistent, we don't make sense, we are non-signifying. These are not downfalls; these are what need to be defended. I care much more about sharing, extending myself, risking myself. I care about wagering, challenging, and inventing, not deducing, organizing, or constructing (to follow Laruelle again). This is why those authors closest to me are those who make, in their "texts," a manifest trial of their own existence (I'm thinking of Bataille, Artaud, Berryman, Spicer). I’m not a paranoid person, and I’m consigned to being incorrect. But I’m incorrect because sense exceeds significance. I cannot help but miss my mark. As Bataille writes, “Poetry is an arrow aimed at something. If I've taken good aim, what's important (what I want) isn't the arrow— or goal— but the instant the arrow is lost, dissolved, in the night air: so even the memory of the arrow is lost.” This is an acknowledgement, a sadness, and a hope.fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-29938514620869206062012-05-10T18:02:57.727-07:002012-05-10T18:02:57.727-07:00What is "needed" is not an operation tha...What is "needed" is not an operation that would be secondary to the very existing of existence itself, and the "essence" of existence is the ex-position or exposure of whatever position I might take. In other words, "claims" dislocate themselves from themselves, "positions" undo themselves in the very moment of their articulation. This is what is meant by the "excess of sense over signification": this excess is not something to operate on, or to write, it is something to accept as "fact," as the very fact of existing itself. This fact, this excess, undoes my intentions, undoes my claims, undoes my programs for others or for ontology, undoes the necessities I think I can willy-nilly impose on other existences.<br /><br />Nancy's "texts" are worthless when they are read from the vantage point of "what kinds of claims is Nancy making?" He is not making claims; he is exclaiming existence as it exists for him, as he is exposed to himself and to the whole world. One does not read Nancy to "read Nancy," but to expose oneself to oneself, qua him/his text, and to expose oneself to the world, qua the materiality of the "reading" experience. Nancy's emphasis on "Here is my body, given for you" in Corpus means: this text is not just text; this text, here, this text here, here is my body. Ex-clamation, ex-actly.<br /><br />I realize I have not addressed your text here directly Jake, but I have tried to get closer to the essence of the problem you have raised as it stands for me, and I am thankful for the opportunity. As a friend, I would advise you to stop reading for the sake of discovering what writing should be, or how we should write. I believe one has to take absolutely seriously Kierkegaard's requirement that, "you must not look at the mirror, observe the mirror, but must see yourself in the mirror." In other words, quit with reading for claims, significations, but see how you are reflected in what is said. To use the terribly inadequate English term: APPLY what you read absolutely to yourself: expose yourself to it: live as if it was addressed only to you: and when it says "existence," do not think something has been reflected, but think only of "YOUR" existence, for if you are not implicated in the writing of existence, then you will not know what it means to exist, or to write, in the first place. "Existence tans its own hide"...<br /><br />For my writing, as for Nancy's, one has to take what is said in earnest. There is no critical distance. No claim but in the raw exclamation of existence, touching on and touched by an excess of sense, which is also the absence of any constituted sense, and both of these senses in one-which-is-not-one but the articulation/disarticulation of "me" as an existent thrown/exceeded, again and again exposed in-common in the world of us all. Kierkegaard again: "My life is too earnest to be able to be served by the prop of an orator's technique... But those confounded people muddle into one speech everything I develop piece by piece in big books, always leaving behind in each book one stinger that is its connection with the next. But the insipidness of some speculators and of some clergy is incredible."fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-73833456774527740782012-05-10T18:01:28.689-07:002012-05-10T18:01:28.689-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-251592157127672248.post-70523781123774000902012-05-10T18:00:53.505-07:002012-05-10T18:00:53.505-07:00First, we have to deal with the fact that when peo...First, we have to deal with the fact that when people read a text, they go looking for what they want to read in it, and not only that, but they go looking for the <i>type</i> of thing that they read for. This is already an exposition of existence. When you refer to Levi's preference for "vividness" when it comes to explicating claims, this tells me nothing about "vividness." It tells me that what is vivid and 'real' for Levi has to do with claims. He thinks that when an author writes, and what an philosopher or theoretician is supposed to do, is to make claims. This is what he reads for, and this is what he uses as the "material" for his own writing.<br /><br />There is therefore a vicious loop between what we are looking for and what we see. Levi takes it that claims of someone like Adorno are divorced from materiality, whereas I would claim that they are only divorced from materiality if one reads in an immaterial way, looking for "claims." This is a way of reading that looks for the significance and the signification of what the author has said. In other words, it is not a type of reading that reads for "sense," it is not a type of reading open to the access to sense. It is not a type of reading that looks to be transformed <i>oneself</i> by what one reads; it reads to gather information to be churned out in new forms, or rejected as misguided, etc. This is the supreme irony (or I might say contradiction) between the explicit claims OOOer's make and their actual "textual" practice: they denounce emphasis on signification, and yet they appear to be unable to read philosophical or theoretical texts as anything other than exercises in signifying, and when they write their own texts, they are obsessed with accurate representation, this strange version of "vividness" that can only mean "signify your claims precisely," "say exactly what you intend to say." In other words: SIGNIFY! Or as Bogost says, "describe existence."<br /><br />It is therefore obvious to me that OOO, in general, has no idea what it means for "sense to exceed signification by a factor of infinity." I do not know Bogost's work well at all, but his claims are only sensible from the point of view where writing = signification. In my opinion, to try and delude yourself into thinking that "acting" is something different from "writing," or that writing itself is not an act, is to be totally ignorant of what "writing" really is. Writing in Nancy's sense <i>is existing</i>, where existing can only mean the exposure of an existent to itself and to the magnitude of what is outside of it. "Writing," taken in this sense, is not the only metaphor for being (as you put it), but it is an apt one. However, to understand why it is "apt" is to understand it as much more than a metaphor. It is to modify ones own conception and lived experience of "writing" and "existence," not to take some boring idea of "writing" and dismiss the metaphor as inapt because "writing just has to do with signification, representing, treatise writing, etc." It is to modify that conception, to speak like Nancy, in the direction of EX-position, rather than IM-position. And isn't that what OOO amounts to? They take positions and impose necessities on other people: stop talking about texts, start talking about objects; stop writing texts, start making things. Oh, imposers of "necessities," when will they see how evil this practice is, how evil is the imposition of a necessity!fragilekeys.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07945608366871667839noreply@blogger.com