grandpasessions

[grandpasessions]

Repetition in the eternal return is thus a necessary consequence of the difference which 'constitutes' the self-identical only by relating it to that which differs from it: it constitutes the same by relating it to the different, to all the differences which the different implies as its internal determination. The eternal return does not express the effort of a Being towards the return of the same, but on the contrary the effort or the power of a becoming to affirm itself as pure affirmation, without reserve, without remainder and without negation. To the extent that it affirms all differences, it also affirms their cohesion in this difference: it is the coherent development of the disparate. In this sense, it is the principle of a synthetic and differential unity, the principle of a dynamic unity which constitutes the sovereignty of the disparate as such.

Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition

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Thesis II introduces one of the document's main theological concepts: Erlösung, which is correcdy translated here as redemption. Benjamin first situates this in the sphere of the individual: his personal happiness implies the redemption of his own past, the fulfilment of what could have been, but was not.

According to the variant of this thesis in The Arcades Project, this happiness (Glück) implies reparation for the despair and desolation (Trostlosigkeit, Verlassenheit) of the past. The redemption of the past is nothing other than this fulfilment and this reparation according to the image of happiness held by each individual and generation.

Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History' Michael Lowy

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“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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"It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place."

—Gilles Deleuze, On Philosophy

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“To conceive reality is to reduce it to possibility — but in that case it is impossible to conceive it, because to conceive it is to reduce it to possibility, and consequently not to hold fast to it as reality. Compared with reality to conceive is a step backwards and not progress. Not as though ‘reality’ were not conceivable; not at all, no, the concept which results from reducing it to possibility by conceiving is also in reality, but there is something more — that is reality.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers

[grandpasessions]

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking. Only calculation is data driven. The negativity of the incalculable is inscribed in thinking. As such, it is prior and superordinate to “data,” which means “things given.”

Indeed, for thought, negativity is preexisting and prescribed. The theory underlying thinking is a precept, guide, and parameter. It transcends the positivity of given facts and makes them suddenly appear in a new light.

This is not romanticism, but the logic of thinking itself, and it has been from the very beginning. Today, the volume of data and information, proliferating without end, is pulling science away from thought on a massive scale. Information is inherently positive. Data-based, positive science (“Google science”), which amounts to merely balancing out and comparing data, is putting an end to theory of the emphatic sort.

It is additive or detective — not narrative or hermeneutic. No narrative tension animates it. As such, it falls apart into mere information. In view of the pullulating mass of information and data, theories are now more necessary than ever.

Theories keep things from running together and sprawling. That is, they reduce entropy. Theory clarifies the world before it elucidates it.

Consider that theories and ceremonies (i.e., rituals) share an origin. They confer form on the world. They shape the course of things, framing them so that they do not overflow.

In contrast, today’s mass of information is exercising a deformative effect. Massive information massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise.

Thinking demands calm. Thinking is an expedition into quietness. The crisis in theory corresponds to a crisis in literature and art.

Michel Butor, the representative of the nouveau roman in France, sees it as a spiritual crisis: “We’re not just living in an economic crisis, we’re also living in a literary crisis. European literature is threatened. What we’re now experiencing in Europe is a crisis of the spirit.”

When asked how one may recognize as much, Butor responds:

For the last ten or twenty years, almost nothing has been happening in literature. There’s a tide of publications, but an intellectual standstill. The reason is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are remarkable, but they cause tremendous noise.

The Agony of Eros Byung-Chul Han

[grandpasessions]

This certainly plays an important part; however, to explain this resurrection of a deceiving Genius by the ‘need for a big Other’ does not seem to exhaust the phenomenon and the meaning of the assumption shared by all conspiracy theories, namely, that there exists a Subject or Agent who is deliberately deceiving us.

The libidinal emphasis is not merely on the existence of the Other (better an evil Other than no Other at all) but also on the implications of this existence for our being.

If we look at it more closely, we can in fact see how a (declared) knowledge about a conspiracy intercepts the traumatic certainty-anxiety of our non-being.

It makes it possible to draw the conclusion that the Other guarantees my being precisely by trying to systematically deceive me at all times.

Unlike for Descartes, for whom the activity of deception is not itself an internal condition of the cogito (of the certainty of my being), it now becomes just that: the more the Other tries to deceive me, the more it is obsessed with me, the more evident it becomes that I exist.

In a way, this reiterates the cogito argument and carries it in a different direction – or, rather, remains with its first step, or first certitude, and replays it over and over again: therefore I am, therefore I am, therefore I am….

Descartes argues that, even if all the thoughts I have are false (induced in me by an evil genius), the fact remains that I have these (false) thoughts, therefore I am.

This could be directly transcribed into the ‘conspiracy cogito’ as follows: I’m being deceived all the time, but I’m the subject of this deception, therefore I am.

I’m being deceived, therefore I am.

The deception becomes necessary for (the question of) my very being.

The question of true or false knowledge (which for Descartes is at the forefront) disappears into the background.

The important thing is that, as long as there is an attempt to deceive me, as long as I’m an object of the Other’s machinations or of the Other’s enjoyment, I exist.

In this way a conspiracy theory becomes a proof of my existence.

Disavowal / A. Zupancic

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Berlinde de Bruyckere, 2020.

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Texto ID: " A kiss can destroy a philosophy".

[grandpasessions]

Friendship is an end unto itself. Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self.

The “true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self.”

The consciousness of the Hegelian slave is restricted; the slave is incapable of admitting an absolute end because he cannot relinquish self-consciousness — that is, he has no ability to die, no capacity for death. As an absolute end, love passes through death. Although one dies in the Other, this death is followed by a return to oneself.

The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other; wrongly, this has been declared the main figure of Hegelian thought. Rather it is the gift of the Other — preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.

The Agony of Eros Byung-Chul Han

[grandpasessions]

As conceived in antiquity, erotic communication is anything but contented. According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity.

Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.

In Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz claims that love is now becoming “feminized.” Adjectives used to describe romantic love-scenes —“nice,” “intimate,” “quiet,” “peaceful,” “comfortable,” “sweet,” “gentle,” and so on— are extremely “feminine.” The prevailing image of romantic love makes men and women alike occupy a female sphere of sentiment.

But counter to Illouz’s diagnosis, love is not simply being “feminized.” Rather, in the course of a positivization of all spheres of life, it is being domesticated into a consumer formula devoid of risk and daring, without excess or madness.

All negativity, all negative feeling, is avoided. Passion and pain are giving way to pleasant feelings and inconsequential arousal.

In the age of the “quickie,” the casual encounter, and sex as stress-relief, sexuality is losing all negativity, too. The wholesale absence of negativity is degrading love into an object of consumption, a matter of hedonistic calculation. The desire for the Other is giving way to the comfort of the Same. The aim is to procure the comfortable and, ultimately, dull immanence of the wholly identical.

Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression.

The Agony of Eros Byung-Chul Han

[grandpasessions]

Today, love is being positivized into sexuality, and, by the same token, subjected to a commandment to perform. Sex means achievement and performance. And sexiness represents capital to be increased.

The body — with its display value— has become a commodity. At the same time, the Other is being sexualized into an object for procuring arousal. When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love — one can only consume.

To this extent, the Other is no longer a person; instead, he or she has been fragmented into sexual part-objects. There is no such thing as a sexual personality. When the Other is perceived as a sexual object, “primal distance” (Urdistanz) erodes; Martin Buber claims that such distance serves as the very “principle of being-human” and constitutes the transcendental condition for any alterity existing at all.

“Primal distantiation” prevents the Other from being reified into an object, an “it.” The Other as sexual object is no longer a “Thou.” It is impossible to have a relationship with it. Primal distance brings forth the transcendental dignity and propriety that frees — that is, distances— the Other into his or her otherness.

Precisely this is what makes it possible to address the Other properly. One can call up, or out to, a sex object, but one cannot address it. A sex object also has no “countenance,” which is what constitutes alterity: the otherness of the Other commands distance.

Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety —matters of maintaining distance— are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost. By means of social media, we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance between ourselves and him or her, to create proximity. But this does not mean that we have more of the Other; instead, we are making the Other disappear.

Nearness is negative insofar as remoteness is inscribed within it. But now, a total abolition of remoteness is underway. This does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it. Instead of closeness, it entails crowding. Nearness acts negatively. Therefore, it is inhabited by tension.

In contrast, crowding acts positively. The power of negativity lies in the fact that things are enlivened precisely by their opposite. Mere positivity lacks any such power to animate. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal.

It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.”

Achievement society —which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project— has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion. The performance principle that dominates all spheres of life today also encompasses love and sexuality.

Thus, the heroine of the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey is surprised when her partner construes their relationship as “a job offer. It has set hours, a job description, and a rather harsh grievance procedure.” The performance principle cannot accommodate the negativity of excess and transgression. Accordingly, the “agreements” the “submissive” pledges to observe include plenty of exercise, healthy meals, and ample rest.

She is not allowed to eat anything other than fruit between meals. She must avoid immoderate consumption of alcohol and may not smoke or use drugs. Even sexuality bows to the commandment of health. Every form of negativity is prohibited.

The list of forbidden activities includes using excrement, as well. Even the negativity of real or symbolic dirt is eliminated. Thus, the heroine signs on to “keep herself clean and shaved and/or waxed at all times.” The sadomasochistic practices the novel describes amount to nothing more than sexual diversions.

They lack the negativity of overstepping — such as occurs in Georges Bataille’s erotics of transgression. Thus, the partners determine in advance that they will not exceed “hard limits”. Socalled safewords guarantee that activities do not go beyond certain boundaries.

The overuse of the adjective “delicious” throughout the novel points to the dictate of positivity, which transforms everything into a formula for enjoyment and consumption. Even torture can be “delicious” in Fifty Shades of Grey. This world of positivity admits only things that can be consumed. Pain itself is supposed to be enjoyable. Here, negativity —which manifests itself as pain in Hegel— no longer exists at all.

The Agony of Eros Byung-Chul Han

[grandpasessions]

In recent years, the end of love has been announced many times. Love, the claim goes, is foundering because of endless freedom of choice, the overabundance of options, and the compulsion for perfection. In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself represents an impossibility.

Passion, too, is said to have grown cold. Eva Illouz has traced this state of affairs back to the rationalization of love and expanding technologies of choice. However, this sociological theory fails to recognize that another influence is now underway, which is corroding love far more than endless freedom or unlimited possibilities.

The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self. In fact, the vanishing of the Other is a dramatic process — even though, fatefully enough, it largely escapes notice.

Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.

It is not by chance that Socrates the lover is called atopos. The Other, whom I desire and who fascinates me, is placeless. He or she is removed from the language of sameness:

“Being atopic, the Other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the Other, about the Other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward.”

Our contemporary culture of constant comparison leaves no room for the negativity of what is atopos. We are constantly comparing one thing to another, thereby flattening them into the Same, precisely because we no longer experience the atopia of the Other. The negativity of the atopic Other refuses consumption.

Therefore, the society of the consumer endeavors to eliminate atopic otherness in favor of consumable —heterotopic— differences. In contrast to otherness, difference is positive. Yet today, negativity is disappearing everywhere. Everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption.

Today, we live in an increasingly narcissistic society. Libido is primarily invested in one’s own subjectivity. Narcissism is not the same as self-love. The subject of selflove draws a negative boundary between him- or herself and the Other.

The narcissistic subject, on the other hand, never manages to set any clear boundaries. In consequence, the border between the narcissist and the Other becomes blurry. The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness — much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is.

Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns — in itself.

Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other.

Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself.

Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One — a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego.

The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation.

A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love — which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.

The Agony of Eros Byung-Chul Han

[grandpasessions]

What we are dealing with is thus a configuration in which knowledge about some traumatic reality (the ‘I know well’) gets strangely redoubled or split and itself starts playing the role of the object that protects us against this traumatic reality.

'Knowledge’ thus adopts a new and different role; it is no longer simply something to be disavowed but – paradoxically – something that can help us disavow (the real of this same knowledge).

As we shall see in the next section, rather than with a disavowal of castration, we are dealing with its possible use value and controlled deployment.

Unlike that raised by classical disavowal, the question is therefore no longer simply why does the knowledge about something, why do revelations such as ‘the emperor is naked’, not really work, so that we continue to believe and behave as if we didn’t know?

The question now is, rather, how this kind of knowledge and these kinds of revelations themselves actively help to maintain the very illusion they are supposedly destroying.

This is to say that a permutation also occurs at the level of ‘but all the same’, which presupposes a certain opposition, a contradiction: the structure ‘I know well, but nevertheless (or in spite of it) I continue to believe the opposite’ mutates into ‘I know well, and that’s why I can keep my belief and enjoy this belief undisturbed.’

Or: I see it, I acknowledge it, and this is why I can now forget about it.

The fetishization of knowledge thus needs to be taken here in the clinical rather than the metaphorical sense: what is at stake is not that knowledge is highly valued, overemphasized, and in this sense ‘fetishized’; what is at stake is that – in a kind of overlapping – knowledge takes the structural place of the fetish as that via which we can keep doing, enjoying, or simply ignoring things that this knowledge would seem to contradict.

All that is important is that we ‘know all about it’, and that we are ‘nobody’s dupes’.

This helps us efficiently to de-realize the reality of what is going on, to maintain it as doubly inaccessible.

This does not mean, however, that in this structure there can be no moments of crisis.

Disavowal / A. Zupancic

[grandpasessions]

However, we should stress again that not all forms of disavowal, and not even all forms of fetishist disavowal (that is, disavowal involving an actual fetish), have this doubly perverse structure.

What is crucial for this structure is not simply the existence of fetishes but a surplus knowledge that orchestrates their deployment vis-à-vis the Other.

It is, in a way, a knowledge about functioning of the fetishist disavowal.

It is a knowledge that could be formulated like this: ‘I know very well that “I know very well, but all the same….”’

So we are dealing not only with disavowal but also with configuration in which I use the knowledge itself of its functioning as a fetishist tool.

Let me explain this.

To illustrate how a fetish works, Slavoj Žižek tells a story about a man whose wife was diagnosed with acute breast cancer and who died three months later; the husband survived her death unscathed, being able to talk coolly about his traumatic last moments with her – but how?

Was he a cold, distant, and unfeeling monster?

Soon, his friends noticed that, while talking about his deceased wife, he always held a hamster in his hands, her pet object and now his fetish – the embodied disavowal of her death.

When, a couple of months later, the hamster died, the man broke down and had to be hospitalized for a long period.

Žižek concludes:

So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he has been cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is your hamster – the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality ‘the way it is’?

It is at this point that we might situate the (doubly) perverse mode of disavowal, which replies to the above question in effect: Of course I have a hamster, and I know how it works, so what’s the problem?

However, rather than bringing us closer to reality, ‘the way it is’, this knowledge and its deployment have the effect of sealing off the reality more completely, making it all the more inaccessible.

Why?

Because in this configuration knowledge itself starts to function as a fetish/object that makes it possible to disavow the disavowal itself (of which we are ‘well aware’).

So we actually end up with two hamsters rather than with the raw reality – reality ‘such as it is’.

Disavowal / A. Zupancic

[grandpasessions]

Disavowal / Alenka Zupancic

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So what is the problem today? The problem is that, although our (sometimes even Individual) acts can have catastrophic (ecological and so forth) consequences, we continue to perceive such consequences as anonymous/systemic, as something for which we are not responsible, for which there is no clear agent.

More precisely—and here we are back to the logic of the madman who knows that he is not a grain of corn, but is worried that the chickens have not realized this fact—we know we are responsible, but the chicken (the big Other) has not caught on. Or, insofar as knowledge is the function of the I, and belief the function of the Other, we know the real state of affairs very well, but we do not believe it—the big Other prevents us from believing in it, from assuming this knowledge and responsibility:

"Contrary to what the promoters of the principle of precaution think, the cause of our non-action is not scientific uncertainty. We know it, but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know."

Take global warming, as already noted: with all the data regarding its nature, the problem is not the uncertainty about facts (as those who caution us against panic claim), but our inability to believe that it can really happen: look through the window, the green grass and blue sky are still there, life carries on, nature follows its rhythm . . .

And therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident: when one visits the site, with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look exactly the same as before, life seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it was, and nonetheless we are aware that something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of the visible reality itself; it is more fundamental, it affects the very texture of reality. No wonder that there are some lone farmers around the Chernobyl site who continue to lead their lives as before —they simply ignore all the incomprehensible talk about radiation.

In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek